Major Arcana · 16
The Tower
La Maison Dieu (Tarot de Marseille) · La Torre (Italian tarocchi) · Lord of the Hosts of the Mighty (Golden Dawn)
A tall tower on a crag struck by lightning, its crown blown off and two figures falling. In the Waite–Smith tradition the Tower stands for sudden upheaval and the collapse of what was built on false foundations.
Upright upheaval · sudden change · revelation · collapse of false structures · awakening · release
Reversed averted disaster · fear of change · delayed collapse · inner upheaval · resisting the inevitable
- Astrology
- Mars
- Element
- Fire
- Hebrew letter
- Peh
- Number
- 16
- Golden Dawn title
- Lord of the Hosts of the Mighty
- Yes or no
- No
Upright
The Tower is the most dramatic card in the deck. In the Waite–Smith tradition it signifies sudden change, shock and the collapse of structures — beliefs, plans, relationships or arrangements — that were not as solid as they looked. It also signifies revelation: the lightning that destroys also illuminates.
Love and relationships: an unexpected disruption, an argument that clears the air, or the end of an illusion about a partner or oneself. What survives is likely to be more honest.
Work and money: abrupt changes of plan, restructuring or an end to arrangements that depended on pride or wishful thinking. Readers advise against clinging to what is already falling.
Advice: let what cannot stand fall. The card's traditional lesson, in the occult reading, is that a sudden clearing, painful as it is, makes room for something built on firmer ground.
Reversed
In reverse, the Tower suggests a disaster narrowly avoided, a crisis delayed, or upheaval taking place within rather than in the outside world. Readers also see a refusal to accept change that is clearly needed, which can make the eventual collapse harder.
In relationships it may mean tension kept under the surface. At work, a reorganisation that has been postponed rather than resolved.
Many readers do not use reversals, and some feel the Tower carries much the same message either way: what is false will not last.
The image
Smith's Tower stands on a jagged mountain peak against a black sky. A bolt of lightning strikes its top, knocking off a golden crown-shaped roof, and flames burst from its three windows. Two figures, a man and a crowned figure, fall headlong from the tower with arms outstretched. Around them fall small flame-like drops in the shape of the Hebrew letter Yod, often counted as twenty-two, matching the number of the trumps and of the Hebrew letters.
History
No Tower survives in the Visconti-Sforza cards, but the subject was part of the early Italian sequence under varying names, including the Arrow, the Fire and the House of the Devil. The Tarot de Marseille calls it La Maison Dieu, "the House of God", showing a tower whose crenellated top is struck off by a feathered ray from the sun, with two men falling and coloured balls raining down. Commentators have connected the French title with the Tower of Babel, with a hospital (Hôtel-Dieu), or with hell-mouth imagery, but its original meaning is uncertain.
Éliphas Lévi and the French occultists read it as the fall of pride and the punishment of the ambitious. The Golden Dawn assigned it to Mars and the letter Peh, and Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) notes its traditional link with the Tower of Babel and reads it as the overthrow of a house of false doctrine.
Symbolism
The tower stands for structures of ego, ambition or belief raised high on a narrow base. Lightning is the sudden intervention of truth, insight or circumstance; the falling crown shows the overthrow of false sovereignty. The two figures are often paired with the couples of the Lovers and the Devil, now cast out. The falling Yods are read as divine sparks descending even amid the destruction.
Mars, the traditional lesser malefic, rules conflict, energy and sudden events. Peh means "mouth", which Golden Dawn writers linked with the spoken word of power. On the Tree of Life the Tower's path is a horizontal one between Netzach and Hod, crossing the lower part of the Tree like a lightning flash. Sixteen reduces to seven, the number of the Chariot, and some readers see the Tower as the overturning of the Chariot's proud victory.
In a reading
Readers often explain the Tower gently, as shock that frees. With the Star, which follows it in sequence, it promises hope and healing after crisis; with the Ten of Swords, a definite ending; with the Ace of Wands, a sudden new impulse. As an obstacle it can point to the querent's own rigidity.
Sources and further reading
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot — A. E. Waite, 1910
- The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City — Michael Dummett, 1980
- The Encyclopedia of Tarot, vol. 1 — Stuart R. Kaplan, 1978
- Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom — Rachel Pollack, 1980