XVI - The Tower

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The Tower tarot card
(Wikipedia;
public domain)

XVI - The Tower

Keywords

Shocking Change. Sudden and Unexpected Events. Systemic Change. Liberation. Inspiration. Intense Purification. Priorities Fast! Ruin. Disaster. War. Decisive Defeat. Materialism Collapses. Delusion Deconstructed. Ego Deflation. Identity Crisis.

Themes

There is a sense of simultaneously being hurt and freed.
The arrogant/self-important/pseudo personality is humbled or crushed. Egocentricity and materialistic ways are torn down. It can be restructured around Truth and God. The Higher Self is waiting to be born.
The old/outworn/false human system is overthrown. The people are liberated. The Way of Nature can be re-established. "Honour Heaven & Earth" is the new order.

The Tower is a rare manmade object in the major arcana.
The height of The Tower suggests a dangerous distancing from natural ways.
The Tower's rejection by sudden destruction suggests that Nature is reasserting itself over the misguided, deluded, harmful ways of humans.
An example is the Climate and Ecological Emergency.

Comparisons

The slavery in The Devil is to ignorance and evil generally.
The slavery destroyed in The Tower is to the intellect, ego inflation and patriarchy.

Notes & Quotes

"Do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?" (Rumi)

"During your transformation, you might feel like everything is falling apart but in reality everything is coming together for your highest good. You’re being pushed to evolve and get out of your comfort zone so you can live and experience your true greatness. Welcome change." (Unknown source)

"Every act of creation begins with the destruction of the status quo. It looks like chaos. But, really, it’s a freedom from the tyranny of ‘how things have always been done’...
Burn every bridge but truth. If you want the job that will make you happy, get out of the job that is making you miserable. Scary. But it’s not going to happen any other way. If you need a relationship that will make you happy, get out of the relationship that is not making you happy. Or get out of the mindset that is preventing you from getting your heart broken. Walk out there with your heart vulnerable and open. You have to give up your defences. You have to give up everything that stands between you and happiness. Most people think they’re all about happiness. But ask them to drop what doesn’t make them happy? Suddenly fear comes in."
(Martha Beck, cited at The Guardian, posted and accessed 21 April 2021)

"Never regret any experience for through it you will grow." (Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki)

"...our unjust world depends for its survival on the very project of selfhood in which we’re all so desperately over-invested... ...and so sustaining a world we can all safely inhabit may very well depend on dismantling the individual life we desire... In the world to come we will have to choose our apocalypse. Either we will annihilate, finally, the sense of ourselves we cling to, or we will redouble our faith in it, feed it, build it until it dwarfs all else, and then watch, hopelessly, as it destroys the world we live in." (Sam Byers, The Guardian, posted and accessed 29 March 2021)

"The Tower of the personality should never be too high!" (Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki)

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." (Rumi)

Also see:-

Major Arcana

Tarot

Maps of Consciousness articles

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