The Tarot Tower Card: A Teaching for the Times

In a teaching today to students of the Nine Gates Mystery School, spiritual director Deborah Jones shared her interpretation of the tarot Tower Card. It's an eerily perfect lesson for the at once profoundly painful and profoundly hopeful transitions/transformations taking place at all levels today - from the personal to the global and in issues of local and national politics, climate change, and economic, social, racial, and environmental justice.

Deborah writes:

"To me the Tower Card reference points to an energy on the planet now that's here to tear down systems of the world, and old ways of thinking and seeing and being. Like the energy of Shiva, it destroys and births simultaneously.  It's a tantric force capable of ripping everything in two and capable of unifying.  Because of this propulsive dynamic, for individuals not stable it is disorienting and brings their "personal systems" crashing down and in upon them.  It's a dynamic that we see in our politics, in our weather (floods in Louisiana and fires in California)..... it's change at its wildest and it will 'kill' and open space.

"In the words of Hermes Trismegistus, 'The (human) soul cannot long endure its nymphal prison.'  Like the dragonfly that backs its way out of its old, dead nymphal form (like those of us in the energy of The Tower card force), it doesn't see where it’s going.  Life calls and it goes.  Life calls and we go without knowing because, to not go, we die.  We understand that Life itself won't stand for half-baked understandings.  In the book The Thursday Night Tarot (if I can remember this quote), Lotterhand writes something like.... The Tower represents rationalizations, excuses and intellectualizations.  Its bricks correspond to words and thoughts.  Like the Tower of Babel, it gets nowhere. So Life takes responsibility and helps us out of this gross mistake.

"In other words, Life itself turns us upside down in spite of all our intelligence, and tears our views down... into rubble.  We are left as the discerner... and our view is now very different.  It's a crazy time.... an essential time.... and only those prepared to back their way out of the nymphal bondage, those who recognize this force and stand stable in the midst of it, those capable of discerning from a new world view, will "survive" to stand and lead their life anew."