An interesting idea has been brewing in my mind lately regarding the story "hidden" in the majors and particularly in this card.
For a while I've too focused on the 'enlightenment' aspect of the tower card, as in the idea of being liberated and having your mind opened by some superior power of super-consciousness. It works for readings, and it lightens that fear that most of us originally had when we pulled this major.
But lately this has evolved into a different angle of the word 'enlightenment'. I'm referring to what in the late 17th century and through the 18th century fermented into the 'Age of Enlightenment' or the Age of Reason.
In fact, I've started to guess that the original story in the major arcana is a preview of this whole movement that promoted a change of ideas, scientific thought and questioning of stablished traditions. I'm sure this were scary and forbidden topics during the fourteen hundreds. You couldn't just start preaching this revolutionary thoughts without ending like the hanged man. Humanity would have to wait some 200 years for people like John Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau to brave out this concepts.
I think that maybe, the original creators of the Tarot found, through painted images in a game of cards, a diluted way to preach this gospel, and it reaches it's peak right around the Tower or Maison Diev, where the classic idea that the castle was the house of God, and that royalty had a direct connection with divinity that gave them the authority to do as they pleased was brought down. That's why we see the nobility finally being trumped! The crown falls, either from within, by the releasing of this powers, or from above, to take down this fake heaven.
I'm aware that this somewhat veers away from the original topic of the thread, but when it comes to the interpretation of the tower card in a reading (RWS or TdM), this theory doesn't necessarily interfere with the "great change", or liberation, or devastation meanings that traditionally have been given to it.
My 2 cents.
Bryan.
