Tower

nisaba said:

How could I forget the Hawaiian volcano deity, Pele?

Click to expand...

Actually I meant Pele not Kali - my mistake. Kali has Tower energy but is not volcanic.

The Tower in this pairing is the working of the Finger of God, bringing devastating change when the querent refuses to make changes after the normal rumblings of warning from their surroundings and surrounding people.

Click to expand...

This reminds me of a friend with whom I used to do Tarot, having been with BOTA for ten years. She kept getting the Tower and told me she knew it meant she had to quit her job as the institution was stifling her. But she kept putting it off. Then, she was suddenly fired, and had to go through all the shock that entailed.

Vicki Noble told me how she kept getting the Tower and wasn't sure how it was going to manifest. She could feel the pressure bulding, but didn't know what it was about. Then, she suddenly threw over her whole life in Berkeley to move to Mexico. This was around the same time that she discovered that a design she had drawn on the sand in the Motherpeace Tower card, just to fill up an empty space, was, in one culture, a sign of exodus - one of the core meanings of her card.

This is the kind of personal but major changes that have always stuck with me.

<smile>

<scrambles for the Motherpeace deck in my collection>

An interesting, if unoriginal, experiment. Same question, one thousand tarot decks, shuffled five times, cut three times, dealt to the same three-card spread.
How many Towers?
What is the distribution among positions?

removed, as irrelevant.

Starshower said:

Isn't the Tower clearly warning (in the light of your question) that all this wanton selfishness, superficiality, destruction & plain greed MUST & soon WILL HAVE TO STOP?!

Click to expand...

I think we all recognize that there's been a wake-up call but everyone sees the changes needed differently - more government controls, less government controls, more support for big business (in the hopes of a trickle-down effect), more support for the 99% and social services. Certainly, if the Tower kept coming up in almost every reading, I'd be really worried. As it is, in just one reading, especially where the question was descriptive, not predictive, it's not necessarily heralding total disaster.

Also, if the Tower were an advice card, it would NOT be advising, "Stop." Rather it would be suggesting, "Blow your top."

One of the things that Eliphas Lévi and Oswald Wirth tried to do, by having the Tarot at the center of their occult philosophy, was to understand the deepest level energy dynamics that characterized a card. It's the difference between saying a person is acting crazy so he should be locked up, and determining what is the genetic or social-environmental source of the craziness so that it can be dealt with most appropriately.

SPIRIT HAWK said:

the tower to me plain and simple of your question , what's happening with the state of the world?
its falling apart....

Click to expand...

This is my thought exactly. The tower crumbling is a strong visualization for me of the state of the world. So many areas are literally falling apart, finance, environment, families, homes, etc. I would be interested to see the rest of the reading to get a better sense of this specific card.

It was an element spread with The Tower as the Quintessence - in the center, summing up the whole. I laid them out with the Knapp/Hall deck so I could use the Minor Arcana, but then I overlaid them with the Wirth Majors.
Earth (bottom) - Five of Coins
Fire (top) - Eight of Coins
Air (right) - The Devil
Water (left) - Strength
Quintessence (center) - Tower

However, as I understand it, this is not the section for discussing entire spreads.

Teheuti said:

Also, if the Tower were an advice card, it would NOT be advising, "Stop." Rather it would be suggesting, "Blow your top."

Click to expand...

Or, "Get the hell out of the building."

Debra said:

Or, "Get the hell out of the building."

Click to expand...

Good one.