By Tonia Shoumatoff
“If only men could see that almost all that they know consists of the ruins of destroyed towers, perhaps they would cease to build them. “– P.D. Ouspensky
It seems that America has pulled the Tower card from the cosmic tarot deck that resides in the collective unconscious of humanity. The constant repetition of the image of the destruction of the Twin Towers that was so pervasive throughout the media is perhaps symbolic of an unseen process that is happening or needs to happen in the psyche of America and the world. Those images have definitely had a powerful transformative effect on everyone who has seen them. People are intuiting that change is happening, but no one is giving voice to what that change really is, and national confidence is eroding because there is a sense that something more than the Twin Towers has collapsed.
It might be interesting to explore the meaning of the tower image in the Tarot in light of recent events and how the knocking down of the tower in the card represents the catastrophic failure of old structures that need to change. This may represent the necessary destruction of our materialistic, patriarchal value system that has been so exploitative globally and the need to find a new structure for the twenty-first century. Marge Piercy commented in her collection of poems entitled “Laying down the Tower” that the tower knocked over becomes the communal longhouse, the quintessential Native American structure where meeting, ceremonial cooperation, and inclusiveness brought together the six native nations. The longhouse can be symbolic of the kind of approach we need to incorporate into the process of finding new structures to embrace what we have learned from the devastating collapse of one of America’s major symbols. The structure seemed to be a phallic statement of our national arrogance at the time when it was erected and seemed to be too tall, too spectacular and almost begging to be attacked in the same way that little boys will gleefully knock over a stack of blocks that is dangerously high.
Traditional interpretations of the card associated it with disaster and change on a material, psychological and spiritual level. If we resist forces beyond our control life can be ‘turned upside down’ by the onrushing of future influences. Cosmic energy in its roughest form is an unavoidable element of creation. And this cosmic change can be terrible and abrupt causing hardship, misfortune, accidents and the loss of security. Other names for the Tower card are “The Struck Tower,” “The House of God,” “War” and “The Fire from Heaven.” Interpretive readings of the card on a personal level associate it with danger, collapse, lost conceptual plans, sudden death and demolition of old beliefs.
President George W. Bush recently said, “Every terrorist act is aimed at destroying our lifestyle.” But what he is not questioning is what parts of that lifestyle may be false, empty, and soulless. Nor are the power-mongers in our society truly questioning why 66% of the world’s resources should be used to accommodate 4% of the world’s most affluent people (according to Jeremy Rifkin’s figures).
The values that America promotes of hyper-consumerism are leaving people feeling bereft spiritually. “When you are not listened to, and you don’t have a community or a place that you feel you really belong…the psyche of the person is disempowered, making the person vulnerable to consumerism and all the things that come along with it,” says Sonbofu Some, an African woman writer from Burkina Faso.
And there are not that many forums questioning the validity of the values that our culture is based upon. It is also interesting that, historically, the men within the power structure are the ones fighting to keep the status quo, while women are more adaptive to change. During the three-year “Siege of Leningrad” in Russia during World War II it was the women who were able to devise long-range survival strategies, whereas the men who initially fought off the external problems were less able to draw on internal resources to survive in the long run.
In the Major Arcana image of the Tower in the tarot deck, we see a tower being struck by a zigzag bolt of lightning emanating from the sun. The explosion knocks off the crown of the tower and causes the figures of men and women to plummet down to their destruction. Fire, smoke, and flames are seen billowing out of the windows and inside the structure of the tower. Traditionally, writers have associated this card with the destruction of the Tower of Babel, the Fall of Atlantis, or God’s vengeance on Sodom and Gomorrah. It has often been interpreted as the punishment for pride. The Tower of Babel’s fall symbolized the destruction of a false system of values by divine forces. This is not to imply that the terrorists who destroyed the Twin Towers were instruments of divine forces…they themselves are victims of false patriarchal tower-like forces. Paul Foster Case, who wrote the book, The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages, explained the meaning of the card as “the perception that a structure of knowledge built on the fallacy of personal separateness is a tower of false science and is thus doomed to destruction.”
Also, the Tower card follows the Devil card, which represents the risks of becoming too entangled in matter and ego. Values which are based only on a materialistic viewpoint are inherently unstable. The lightning represents the sudden flash of illumination that all life is about the power of spirit and change, and that if we cling to ideas that no longer work for us, unexpected events and disasters may force us to make a major shift in our perception of reality.
The Tower also represents attitudes that are resistant to change, so perhaps we should be asking ourselves, what in our culture is resistant to destruction? The Tower shows us that resistance can create destruction. The hurricane of rage at that resistance and the winds of global change will batter us into letting go of concepts that no longer work for humanity. As the Taoists often so aptly expressed, “the stick that won’t bend must break.”
In the famous movie about the imbalances of modern life, Koyaanisqatsi, Francis Ford Coppola depicts images of fire spewing out of an industrial tower and ashes raining down from the sky. The word “Koyaanisqatsi” in Hopi means “crazy life, life out of balance, life disintegrating or life that calls for another way of living.” There is an apocalyptic sequence of buildings crumbling and collapsing into rubble, empty buildings with broken windows, bridges collapsing and planes in a mirage-like haze. We see images of barren city structures crumbling to the ground, gaze up at glass towers, and watch explosions throughout the movie. Human beings are reduced to a robot-like existence riding up elevators, playing video games, marching along crowded sidewalks, and driving through clover overpasses. At the end of the film we hear the Hopi prediction that “containers of ashes will be thrown from the sky causing the land to burn and the ocean to boil” and that “near the day of purification there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky.”
Perhaps the deep psychic pain, emotional devastation and personal grief we have collectively experienced as a nation in the aftermath of the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York will catalyze an awareness of how some of the most basic assumptions of our culture, as symbolized by the rectangular and box-like shapes of our architectural structures, may need to shift, if we are to truly adapt to a future where we can negotiate with other peoples and countries as respected equals rather than as a patriarchal world supremacy.
