The Tower - “You Can’t Stay Inside A Crumbling Structure”
It barely surprises me that The Tower should follow two consecutive days of Major Arcana messages, The Chariot on Tuesday and The Fool yesterday. I would also just like to say that though our readings are day-specific to some extent, more than half of the content of every article is general useful information on the card and its corresponding astrology. The day-specific components are a) that the card is drawn specifically as a collective message for the day, and b) that we examine the day’s astrology as relates to that card. So I do invite you to utilize these articles as general reference as well. Without any further ado, let us receive our daily blessing from Lettie Jane Rennenkamp before we move on to the depths of our messages. Regarding the Tower, our card’s artist states, “Cataclysmic destruction makes way for radical growth. Brace yourself for change and soften around it. You can’t stay inside a crumbling structure. Free yourself from expectations and embrace change.”
The Tower - Dismantle Your Old Personality and Become A New Person
One of the best ways to learn with and from the Tarot is to invite an impression or essence of the card into yourself. I feel like the Tower is one of the easiest to do this with early on as a student. My teacher Sandy Tiernan Menzer taught me long ago, the sooner we align with the Tower’s essence that “the old needs to be torn down to make way for the new”, the better. I invite you to also absorb this cards foundational truth into yourself through that simple statement.
When we see the Tower we just know that something is coming to an end. Something that inevitable needs to happen so the new can begin. The tower can be both traumatic and cathartic. But most importantly it reminds us that we cannot build a new structure on an old faulty foundation. The Tower burns all the way down. We rebuild the foundation before we rebuild the structure.
The Tower often comes to us when we are clinging on to some final shreds of the old way. Often fear of letting go, fear of the hard work ahead when it comes to rebuilding, fear of losing our identity and all we may understand about ourselves and our lives...The list goes on, and I’m sure you could add some of your own as well. I urge you to take stock of the structures (ideas, concepts, philosophies, beliefs, even intrusive thoughts) that are restraining you at this time.
I like to engage a simple Tower meditation for times when my conscious mind is preventing me from allowing this dissolving process to occur: setting a timer for 5-20 minutes and finding a comfortable position (sitting or laying down is fine), I bring a vision of a tower into my mind’s eye. I see lightning striking it and I watch as it burns and crumbles to the ground. I repeatedly disengage the conscious mind from its tendency towards actively thinking about whatever my life situation is and just letting the conscious and unconscious mind simply observe this crumbling. Sometimes the unconscious mind speeds through the burning down of the Tower, so I just start over and repeat it again and again until my timer is up. Sometimes the unconscious mind takes the entire meditation to play out one slow and complete burn.
Mars - The Tower Yields to All Elements, Not Just Fire
While Mars is considered second only to the Sun when it comes to astrological harbingers of fire energy, the Tower is taken down by all elements. The lightning strike (fire), the roaring wind (air), the pounding sea (water), the quaking earth. The way I interpret our current astrological placement of Mars in Taurus (Jan 6 - March 3) in conjunction with receiving the Tower as today’s message, is that we must look to the Earth element component here.
Taurus is considered a highly stable placement for any planet, so when we see the “war god” Mars here, we may think this is a harbinger of calm, or that it’ll give Mars a moment to take a nap. No such luck, kids...like ever. Mars is on, always. So let us absorb the following information through the concepts of earthquakes more than lightning.
Both Mars and the Tower symbolize quick, sudden, intense, potent surges of power. Overlaid with Mars, we can understand the Tower’s earthquake as birthed from a place of desire. What is more likely to shake your world than that? What is more likely to motivate the masses? Many may say fear, but I ask us to dig past the fear to the seed of desire which birthed the fear. Can you feel the seed inside yourself that births your confidence, your power, your sexuality, ambition, aggression, assertiveness? What about your tendency to give into impulse? The impulse to rock the very ground upon which you stand is Mars in Taurus taking down the Tower.
Mars In Taurus - Further Softened by Venus
We can also take a peek at Venus’ current interaction with Mars as Venus rules Taurus. Venus is currently transiting Capricorn and thus trine with Mars’ placement in Taurus. So I will leave us with this idea in closing: another important component of the Tower is that it represents enlightenment, inspiration, release, purification, protection and self preservation, or even a metaphorical get-out-of-jail-free-card card. How does this mesh with the components of relationship, love, beauty and empathy in our lives as those elements may harmonize with sensual, rooted, nurturing Taurus to transform Mars’ initiative, ambition and will to act?
Build Your Intuition With The Tarot
If you’ve enjoyed today’s column, I invite you to join my weekly email group where we practice the mystical art of scrying with Maria DiStefano’s Circle of Life Tarot to improve our psychic senses and deepen our relationship to the Tarot. You can also get email notifications for this very weekday Tarot-Astrology collective readings posts that you’ve just read. Last but certainly not least, we use Lettie Jane Rennenkamp’s Many Queens Tarot for all of our weekday readings this year which is the source of the beautiful images in these posts.