The Tower.
The crown off, the tower still standing.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
Lightning strikes a tower on a rock. The crown blows off the top of it, flames come out of three windows, and two figures fall head down, one still wearing a crown. Twenty-two flame-shaped drops fall on either side of it.
Sudden, public, and smaller than it looks. The tower is still standing. The crown that came off was never part of the building, and the drops are falling in the same motion as the people. What has gone was not holding anything up. You knew that before it went.
Four things people go to on this card
- the crown
You went to the crown. It is off the top of the tower, in mid-air, and it was never part of the building.
What was on top rather than what the thing was made of. The lightning took the crown off first, and the tower is standing underneath it with three windows lit, holding up nothing but itself.
So this is not the end of the structure. It is the sudden removal of the claim that was sitting on it, which is a smaller event and feels considerably larger. A claim about this has just come off. Look at what is underneath and count the storeys still standing before you decide how bad today is.
What claim about this has just come off, and is the thing underneath still standing?
- the two below
The falling figures took you. Both head down, out of the windows, one still crowned.
People leaving a position involuntarily and in public. Neither of them jumped. The building put them out, head first, in front of whoever is watching, which is the part that hurts longest.
This gets read as catastrophe and it is more specific than that. It is the phase in which something that was not true stops being maintainable, and the people who were maintaining it become visible. You were maintaining something. The work of it is over as of now, and the visible part is what you are actually dreading.
What were you maintaining that has just stopped being maintainable?
- the flames
You went to the fire. It is coming out of three windows and the building has not fallen down.
The damage is inside rather than structural. The tower has not collapsed in this picture; it is on fire and standing, and the fire is going out through the openings that were there for light.
Which means the thing to be rebuilt is not the walls. Ask what was inside this that is now gone, because that is what needs replacing, and it is possible to spend a year repointing the outside of a building whose contents have burned. Nobody will stop you. It looks like work.
What was inside this that is gone, as against what looks damaged?
- the yods
The flame-shaped drops are where you looked. Twenty-two of them, falling on both sides.
Something is being given in the middle of something being destroyed, in the same downward motion as the people. Twenty-two drops, one for every card in this sequence, falling either side of a burning tower.
That is the card refusing to be simply a disaster. Something arrives in this weather: not as compensation, not afterwards, at the same time. You have not counted it, because it turned up in the same week as the worst news and you filed the whole week under the worst news.
What arrived at the same time as this went wrong, that you have not counted because of the timing?
On the Tree of Life, The Tower is the twenty-seventh path, Peh, from Netzach to Hod, in the Golden Dawn's attribution (Liber 777).
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.