The Tower

The Plate

The first thing the lightning removes is the crown. For the instant the plate freezes, it hangs just off the summit of the tower, knocked clean like a lid, and the bolt that did it enters exactly there — at the top, not at the foundation. Flame comes out of the three windows. Two figures fall head-down through a black sky, one crowned and one not, and around them drift small tongues of light in the shape of the letter yod, twenty-two of them by the usual count. The tower stands on a peak of grey rock with no visible road up to it. Waite (1911) works through several readings and settles nearest to this one: the rending of a House of Doctrine — a structure of belief, not a home.

The Reading

The school's standing reading is audit, not doom. What the bolt strikes first is the crown — the claim at the top, the story the structure told about itself — and what falls was standing on a false floor long before any weather arrived. Lightning of this kind is violent and it is also accurate; it finds the one joint that was never sound and publishes it. The card rarely announces the loss of anything true. It announces the loss of what was propped, and the two are confused only from inside the tower.

Reversed, the picture shows the collapse resisted floor by floor: the same bolt doing the same work more slowly while each storey is defended in turn. The fall is prolonged, not prevented. And the plate, the school points out, does not show a landing — the falling figures are the only people in the whole sequence drawn mid-air, still alive.

In the School

Mars rules the card in the school's tables; its element is Fire; its keywords are collapse, revelation, lightning. The tarot course opens Degree VI with it, then spends the rest of the degree — the Star, the Moon, the Sun — on the lights that come after the fall.