The Tower Card
For a new-born to survive birth, there is a remarkable sequence to the child’s development that crucially delays the bones from fully calcifying, to prevent the bones braking or causing injury to the mother. Yet only days after birth, this extraordinary phenomenon will begin to reverse. I’m sharing this remarkable occurrence with you as it offers the perfect analogy for today’s card.
At birth, our mind is inexperienced and unchallenged, so supple and adaptable. Throughout our lifetime, like the baby’s skeleton, the mind becomes increasingly rigid and inflexible. Yet there are events in life that are so overwhelming that we undergo our Tower moment.
This is a profound and systemic shift in our perception and understanding of life, an event that forces us to confront life in an entirely new way. While these occurrences may at the time feel absolutely devastating and they are, the message of the Tower is far more giving and transformative than the insight may first appear.
Crowley describes this card as “The Coming of a New Aeon.” The destruction of old ways to make room for the new. For better times are promised, as we will look back at these times in a more forgiving way, more a time of deconstruction and transformation, than a point of obliteration and devastation.
To return to our early metaphor, the deeper message of this card is to understand that there is a profound difference between the mind, soul and spirit, and it’s the mind that the Tower describes. For the mind is nested within the soul, as they both reside in the infinite bliss of the great consciousness, spirit. For it’s your thoughts, beliefs and understanding of life that becomes rigid and fixed.
Simply, your experiences construct the Tower, the rock that the Tower is built upon is your soul, and the entirety of the scene is spirit.
