I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
To say that the Tower’s appearance usually signifies difficult experience is not to insist that the deeper meanings will never arise. The card can mean a flash of enlightenment, particularly if such enlightenment replaces a limited view of life. Only the reader’s intuition and experience, as well as the hints from the other cards, can indicate the specific meaning.
Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom
I’ve been going a little crazy with AI-driven Tarot readings recently. It amazes me how enlightening they can be.
This morning, the Tower appeared as the outcome/warning card in a reading I was doing for myself, about my current romantic situation. I dread seeing cards like that, as though they really are predicting my future! Is everything going to fall apart, I wondered?
In this case, I interpreted the Tower as guiding me towards a tearing down of old beliefs I held about relationships and what sort of person would be right for me.
In her book Tarot for Change, author and Tarot interpreter Jessica Dore further explicates this kind of reading of the Tower:
Psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan believed that the core motivating force for all human behavior is anxiety, and that our personalities are essentially a collection of habits and strategies we gather over time to minimize anxiety, avoid disapproval, and preserve a positive sense of self…. [The] Tower can be understood as symbolizing the particular personality traits that function as a sort of buffer against the anxiety of living. And from this perspective, the Tower can go from being one of the most feared cards in the deck to a powerful blessing….
When our towers crumble, we’re thrust headfirst into a direct experience of the stuff that’s struck terror in our hearts since infancy and that we’ve been unconsciously avoiding ever since. If our personality, our tower, is built with the bricks of behavioral patterns that make us feel protected from what we perceive as threatening, including the experience of anxiety itself, when we begin to pluck those bricks out, we feel vulnerable and exposed. Exposed to the elements of social rejection, abandonment, unworthiness, failure, unlovability, and isolation….
The Tower falls when we realize that anxiety in itself is not dangerous.
In the past in choosing romantic partners I usually chose in a way to maintain social approval. Feeling anxiety about who I was, I sought to find someone externally admirable (by the standards of my social group) to bolster my sense of self.
But at age 57, I no longer need to do that. I don’t need to seek social approval, directly for myself via my profession or my wealth, or indirectly via my partner, through his profession, wealth, education level, or age and appearance.
I pulled the Star after the Tower. The Star keeps appearing in my readings. The Star comes after the Tower in the Tarot deck. Both deal in the unconscious.
Pollack writes:
In divinatory readings, [the Star] expresses hope, a sense of healing and wholeness, especially after emotional storms. Very often the Star and the Tower suggest each other even when only one actually appears.
The last thirteen years of my life have, at times, felt like one long emotional storm. Am I now entering a time of peace, calm, and flowing authenticity?