MAJOR ARCANA

The Tower Tarot Meanings

The last ‘scary’ card of the major arcana is The Tower, personally, I love it but everyone has their own unique reaction when The Tower card shows up. A good place to start with this card is by acknowledging where it sits within the flow of the major arcana. Coming in right after The Devil and prefacing The Star, The Tower card is the moment of rebirth, the destruction of the old to make way for the new.

It has a lot in common with the Death card, however, The Tower is not so much about chapters ending, it’s about complete rewrites. Once the dust settles we are left with only the foundations of what was and a need to rebuild, but what we rebuild will be stronger, more effective and in our best interest.

The Tower Upright Meanings

In the upright position, The Tower is an unexpected change, it is ruled by Mars so it’s all about destruction and creating space for bigger and better things. The main upright meanings of The Tower are:

Unexpected change
Rocky foundations
Disruption
Shock

The important thing to remember with The Tower is that it is in your best interest that what was is destroyed to make way for what will be. It’s part of the plan of the universe for you and it’s something to be welcomed and embraced. It’s the cleaning of the slate so that you can start fresh.

The Tower Reversed Meanings

In the reversed position, The Tower is a breath of fresh air. It shows that you are accepting this big change that has come your way and that you’ve got big ideas around what you want to build in place of what has just been destroyed.

Release
Start fresh
Strong foundations
Flow

The Tower often represents our breaking down of learned behaviour and beliefs. It can be a time where you are really finding your authentic self and it can sometimes feel like you’ve been underwater for a long time and now you’re finally coming up for air. Go with the flow and see where the energy of The Tower takes you.

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Reading The Tower in a Tarot Spread

The Tower bursts through the darkness we’ve been enshrouded in with The Devil card and that flash of lightning is all we need to help us see the light. This is the storm and we have to brace for impact, knowing that once it passes we can start to rebuild and feel the freedom that it has given to us.

A good way of reading The Tower is imagining a Devil card situation that could have come before, think about what darkness you’ve been encased in and how The Tower could be setting you free from it.

The Tower as An Invitation

As an invitation The Tower card asks us to really look at our structures, what are our beliefs, our thoughts, our habits etc. It wants us to see where the cracks are and to find that realisation that this structure that we’ve built for ourselves was never meant to sustain us and it’s now time to start from the bottom and rebuild.

For The Tower, this invitation could be the following:

An invitation to see where the cracks are in our inner foundation
An invitation to embrace the sudden changes that are coming and try and see the light at the end of the tunnel
An invitation to accept disruption and find a way to navigate through it
An invitation to release what is not serving you

The Tower as Sage Advice

The Tower makes for very forceful advice, it’s showing up to tell you that you’ve gone on long enough and it’s time to take a sledgehammer and bring things crashing down. It is permission to abandon ship and head out to find something more stable.

Some advice The Tower may offer is:

Assess your inner structure and don’t be afraid to highlight the weaknesses that you’ve been avoiding
Life is full of unexpected changes and it’s our reaction to them that decides whether they are pleasant or not
If something comes crashing down, it was never meant to last
If you build on rocky foundations then expect the inevitable destruction that is to come

The Tower as a Lesson

The Tower can teach us a lot about the unfairness of life, how we can’t control everything and how we can weather those times when the universe has other plans for us.

Some lessons that The Tower may offer you are:

To learn to handle shock and explore the thoughts and feelings that it can conjure
Learn to release the things we have a tight grip on
To learn how to rebuild when the things we’re used to disintegrate
To learn when to disassemble deeply rooted habits, beliefs and thoughts

The Tower as a Redirection

The Tower is a card that often forces us to take apart everything we thought we knew and look at whether it is still supporting us the way we had planned for it. Like anything, our beliefs sometimes don’t stand the test of time and there comes a point where you have to ask yourself whether they are still valid and leading you in the direction you want to go.

As a redirection, The Tower could symbolise a need to:

Reassess everything you think you know about yourself and take an outside perspective to see the truth
Challenge certain structures you have built to determine whether you want to carry them forward
Do some deep spiritual work to realign yourself with your hopes and desires
Hang tight, don’t try and interfere and wait for the dust to settle before deciding how to proceed

The Tower - Number 16

The number 16 can often be seen as a Karmic number. We can reduce this down to the number of 7 (1+6=7) and we know that 7 is one of the most spiritual numbers within numerology. It offers both potential for growth and painful lessons, something that sums up The Tower perfectly.

Just like The Tower, the number 16 can offer us immense transformation. It’s not an easy transformation and there a lot of challenges to overcome, but they are for the best and help with long-term stability.

The Tower - Mars

The astrological sign of The Tower is Mars. Mars being the planet of action, aggression and energy. It is named after the Roman god of war and it can often feel like we’ve gone to war when we are in the midst of The Tower’s energy.

If we follow the thread of war with astrological mars, we start to understand the scale of destruction and what that can mean for us. It’s not just an inconvenience, it’s a complete upheaval. Everything is destroyed in the conflict and we often have to rebuild from the rubble that is left.

The Tower - Artist

Pin-pointing the exact archetype of The Tower is a little tricky because it offers so much once the destruction is all done. For me though, it feels more like the Artist archetype. It’s about innovation, updating all your core beliefs and understandings so that they realign with who you are in the present.

So much of The Tower is about getting rid of the old to make space for the new and to do that, you need to be able to build new processes with little hesitation or distraction.