the terrifying tower

Breaking up of solid structures: Old routines, rigid habits, or artificial institutions are dismantled. Getting free from confinement: Overcoming mental, emotional, or physical boundaries that have trapped you. Sudden breakthrough: Long-standing blockages are cleared away rapidly after a period of hidden preparation. Ben Doav, The Open Reading

Most of my clients are frightened of this card. And no wonder - lightning, a crumbling building, two figures plummeting down — it doesn't look too good. I used to feel the same and read all sorts of disaster into it when I got it in a spread. But these days, after a fair bit of falling of my own, I no longer read it as punishment.

In the earliest French decks this card wasn't even called the Tower. It was La Maison Dieu — the House of God — which sounds impressive, until you learn what a maison-Dieu actually was: a hospice, somewhere the dying and the destitute went when there was nowhere else left. So perhaps this tells us this card was never really about random catastrophe, but more about the kind of ending that's serious enough to need its own institution — and maybe about what's still standing afterwards.

There's a version of the story behind this card that goes back to Nimrod, the builder of Babel, struck down by lightning for building too high, too proud of what he'd made. And there's a quieter version from the Book of Job, where messenger after messenger arrives to tell him everything he has built and loved has just been destroyed — his flocks, his servants, his children — and all he can do is sit with it. If we think about that version more than the Babel one, Job wasn't punished for hubris. He simply lost the shape of the life he thought he had, and had to find out what was true underneath it. That's a much more useful way to interpret the Tower card.

Jung talked about ‘enantiodromia '—the tendency of things to turn into their opposites. Jung's observation, which he took from Heraclitus, was that when we hold ourselves too rigidly in one position for too long — too certain, too composed, too identified with the story we've been telling about who we are — the psyche eventually generates the opposite with force enough to break through. The tower doesn't fall because something cruel and external decides to strike it. In this reading, it falls because it was already unsustainable, and something in us knew it long before the lightning arrived.

I think this is why the card so often turns up for my clients, not at the start of a crisis, but somewhere in the middle of one they've already sensed coming for months, sometimes years. The marriage that's been unnourishing for a long time before it ends. The job that does not feel aligned with their values. The version of themselves they've outgrown but kept propping up because it was the only structure they knew how to live in. When the Tower comes up in a reading, rather than asking what has happened, it might be better to ask what part of the structure had already stopped holding weight before it came down.

There's real research behind the idea that a crisis like this can be the site of something other than pure loss — psychologists call it post-traumatic growth, and it's not the same as saying the loss was worth it, or that we should look for silver linings. It's closer to this: a life built on assumptions that no longer hold true will eventually meet the moment those assumptions get tested, and for many people, what gets built afterwards — new priorities, more honest relationships, a clearer sense of what actually matters — is sturdier than what fell. Not a replacement for what was lost- but something built alongside the grief of it.

With clients, I sometimes use a simple two-column exercise when the Tower turns up. On one side: what actually collapsed. On the other: what, if we're honest, hadn't been standing properly for a while before it did.

I'd invite you to try the same, wherever your own ‘tower’ has recently come down, or is creaking now, mid-collapse. Not to rush to the reframe yet — but to ask, honestly, what has already stopped holding weight. And it is also interesting to look at different versions of the card - as in some, the lightning comes from outside - an external force, whereas in others, the tower combusts from the inside - from within you. Which one feels more like your own version of the breakdown of old ways and the clearing of the way?

Is the fire coming from without or from within?