Death and The Tower: Good? Bad? Or valuable?

Editor’s Note: This article continues our weekly series on the tarot. You can find some of the earlier ones by clicking the “tarot” category link above. In case you want to experiment with the cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator. The formation is called the Celtic Wings spread. It’s based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells how to use the spread. We’re happy to respond to questions and will take direction from readers who comment, so please let us know what you think. Today’s installment looks at Death and The Tower — two of the most potentially charged, and often misunderstood, cards in the major arcana. You can visit Sarah’s website at this link. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

A few weeks ago, in our discussion of The Lovers card, I wrote that, “I’m not aware of another card that is as immediately recognised and positively received…. The Lovers seems to amplify any feelings of hope and expectation when it shows up.”

Well, conversely, there is nothing like drawing Death or The Tower (or any card in the swords suit for that matter) to throw the reading into a new light for a client. Responses are varied, but many of them run along similar lines, from “Death. That’s not great, is it?”, to “I don’t like the look of that one.”, or, “Tell me I’m not going to get bad news!”

Whether we have been in that position or not, whether we have had a similar reaction or not, I think that we can all relate in some way. This is in no small part due to the imagery and the archetypes that it evokes — something we’re going to be exploring in more detail a little further on.

But first, I think the subject begs a question. Yes, the imagery is vividly uncompromising; and, yes, one card in particular — Death — has become part of the vernacular.

But what is that fear, and what lies beneath it?

I think the fundamental, often conscious, fear that inhabits our hearts and minds when we draw a card like Death or The Tower is the one we deal with when we confront our own mortality. In essence, these cards bring up a fear of death or annihilation, even if it is only there for a nanosecond before we buffer it with reason and diversion. It is visceral, charged with emotion, and our ego tries everything it can to avoid our thinking about it, feeling it, or experiencing it. Coming to terms with it is one of the greatest challenges — if not the greatest challenge — in our human experience.

When there is no immediate risk of injury or annihilation, are we scared of death or are we in truth afraid of disruption and change? The ego — our conscious mind — is not comfortable with change, and it often interprets imminent change as a threat to its survival, and consequently we feel death standing at our shoulder. What we are feeling is ego death, but try to persuade ourselves that this is so and we have a hard time accepting it. It can feel so real.

What of physical death? What lies beneath that fear? As a person who grew up fearing death to the point of paralysis, and who has experienced her share of it, I have given this a lot of thought. For me, death is equated with a loss of control and permanent separation. It can strike at any time, it will cleave me from what I love, and there is nothing I can do about it. I know I’m not alone in this.

This means that when these two archetypal cards come up, they have the ability to play with your objectivity as a reader — especially if you’re reading for yourself. And yet, here’s the thing that I have learned:

While the pain and grief that come with loss are true, felt emotions and ones that need to be honoured, the fear associated with what these cards evoke is an illusion. Those things that we fear are those things that have not yet happened. They may never happen; and, if they do, they rarely happen in the way we expect them to. But we live as if they are already here. We move out of the present, project ourselves into a fictitious future (all future is fiction until it moves into the present), and in that moment our well-being leaves us. When that happens, we are no longer living our lives consciously. We become passive.

Tarot gives us an invitation to recognise our fears, put them in perspective, move consciously through a reading, and act rather than react. The cards are not about separation: they are interested in integration. Tarot is a tool that can assist us in reconciling those parts of us that seem to be missing. But by balking at the cards, we let our fears decide what they mean to us before we even start to enquire for ourselves — yet another example of static build-up on the line between the message and its recipient that I have referred to in previous articles.

So, acknowledging that Death and The Tower are able to tap into some primal thoughts and feelings; and understanding a little of what lies at the basis of our reactions, we can take what we now know and see if we cannot cast the cards in a more objective light.

Let’s look at the cards in turn …

XIII. Death

On very few occasions is Death about physical death. Moreover, I don’t believe that any one card can carry a definitive interpretation. It really is about the other cards in a layout and how they aspect each other that determines each card’s significance and meaning. I have not yet done a reading that I know of where Death is involved in a literal sense, which gives some idea of how infrequently this occurs. And I have drawn it so often over the years, both personally and professionally, that I have become more concerned about attending to my clients’ reactions to it than I am about what it is actually going to mean for them.

I have come to enjoy Death as a card. Its prevailing quality has been that of the old making way for the new, for example the loss of a job, the transition of a relationship, or the giving up of a particular belief or thought pattern.

The imagery on the card is rich and complex. Here sits black-armoured death on a white horse, holding a black flag with a white flower. Black and white: the balance of opposites. There is as much light as there is dark here. The horse is on the move, suggesting progression as opposed to cessation or stagnation — and this is echoed in the waterfall behind. Water often symbolises emotions, and there is a lot of it here.

There is a figure behind the horse that is lying prone, as if on his death bed. He is watched over by a child — heralding the new; and a bishop, perhaps representing the sacred nature of what is happening. This is a spiritual matter; a matter of soul. A woman kneels behind the child, leaning away. She seems ambiguous, and perhaps the key to this is that this ambiguity is deliberate. What does she mean to you? What can you know about yourself, about your client, about the situation, through her?

Finally, the sun is shining through two columns on the far right of the image. As with The Sage last week, the card holds the promise of light — of life. The yellow of the sun is reflected in the yellow of the sand beneath the body, and in the bishop’s clothing as it is on death itself. Is death, in fact, a bringer of light, contrary to what his outward appearance (his armour) might suggest? Do we need, perhaps, to take that message to heart instead of succumbing to our first urges to run? Do we need to remain present to what death can bring us?

XVI. The Tower

I find it impossible to have a discussion about The Tower here without drawing a parallel between the image on the card and the one that is indelibly imprinted on our conscious by the events of 9/11. On the image, we have a tall building, torn open by a cataclysmic event, engulfed in flames, with two figures falling to earth. If I were writing this prior to that date, I would probably have started by observing how the symbolism is mirrored in other stories, such as that of the tower of Babel in the Bible and, in popular culture, in the movie The Towering Inferno. As it is, our world has changed since then; but maybe what has become a part of our psyche as a result of 9/11 is perhaps wholly relevant to the meaning of The Tower, rather than simply an add-on. No doubt there will be a future article with a more in-depth focus on The Tower, so perhaps we can see this as a precursor to a larger conversation on the subject.

Basically, I believe that The Tower is about the ego’s ambition to match, if not supercede, divine power through material means. Or, to put it another way, it is about our desire to be as powerful as God (however you choose to understand Him/Her/It) and our attempts to satisfy that desire in the physical world.

However, we find that there is a fundamental problem with this desire: we are using the incorrect building materials. The divine is interested in evolution through the building blocks of the soul, while the ego is interested in bricks and mortar. The Tower is built on a miscomprehension of what it is to be powerful. And so it sows the seeds of its own destruction. Past a certain point (i.e. the truth), it can no longer maintain its structural integrity, and so it falls — it is destroyed by the divine, who knows that we cannot reach it that way.

The Tower is about misplaced ambition, and how at some stage the light dawns (in this case, in a blinding flash) and what we have worked so hard to achieve crumbles around us. It is a false edifice, and the truth will have its way.

As with Death, I have drawn this card many times; and, like that card, when it is in a future position in a spread, it can summon up a sizably negative reaction in a client — although it often plays out very differently to the way that we anticipate it will, and, speaking personally, my fears about it have almost inevitably turned out to be illusory. What is not in question is its impact: it will be felt, whether emotionally, mentally or physically, and it tends to leave ripples in its wake so that other areas of the client’s life are affected.

Some time ago, for example, a client had The Tower in the near future position. (The reading itself was focused on events that were going on in her personal life at that time.) There it was: a warning to be vigilant that she was not constructing her life around false assumptions. As it transpired, she had a history of bipolar disorder, had assumed that she was cured and no longer needed medical supervision, and at the point of the reading had hit the peak of mania. A matter of weeks later, she was plunged into a profound depression that she took months to recover from. For her, The Tower not only served as an admonition (though, as the adage goes, we only have 20/20 vision in hindsight), but it engendered a new sense of responsibility, and she is now on a program to manage her symptoms. As with the tower in the image, the heights that she soared to were unrealistic, and called for grounding.

Where do we work under false assumptions about who we are and what we do? Where do the lie and the truth intersect? What figurative structures that lie within us are calling for destruction so that they can make way for something that serves us better? How is The Tower playing out on the world’s stage in our lifetimes, and how does it affect us individually and collectively? The Tower may indicate a time of great upheaval, but for all of its negative connotations, its message is one of freedom. If we listen to the message brought by The Tower, even if it has already fallen, we can release ourselves from the fetters of what no longer serves us and take a new course of action.

Death and The Tower are not “negative” cards. Nor can they be spun to be completely positive either. As with all messages from that divine part of ourselves, they are neutral. It is the filters through which we see them that determine our reaction to them. What is not in doubt is their value, because they can point us in the direction of new growth. Out of the ashes rises the phoenix. So it can be with us.