We need to talk about… The Tower

Isn’t it the way that when you are working on one particular thing other stuff, that feeds into and off that thing, pops up and proliferates wherever you happen to be looking – like yellow cars if you are in the market for a yellow car. And this is how it often is when I’m working with specific Tarot cards.

Call it synchronicity or the Reticular Activating System – acting as a filter between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind.

The Tower as a harbinger of doom

I’ve been working on The Tower card this week. Numbered 16 in the Major Arcana, this card has at times provoked such dread in me, like the worst, most uncopeable-with awfulness will be invoked by the mere turning of the card. I know. I know the cards don’t work like that. But when you know shit is brewing in your life… The Tower can feel like a prescient and unwelcome harbinger of doom. Like a dreaded letter from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

I know we have a King now, but I’m still accounting for money earned during the reign of Elizabeth II, so energetically it feels like the taxes should go to her. Hmmmn. I seemed to have strayed on to the British Monarchy. Now, there’s a big old Tower right there. Anyway…

From studying many Tower interpretations, I do get that not all destruction, as violent and shocking as it may seem, is a bad thing. Some ideas, constructs, edifices, institutions, and people even, do indeed need to be brought down, don’t they?

Fear the Tower, not its destruction

As I worked on The Tower, I wanted something that expressed the idea of ‘let it burn’. An image telling the story of someone coming home to find the house on fire (honestly, one of the most catastrophic things I can imagine) and for them to say…

‘Do you know what? Let it burn’.

‘It’s ok. Let it burn.’

And then, this poem by Angi Sullins popped up in my feed the last line of which is ‘let it burn’.

So, if the house on fire, The Tower, is the patriarchy, if it represents ‘cages made of shame’, stories that perpetuate lies, or those that would seek to ‘violate… shrink… silence you’, I say let it burn.

Here is the poem

when they want to
control you
they do not come
with shackles
made of iron
they come instead
with cages made
of shame and story
like the one
about the woman
who earned crisis
for her curiosity
so tempted by a life
of wisdom and independence
she caused the downfall
of all civilization

women are dangerous
says the shame story of Eve
they cannot
be trusted and
should not
trust themselves

give a woman
free choice and
she’ll eat the fruit
tempt the man
enrage the god
she’ll destroy us all
with her mad desire
to know
to discover
to understand
her self
her world
her maker
give a woman any freedom
and she’ll follow
her curiosity
shape her
own story
seek truth beyond
the dictates
of order and obedience

she will wreck
your carefully controlled mandates
your reign of tightness
she will unmake
your holy wars
of right and wrong
and infuse the realm with
choice and instinct
empathy outranking rules
creativity eclipsing war
sovereignty subsuming
blind servitude

when you want to know
like Eve
when you have a taste
for truth
and a hunger for wisdom
you have to question
the stories
test the facts
rattle the cage
who profits from you
believing a lie?
who benefits because you
believe you are both
cause and curse?

they have tried
to burn you
with their shame
strip you
violate you
shrink you
silence you
but they could not break
your phoenix spirit
its fierce heat
will melt old regimes
and enflame a generation
who will not settle
for smallness
for submission
for shame

sink your self into
the feathered
red sleeve
of your ancestors
and rise, woman
rise again
for you are
Persephone’s Daughter
Lilith’s lover
Eve’s heir

find the truth
eat the fruit
unmask the myth
let it burn

This poem is from the book/oracle deck W.I.T.C.H. – Woman In Total Control Of Herself. and prints are available to buy at angisullins.com