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My rendition of The Tower using a painting on paper that’s actually a tribute to Persephone. It’s still available, and newsletter subscribers get a discount with FRIEND15. Buy it here.
While the Death card is the most feared card among people who know nothing about tarot, I’d bet that The Tower is the most feared card among actual tarot practitioners.
I mean, look at it. About 99% of renditions use imagery evoking sudden, reality-shaking chaos. Namely, storm clouds with many spears of lightning, as if Zeus himself has Hulk-smashed your life out of whack. In many decks, people fall. It makes sense to gaze upon The Tower and declare, “Do not want.”
Ah yes, chaos across a few versions: the Robin Wood tarot deck; the Visconti Tarot deck; a print by Jazzberry Blue; and the classic Morgan Greer tarot deck (one of my favorites).
And perhaps this is why I always see it misunderstood. Interpretations are oft oversaturated with wary foreboding or mishap. “I pulled The Tower and then I stubbed my toe!” someone once said to me at a tarot meetup. She was, by the sound of it, convinced that the card’s message was “Bad things will happen today!” Another time, a friend texted me, “I missed the bus. Tower card.”
This, dear readers, is not The Tower.
In our era of Difficult Society™, The Tower has become an avatar for unjust misery, a symbol of “We have no control and things are bad.”
Yes, bad things randomly happen in life. But The Tower isn’t that.
No card is necessarily prophesizing of woe: each card, as I tell clients, is a kind gateway to compassionate awareness. But fear of The Tower makes sense: Change we can’t control is hard. Uncertainty, too. A 2016 study found that uncertainty is actually more stressful than knowing for sure that harm will come.
To understand The Tower, you have to inspect what’s transformed in the lightning’s wake. Let’s take a moment to behold the This Might Hurt Tarot Tower by Isabella Rotman. What do you notice?
Notice the cupola at the top, completely calved off via firestorm. Should four spears of lightning be able to topple a large stone structure? No, babe. That’s actually quite bad! If a large stone constructed tower can’t withstand some weather, then people probably shouldn’t be living in it.1 And yet, they have been.
If that’s the case, the city inspector has likely been eyeing your property, and they’ve been seeing things they don’t like: collapsing roofs, crumbling foundations, poor lightning mitigation, or fire safety hazards. They’ve been sending you code violation notices in the mail … but you’ve been ignoring them, whether subconsciously or deliberately. You have other things to do, you don’t want to face it quite yet, or you don’t have the resources to do anything different.
We all have things like this sometimes — the structures that you keep trying to hold together with scotch tape, but really you need to tear that shit down and start over. But this awareness is, most of the time, subconscious or clouded. You only realize in retrospect they were warnings. Your knee-jerk yeeting of inspector notices into the dark abyss of your psyche continue.
The Tower stops this yeet business with a smack. It yanks the pile of shoved-away notices from the depths into the forefront of your awareness, like a dentist wresting a carious tooth.
The Tower shows you: this is what you were trying to live with. This is why it’s been hard. This isn’t serving your needs anymore. This is The Tower: a sudden uncomfortable change that reveals what you’ve been clinging to for support is not supportive at all.
As Pema Chodron said, “You must face annihilation over and over and over again to find what is indestructible in yourself.”
Here’s an analogy you may relate to.
A job you’ve had for way too long and have outgrown, yet you’re too scared to leave. The “city inspectors” have been sending you signs for a while, through friends who note you’re dissatisfied or feelings you keep stuffing down.
The Tower is the moment when the yeets fall apart. The yeeting cannot hold. Your job lays you off, suddenly. But The Tower is also the empowerment that comes with accepting that things fell to shit because it was time to: You’re now out in the open, free to roam, and able to rebuild something much stronger.
Most importantly: The Tower is something you will look back on and define a key turning point, when the universe both kicked you in the ass and also cushioned you in your fall. The agency and being in conversation with the universe is as much a part of it as the initial lightning blast you had no control over.
What’s been a Tower moment in your life? For me, it’s been when a metal pipe fell through my New York City apartment ceiling and forced me to move out of a place that wasn’t good for me anyway. (Gotta love NYC!) Respond with one of your own.
Correspondence to the Correspondent
This week's letter comes from Chelsea, a gem of our time, with one of the most frequently asked questions in tarot.
Q: How do you interpret reverse cards?
A: For those unfamiliar: a reverse card is exactly what it sounds like: a card that lands upside down. There's already a lot written about this, so I’ll answer your question with a question.
What does it mean to you to be reversed? Do you define it as inversion? Opposite? Upside down? Reversing the way a car reverses, backing up and revisiting what came before? Or maybe you're a person who loves hanging upside down, who gets into a headstand pose in yoga because you feel powerful when your head’s full of blood.
For me, “reverse” isn’t actually my preferred adjective: I use inverse. It comes from the Latin invertere, to turn upside down or turn about. It carries a sense that “reverse” or “backwards” does not: we are entirely flipped in nature, order, or effect.
Sorry to bring math into this. But this is what I picture: kind of an upside-down mirror dimension. Source
It's worth sitting with your own definition first.
This is because you read, and the cards communicate with you and draw from your awareness. While many people use tarot purely for psychological self-reflection or creative practices, I’d also invite you to consider that tarot is a divinatory practice. You’re attuning to messages from spirit or from your inner knowing as much as you’re intellectually recalling card definitions. What you sense a reversal to mean in the moment matters.
That reminder of tarot as channeling can turn reversals from something you dread getting wrong into something that adds dimension to your reading experience.
The practical part
Mary K. Greer wrote The Complete Book of Tarot Reversals, and in it you’ll find dozens of ways to read one. She cites a mnemonic from tarot author James Ricklef known as the 5 Ds, which I’ve expanded on with examples:
Delay of the original effect: the card’s promise simply hasn’t landed yet. So, a reversed 4 of Swords (meaning “mental rest”) can mean the break you need keeps not arriving. I also interpret this as “blocked.”
Diminution of the original effect: the energy is present but dialed way down, like flicker where there should be a fire. So, The High Priestess reversed can be reaching for your intuition and finding the signal to be very quiet.
Direct opposite of the original meaning: 8 of Wands is usually fast-moving energy, so inverted it can mean things are moving sluggishly or not at all.
Dark side of the original meaning, which you can also think of as the shadow: The Magician’s power to make an idea material becomes a conjurer producing whatever he wants, integrity entirely optional.2
Direction change: the energy is same as upright but taking place inward or downward instead of outward: 2 of Cups is mutual exchange, love moving between two beings. Reversed, it can be that same love poured toward yourself.
How I actually do it
I’m a tad fastidious, so in my personal practice I treat the deck as if it holds 156 cards — 78 × 2. Each inversion is connected to its upright counterpart, obviously, but I hold it as a universe of meaning unto itself rather than just a modifier. (That’s not what Greer advises as a starting point, by the way, so take my practice with a grain of salt.)
So then you might be asking: doesn’t that leave me with like dozens of overwhelming options? Yes. And this is exactly where treating tarot as divination clears it up.
Which is my way of admitting that I can’t summarize it for you, and that there is no one answer. I suspect that’s why the question gets asked so often. But if you learn to work with reversals then you’re likely to become a confident tarot reader, because it forces you to get in there.
Thank you for reading! If you’ve stuck it out until the end, you get a gift. Reply to this email and I’ll send you a cute lil freebee.
— Cristina
1 I have learned in fact-checking this post that lightning actually can topple buildings. Before lightning rods, tall stone towers were struck constantly; as masonry does not conduct well, the current vaporizes moisture inside the stone and blows it apart. Yikes. For instance, St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice was hit at least a dozen recorded times over five centuries. It kept happening until the physicist Giuseppe Toaldo mounted Venice’s first lightning rod on the tower in 1776. Today that engineering is standardized (via things like air terminals, down conductors, and grounding), which is why a modern building struck by lightning won’t collapse.
2 One of my favorite explorations of this is in an episode of my favorite tarot podcast, formerly known as Strange Magic, wherein Amanda Yates Garcia and Sarah Faith Gottesdiner talk about how The Magician Reversed is akin to how Donald Trump has manipulated the masses.
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