The Tower

  • Arcana Major
  • Number XVI
  • Figure on this site Valhalla in flame
Historical evidence

In the earliest decks

The Tower is absent from the surviving Visconti-Sforza decks (Milan, about 1450). It is one of four trumps missing from them, and no fifteenth-century original of it is known from that set, so what it looked like there cannot be said.

Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian writers who list the trumps give it names such as Arrow, Fire, Lightning and House of the Devil, and a mid-sixteenth-century text also calls it the House of Pluto. These are literary names, not card titles. Scholars following Michael Dummett describe three Italian traditions of trump order, centred on Florence and Bologna, Ferrara and Milan. The order varies by region and date, but in decks that have the card it follows the Devil.

The oldest surviving Tower cards with a picture are later. The Budapest and Rosenwald decks (about 1475) show fire coming from the sky, and the Rothschild Sheet (about 1500, Louvre) is the earliest known Tower with people on it. The Sola Busca deck (about 1490) is different again: its card is titled Nenbroto, that is Nimrod, and shows a man struck by fire from the sky while his helmet, shield and the top of a pillar fall.

The French name La Maison Dieu belongs to the Marseille pattern. The first known deck of that type, by Jean Noblet (about 1650), uses it, and a French maison Dieu was a hospice, though how the name came to be attached to this picture is not settled. The Marseille card shows a tower struck from above, with its top thrown off and two figures falling. Other seventeenth-century French and Belgian decks show instead a tree struck by lightning, called La Foudre. Italian printers later used La Torre, after the Marseille pattern reached Italy in the eighteenth century.

Historical evidence

The Rider-Waite-Smith card

Pamela Colman Smith drew the card in 1909 for Waite’s deck, working from the Marseille picture of a tower struck from the sky with two figures falling. A crown sits at the top of the tower, and the older round balls of fire are replaced by small flames shaped like the Hebrew letter yod. A modern commentator reads the crown as thought that has set itself above everything else; that is an interpretation, not something Smith or Waite stated in the sources checked here.

Myth and literature · Quotation

Waite’s description

Occult explanations attached to this card are meagre and mostly disconcerting. It is idle to indicate that it depicts ruin in all its aspects, because it bears this evidence on the surface. It is said further that it contains the first allusion to a material building, but I do not conceive that the Tower is more or less material than the pillars which we have met with in three previous cases. I see nothing to warrant Papus in supposing that it is literally the fall of Adam, but there is more in favour of his alternative—that it signifies the materialization of the spiritual word. The bibliographer Christian imagines that it is the downfall of the mind, seeking to penetrate the mystery of God. I agree rather with Grand Orient that it is the ruin of the House of Life, when evil has prevailed therein, and above all that it is the rending of a House of Doctrine. I understand that the reference is, however, to a House of Falsehood. […] The one is the literal word made void and the other its false interpretation. In yet a deeper sense, it may signify also the end of a dispensation, but there is no possibility here for the consideration of this involved question.

Myth and literature · Context

Later meanings

The Tower’s later attributions belong to occult writers, not to the early decks. Waite himself called the occult explanations of this card thin, and he named Papus, an author he calls Christian, and “Grand Orient” as earlier readers who saw in it the fall of Adam, the downfall of a mind trying to reach God, or the ruin of a house of doctrine.

The Golden Dawn tied the card to the Hebrew letter Peh and to the planet Mars. A French line of attribution uses the letter Ayin instead. One source ties Mars to McCann (1998) and the two letters to Greer (2003); the sources checked here do not say who in the French school first made the Ayin link. The common modern association of the card with the Tower of Babel is credited in the source consulted to Éliphas Lévi, and with the medieval Harrowing of Hell as another suggested origin of the image. These are guesses about the picture’s source, not documented facts. Court de Gébelin’s part in the card’s history was not confirmed in anything fetched for this entry.

Modern interpretation

As read on this site

This is the meaning used for readings here. Using the tarot to divine is a modern practice, and the Norse figure shown for each card is this site’s own association; the tarot began as an Italian card game. A short history is on the Tarot page.

Upright

Keywords: sudden upheaval, shattered illusion, forced collapse, unwelcome change

Even Valhalla falls at Ragnarök, and nobody inside it gets a warning shaped like one. This card is sudden, often unwelcome upheaval — something believed solid coming apart fast, without your consent and often without good timing. It's allowed to just be hard right now. The clearing that sometimes follows doesn't have to be felt yet for the collapse to be real.

In general: Something stable is breaking apart suddenly and it hurts. That's the honest read right now, before anything about silver linings.

In love: A relationship's foundation giving way suddenly and painfully, exposing something that was already cracked but hadn't been forced into view until now.

In work: A plan, role, or arrangement collapsing abruptly, with real disruption and no easy reframe available yet.

Reversed

Keywords: anticipating collapse, exhausting denial, delayed fall, dread before the ending

Holding up a wall that's already cracked all the way through costs real energy and delays an ending that's coming regardless. This card, reversed, is the exhausting in-between: bracing against a collapse you can feel coming, unable yet to let it happen and unable to stop it either. That bracing is its own kind of suffering, separate from the fall itself.

In general: You're bracing for something that feels unavoidable. The waiting itself is taking a toll worth naming honestly.

In love: Bracing against an ending in the relationship that feels inevitable but hasn't happened yet, caught between dread and denial.

In work: Holding together something that's already structurally failed, spending energy on delay rather than on the fall or what comes after it.

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