The Tower
When it rains, it pours.
Out of one of the most disturbing and frightening cards of the entire tarot deck, we are immediately brought to the another of the most disturbing and frightening cards of the tarot: looking at this card, it’s quite evident that we are not having a good day. We are in fact having a very bad day. (Or are we? But that’s a question I’ll get to later.)
The Tower comes right after The Devil in the Smith-Waite deck, and, if we go with the traditional interpretations of The Devil, it only makes intuitive sense that The Tower represents what happens to us when we give in to the Devil’s temptations and let baser nature, or our addictions –not necessarily those of the chemical kind — get the better of us.
Linking back to our earlier discussion of The Devil and the Shadow Self however, the Tower can also represent what will most likely happen to us (especially as ace and aro people specifically) if we don’t take the time, effort, and vulnerability to directly address our innermost needs and desires. Those innermost impulses can be as simple as a need to be heard in a relationship, or a need for safety in a group. It can be as complex as grappling with a potential attraction to another person in our lives, or a need for contact and connection with another person. In the end however, there are no easy or simple answers with The Devil — hence our need to at least acknowledge that there is a lot of work here to be done, in terms of difficult conversations or inner work, or reflection. After all acknowledging that we need to work on ourselves is an important step to dealing with our own inner tensions, or past traumas (and this, it cannot be understated, is abundantly true for all people, queer or straight, ace/aro or allosexual alike).
So in that context, on some level, The Tower is what happens when those inner issues aren’t dealt with. It can represent the inner crisis one has when they have to reconcile their asexuality or aromanticism with a lifetime of being raised to believe that all of the societal norms governed by amatonormativity and cisheteronormativity safely apply to them. Perhaps we haven’t properly integrated the lesson of Temperance and believe that our asexual/aromantic identity or gender identity is immovable and forever fixed (Spoiler Alert: It doesn’t have to be)— then when the potential for a new relationship or attraction opens itself in our lives, we are left feeling like our very core nature is under threat. It can represent the similar crisis that can occur when one grapples with an attraction to genders for which they were conditioned to never feel attraction for, under pain of social stigmatizing and shame.
It can also represent what happens when those who are overzealous for ace and aro community end up alienating valued friends and loved ones. Or it can represent what happens when a deep sexual, relational or emotional mismatch between an ace and allosexual partner (or even two ace partners) has not been discussed or addressed, leading to a widening chasm in their relationship. Or in the specific case of this card, a powerful lightning bolt striking at a relationship that may have taken years of careful emotional labour to build.
In any and all of those cases, The Tower is our reckoning. If the previous cards of the Tarot were warnings, or lessons or opportunities offered to us by the universe, then The Tower is what happens when all of those messages are left ignored and unheeded. If The Devil presents the cause, then The Tower is its effect.
We often think of events or situations such as these to be deeply painful and tragic, and rightfully so. It would be tempting then, to think of this all as “bad”. Perhaps this, as well as in the case of The Devil, is opportunity to think about what we think of as “good” and “bad” in the first place. Early in my therapy sessions, I struggled to grapple with the decisions that I had at the time recently made — these were decisions that had ended up tearing down a relationship of eight years and deeply hurt someone I’d deeply treasured and cared about — I’d thought about many of my feelings as being bad, and myself as being “bad”. Am I a “good” person? Why had I done all of these bad things? These questions echoed in my mind, until my therapist offered me a revelation: that our feelings aren’t in and of themselves, “bad”, or “good”. There are no bad or good feelings: there are just only feelings.
In much the same way, there are no good or bad cards in the tarot. Ultimately, they’re just cards; pieces of cardstock with pretty pictures on them. Much like our feelings, it is what we decide to do with them, it is how we address them, and it is how we choose to act on them that can, in the end, take on the many qualities of being “good” or “bad”. And in the spirit of queerness, let us try to move past the restrictive and ingrained binary of “good” or “bad” altogether, and just recognize that what we think of as good or bad, positive or negative, or upright and reversed are really just aspects of how we express and act on our deep-seated needs, in situations of both ease and difficulty.
The Tower is a powerful example of this. If The Tower represents the annihilation of a relationship, perhaps it was a relationship that *had* to be destroyed: A difficult situation, but one is that helps us become ultimately more emotionally healthy. Perhaps, as an ace or aro person, it was a relationship that was so horrifically romantically and sexually imbalanced that it was poisoning us, but yet, we still stayed out of either a fear of being alone, a unfailing desire to be amatonormatively “normal”, or a sense of obligation to a selfish or oblivious partner. Sure, losing the relationship was no doubt painful — but as a construct, it was a building that had to be demolished. Think of what would have happened if we had stayed. Imagine being trapped up in that tower for the rest of our lives, confined and locked down in a place preventing us from moving forward. This can be hard to digest, especially as we fall from our lofty position, seeing the jagged rocks below rushing up to embrace our tumbling bodies.
But at least we’re now free.
In our collective lived experiences as queer and ace and aro people, there are many examples of things in our lives that fall apart, only for us to realize with hindsight that such cataclysms had to happen, and that in the end, we were all the better for it. This is actually reflected in the card itself and its iconography: Notice how the lightning bolt and the fiery conflagration it’s triggered is seen in the upper half of the tower itself. However, the base of the tower, and its foundation has been left relatively unharmed.
While the once proud and mighty tower we have built has been destroyed, it nevertheless remains as something from which we can build up again. We can rebuild, but not just as a monument to ego or misplaced trust social norms. We can build back using a healthier, more honest, and more affirming architecture that honours our needs, desires, and inner truths while centering our selves in a self-empowering way.
A common, traditional view of The Tower is that it is something that happens to us. We are the passive recipients of an event that tears us down to our core. We are the people haplessly falling out of The Tower as it comes crashing down, asking ourselves what happened to invoke that lightning bolt out of heaven to destroy our comfortable construct. What did we do to deserve this, we might say, before we hit bottom.
This marks a good point to mention how I often try to view and read tarot, a perspective on reading that I derived from my therapy sessions and from my readings on tarot from people like Joav Ben-Dov, Caitlin Matthews and Jean-Claude Flornoy. You could almost describe it as a game: “Who are you, in this tarot card?”
If we apply this game to The Tower, then the question becomes this: Are you the one whose tower is getting smashed, or are you smashing someone else’s tower?
Out of the superficial doom-and-gloom and tragedy of both The Tower and The Devil, comes a strangely liberating and dare I say, badass empowering sensation out of the notion that it could in fact be you hurling down that lightning bolt. It could be you who is tearing something down, or even welcoming the tearing down of a construct that may have served you well in a past life but is only acting as a blockage or source of toxicity to you in the present. Perhaps this is you saying good bye to the “I feel so broken”, and “Maybe all I need to do is just find the right person” life you led as a struggling and confused allosexual. Perhaps this is you knocking down the amatonormative future that your parents and family sold you on. Perhaps this is you ripping to pieces a relationship where your partner told you that sex was a compulsory obligation; that because you would say no to sex or conventional romance, no one would ever want to be with you or date you, and that you would be forever alone.
In that case, I imagine you sitting with your feet up as you witness this scene unfolding before you, smiling wildly as this awful, awful tower gets torn apart and set ablaze by the universe, seemingly obliging your need to say goodbye to this place and all it’s meant and done for you. A gift.
Or I imagine you up there in the sky, perhaps in some sort of steampunk flying device, at the helm of an elaborate apparatus summoning a terrific arc of electricity sparking out of the clouds. You waited for so long for those who built The Tower with you to listen to what you needed and wanted. You hoped they would let you have you say and express what you needed to express. But now, there is no more waiting. No more hoping. It’s time to burn it all to the ground. You see the people jumping to the ground below (It’s odd, but doesn’t at least one of them look a lot like you?) but they’ll be ultimately unhurt, save for a few broken bones that will no doubt heal. Maybe they’ll learn their lesson for next time. Or maybe they won’t, and someone else will end up teaching them a lesson again with another flash of thunder and bolt of lighting from the sky. The blockages and unhealthiness and toxicity are gone, at least here. You will rebuild, and what you will build in place of this building will be better than what came before. But the work will come later.
For now, bring our your popcorn and marshmallows, and enjoy the show.
Previous: The Devil
Next: The Star
