The Tower upright
The lightning strikes the crown off the Tower. Two figures fall. The crown was never the building - it was the lie the building told.
Shock. Sudden revelation. Something you'd built to keep something else out turns out to have been the problem.
The card looks catastrophic. It usually leaves the foundation stronger.
The Tower reversed
Reversed, the Tower is trembling but hasn't fallen yet. Or you're surviving it but refusing to learn from it.
Resistance to a change that's already happening.
Keywords
- upheaval
- revelation
- collapse
- awakening
- sudden change
Where this reading comes from
Meaning paraphrased from A. E. Waite's The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), which is in the public domain - reworded rather than reproduced.
Common questions
- What does The Tower mean?
- Sudden collapse, the lightning that strips the false away. The lightning strikes the crown off the Tower. Two figures fall. The crown was never the building - it was the lie the building told.
- What does The Tower mean reversed?
- Reversed, the Tower is trembling but hasn't fallen yet. Or you're surviving it but refusing to learn from it.
- Is The Tower a good card to draw?
- The Tower is one of the twenty-two Major Arcana, which mark structural turns rather than day-to-day detail. Tarot convention treats no card as simply good or bad - the reading depends on the question and the position it falls in.
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