Quantum Tarot: The Tower

nisaba

<shuffle> <cut>

Oh, we've already looked at this one. <Shuffle> <cut>

Ah, the Tower. A huge edifice goes screaming through space at a Red Dwarfian angle. Its windows are lit up not with office lights, but with the yellow of superheated metal, implying that contrary to the impression of deep space I have, the Tower must be hurtling through some form of atmosphere to generate those temperatures. It is starting to crack, like the superstructure of a stressed aeroplane (Yes, I have an accent). The whole tower is wreathed in crackling electricity. Close to us, at the base of the card, shock-waves look like gigantic thumb-prints. At the top of the tower or the nose-cone of the ship, a blue-white sonic boom seems to be happening.

Is the Tower immense, or tiny? If it is tiny, it could be an open-ended string, tensioned beyond belief, vibrating at incredible energies. Bubbling away at the realm of the super-small, below anything Planck imagined, is quantum foam: the constant fizz of things or non-things in a state of flux and change, of popping into and out of existence, of changing from blue whales falling through space into small bowls of petunias that sigh "not again". A string smaller than a quark may believe in its own resilience and strength, to find itself snapping like the Tower, or melting into its own energy, or welding onto another string and becoming indivisible. Everything that string believes in, could end or be recreated at any moment in the subatomic turmoil that is quantum foam.
 

Leo62

The think I like about the idea of quantum foam is that it's endlessly creative. It may be chaotic and uncontrolled and a little insane, but hey so is the human imagination ;)

The positive side of the Tower is that it gets stuff moving again - often by explosive force - that was terminally stuck and in danger of stagnation.

I see the corona at the top of this card as a giant butterfly - something taking wing once it's freed from imprisonment.
 

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nisaba

Leo62 said:
I see the corona at the top of this card as a giant butterfly - something taking wing once it's freed from imprisonment.
<scrambles back to the card> Oh, yeah, I see it now - thank you!
 

swimming in tarot

Whew! I'm getting the hang of this deck a lot better from reading the posts of both of you. I saw the butterfly too, and it made sense--not usually seen on Tower iconography, but so what? Having someone else point it out, too, is building my confidence in allowing myself to see what I see, even if it seems a little unorthodox.
 

The 78th Fool

This was another card that was created very quickly, much like the Moon card. This was the first version and we've never felt any need to alter it in subsequent revisions. It just said everything Kay wanted to say at first attempt.

My own impression when we'd created the image was of a tower not about to collapse, but about to explode through being energy charged. One of my personal favourite Tower cards is the one from Ellen Cannon Reid's Witches Tarot (Llewellyn). You get a sense in that card of something similar - The destructive force is within, waiting to burst forth. In my own experiences, the Tower has often been an inner state rather than an outer one. it's what's going on inside that can often be the most destructive, burning from within. As Kay rightly points out though, The Tower, the destruction it symbolises and also the chaotic and ever changing nature of quantum foam are symbolic of change making way for development.

Chris. xx
 

nisaba

I like the heated nature of the card. You can see a fissure developing in the Tower, as if it's breaking up under extreme conditions, like an aeroplane subjected to unacceptable stress, or a deep-sea octopus trawled to the surface.