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The Tower ~ symbolic meanings painted in the card.

The card of the Tower portrays a stone edifice built on a high rock overlooking the sea. From the depths of the water a powerful, menacing figure emerges, crowned with gold, brown hair streaming with seaweed, with a fish’s tail that can be seen between the angry waves. He points his trident at the building, which is struck by a flash of lightning and cracks open. The sea boils and the sky is black and ominous, lit by stormy red flashes.

The trident is Poseidon’s attribute of power, reflecting the lunar crescent which links him with the realm of the instincts and the night. The god’s eruption from the sea suggests a powerful instinctual force emerging from the unconscious, stronger than the will’s efforts to repress it.

Although Poseidon is an earth-god, he is portrayed with a fish’s tail. This links him with the cold-blooded sea creatures, far away from warm-blooded human life, which belong to the archaic world of the instincts.

Major Arcana ~ The Tower

Here we see the famous Labyrinth of King Minos, which was struck by an earthquake when the angry god Poseidon rose up from the waters to topple the kingdom. In myth, Minos was the wealthy and powerful king of Crete. He was given this power by Poseidon, god of earthquakes and the ocean depths, who agreed to make Minos sovereign of the seas if the king offered a beautiful white bull in sacrifice to the god. But King Minos did not want to give up the bull, and hid it in his herd, substituting a lesser animal in its place. In fury at this act of arrogance and repudiation of the pact, Poseidon called upon the love-goddess Aphrodite for aid. She afflicted Minos’ wife Pasiphae with a consuming passion for the white bull. The queen bribed the palace artisan Daedalus to build her a wooden cow.

Pasiphae entered the cow, the bull entered Pasiphae, and from this union of queen and beast was bom the Minotaur, the shame of Minos a horrible creature with a man’s body and a bull’s head which fed on human flesh. In terror the king hid this creature at the heart of a great stone Labyrinth which he ordered Daedalus to build.

But the kingdom could not remain forever in such a stagnant state, with such a shameful secret hidden at its core. With the help of Minos’ daughter Ariadne, the hero Theseus, son of Poseidon, came and slew the Minotaur, and the god at the same moment rose up in anger from his bed beneath the sea and struck at the Labyrinth. The building was reduced to nibble by the earthquake, burying both King Minos and the corpse of the Minotaur beneath it, while all the slaves who had been held in bondage by Minos’ power were set free. Theseus was proclaimed king of Crete, a new era was inaugurated, and the Labyrinth was never raised again.

On an inner level, the god-struck Tower is an image of the collapse of old forms. The Tower is the only man-made stmcture in the Major Arcana, and is thus a representation of structures, inner and outer, which we ourselves build, like Minos, as defenses against life and as concealment to hide our less agreeable sides from others. In many ways the Tower is an image of the socially acceptable fagades we adapt to hide the beast within. Then we use our professions, our good credentials, our affiliations with respectable institutions and companies, our carefully mannered social roles, our politest smiles and most diplomatic exchanges, our magazine-inspired appearances and family-instilled morals, to hide that shameful secret which in the card of the Devil awaits the Fool in the underworld. The Tower is a stmcture of false or outgrown values, those attitudes toward life which do not spring from the whole self but are ‘put on’ like costumes in a play to impress the audience. Likewise the Tower also represents the structures we build in the outside world to embody our incomplete selves.

Thus, when the Fool confronts the great god Pan at the heart of the Labyrinth within, he is changed by the encounter. He is more humble, more complete, and more real. Inevitably, this change will result in changes occurring in outer life. Just as our attitudes are altered by any encounter with what lies in the unconscious, so too are our chosen lifestyles. One of the reasons why many people fear this inward-looking process is that they are dimly aware that, having discovered one’s real nature, one can no longer pretend in the eyes of the world. Honest encounter with the Devil invokes a profound inner integrity, and thus the Tower, the edifice which represents the values of the past, must fall.

The Fool perceives the ways in which he has betrayed his essential self, and this shock is like the trident of Poseidon striking the Labyrinth: It cracks open the defenses and releases those parts of ourselves which have been enslaved. In many ways the Minotaur is like the Devil, for both represent a bestial secret connected with the body and with shameful sexual feelings which must be concealed even from ourselves if we are to appear blameless and ‘nice’ in the eyes of society.

On a divinatory level, the card of the Tower appearing in a spread augurs the breaking down of existing forms. This card, like the cards of Death and the Devil, depends a great deal upon the attitude of the individual in terms of how difficult or painful it is to deal with.

Obviously it is more creative to ask oneself where one is constricted or bound by a false persona or image, because a willing effort to break through this pretense can spare a great deal of anguish. But it seems that the Tower will fall anyway, whether we are willing or unwilling, not because some malicious external fate decrees it, but because something within the individual has reached boiling point and can no longer live within such confines.

I will explain in my readings what each card means, this is a general interpritation taken from the Mythic Tarot Deck

Information Source: Mythic Tarot Deck
[published in 1986 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene and Illustrated by Tricia Newell (not the New Mythic Tarot)]