Key 16 – The Tower

In the Deceiver Key 15 we were faced with self-inflicted bondage and how to deal with it.  Here on Key 16 The Tower we find the two chained characters of the previous card falling upside down from a tower! Not looking good for them! So, what is being played out here? And where did the lightning come from?

In the Tarot Tableau this Key is at the bottom of the second column of three cards. These three cards represent the second stage of spiritual unfoldment called Spiritual Awakening. Based on the previous card the Deceiver Key 15, we were asleep. There we erroneously thought that all that we can possibly know is solely based on the experience of our five senses. Here we are, the alarm clock has just gone off, and we are suddenly awake. And there’s no snooze button! Time to wake up!

The good news is that the alarm is none other than the Sun. The feeling you experience at this point is like a flash of lightening. Your whole world is turned upside down, destroyed. Your experience is none other than a flash from the super-conscious mind, your Inner Self, emanating from the center of your being. This is your first moment of clear vision. Here is the turning point, and you’re never quite the same again.

It’s something like the hatching of a chick. Once the shell is broken, the chick can never return to the egg. It has entered a new phase of existence. Another life opens before it. So it is with mankind. At the moment of sudden illumination pictured by The Tower, you receive an initiation, and from then on you belong to a new order of creatures. There’s no going back!

With a little observation you will find that destruction is the foundation of existence. Our entire lives are spent in the disintegration of forms for the sake of building up other forms. Power is released by disintegration. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the cars we ride in, are all in the process of destruction from the very moment we put them into use.

In the experience of spiritual unfoldment, awakening is distinctly a destructive process. All the customary wrong thinking and wrong acting must go. The false sense of personal will, of personal autonomy, of personal self-action, must be destroyed. Not a comfortable process! When you’re forced to recognize the truth that some of your most cherished beliefs are false, the readjustment is not easy.

The first chapter of the Gospel of St. John says: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. That which has been made was life in Him, and the life was the light of men.” From this you realize that not only all the good stuff comes from Creation, but all the bad stuff, too. We’ve been given the ability to choose what goes on in our lives, good, bad, or boring.

But you can only start from where you are, right now. No matter how much you jump up and down about the past, there’s not one thing you can do today to make it any different. It’s gone. Say bye-bye! The practical occultist has to learn that he cannot hope to reach any goal he may have set for himself without first figuring out where he is today, right now, and then making a plan to get rid of what hasn’t worked so far.  You can’t have your cake and eat it too! Break those chains that bind you. You’ve already made a good start! You are aware of your limitations, now make an effort to transcend them.

Your first step is to apply in your daily life the principles of the Tarot Keys. In the Yoga classes that I attend there is always the final pose called savasana, or corpse pose. You lie on your back and are still, allowing your mind to be still, too, so that your body absorbs the activity of the class. This is the most important pose in the class. When you arise, your body is a new structure, it can be nothing less! The subconscious mind runs our bodies at the direction of our conscious mind. I chose to attend the class; the body takes it from there. Make it practical, useful. You’re the Magician, the Doer! Do something! Get these lessons out of your head and into your body. Every cell in your body is conscious. Bring them into the light. Be kind to them. You’ll make it a whole lot easier on yourself.

Start with the basics. The number 16 shows you the way. It’s a combination of 6 manifesting through 1.  In Key 6 The Lovers card, we saw the principle of right discrimination at work. The Magician Key 1 applies this principle through acts of concentration.  What does concentration do? You’ll only know that through practice and the experience created by it. Get beyond the intellect and into the experience. It puts you in a very different place than an intellectual conception of an object. How does this work?

Place your attention on an object. It can be alive, like the interior of your body in a Yoga class, or an orange, or flower, or it can be inanimate, like a lit candle. By doing this it will reveal itself to you. Don’t Google it, don’t look it up in a book or on a screen.  It will only speak to you in person. And it will! There’s an orange exercise on this web site. Start there.

Doing this will open a door that brings to you some measure of the awakening pictured here. Superficial observation will not suffice. You begin to give attention to the meaning of your thoughts, your desires and your actions the same as you would when you place your attention on an object. This is a skill that you must develop. You are applying the principle of limitation to overcome limitation. Once you get the hang of it, the results are amazing.

Concentration takes some skill, so spend time on it daily. You will soon find that you won’t place yourself in embarrassing situations by rash and unconsidered action. You’ll think before you act, and then you’ll act wisely. The planet Mars is related to Key 16 through the Hebrew letter Peh, the letter of this Key. In astrology Mars is the planet of desire, war and rash action. Yet desire is the driving force behind all successful activity. Can you control it or will you permit it to control you?

Control of desire is not repression. The repression of the Mars force causes havoc and terrific destruction. So how does this work? What do we need to do to find the balance necessary to control and manifest our desires? Desire is actually a normal part of our nature. The Magician, who wears a red cloak signifying Mars activity, shows us how to do this. You must formulate your desires through intelligent discrimination.  Then make your mental images of the desired results sharp and clear. You want your subconscious mind to receive clear, definite impressions. The Strength card goes into great detail about how to go about this.

The Hebrew letter Peh (P, Ph, F) means “the mouth as the organ of speech.” So it symbolizes the power of utterance. The letter even looks like it has a small tongue. This reminds me of the Bible story about the Tower of Babel. According to the story, all of mankind spoke the same language. Man came up with the idea that he could reach heaven by building a really tall Tower. A material-minded concept.

According to the story, God changed their speech into a multiple of different languages. The project was a failure. What the builders didn’t realize was that language was a tool of their thoughts. If their thoughts were a mess, then it didn’t matter if they all spoke the same language, or not. If your thoughts are truly organized enough, you control the forces of nature, and reach heaven, right here, through your Word. No need for the tower.

Let’s take a further look at the symbology and colors on this card. The gray stone tower sits at the top of a dark brown mountain, the same earthy color as the Deceiver. The tower is constructed of 22 layers of brick. This is a reference to the Hebrew alphabet’s 22 letters. So, you could call it a structure of human speech.  In some earlier decks this structure was called “The House of God” because its gray color denotes wisdom. So here you have a House of God whose foundation is based upon the earth.  This reminds us of the earthy Deceiver, who intimated that all you see with your senses is all that there is. Therefore, we can assume that this structure is based on human error and ignorance.

This is similar to our personalities. We’ve constructed them with our false notions, but they are at the same time Temples of the Living God. The limitations and diseases in our bodies are dependent on the incorrect thinking fed from us to our subconscious mind. The tower is our spoken word manifested and elaborated upon by the Empress, based upon our superficial and race-thought observations. Remember, she’ll deliver everything you request, in spades.

On the other hand, we see 22 flaming Yods suspended in the air. Again, we have the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Ten are on one side of the tower and twelve are on the other side. The 10 represent the Tree of Life and the 12 represent the signs of the zodiac. Thus, we have represented the sum-total of the cosmic forces. They also include the four elements of fire, air, earth and water of the Creative Word. By hanging them in space the Key is stating that none of these cosmic forces has a physical foundation, unlike the Tower.

On average most people think of their lives as being totaling in a physical world. We eat, drink, breathe and work in a physical environment. The Ageless Wisdom says that isn’t so. The conditions we encounter and depend on in our daily lives are supported by the Life Force. For us to function here certain physical conditions must be met, but they neither cause or support these functions.

Causation is not physical. Physical is the result. To make a change in your life you must place your attention on the cause beneath the surface of the physical. This isn’t popular, but then the earth being round wasn’t either for a long time. Also, this can be demonstrated, it’s just that there are very few that can do it. Developing your skill in concentration will allow you to see the cause beneath the surface. That is a life changing experience you don’t want to miss.

It is important to realize that we can’t just forget about our bodies as we advance along the path of wisdom. Your perception of change will be felt at the physical level of awareness. Our bodies must be prepared in order to hold the higher levels of consciousness. The flash on this card comes from a solar disk. Here we have the destructive agent of the Cosmos preparing us for the change that is taking place within us. Note the disk is in the same corner of the Key as that of the Sun in the Fool Key. The source of the flash is the lamp of the Hermit, which is located directly above this Key. The zigzag form of the flash is a reminder of the Tree of Life and the movement of the Life Power among the ten Emanations of Light on that diagram.

The crown is a symbol of authority and will power. Here the crown represents false material attainment. Mankind has done well for itself over the centuries. Here we are again at the Tower of Babel attempting to storm heaven’s gate by building up an earthly structure to a far-off God. Instead, man should now consider preparing the temple of his own vehicle so that it is fit to hold the indwelling God already present.

Right knowledge begins with a flash of perception. We realize that we’re not separate from the Life Force. This means all the time. But with this we also realize that we don’t have a separate will from the Life Force. It’s all one, we’re all one. The current structure of our lives begins to fade away into the new realization that the Life Force is here for us. This is personal. It also mean that we begin to look at our family, and friends, and even strangers differently. We’re not separate. What happens to them happens to us. What happens to us happens to them. You can’t forget this. You’re waking up!

The falling figures are the directing (male) self-conscious mind and the receptive (female) sub-conscious mind that’s contained within each of us. The flash of inspiration that hits us takes all our previous notions about them and throws them off the tower! In the Tower, the figures are clothed. They’re hiding their true nature from each other while mankind remains in a state of ignorant separateness.

The man wears both red and blue, to show a mixture of self-conscious and sub-conscious activities. The woman is shod with red but wears a blue robe. Furthermore, she is crowned with a crown similar to that of the High Priestess. The domination of personality by emotion shown by these two figures has to be overcome. The only way to do it is by seeing ourselves clearly.  There can be no division between these two modes of consciousness. The concealment and division between the two is over.

The Mars force is a powerful stimulation of desire. Most of us are overwhelmed by a mob of complex and overwhelming desires. Many of them are unimportant and weak. As an enlightened being, you have comparatively few desires, but they are deep, powerful and one-pointed. Go straight for your mark, allowing nothing to turn you aside. Make it the center of your being and flavor all of your actions and thoughts.

Select your most important desire. Do not allow less important ones to interfere with it. Though easy to describe, this practice is difficult.  The basis of mastery is controlling your desires. Get out your sword and make it easier through right discrimination. Remember, your subconscious mind is standing by, ready and willing to happily deliver to you all that you need!