The Tower (XVI)

This is the card Waite found hardest to write about, and he says so before he says anything else: the occult explanations attached to it are meagre and mostly disconcerting. Then he sorts through them. Papus called it the fall of Adam, which Waite rejects, though he prefers Papus's alternative, the materialization of the spiritual word. Christian called it the downfall of the mind trying to penetrate the mystery of God, rejected too. Waite sides with Grand Orient: this is the ruin of the House of Life when evil has got into it, and above all ‘the rending of a House of Doctrine’. His own last word is harder. The reference, he understands, is to ‘a House of Falsehood’.

The picture is a tower on a crag at night. Lightning comes down from the right and strikes the top, flame bursts from three windows, and two figures fall head first towards the rocks through a sky full of burning drops, twenty two of them shaped like the Hebrew letter yod, counted here and not by Waite. He offers one historical reading and seems mildly annoyed nobody got there first: ‘it is a little surprising that the device has not so far been allocated to the destruction of Solomon's Temple, when the lightning would symbolize the fire and sword with which that edifice was visited by the King of the Chaldees’. The older names for the card he lists as ‘Castle of Plutus, God's House and the Tower of Babel’, and in the Babel reading the two falling men are taken to be Nimrod and his minister.

Look at what the lightning has done first. It has knocked the crown clean off the tower, and the crown hangs in the air a little way clear of the top, the way a lid comes off a pot. It is gold, and it is drawn as a real crown rather than as battlements. Waite's text says nothing about it and nothing about the two people falling either, so both are marked here as seen and left unread, which is honest and also unnecessary. Nobody needs telling what it means when the crown comes off the top of the house. The illustrator has said in one stroke what Waite takes a paragraph to say about the House of Falsehood: what falls is what was set highest.

The card is tied to the one before it, and Waite is careful about how. The catastrophe reflects the Devil, but by analogy rather than by symbolism: the Devil is the fall into the material and animal state, the Tower is destruction on the intellectual side. Then he quotes the psalm, that except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. The tower went up in the wrong hands. The lightning is the correction.