The Tower

A tower is shattered by flame that bursts from the mouth of Dis at its base; geometrical figures fall from it; at the top the open eye of Shiva watches. A dove with an olive branch and a lion-serpent face each other across the destruction.

Peh, the mouth, on path 27 from Netzach to Hod: the horizontal path across the lower Tree, the mouth that speaks the Word that shatters. Peh joins emotion and intellect, and when the current jumps between them the tower falls.

Mars, the lesser malefic: force, war, energy, the breaking of forms. Mars rules Aries and Scorpio, is exalted in Capricorn, and is the planet of Geburah.

Sixteen, the square of four, matter squared, and Peh's value 80. The perfect solid structure is exactly what the lightning must destroy.

The shattering of the persona and of ego-defences by the irruption of the unconscious: the crisis that precedes real change. Jungian readers see the collapse of a one-sided attitude and the eruption of what it excluded.

Waite's lightning strikes a crown from a tower as two figures fall; Crowley adds the mouth of Dis, the eye of Shiva, and the dove and serpent, so that the card reads as the end of an Aeon and the war between the old and the new.