'When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves'

Viktor Frankl

The Tarot is something that most people have heard of, and also something that carries with it a cultural baggage of fear, misunderstanding and misrepresentation that is as deep as the images are well known. It even feels a little risky to write a post that has the key you will find below as central to its thesis, due to the assumptions that surround this set of images. Yet the more one studies these images, the more that one begins to develop a hint for what they might actually represent....and realize that they are not primarily a tool for fortune telling, they are not a tool of the dark arts, or a carnival side show, but instead can be understood as a pictorial or symbolic representation of what are known as archetypes.

So what is an Archetype you may well ask? Well the simple and brief explanation is that Archetypes can be understood as essential aspects of our Collective Unconscious. They are forces that create experiences, processes and qualities of consciousness that are deeply primal, and so deeply fundamental to being human that they are often unrecognized and unseen...yet they are the images and figures that populate our dreams, that inhabit myth across the world, that are embedded in fairy tails and religious traditions and as such they tend to exist most often outside of the rational worldview. They are limited in number as they correspond to experiences of humans since primordial times, and are commonly poorly expressed and communicated through the binary limitations of language. As such one of the primary ways that these forces can be encountered is through image and symbol, ' a picture paints a thousand words' I think the saying goes... it is this type of picture and symbol that Tarot contains.

So to further our exploration of one of these archetypes, that will touch all of us at some stage, we will begin by exploring Key 16, the Tower.

The Tower can evoke many concepts and ideas, but commonly it can represent those experiences in life when forces that are out of our control, cause the rapid destruction of the sense of self that we have built up over the years. These are the experiences where we realize that what we have identified with and who we have thought ourselves to be, is lost and rapidly comes crashing to the ground. These are the events where we lose someone close to us, a divorce or a health issue which means that we can no longer do what we have previously had available to us. It is the loss of a passion or vocation that you have worked your life to cultivate, or a traumatic incident for which there seems to be no rhyme or reason and for which we struggle to piece together some sense.

One of the primary symbols within this Key is that of the Tower itself. This is a human made structure that is built brick by brick on what appears in the image to be shaky foundations. This Tower is a representative of the ego, the little self, those structures of thought and bodily tension, of memories, fantasies, behavioral patterns and habitual interactions with others that we believe ourselves to be each and every day. The Towers walls are built over the years, to provide us protection from pain, from our own discomfort and the discomfort of others, it provides us with a sense of individuality and coherence, a story about who we are that offers us continuity across time. It separates us from those parts of ourselves that we cannot and do not identify with, the NOT me.

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So what happens when something occurs that destabilizes everything that we believed we were, and destroys our ability to identify any longer with the objects in our awareness that we have attached to throughout our lives. This is without doubt a crisis, full of pain and turmoil, full of uncertainty and potentially fear, yet it is also a breaking down which must occur before novel and higher order structures can begin to emerge.

Often in our lives crisis is seen as something that we want to avoid, and I must admit that living with some stability(homeostasis) is most certainly desirable, yet an extreme in either direction will lead to problems in a system. What we know from systemic theory is that any system which doesn't allow for morpho-genesis, for dynamic change in the rules of the system and how its parts interact will, when confronted with different environmental conditions or input, break down, as the rules are too inflexible to accommodate the necessary changes. This is one of the mechanisms by which systems evolve and change, the rules which provide stability are stretched by attempts to accommodate changing circumstance as in many situations changing the environment may well be outside of the systems sphere of significant influence. Hence we return to the quote by Victor Frankl at the beginning of this post:

'When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves'

Continuing it can be seen that these ideas function well when attempting to conceptualize evolution & change in our own lives and the idea that often if we don't have environmental pressure, or 'Grist for the Mill', if we are not confronted with significant changes in circumstances then our system, our awareness our sense of self has no impetus to grow and evolve. We will have change but this will be of the first order, change within the system not of the system itself. It is this second order change that the Tower invites us into, It is this type of transformation that the destruction of the Tower we have built up over the years allows. The system must collapse to be rebuilt and in so doing we have an opportunity for the occurrence of a bifurcation, a Radical transformation where who we are left as is profoundly different from what came before. Yet while the destruction of the tower provides profound opportunity and possibility , it does as stated above bring with it significant challenge, as when the defensive structures that we have built up to surround us break down all that we have condemned in ourselves, resisted and unconsciously avoided over the years is still present and patiently waiting for our attention.

These stories, or complexes of thought, feeling & psychic energy as Jung would call them, that have, at least partially, been keep outside of our awareness might include things such as.....that nagging sense of not being good enough that may have driven you to great achievement and success, yet it also might be that which drives an addiction, destructive habit or compulsion. It could be the deep seated fear that you are unlovable and that without the tower of roles and achievements, you will be left abandoned....you know the things I am talking about, and you no doubt have had glimpses of those aspects of your story that are presently waiting over the walls of your Tower. Yet it is according to Jung in the experience of opening to and facing that which we do not accept in ourselves that change and evolution can begin. As Jung states:

'We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate it oppresses'.

Hence the Tower represents not only those experience of radical transformation and destabilization in our lives, but also the consistent movement of our organism towards integration and inclusion rather than separation...the walls we build, brick by brick will always inevitably come tumbling down, leaving for a time, if we let it, a void, an emptiness, a space or a silence, that can allow a deeper and more profound light to begin to break through...and it is this gnosis, this experience of what we are at our core that can form the foundation of a truly New Being.

To finish with a poem from Cristen Rodgers.....

'I have died a thousand deaths, each time reinventing myself brighter stronger and purer than before. From the midst of destruction, i became the creator of myself, from the midst of darkness I become my own source of light'

References

Frankl, V.,(2006) Man and his search for Meaning, Beacon Press.

Kelsey, M.,(1974) Myth, History & Faith: The re-mythologizing of Christianity. Paulist Press, NewYork.

Nichols, S., (1980) Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey. Weiser Press.

Pascal, E.,(1992) Jung to Live By: A guide to the practical application of Jungian principles in everyday life. Warner Books New York.

Knight, G., (1986) The treasure house of Images. The Aquarian Press. Northamptonshire.