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My favorite teaching on the Tower comes from ‘Meditations on the Tarot’. Honestly, I think that book is unnecessarily complicated, and while I recommend it all the time, I do so because of the few precious sentences that are to be found within a practically incomprehensible tangle of esotericism.
Complaints aside, the essential teaching is that the Tower offers us a choice between ‘masonry’ and ‘gardening’. The way that I understand that is that we can:
-continue to believe that we’re in control, as if we can expect life to go according to our own plans and designs (Masonry),
-or we can live humbly, with an awareness that there is so much about the world that we cannot even comprehend much less control (Gardening).
-Our desire to exert our will and to understand and explain the world around us can make us rigid and inflexible (Masonry),
-or we can stay adaptable, growing in the directions that life directs us, rather than towards an arbitrary aim that we’ve decided on long ago (Gardening).
Masonry is obviously represented by the Tower: we build and build and build, according to our will. We build walls designed to keep us safe, as if we are in control. I always think of the ‘gardening’ approach as 4 of Wands (which is also connected to the Tower astrologically. Tower corresponds to Mars, Aries’ ruling planet, and 4 of Wands is Venus in Aries). Rachel Pollack connects 4 of Wands with the Tower in ’78 Degrees of Wisdom’:
[The figures in the 4 of Wands] are leaving a walled city for the open bower. In other words, their spirit and courage carry them from a defensive situation to an open one. We can contrast this image with that of the Tower. The 2 figures in that Major card are dressed very similarly (even to blue and red robes) to the two in the 4 of Wands. In its less esoteric meanings the Tower shows the explosion that results when people allow a repressive or miserable situation to build up to an intolerable level. In the 4 of Wands, optimism and love of freedom carry the people, together, out of their walled city before it becomes a Tower-like prison.
So let’s look at this masonry/gardening theme in today’s spread:
I have approached this as a mason:
Attempting to mold it to my expectations:
Instead, I could work with it as a gardener:
And allow it to take its organic shape: