Major Arcana · XVI
♂︎ Mars · פ Peh · Thoth: The Tower (War)
A structure built on something untrue comes down, suddenly. It is a shock, and it is also a release.
Peh, the mouth, is the organ of speech and of eating. It is a Double letter with a final form (ף, 800); its ordinary value is 80. In Kaplan’s Sepher Yetzirah its opposites are Dominance and Subjugation. The word spoken by the mouth can build or destroy, as the Tower shows.
The 27th path runs horizontally from Netzach to Hod, the lowest of the three horizontal paths: it links feeling and intellect, Venus and Mercury, through the fire of Mars. The Golden Dawn’s Philosophus grade includes it. In the diagram of the Fall, the Tower is the path struck by the dragon.
A tall grey tower on a crag is struck by lightning; its crown is blown off, flames burst from the windows, and a crowned man and a woman fall headlong among falling flame-shaped Yods. Waite, following Grand Orient, reads it as the ruin of the House of Life when evil has prevailed in it; Case’s key word is awakening: the flash of insight that destroys the false structure built on mistaken ideas.
Crowley subtitled it War. The Eye of Horus (or of Shiva, whose opening destroys the universe) blazes at the top; from the jaws of Dis below, flames shatter a geometric tower and figures fall. To one side a dove with an olive branch and a lion-headed serpent (Abraxas or Chnoubis) represent the two forms of desire, love and death. Crowley calls the card the destruction of the old by the new, and says that it can mean the sudden awakening that comes with initiation.
In the Marseille deck it is La Maison Dieu, the House of God (or the hospital, as the Hôtel-Dieu), struck by fire from heaven, perhaps an image of the Tower of Babel. Lévi gave it the letter Ayin.
Card image: Pamela Colman Smith, Rider-Waite tarot, 1909 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).