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Major Arcana · Trump XVI
The Tower
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightSudden upheavalPretense collapsingA hard truth
↓ ReversedUpheaval resistedConfinementA lesser shock
What it means
↑ Upright
Lightning strikes the tower, the crown is knocked from its top, and two figures fall. What the card points to is sudden upheaval in whatever was built on a false footing — an assumption, an arrangement, a picture of things that could not hold — and the shock, real as it is, also shows plainly where you stand. Steady yourself first, then decide what is worth building again.
↓ Reversed
The upheaval is held in check, or felt as pressure rather than a crash: a situation that confines you, an authority that leans too hard, a change everyone can see coming and nobody will name. Holding the walls up tends to cost more the longer it goes on, so ask what needs to give way and let it go on your own terms.
What's on the card
The tower stands alone on a jagged peak, as high and as cut off as pride can build. Waite reads it as a house of falsehood torn open, and quotes the psalm: "Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it." The flames falling through the air beside the two figures are commonly read as a grace that comes even in ruin, the light that breaks in once the walls give way.
Waite's meaning, 1910
Upright
Misery, distress, indigence, adversity, calamity, disgrace, deception, ruin. It is a card in particular of unforeseen catastrophe.
Reversed
According to one account, the same in a lesser degree; also oppression, imprisonment, tyranny.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.