Is there always more than one meaning to a tarot card?
Does the Tower spell disaster in a tarot reading?
Recently I had a very interesting experience giving a reading to a young woman in her 40s who had been reading tarot since her childhood and was thinking of making it her career in the future.
It was fascinating and really gave me food for thought as I could see each of us were a bit ‘set in our ways’ about how we interpret a card.
The Tower looks most alarming and its easy to read disaster!
For instance, when the Tower appeared in her reading, her reaction was instant ‘Disaster’.
Now when you look at the card, there is lots of darkness with flashes of lightening, bodies are falling out of a crumbling tower, it does rather portend disaster. And this card can certainly speak things suddenly going wrong; ‘the rug being pulled out from under you’, possibly quite out of the blue.
However I see this card more as an alert to the idea that there might be something dodgy with the foundations (of your job, situation, relationship). Definitely worth paying attention to, not the end of the world, as the card seems to imply. Once you acknowledge and address the underlying flaw things can quickly be rebuilt. The Star is the major arcana card that follows the Tower. The card of bright hopes and new prospects. So the opportunity might be to consider where unseen ‘trouble’ might lie.
The Star heralds bright hopes and new prospects….especially once the dodgy foundations of the Tower have been rebalanced…
Tarot cards indicate ‘potential’ and so one of the benefits of having a tarot reading is that when you anticipate a challenge ahead, you are prepared to face it, or avoid it, or at least have enough insight to make the best of it. Once you see the Tower in a spread, you can be especially conscious of the anything you are unsure about in a situation. A silly example might be, you think the car tyres might need their pressure checking, something I can easily ignore. When you slide into another car that had to stop suddenly you realise the incident might have been avoidable!
Taking the example of my tarot reader client, she had the Tower for a new job she was starting. Her immediate thought was, what was going to go wrong? She went into the job looking for disaster and sure enough, a co-worker was against her from the start. It turned out they had wanted the job she had won. In retrospect she realised her mistake had been in not clarifying the working relationship with this colleague before accepting the job, hence her position was dodgy from the start. Its very much a card saying its worth observing preconceived ideas as they might need to be up-ended.
At the beginning of this New Year, The Tower turned up in lots of readings, which made me a think this year is all about letting go of our preconceived ideas about how the world works. I say ‘how the world works’ because so often in the new year we start planning our year, and it seems to me, this is not a year to be making many firm plans, more a year of having one or two intentions and heading in that direction. Set views are not the way to go, embracing flexibility and curiosity might be a better way to travel.
Just as the tarot reader opposite me looked at things very differently, not to mention chose cards in a completely different way! I had never seen cards fly out of a deck like that when shuffling (except on Instagram when I thought the reader was showing off!) They flew out. She said my cards were very talkative. Well they never talked to me like that. She was quite unconcerned with the position of the cards…which was most liberating. Although her interpretation was curiously much more fixed. i.e. the Tower equals disaster, the ace of swords can be someone taking something from her?
It's what makes Life and Tarot so interesting. Everyone is unique and brings something unique to table. Do come and have a reading with me in Battersea or online. It is a fascinating and very useful experience.