Dismantling The Tower (From an Actual Tower)

Tarot is everywhere if you’re looking for it. And me being me, I always am.

Which is why, despite being on holiday in one of my favourite cities, Seville, where I was making every effort to ‘unplug’, I couldn’t help but… make it tarot.

Seville is full of history and character, and so while I was there, like many other tourists, I went to the top of La Giralda, the bell tower attached to La Catedral de Sevilla (the largest gothic cathedral in the world) to see the striking views of the city. To get to the top, you have to walk a winding slope that wraps all the way around the internal walls of the tower - over 35 floors of dark, narrow hallway. Upon entering the tower, though, the total number of floors is unclear. Certainly, judging by the height of the building, there are going to be many floors. But with the gently sloping, dimly-lit path that you’re walking, it’s hard to tell when you reach floor 15 whether there’s a total of 20 or 50.

All of this was a bit disorienting.

And so, as we climbed the floors of the tower, I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. Seville was approaching 40 degrees. The narrow hall was hot and full of people. I had little concept of where we were, other than, from the occasional window we passed, that we were very high up. It felt claustrophobic and stifling.

La Giralda from the Orange Garden in La Catedral de Sevilla

Naturally, my mind wandered to The Tower card. For me, it’s always meant that the foundations of the structure you’re building are not strong enough. But as the path wound ever higher in La Giralda, I started to wonder whether a tower is even a desirable structure in the first place.

A Tower gives us height, yes, but it can also be exposing and create vulnerability. There is only one way in and out, and it’s a long, long way from the top. It can also be isolating and restricting, with limited space. A tower can only be as wide as its base. The only room for expansion is to keep building up.

So, here’s the question I found myself asking on my way up The Tower: is a tower really the best structure we could build for ourselves?

The Tower card is less about the structure and more about the destruction of it, and this typically leads to more aligned outcomes, that could not have existed prior to The Tower’s collapse. The Tower asks us to go back to the foundations. To start again. To create something more intentional, safer and structurally sound.

And maybe part of that is realising that, all this time, we’ve been chasing the height. We’ve been climbing to the top. We’ve been racing to build the tallest tower of them all. It’s no surprise. After all, most of us are taught that this is what life is all about. You want your tower to be as tall, if not taller, than those who started building theirs at the same time as you. It’s like someone yells, “Go!” and sets off a stopwatch, so we start at the bottom and we start building, building, building. The goal only to keep up. To keep adding floors as quickly as everyone else.

But did it ever really give us what we wanted?

Well… obviously, in the energy of this card, the answer is no, because now that Tower is crumbling!

But even before that, was The Tower really the structure that benefitted us the most?

As the saying goes, it’s lonely at the top.

And we see this in our world today. Scarcity mindset is pervasive. We’re often taught to believe that there isn’t enough, and if you want to succeed, you need to be ahead of everyone else. To see someone else succeed over you means that there is less room for your own success. In this mindset, we are all building our own individual tower, perceiving everyone else’s tower as competition - maybe even threat. And yes, that is lonely. And it’s not sustainable.

Is it any wonder, then, that such a tower would collapse?

But even if The Tower would not fall of its own accord, the thing about a tower is that it can only continue to grow upward from the point at which it started. Its expansion is, therefore, limited to the foundations underneath it.

So what happens when we grow, evolve, or just, quite simply, change our minds? A tower has very little flexibility to account for this. We must continue upward within the parameters that we set out when we first started building.

It stands to reason that we might reach a point in our lives when the foundations we built no longer fit the person we’ve become. I’m sure we’ve all experienced some version of this. The career path that we began at school that doesn’t align with the adult we became. The relationships founded on beliefs, values and goals that shifted as we became more sure of ourselves.

And in this context, we have a choice to make. We can keep building something that doesn’t quite fit. Or we can dismantle The Tower and rebuild.

All of this brings us back to the question I found myself asking in La Giralda…

Is a tower really the best structure we could build for ourselves?

We are regularly led to believe that the goal is to build the tallest tower.

But what if the goal wasn’t height?

What if the goal was simply growth.

And that growth could lead us in all directions.

Expand outwards. Upwards. Create not a tower, but a whole freaking village.

This is a structure built upon diverse foundations. It allows for collaboration and connection with others. It means that some parts can grow taller than others. It allows for expansion and contraction. And it leaves space for change and evolution that doesn’t require total destruction and rebuilding from scratch.

When the goal isn’t height, to ‘get ahead’ or ‘reach the top’, perhaps life stops feeling like a game of snakes and ladders. The stakes aren’t so high. Because every tweak doesn’t require dismantling a whole life, a whole identity. And each adjustment doesn’t leave us defining our success against someone else’s.

And in this way, perhaps The Tower was never really asking us to build a better tower. Rather, it was asking us to build something different altogether.

How high we have climbed isn’t important if our world is full.

Have you ever had a tarot epiphany in a real life situation? Tell me about it in the comments!

N x