La Tour
La
Tour - the Tower - is surely an image
of stability.
But the tower in the Tarot is pictured at a moment of crisis, struck by lightning or some other fierce explosive force. It is an instant of complete and sudden change.
Some packs call this card La Tour Maline or La Maison-Dieu. What happens when the house of God is struck down? It is the moment when the old beliefs must pass, a time of abandonment, opening all kinds of unexplored pathways.
For me, La Tour is one of the most abstract of the major arcana of the Tarot. It is, perhaps, the least likely card to be able to represent a querent come to seek a reading.
What sort of person might exist, poised on the cusp of such brutal change?
And, for the novelist, how long could such a character be sustained, teetering between the past and the future.
The card reversed describes nothing more than the rut worn in the track by the cart wheels of the past - old ways, narrowness, unwillingness to change, inability to leave the way.
If your character will not fight back, they will find themselves oppressed, taken advantage of, trapped by unhappiness and impotence.
I say 'if'.
Perhaps, after weeks of torment, their children abducted, their lover murdered, they will one day stand up and shout, like Webste's heroine:
'I am Duchess of Malfi still!'
