Carpe Diem #202, The Tower (XVI)

Dear haijin, visitors and travelers,

Our new episode was really a struggle so I couldn't publish it yesterday, but here we go ...

With our last episode, The Devil (XV) we entered the last phase of our journey through the RW-Tarot-deck and our quest for the divine meaning of the Tarot.
As we started our journey (and quest) I stated that the Tarot is in his original form divine, but through the centuries it has been used by occult movements or groups as e.g. The Golden dawn for divination and occult work.

once divine
than magical and occult
again divine

This month has been, so far, a revelation for you all, but also to me. It's a joy and a struggle to prepare and write the posts of this month. And as we are going further on our journey we are coming closer to the spiritual realm of the divine Tarot.
With The Devil (XV) we entered that realm and now we are at the next step, the next card, The Tower (XVI), it's the equivalent of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9 NIV). Mankind builded a Tower to reach Heaven so they could become one with God and like Him, but as we all know, God scattered the Tower and gave humankind all different languages and dispersed them all over the world.

reaching for Heaven
building the Tower of Babel -
broken Sunflower

Is this the true meaning of The Tower (XVI)? Let us look closer at this card.

What do we see?

The Tower stands alone on a very high rock. It has three windows which were previously occupied by two people. Upon the very top of The Tower was a crown (Kether, the first sephira on the Tree of Life). At the moment we see the Tower, several things are happening. First, the lightning bolt is coming from Heaven and has hit the Tower. The crown is flying off. The Tower has burst into flames. The two occupants have jumped from the Tower and are falling to unknown depths below. There is a rain of Yods all around the Tower. (Yod is the 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet it represents a divine point of energy. Yod is used to form all the other letters, and since God uses the letters as the building blocks of Creation, Yod indicates God's omnipresence. Yod is the starting point of the presence of God in all things, the 'spark' of the Spirit in everything. By the way Yod is part of every Hebrew letter and is therefore omnipresent in every word of the Old Testament.)

yod the tenth letter
base for all Biblical words -
a spark of Spirit

The Tower (XVI) is a multiple layered card with a lot of symbolism in it. The Tower stands alone and symbolizes our individual consciousness, exclusively in the realm of mind and thought. In other words, it symbolizes the spiritual realm. The Tower is our mind, and represents all that which we have learned during our life.
The ligtning bolt stands for the flash of intuition, the flash of recognition, the dawn of consciousness, wherein we finally see absolute total divine light. We are using our minds and beginning to radiate with the glow of God's truth. The lightning bolt is the fire, the Light of God (John 9: 12 NIV), that touches us.

transformed to gods
as we reach for the Light of God -
Summer Solstice

Than starts our transformation which in the card is depicted as the burning tower. However that burning is not a destruction, it is a transformation. We have dealt with the temptations of the nihilism involved in the pathway of death as it pertains to the transcendence of ego, the transformation of our mind. This refers to Roamns 12: 2 NIV 'Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is'.
As the tower is burning it releases different chemicals. Some of the energy will be released from the wood and rise up into the air, to Heaven, as a kind of sacrifice. E.G. the pure thoughts and unconditional love we have learned through our lives. Other parts will turn to ash and charcoal, these are the 'bad' 'evil' thoughts who are of the Devil, which we have already conquered in our last post.

sacrifice
burning the ships behind me -
a new day rises

This separating is also seen in the two figures jumping out of The Tower. They represent our conscious and our sub-conscious minds which are purified through God's Power.
Back to my first thought, the tower of Babel. God scattered the tower and made humankind diverse through their languages. This says: 'We call by many names what is truly one'. (All Gods Are One).

As we overcome the barriers of language, we recognize that we are, and always have been, one family (as e.g. Carpe Diem is). We are talking here in the Tower about awareness, past language. This is extremely difficult. Part of the power which The Tower is transferring to us is the ability to rise above and beyond the limitations of language, to be able to perceive things as they are in their pure prelinguistic state.

no boundaries
all humankind gathered
as water in the seas

The Divine Light, which strikes the Tower, seeks to enable us to see people as they are, to love them all unconditonally, to leave the darkness of our solitude, to transform that conscious energy into its original pure state and be able to recognize things as they are.

open your eyes
like the compassionate Buddha
see the real world

The Tower, as we have seen, is all about purification. When we are purified the pathway towards Gods Realm, Heaven, the New Jerusalem (Revelations 21: 1-5a) is open in front of us.
The Tower can be seen as a 'watch-tower' from which we get a glimpse of Heaven, the new Jerusalem, but may we enter? Through purification, the message of The Tower, we may.
Moses wasn't purified. He could not enter the Promised Land, Heaven, the New Jerusalem was forbidden. We can read this in Deuteronomy 34: 1-4 NIV.

purified we stand
eye in eye with the Father -
a newborn child

This was The Tower (XVI) and I have struggled to write this episode. Blood, sweat and tears I shed, but I had to write this to fulfil our journey and quest trhough the Divine Tarot. I hope this post inspires you to write and share haiku.

This prompt will stay open 'til May 24th 11.59 AM (CET) and I hope to publish our next episode, a Special haiku by Kyoshi Takahama, later on today around 10.00 PM (CET). That Special haiku I will share here already.


kogane-mushi nageutsu yami no fukasa kana

a gold bug -
I hurl into the darkness
and feeling the depth of night