The Sixteenth Principle

by Tony Willis   

The Devil tarot card represents, at one level, pure logic, logic divorced from feeling. When this kind of logic is brought into play the results can be chilling. In the seventies I read a newspaper article about a man, living in London, England, who had killed his mother so that he could inherit her assigned parking space. He explained his thinking in the most logical terms. In London, he argued, people were common as snow in January; parking spaces, on the other hand, were scarce. The sacrifice seemed to him to be perfectly warranted, given the circumstances.

Logic has its place in the world, but logic devoid of feeling leads to heartless acts. Humans, therefore, at some point in their mental evolution, need to move beyond logic. They need to combine it with emotion and to work out which ought to take precedence in any given situation. They also need to realize that neither should ever be used alone, one excluding the other.

For the occult student, the situation is slightly different. The passage from Logic to what lies beyond Logic brings the seeker after the secret wisdom of the unseen forces to a confrontation with paradox. The phase has been aptly summed up in this way: The occultist must take the formula 2 plus 2, realize that the result might be either 4 or 22, and proceed if as both answers were correct. That is the general principle; it can be applied to a wide variety of decisions the student of occultism has to make. To give one instance: When studying the deities of various pantheons, the student may read that the very important Egyptian god Osiris was equated by the Greeks with their own Dionysus. But Osiris is lord of the Underworld and sits in judgment on the souls of the dead. Dionysus, on the other hand, is the god of wine, the ecstasy of inebriation and the ecstasy of exalted consciousness. There appear to be no parallels between the two. The seeker who remains in thrall to the old devil logic will reject the attribution and in doing so lose their hold on the thread that enables occultists to find their way through the labyrinth of esoteric symbolism. Whereas, the seeker who has broken through the barrier posed by the form of logic that is unable to cope with paradox will move forward along the road leading to the Greater Mysteries. The latter will make progress with their understanding of the secret wisdom; the former will come to a halt on the road to higher knowledge, occupying a frame of mind they are comfortable inhabiting, but paused in their spiritual evolution, awaiting the realization that will enable them move on.

At the material level, the Tower has been allotted divinatory meanings such as sudden alterations, unexpected changes, and disappointments in life. The Golden Dawn understood it to represent “[r]evolution as distinguished from transmutation or sublimation; the destructive, as opposed to the conservative energy, attacking inertia.” In a mundane tarot reading the card stands for surprising events, generally, but not always, having unfortunate consequences. Everything depends on the cards surrounding the Tower in the spread, especially those coming after it. For one should never lose sight of the fact that, out of tragedy, success can come, even as the phoenix rises up out of the fire on which it has immolated itself.

     

At one end of the scale, Trump 16 predicts disgrace, even ruin; at the other, an unforeseen or unexpected calamity. At all events the card presages disruption of the inquirer’s plans. When it appears in a spread, it is the tarot reader’s job to pinpoint where exactly on this continuum the card is functioning in the layout under review. The cards surrounding the Tower will show the way. With the 8 of Swords preceding it and the 3 of Pentacles coming after, the message is an ultimately uplifting one: A confining situation, that the inquirer possibly could not see a way out of (8 Swords), will be transformed by some force beyond their control, and while the immediate upshot may be disappointment and disruption (Tower), the inquirer’s life can be restructured, most probably in a better, stabler form (3 Pentacles).

Two keywords traditionally associated with the Tower are ‘ruin’ and ‘catastrophe’. They resonate to the material or predictive level of interpretation. One of the card’s secret titles is ‘Astral Constriction’; it references the psychic or astral level. The astral plane is not open to the scrutiny of the five physical senses. Those people who have spent time on the astral plane have no option but to report back to those who have no experience of it using the language of analogy. Over the centuries, astral explorers have turned over and over again to the same comparisons. From one angle, the Astral acts like a sea or ocean; it rises and falls, ebbs and flows, and is perpetually in motion. From another angle, the Astral has airy qualities (without actually being Air, as we are talking analogically). Humans live surrounded by air but hardly notice that they do. Not until, on a blustery day, the wind threatens to blow our hat off or turn our umbrella inside out, and then we are reminded, not only of air’s constant presence, but also its latent power. Both water and air can be treacherous mediums to the unwary or unprepared. What Water and Air have in common is the tendency to move. Water flows in a tidal motion while Air blows in any direction it chooses. Astral Constriction, then, is something of a contradiction in terms.

     

The astral level is also the level of psyche. Viewed from one angle, the word psyche refers to the soul, and viewed from another it refers to an aspect of consciousness, the aspect of consciousness people are referring to when they talk of ‘consciousness raising’ or ‘the expansion of consciousness’. These are the same thing, raising consciousness being simply the expansion of consciousness in an upward direction. However, there comes a point where the psyche needs to rest from its consciousness-raising exertions, regroup and reassess. Not until this process has been gone through is it safe for the occult student to attempt further expansion of consciousness or to raise their consciousness to a higher level. This is the Astral, or psychic, Constriction adverted to by the secret title of the Tower card. It is a necessary pause and when it is imposed upon us should be embraced. Adequate sleep is essential to the health of the body and adequate rest is essential to the health of the psyche. Those who ignore either of these truths do so at their own peril.

The Tower’s other secret title, ‘Logical Elimination’, operates at the spiritual level, and that has been dealt with already, in the discussion about how the Tower’s energies relate to those of the Devil, one of whose secret titles is ‘Logic’.

The predictive tarot and the psychological tarot are, these days, treated as separate entities. But the predictive tarot has a psychological side to it and always did have. Some excellent examples of the psychological approach to tarot interleaved with its predictive aspect are to be found in Basil Rákóczi’s The Painted Caravan. Despite the title, the book is about the predictive tarot. Unfortunately these days copies, supposing you can get your hands on any, are selling for £600.

What then does Trump 16 denote from the psychological point of view? The Tower, upright, signifies a person, unremarkable in many ways, who acts as a catalyst. Startling events happen around them rather than to them. Those events start when the person enters your life and cease when they move on. In reverse, the Tower denotes one who, consciously or unconsciously, fulfils the role of Trickster. They may lie, dissemble, or manipulate; the ultimate Trickster engaging in all three. Some tricksters tease or torment, unerringly homing in on their victim’s sore spots. The worst of the type enjoy wreaking havoc and are best avoided by the rest of humanity.

Finally, let us imagine that the inquirer has asked about their spirituality or the condition of their immortal soul. Under those circumstances, The Tower in the first house of a horoscope spread is a sign that the inquirer’s current incarnation is one of spiritual transition, during which an important advance in knowledge and understanding will be made. As a result, the emphasis of the inquirer’s life will shift from the gathering of material experience in the direction of more spiritually oriented goals. It is the symbol of the seeker after higher things taking their first stumbling steps towards the next spiritual level open to them.

In reverse in the first house of a horoscope spread, where the question relates to spiritual or soul-experience, The Tower denotes someone who delights in stirring up trouble in order to further their own ends. Its presence in the first house, reversed, indicates that the person the card refers to has entered a spiritual cul de sac; they may remain stalled in that dead end for some time before coming to their senses and retracing their footsteps. The more educated the person is in their general outlook on life, the more likely it is that they will cause trouble within an esoteric school or a study group investigating the occult. The less advanced will play their games at their place of work or within their family. They may get away with their antics for a time but inevitably they will be found out and suffer censure or even ostracism. When the card comes up reversed in the first house and the question asked concerns spiritual matters, the best advice the reader can give the inquirer is that, for the foreseeable future, they examine their motives very carefully before taking any action whatsoever on the physical plane.

The Tower as a Predictive Anomaly

There are a number of schools of thought active in the tarot world. In my opinion none is superior to any other; there is something to be learnt from all of them. One tradition relating to the Tower assigns it a unique attribution. Whereas all other Trumps take on negative connotations when they fall in reverse, and those with an unfortunate significance when upright become even more malignant when they appear upside down in a spread, the Tower assumes a better tone in reverse. Charles Platt, in his The Art of Card Fortune-Telling (1921), says that, when reversed, the Tower loses much of its malevolence, though he feels that in association with cards of negative import it might predict imprisonment. In a book published in 1936, Richard Huson stated: If reversed, its evil influence is lessened considerably. If placed near a card of deniers [pentacles], especially the seven, it foreshadows, strangely enough, an unexpected legacy.

As I’ve already said, more often than not, where the predictive tarot is concerned, the meaning of a card when reversed is the exact opposite of its meaning when upright. But here we have an instance where an upright meaning can be worked out from the reversed meaning. If the Tower reversed signifies imprisonment, as Platt says it does, then one of its upright meanings should be ‘freedom from imprisonment’. I have, on a number of occasions, found this meaning to apply metaphorically to the upright Tower. That is to say, for me, it has signified the inquirer ‘seeing the light’, coming to their senses, or experiencing a eureka moment that freed them from a confining mindset that had held them in its grip for a number of years.

Everybody’s interaction with the tarot is unique. I am merely pointing out that the card meanings that find their way into books arrive there for a reason. Charles Platt must have seen the Tower forecasting imprisonment in readings he made or he would not have been promoting that meaning for the card.

For the sake of completeness, I am going to say a few words about the way the Four Elements correspond to the Three Planes. The physical plane is aligned with Earth. The astral plane is aligned with Water and Air, as described in the body of this post. The Lower Astral is more emotional (Watery) in nature and the Upper Astral more mental or thought-orientated (Airy). The spiritual plane is associated with Fire, that aspect of fire which, the poet tells us, burns but does not consume; for spiritual Fire is not mundane fire, although the latter is a physical manifestation of the former.