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Thursday, 6 December 2012

Lightning strikes again

Star Tarot, Cathy McClelland
For a Tower card, I find this one looks rather too static and stylized for my taste. This card comes from the Star Tarot by Cathy McClelland.  At first glance, it looks to me like a cutaway of a nuclear cooling tower, or the neck of a bottle, or just about anything other than a tarot Tower. I think it's the lava flow and the blackness of the Tower that confuse my eye.

Lightning strikes the black tower from above, piercing it all the way through and crackling it down to its very foundations. It won't stand for much longer before it crumbles to dust.  Three figures that look nothing like human beings exit through flaming windows, but instead of plummetting to earth, they appear to be flying away in the form of a rather putrid-coloured smoke. In the background there is water, mountains on the horizon, a setting sun on the right and perhaps a comet falling on the left. At the bottom in the foreground, curiously, a dove holding an olive branch flies across the scene.

The Tower doesn't pop up much in my readings, and when it does, it usually heralds something fairly mundane, an inconvenience. Many times, the Tower can indicate great personal, or even spiritual, upheaval. Could even be cultural upheaval (as in the many readers around the world who kept pulling the Tower in the days and weeks before 11th Sep 2001). But the Tower can also mean a liberation--in that the Tower often represents entrenched beliefs or habits or anything that has formed in one's life as a means of self-protection or experiencing of life. These entrenched behaviours or ideas are being struck down. So the Tower can mean an event or bit of news or even a new understanding that leads to a radical change in one's life. For me so far, every time I've drawn the Tower, the result has been low key. I think maybe I got my quota of Tower moments before I discovered tarot.

Today my interview for that new opportunity I mentioned earlier. It wouldn't mean more money or power or prestige, but it would mean a, for me, radical change in my daily life, one that would not be unwelcome. So either it is going to be a total disaster (!) or it will go swimmingly and result in completely changing my daily routine.

Update at the end of the day: Well, I didn't get the job. But I don't feel I've been struck by lightning. The feedback I got was good and I shall move on from this place of heightened understanding of how to present what I have to offer.

This always happens with me with the Tower. It's never been a HUGE BIG THING. And for this I am grateful.

4 comments:

  1. a new job carla??? boo hoo, we wouldn't see you any more :-(

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  2. It was only a 6-month secondment, over before you know it! :)

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  3. I tried commenting earlier, but it got swallowed in the ether :( Darn phone!

    Sorry to hear you didn't get the job. As you say, though, maybe just going to the interview was a bit of a shake-up, opening your eyes to new possibilities :)

    Anyhow, I agree with you about this card. Somehow, the volcano aspect makes it feel a lot less like something which we feel is safe, but which is actually restricting us, which is how I often see the Tower. So, my least favourite card of this deck so far...

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  4. Also shaking me a bit out of complacency. Or comfort zone. I've always seen the Tower as self-defenses (for lack of better word) that have been built up, that must now be torn down. And that seems quite lacking in this card, as you say.

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