The Tower
Trump XVI of the tarot: a tower struck by lightning, with people falling from it. A. E. Waite read it as ruin and unforeseen catastrophe.
Meaning
Papus describes a tower "struck by lightning", and two men, one crowned and one not, falling with the broken masonry. Its older names, Waite recorded, were the Castle of Plutus, God's House (the French Maison Dieu) and the Tower of Babel, and Papus called it the Lightning-struck Tower.
What does the Tower card mean?
Waite's meanings are "misery, distress, indigence, adversity, calamity, disgrace, deception, ruin", and "in particular of unforeseen catastrophe"; reversed, the same in a lesser degree, or "oppression, imprisonment, tyranny".
In older decks
A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles the card La Torre. Papus joined it to the sixteenth Hebrew letter, Ayin.
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsThe StarTrump XVII of the tarot: a woman pouring water beneath a great star. A. E. Waite noted it is usually read as a card of hope.
- The same shape in Chinese radicalsMù 目The character for ‘eye’, and radical 109 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for looking and seeing are filed.
See also
The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers, lines or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research
Added . Last updated .