The History of the Tower (Fire) Card

 

The classic imagery of the Tower card, the stone structure struck by lightning with its top aflame and bodies tumbling out, goes back to the very earliest printed tarot cards (the Rosenwald, Rothschild, and Metropolitan Museum sheets, c.1500). Its title, though, is relatively modern. In 15th- and 16th-century Italy, it was usually called simply "Fire" or else "The House of the Devil" or some variation, even once being referred to abruptly as "Hell". Gertrude Moakley has suggested that the card may be connected to the "Hellmouth", a regular feature of theatrical sets in previous centuries, a mocked-up building that represented the gates of Hell. The Florentine Minchiate shows a woman fleeing from the doorway of a burning building; the top of the structure is not seen. We must admit, though, that the imagery on the card is a little unusual if it is intended to represent the Infernal regions, as the tower reaches skyward from the surface of the Earth; there is no suggestion of a pit or underworld.

A very important parallel tradition exists for this card, one that does not show a tower at all. It was sometimes called "Lightning" or "Thunderbolt", and the fiery lightning bolt would be shown striking a person or tree. We can see this in Mitelli's Tarocco Bolognese and the Belgian Tarot. The core idea of the card thus seems to be fire or lightning shooting down from the heavens, perhaps as a sort of divine punishment. The tower itself was perhaps not quite so essential an ingredient in the image, although it is certainly very consistent with the theme, bringing to mind thoughts of the Tower of Babel and its destruction.

Tarocchini di Mitelli, c. 1665
Belgian Tarot, 1770
Minchiate Fiorentine, c. 1820

While the church objected to the Pope and Papess cards, the nobility seem to have been uncomfortable with the Devil and the Tower. None of the early lavish hand-painted decks from Milan or Ferrara come down to us with a Devil card intact, and the Tower is almost as rare, being found only in the so-called Gringonneur cards, which were woodblock printed and then hand-painted and ornamented. The castle or tower was a strong symbol of the permanence and power of the noble dynasties, and the nobility may not have been at all pleased with seeing it broken in a fiery conflagration of divine wrath. When the tarot found its way to Sicily in the 17th century, the local duchess insisted that the Devil and Tower cards be replaced by something less offensive. The Devil became a ship, and the Tower lost its flames and tumbling bodies to become a very solid and safe-looking castle.

In the Tarot de Marseille, the card rather mysteriously acquired the title "Maison Dieu", the House of God. Perhaps the building was thought to be the Temple of Jerusalem, or a hospital or hotel. One clever speculation is that it was a misunderstanding of an abbreviated title, "Maison de Diav.", for house of the Devil, a more conventional title on the Italian model. For whatever reason, it was this French title that gave rise to the modern name of the card, "The Tower".

What might the Tower card have originally meant? It is surely connected in some way with the Devil card, always following it immediately in sequence, and usually showing fiery imagery and sometimes bearing a suggestive name. Paradoxically, however, the fire seems more celestial than infernal; it usually arcs down from heaven. And the card following the Tower is the Star, the first of the celestial cards of the tarot. One way to reconcile these disparate ideas is the recall that in the cosmography of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the four elements were arrayed in concentric spheres according to their weight: Earth at the center, then Water (the oceans), then Air (the atmosphere), and finally a sphere of Fire, highest of the sublunar domains, marking the uppermost boundary of the changeful, material world. Although we do not usually see Fire when looking up into the sky, the scientists of the time regarded the Sphere of Fire as the source of lightning and meteors. Sound familiar? Perhaps the Sphere of Fire, with its violent discharges, serves to strike down the prideful mortals who would seek to ascend into the immortal celestial reaches of the cosmos.

The connection with the Devil is then understood in terms of his lordship over the world of matter; he blocks the way of the spirit that seeks the heavenly world. This conception of the Devil ruling the material world was expressed with great force in early gnosticism. For the gnostics, the god of the Old Testament was actually the Devil, the evil demiurge Ialdabaoth, who had shaped the world of matter to be a prison for the human spirits. He erected for himself and his minions a great dwelling extending above the Earth, a kind of false heaven. But when Sophia, divine Wisdom, reveals herself to the enslaved spirits, the Devil's tower shakes and falls. Although the Renaissance designers of the tarot almost certainly had no access to the ancient gnostic texts that contain this particular rendition of the idea, the parallel seems quite uncanny to me. It explains what the Devil is doing in the upper reaches of the material world (the Sphere of Fire), and why his "house" must be destroyed before the Star can appear. It is also consistent with all the various titles of the card, including the enigmatic "God's House", for the gnostic Devil is worshipped by the unknowing as God.

Dante wrote, "The road to Heaven leads through Hell", and this is certainly the essential archetypal message of the sequence Devil-Tower-Star. We may never know for sure what particular cosmographic or mythic system the first tarot designer was referring to in the card designs and sequencing, but regardless of the details, the Tower seems inescapably connected with ideas of divine purgation, punishment of hubris, and liberating catastrophe.

 

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Copyright 1999 Tom Tadfor Little