Cosmic Tribe Tarot
XVI - TOWER
CLICK (perky couple) melts fat right off your thighs; CLICK (pink man, white suit) it says right here in the Bible; CLICK, CLICK (vindictive expression) bang!, bang!; bang!; CLICK (aerosolized hair) we go live to the scene of the grisly crime; CLICK, CLICK (pond close-up) the extinction of all species of frogs; CLICK (audience) can you believe she did that to him? CLICK ... CLICK... CLICK ... SMASH!
The Tower figures prominently in the history of human culture. From the ancient Tower of Babel to the TV towers piercing our cityscapes, we have strived for millennia to build literal bridges to unknowable gods. Today, mass media bombard us with messages carefully designed to alienate us from nature, from each other, and from ourselves. Disconnected and anxious, people buy more status trinkets as commercialism overruns spirituality. While the gross national product soars, our sense of self fragments and fragile psyches crack with increasingly dramatic consequences.
In the card a Tower of wonderbox wastelands still flickers even as it bursts into flames. Rising out of the seas of life-blood, the images on the screens project our individual hopes and fears. On one screen, closest to the sea a figure prays to the depths for guidance. Next to it a fearsome Kali-like figure warns us of the dangers of climbing higher. But inevitably, as witnessed by the Sphinx face from the Wheel of life, we do climb higher, lured by the power of the split atoms and bulging muscles. We try to reconstruct nature's flying birds and green grass but we find the bird spiritless and the astroturf lifeless. When we insist on going higher we encounter disembodied smiles and vacant stares from robotic people and fantasies of deliverance from the falsely separated "outside." Still climbing, blind to the violence we do to our planetary potential, we approach the soulless void of big brother's eye at the top of the Tower. In its psychosis it scans our world looking for things to control.
But big brother's mechanical eye, even at its Orwellian worst, eventually blinks, and the mesmerizing beams turn on the Tower itself; collapsing it back into the sea. The original all-knowing, all-seeing cosmic eye, the truth we were counterfeiting, reasserts itself. To save his soul, a flaming figure, could be any of us caught in this fantasy, ejects himself from the idiot box of prefabricated ideology. Stripped of illusions, he falls back into the regenerating seas and is reborn as a golden phoenix of hope zooming skyward, barely escaping the burning wreck.
