major arcana
Suit: Trumps Major Arcana
Also known as The Blasted Tower, The House of God, and La Maison Dieu.
Lightning opens the Tower in an instant. The fall is frightening, but it reveals the weakness already built into the structure and ends what could no longer stand.
A card carries more than one history. Its place in the tarot pack, Golden Dawn path, Rider–Waite–Smith reading and later variants are kept beside their own sources, since the same name can do different work in different decks.
7 sourced claims: 4 traditional , 3 modern
The meanings are Waite's own words from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. They belong to one influential school of reading and do not exhaust what the cards have meant in other hands.
A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, Rider–Waite–Smith — Part III, §3, The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings.
The Tower · XVI · The Lord of the Hosts of the Mighty
Lightning strikes a crowned tower and casts two figures into darkness, an image Waite connects with the violent collapse of false or materialized forms.
A concise paraphrase of Waite's published explanation of the Pamela Colman Smith design, not a universal description of all historical decks.
Upright, Waite associates The Tower with unforeseen catastrophe, adversity, disgrace, deception exposed or ruin. Reversed, the card can indicate oppression, imprisonment, tyranny or a less complete version of the same destabilising crisis.
Waite himself warns that many fortune-telling allocations are artificial and arbitrary; these are historical Rider–Waite–Smith meanings, not assertions of fact.
Hermetic Qabalah
Book T establishes this Tarot-to-letter attribution. The path number and endpoints belong to this tradition's canonical Kircher arrangement.
Book T's formal title, Tree or elemental place, astrological attribution, and characteristic reading. This is the system used by the Hermetic Tree.
The Lord of the Hosts of the Mighty
The formal esoteric title printed in Book T.
פ · Peh
A Golden Dawn correspondence, not a claim about the historical origin of the card or a universal Jewish letter-to-card system.
Mars
Book T's attribution carried by the Hebrew letter and therefore by this path.
Ambition, conflict, courage, danger, destruction, a fall, or ruin.
Paraphrased from Book T's brief meanings; its dignity method reads a card in relation to neighbouring cards rather than as a fixed keyword.
Historical context and places where influential decks or occult systems differ.
One of the twenty-one figured trumps plus the Fool found beside the four ordinary suits in historical tarot packs.
Museum history dates the earliest documentary references to the 1440s–1450s in northern Italy and identifies tarot's original use as a trick-taking game. The occult-Qabalistic reading is later.
| Relation | To | First attested |
|---|---|---|
| Tarot trump of | Path 27 · Peh | 1888 CE |
| Hebrew-letter attribution | Peh | 1888 CE |
| Astrological attribution | Mars | 1888 CE |