As I’m writing this it’s the 18th anniversary of the planes hitting the Twin Towers on 9/11. There are so many images of horror and death from that day that it’s difficult to ever really process them.
A flaming, collapsing Tower is truly a human archetype, as The Tower card shows. The image is deeply seared into the human unconscious and we can find examples of it in numerous cultures across the world.
The common theme in all of the stories is the hubris of humanity, building massive towers to reach the gods or to be equal to the gods or to confront the gods.
They’d get to a certain height and the gods would blast the towers into rubble to punish them for their arrogance.
In the case of 9/11 we could say that the hubris didn’t involve people trying to confront the gods so much as people trying to BE the gods. We can draw a direct line between organized religion and the Twin Towers and that SHOULD be the most important lesson here.
Remember: Osama Bin Laden was a very, very religious man who stopped and prayed several times a day. He orchestrated the attacks on the Twin Towers because he believed that god told him to incinerate thousands of human beings.
Which is just fucking nuts.
On the other side of the fence, we see Americans recoiling in disgust when Central American immigrant children are imprisoned in camps at our borders. We forget that Palestinian families have been living in horrible camps for generations.
That’s happening because the ultra-right party in Israel believes that centuries ago a Thunder God named Yahweh told the Jews that the land the Palestinians owned actually belonged to the Jews so it’s okay to steal it.
Which is just fucking nuts.
BUT . . . the Israeli land grab is mostly supported by the United States because American Christian evangelical voters believe that Armageddon will happen in the Middle East when the Jews and the Muslims go to war and then all of the Christians will be whisked up to heaven where they’ll eat pancakes with Jesus forever. Amen. So, anything that causes troubles between the Muslims and the Jews is a GOOD thing for the Christians because . . . um . . . it will cause the end of the world.
Which is just fucking nuts.
We really are reaching a point of critical mass in the world today, a point where violent religiosity in all its forms has to be rejected as psychotic behavior. We’re distracted by the outer shapes of the various religions but it’s the same hateful fundamentalism whether it’s hiding under an Imam’s robe or a preacher’s suit.
It almost always involves a belief that their religion – and their religion alone – is the true word of god. A belief that it’s somehow okay to murder, torture, rape, and drop bombs on innocent children if you’re doing it in the name of your god. It almost always involves a hatred of art and a war on women and female sexuality.
And it’s time to say, “Enough.” The rest of us actually live in the towers that these fanatics are blowing up. The rest of us are the innocent civilians caught in the middle of their violent, psychotic fantasies.
Enough.
Just the Tarot 