bible – Just the Tarot

THE TOWER CARD AND THE HOUSE OF GOD

Why was The Tower card once called, “The House of God?”

We all know the basic definition of The Tower card: destruction. When it appears in a reading, it tells us that massive change is on the way. It can signal divorces, loss of employment, and many other difficult life-changing events. I’ve described it in the past as having our lives blasted right down to the studs.

Depending on which deck you use, you may have heard different names for The Tower card. Some call it The Lightning Struck Tower. Some refer to it as The Blasted Tower. Most of us just call it The Tower. There’s an interesting twist, though, in the name that a much older Tarot deck applied to it.

THE HOUSE OF GOD

In the Marseilles Tarot deck, which is a style that emerged in France in the 1500s, The Tower is referred to as, “La Maison Dieu.” Which means, “The House of God.”

That’s a very peculiar name for destruction, isn’t it?

What do we automatically think of when we hear the term, “House of God?” A church, of course. So is The Lightning Struck Tower actually a Lightning Struck Church?

Hmmm . . .

NOT GOD

Now, if the card had been labelled as, “The Finger of God,” or even just, “God,” it would have made more sense theologically.

The Middle Ages were a hyper-religious time in European history and, of course, Christianity was the dominant religion. As I’ve noted in previous posts, the God of the Old Testament acted very much like a bipolar alcoholic who was off his medications. He was constantly rampaging around causing floods or blowing up cities or throwing people out of gardens because they ate an apple.

If that was your concept of God, then, of course, you might associate him with complete destruction of your life. “Uh, oh . . . God’s pissed off at me for some reason, so he’s going to smash me like a bug.”

But the thing is, God is most notable in the Tarot by his absence. True, there are devils and angels and popes and priestesses, but there isn’t one single card that shows a god.

So if it wasn’t the wrath of God that the Tarot was trying to depict, what was it?

IT’S NOT THE TOWER OF BABEL

The French occultist, Eliphas Levi, created a rabbit hole that a lot of subsequent scholars have jumped into. For no particular reason, he looked at The Tower card and announced that it was a depiction of the Tower of Babel.

If you’re not familiar with that myth, here’s a brief recap: at one point, all humans spoke the same language. Since they were able to communicate, they decided to build a tower that would reach all the way to heaven. That pissed God off and he cursed them so that they’d all speak different languages and couldn’t complete their construction project.

Now, nowhere in the Tower of Babel myth is there any indication that the tower was struck by lightning. And nowhere in the Tower card, is there any indication that the people falling out of the tower are trying to talk to each other.

In other words, the only thing that the Tower of Babel and The Tower card have in common is the word, “tower.”

One really unfortunate result of that confusion is that The Tower is now associated with hubris and arrogance. Like the builders of the Tower of Babel, people who draw the card are supposedly being punished for their pride. Again, there’s no evidence for that whatsoever. You can be a perfectly good person and still have that Tower energy blow through your life.

THE INQUISITION

So, again . . . why call it The House of God?

We have to remember that the Tarot is basically a system for predicting the future, or what we loosely call fortune telling. And the Bible – the operating manual for the Christian church – is very much against it.

“Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft.” – Book of Deuteronomy 18:10–12.

There are several other examples, but suffice it to say the church was against fortune telling and the punishment was death.

The Inquisition was reaching its peak during the exact same time frame that the Tarot first emerged. Priests were merrily torturing, maiming, and burning anyone whom they considered to be practicing witchcraft.

In a very real sense, then, the church itself – the House of God – could be viewed as complete destruction for both the Tarot and those who used it for divination.

THE DEFINITION IS THE SAME

The basic definition of The Tower remains the same, of course. It signifies an almost complete destruction of a person’s way of living or thinking. Upright, it shows that the destruction is coming and reversed, it shows that it’s already happened.

It IS fascinating, though, to conjecture about what those early Tarot designers might have been trying to tell us. Were they saying that the church itself was evil?

Were they warning other occultists to keep the true meanings of the cards concealed or risk persecution?

Were they warning against the ultimate effect of rigid belief systems?

Were they, perhaps, predicting the eventual destruction of the church system – the House of God?

We’ll never really know. In an age when we’re once again seeing the rise of religious fundamentalism and intolerance, though, it might serve us well to ponder those very questions.

“Just the Tarot,” by Dan Adair – Available on Amazon

Taking Religion Out of the Tarot – A Look at the Real Tarot Deck

For centuries, Christianity condemned Tarot as witchcraft — yet hidden Christian symbols helped the cards survive the Inquisition. This post uncovers how those overlays disguised the deck’s true archetypal roots.

“Are Tarot cards evil?”

That’s one of the most common Google searches on the Tarot and I assume it comes from people who were raised as, “good Christian folks.” After all, for centuries Christianity has railed against the Tarot. Preachers and pastors are still screaming that the cards are the gateways to the Devil and dangerous tools of shadowy occultists.

One of the weird things about that is the Tarot actually contains a strong Christian thread that was intentionally stitched into the deck as camouflage. It’s chock full of angels and not so subtle allusions to the Bible. Without them, the Tarot would never have survived the Inquisition.

So let’s take a little closer look at how the Church’s iron grip shaped the early Tarot, what Christian symbols were embedded to disguise it, and what the cards may have actually looked like before that clever cover was sewn in.

TAROT WAS BORN IN DANGEROUS TIMES

The first historical references to the Tarot are in Europe in the 1450s. Right in the middle of one of history’s most brutal religious crackdowns: the Inquisition. It’s hard for us to imagine it today, but ANY sort of fortune telling or divination could mean an automatic death sentence.

The Bible was explicit in its warnings. Leviticus 19:31 commands: “Do not turn to mediums or necromancers; do not seek them out, and so make yourselves unclean by them.”

We may casually lay out a reading today, curious as to what the cards can tell us. To the Church, though, there was nothing casual about it. It was witchcraft. And witchcraft meant torture, trials, and being put to a horrible death.

The death toll from the Inquisition is still debated. Some historians estimate the death toll from the Catholic Church’s witch hunts as, “low” as 30,000 victims. Others, like Leonard Shlain in, “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess” place the number as high as 10 million.

Whatever the numbers actually were, the climate of terror was real, daily, and all pervasive. So how did the Tarot survive?

HOW THE TAROT HID IN PLAIN SIGHT

The disguise of what the Tarot actually is was quite brilliant.

First, the makers announced that it was a card game, plain and simple. Nothing to see here. It’s just poker, only with archetypes.

And then they wove Christian symbols directly into the deck.

Take The World card. It’s four corner symbols – lion, ox, eagle, and angel – aren’t just random. They’re the traditional symbols of the four evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Even more striking are the Four Cardinal Virtues, lifted straight out of Catholic theology:

Justice

Temperance

Fortitude (Strength)

Prudence

By embedding these virtues, the creators of the deck could claim that the Tarot promoted Christian morality rather than undermining it. It was a survival tactic: “See – these aren’t pagan symbols. Ripping up a Tarot deck is just like ripping up a Bible.”

Prudence eventually vanished from the deck (see my previous post, “Dear Prudence – The Mysterious Case of the Missing Tarot Card”), but the other three virtues remain mainstays of the Major Arcana to this day.

WHAT DID THE ORIGINAL DECK LOOK LIKE?

So what happens if we get rid of the Christian overlays, the cards that don’t really belong in the deck?

What remains are the raw archetypes. Timeless figures like The Fool, The Magician, The Lovers, The Devil, The Wheel of Fortune and Death. Those cards pulse with universal energies that transcend any single religion.

A question that arises naturally out of this is: if we’re getting rid of the Virtue cards, why not get rid of The Hierophant, too? After all, it was originally known as, “The Pope,” and what could be more Catholic than that? The answer is The Hierophant is nothing but The High Priest in disguise and is the partner card to The High Priestess in the same way that the Emperor is linked to The Empress.

Beneath the Christian veneer lies a much older symbolic system, one that might have looked very different if it hadn’t been forced to wear this mask.

WHERE DID THE TAROT REALLY COME FROM?

Contrary to many modern assumptions, the Tarot did NOT evolve out of Christianity.

Instead, it seems to have appeared fully formed in the mid-1400s, as though it had been carried forward from some older source. What that source was – Ancient Egypt or an even older, lost esoteric tradition – remains a mystery.

What’s clear is this: the Christian layer was camouflage, not origin. It was a survival strategy, not a birthing.

SEEING THE REAL DECK

The, ‘Christian Themes’ in the Tarot were never a part of the original deck. They were just part of a clever disguise to get past the censors of the Inquisition.

When we peel back that layer, what we find is a universal language of archetypes. The Fool, Magician, Death, The Star – these are symbols that speak to something much deeper than mere religious dogma.

And so the question remains: when we lay the cards out today, are we seeing the archetypes themselves? Or the clever veil that once kept them alive?