The Tower is everywhere

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

"The Tower" is one card of "WEISSMANN'S TAROT" (see GR, p. 746); it's 
the second card of ten which covers the "Significator", here "Knight of 
Swords" which itself - in the system of "Mr. A.E. Waite" (p. 738) - 
stands for  'Air in Air'. According to Waite's "Celtic style" (p. 738) 
the second card - here "The Tower" - represents the general atmosphere 
and influences inside which all other influences do their work. 
Materialistically speaking, you could say that the Knight of Swords is 
the SS-air-engineer and The Tower is the war. Pynchon himself, or 
better: the narrator of "Gravity's Rainbow", sees it like this:

"Of 77 cards that could have come up, Weissmann is 'covered', that is 
his present condition is set forth, by The Tower. It is a puzzling card, 
and everybody has a different story on it. It shows a bolt of lightning 
striking a tall phallic structure, and two figures, one wearing a crown, 
falling from it. Some read ejaculation, and leave it at that. Others see 
a Gnostic or Cathar symbol for the Church of Rome, and this is 
generalized to mean any system which cannot tolerate heresy: a system 
which, by its nature, must sooner or later fall. We know by now that it 
is also the Rocket.
Members of the Order of the Golden Dawn believe The Tower represents 
victory over splendor [well, implicitly saying that Netzach is 'better' 
than Hod is, imo, a too linear understanding of the Tree of Life. - 
kfl], and avenging force. As Goebbels, beyond all his professional 
verbalizing, believed in the Rocket as an avenger.
On the Kabbalist Tree of Life, the path of The Tower connects the 
sephira Netzach, victory, with Hod, glory or splendor. (...) Netzach is 
fiery and emotional, Hod is watery and logical. (...)
But each of the Sephiroth is also haunted by its proper demons or 
Qlippoth. Netzach by the Ghorab Tzerek, the Ravens of Death, and Hod by 
the Samael, the Poison of God. (...) Though the different Qlippoth can 
only work each his own sort of evil, activity on the path of The Tower, 
from Netzach to Hod, seems to've resulted in the emergence of a new kind 
of demon (what, a dialectical Tarot? Yes indeedyfoax! A-and if you don't 
think there are Marxist-Leninist magicians around, well /you/ better 
think /again/!) The Ravens of Death have now tasted the Poison of God 
... but in doses small enough not to sicken but to bring on, like the 
Amanita muscaria, a very peculiar state of mind ... They have no 
official name, but they are the Rocket's guardian demons." (pp. 747-8)

Understandable enough, "The Tower" anew met special interest in the 
decade after 9/11.


On 16.01.2012 13:06, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:

>
> >> P got the Tower image from modernism--Yeats, maybe Pound, maybe Frazier
> full of its deep spiritual/religous resonances....<<
>
>
> Or - think GR and AtD! - from *Tarot*:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_%28Tarot_card%29
>
> Likely both is in P's mix.
>
>
> On 14.01.2012 22:42, Mark Kohut wrote:
>
>> One reason great artists are great is that the symbols and tropes
>> they find, create, use are so richly resonant......Can contain so much
>> beyond literalness, all meaningful.
>> P got the Tower image from modernism--Yeats, maybe Pound, maybe Frazier
>> full of its deep spiritual/religous resonances....
>> Today I learned from Confidence Men, that in the secular world of 
>> finance,
>> Shit, Money & No Word, so to speak, the bundling and reinsuring of
>> mortgages to diversify risk...........
>> "were also sliced into tranches, a tower of different levels of 
>> anticipated risk."
>> 'tower of tranches'was a phrase, it seems..................
>
>

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