The Tower is everywhere

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

 > Materialistically speaking, you could say that the Knight of Swords 
is the SS-air-engineer and The Tower is the war.

Please turn that "SS-air-engineer" into "SS-aircraft-engineer"!


On 16.01.2012 15:07, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:

>
> "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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