Continuing their series on the tarot, Phil and JF discuss the card nobody wants to see in a reading – The Tower. Featuring lightning bolts, plumes of ominous smoke, and figures plummeting from the windows, the Tower’s meaning at first glance seems clear: “pride comes before a fall,” as the old adage goes. But as JF and Phil delve into the details, they note not only the card’s connection to the Biblical tower of Babel and the fall of man, but also its relevance to the present era’s systems of control and communication breakdown. This discussion leads them to search for an antidote to the Tower's message of destruction.

References

Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot
Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of the Tarot
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Arnold Schoenberg, Austrian composer
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”
Wilco, “Radio Cure”
Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies
George Cukor (dir.), A Star is Born
Performativity, sociological concept
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Jaques Ellul, The Technological Society

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Episode 103: On the Tower, the Sixteenth Card of the Tarot