What is your favorite Chaos card in the Tarot?That would be the Tower——In the Rider-Wait

What is your favorite Chaos card in the Tarot?

That would be the Tower——

In the Rider-Waite deck the building resembles the Tower of Babel, with lightening striking a structure built too high, as it crumbles back to the ground. It is a card about sudden change, cleansing fires, old-school revelations. Two figures are seen twisting in the air; whether they jumped to save themselves or were thrown as their world crumbled around them is immaterial. They will not survive the fall. After 9/11 I couldn’t use this card for a long while, the images of people falling from the Twin Towers was too much of a trigger. Yet, one does not need a literal structure to represent Chaos; for me, the Hurricane will do just as well.

The Taino, an ancient indigenous people of the Caribbean, named their supreme goddess, associated with all natural destructive forces, Guabancex. She remains the embodiment of the Hurricane, that unescapable, divine power that can level villages and whole islands with ease. Petroglyphs depict her with mouth agape, her arms curved in the same swirling pattern that the storm itself takes.

When the Tower card appears in your Tarot reading, expect the unexpected: violent change, catastrophe and anarchy. Change, as they say, is painful; but it is a necessary pain in order to grow. Guabancex represents the elements in your life that you cannot control: illnesses, accidents, financial failure, the ending of relationships. In her book of poems about Hurricane Maria’s 2017 destruction of the island of Dominicia, Celia A. Sorhaindo writes about the relief that her family felt in surviving the storm and then the horror of realizing that everything that they had, everything the island had, was gone. In the poem, “In The Air,” she writes:

After the hurricane,
my grandmother,
who in her basement storeroom,
had hunkered down
and knelt
her knees raw with prayer
the whole long long lashing tail of night,
ascended slippery stairs
hoping by holy intervention
her home had been saved.
She stared from ruined room to room,
swaying like a punched drunk spirit,
mouth and eyes wide black holes of disbelief …

This is the lesson the Tower reminds us about: we like to imagine we have control over our fate but that is an illusion. The real question is what will be your response when the gods decide to knock you to the ground?