Kali the Awakener is the DOM version of the Tower, and it is interesting to see the differences from the more traditional Tower cards.  The central figure in this card is the four-armed goddess Kali, who represents the more violent and destructive side of the Goddess.  Here she takes the visage of a dark-skinned woman with her arms outspread and her legs bent with her feet pointing outward.  Her dark hair fans out behind her head and arms with green snakes radiating outward within it, and green snakes also entwine around two of her four arms.  She wears a red draped cloth around her hips and upper legs, with a central piece of deep blue with red flames climbing up it.  Each of her feet is planted on opposite sides of a chasm, whose grey rock walls climb to either side.  Out of her four hands emanate jagged lightning bolts.  Two of these end near her feet, and the others blast the rock walls – the one from her left hand shatters a small tower, and the one from her right hand breaks off a small piece of the rock wall itself.  She has quite a calm look on her face, and it is clear that what she is doing has a necessary purpose.

Some differences between this and the usual card – there are no human figures in the card other than the goddess herself.  The Tower is very small and in the background, and it does not seem to have the same degree of importance.  In addition to the cap of the tower being shattered, a piece of the underlying rock is also blasted off, which is normally not the case.  If the rock walls symbolize the self, then Kali is bridging a chasm that has opened up in one’s basic identity, and is purposefully destroying both man-made structures and unnecessary bits of the bedrock itself.  The sense is of a fundamental upheaval not only in ideas, self-image, and security structures, but in the deepest self.  In spite of the energies being released, there is less of a feeling of uncontrollable chaos and more of a sense of calm, deliberate purpose.  The authors state that this card is associated with the privilege of expressing righteous anger to throw off oppression :-).  But they also caution that the anger must be focused to areas that will do good and provide opportunities for rebirth and awakening, and is not to be used blindly for destruction’s own sake.

Because this is a feminist deck, it is interesting to take a moment to look at the male and female archetypes that surround these images.  In the tarot and in the Tree of Life, safety and security are associated with Fours, with Kings, the Emperor, and the fourth sefiroth.  It is in these cards, associated with the male archetype, that the Tower is built in the first place.  In some ways, I also associate the Tower with human’s domination of the earth, and the building of so many concrete structures.  Then along comes Kali, associated with Severity and the fifth sefiroth, as well as Fives in general, and she destroys the Tower, providing an opportunity to return to the beginnings and start over.  She represents the dark side of the Goddess, as well as the destructive forces of nature – the idea of destruction here can be both positive and negative. 

There is a cycle here of building and destruction, civilization vs. nature, that we can add to our male/female energies.  The male side tends toward order, while the female side tends toward entropy (or disorder).  This is appropriate since the male principal is considered the active principal and the female the passive – and in physics, entropy is the natural tendency of all things unless energy is applied to create or maintain order.  In most natural systems, we are now learning that periodic “disasters”, such as wildfires, lightning strikes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, are necessary to maintain the balance of an ecosystem.  The natural world is not a set of unchanging food webs or ecosystem relationships, but changes constantly in response to environmental changes – one thing we have learned recently is that these changes are irreversible – you cannot put an ecosystem back to exactly the way it once was.  The same can be said of our lives and our personalities – to expect to be able to build your life the way you want it and have it continue unchanged is not possible, yet many people live in exactly that expectation.  And once changed, many people live in the hope that they can get back something they have lost.  If instead we realize that our lives are always changing and always moving into the future, Kali and the Tower will appear as welcome energy rather than something to be feared.

Thrysse