top of page

When Lightning Strikes – The Tower, and Necessary Destruction


When Lightning Strikes: The Tower and Necessary Destruction

When two highly and oppositely charged regions of the atmosphere temporarily equalize, the result is an electric release of about one billion joules of energy—lightning. Though we can sense its formidable formation and inevitable explosion, we cannot predict precisely when and where it will strike. The only thing we are sure of is that eventually, it will.

When sudden intuition strikes us at our core, destruction is unavoidable. The structure of our personality—everything we may have thought was solid, sturdy, rooted—is pierced by something severely divine. We’re forced to reconsider what we once were sure was steadfast and whole. Apparent securities are no longer. A previous sense of self is severed. The charges have collided, the higher self has penetrated the ordinary, the past is blasted apart.

In the wake of this tumult and destruction, a quiet trust of possibility lingers. Though we may feel torn from our prior unity, the true nature of this devastation will unravel itself in learning and self-recognition. So this inner-tension has consumed me; so this desperation has swallowed me whole—who am I now, if I can’t be as I was? Where is this radiating and far-reaching inner transformation asking me to go?

The Tower stands as a symbol of wisdom relating to our ultimate good. To attain a deeper connection with ourselves—to shed and change and morph into the next Self we’re meant to be—does require a certain degree of struggle. When we’re unable to make the changes necessary to move forward with ourselves, the lightning strikes. Illuminated is the inner wisdom we truly do possess to recreate our lives at a higher level, to be who we’re meant to be, to grow where we’re called to grow.

We can all sense it—the electromagnetic potential brewing in the center of the storm. Flashes of fate infiltrate our lives when we need them; we have magnetically conspired in creating them, whether we have done so consciously or not. The electricity in you is mechanizing itself for your liberation. You can’t predict it, nor can you stop it, but you can allow it, and you can welcome it with new eyes, which are nascent and freshly illumined.

Emily Mundy is the Co-Author of the Dark Days Tarot Guidebook.

Subscribe below for Tarot musings at each dark moon.


bottom of page