The Tower
Turris Eburnea - Western Paradigm Ivory Shadow
Up in the highest tower
Made of bone and stone
Higher than the tallest tree
Higher than the storm clouds
~
Who exiled you there?
Or did you climb it searching for safety?
Did you climb it alone, avoiding your fate?
~
From these heights, you can hear the thunderous roars.
~
Where do your eyes reach in your banishment?
What horizons cross in your isolation?
~
Do you hear the tower crumbling?
The Tower
The image of the tower has been stubborn, consistently seeping into dreams and visions, a persistent presence that spills into the corners of my psyche. Perhaps it's the archetype of (my) present moment. The path of Eco-Mythic Activism involves intentionally wandering into the depths of invisible dogmas, lifting the heavy cloaks that hold our cultural symbols captive to obsolete paradigms. Venture out at your own risk because the territory is rough and twisted, and once you enter the tower I don't know whether to go up or down.
To try and decipher fragments of the tower, I've searched various sources for its stories and unraveled its many myths, through archetypes that are supposed to be universal, but are only European ( and valid in this context).
The tower can be made of bronze, ivory, stone, or glass/crystal; it can have no stairs, windows, or doors, but in the center, it can hold an abundant garden; it can be built mysteriously in the middle of a forest, a swamp, a devastated and distant place or in a secret and magical place. The tower can be a place of refuge and safety, as well as a prison and exile; it brings the image of isolation and perhaps loneliness; it can be a symbol of solidity and of ruin falling apart. The tower can be magical and enchanted, a military lookout in defense or attack, spiritual in its version as a belfry, or of songs in prayer.
It can be a place of study and learning, leading to discernment or oblivion, both integration and fragmentation.
The tower requires devotion, patience, perseverance, commitment, and bravery to stay in and leave it. The tower can either grow tall, ascending to the sky or take root, inscending itself in the depths of the underworld, through wells and catacombs, acting as an intermediary between the chthonic and the cosmos, in a desire to meet since the beginning of time - “a series of round towers throughout southern Africa is believed to be related to the myths of towers widespread in this area, seeking to unite the high and the low (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism 622 - Willis, 273).”
The Tower in the Tarot
In the tarot, the qualities of the tower speak of inner change, identity crisis and destruction. This card goes by various names, such as The House of the Devil, The Tower struck by Lightning, The House of God - The Hospital, The Tower of Babel - The Fire of Heaven, or Heaven - The Castle of Pluto. (Hundley et al. 310) Of course, it is reductive to bring up the card here in its aspect without a “draw”, because the strength of the Tarot is the relational and contextual movement between draws and cards.
The card's image shows a fiery bolt of lightning setting fire to the Tower. Flames emerge from the stone windows, and bodies leap from the heights, terrified, attempting to escape the impending destruction collapse. Sometimes, other objects are shown falling through the air: bricks, stones, gold coins, drops of water, and pieces of burning flames. Occasionally, the tower has a door; at other times, its faceless stone sides show no sign of entry or exit. When the building collapses, a rocky mountaintop rises beyond, the natural world indifferent to the explosive scene unfolding below. (Hundley et al. 310)
The Tower card signifies that old structures must collapse to allow new ones to emerge. The shattered stone of the tower walls is a symbol of sudden change. This card signifies essential and radical changes, revolutionary transformations that shake foundations and overthrow traditions. Cracks appear, the sky opens up, and the bricks crumble. Sometimes, catharsis arrives unsolicited and unexpected. There is no escape: chaos, rupture, a fissure caused by the lightning of intuition. Whatever the method, the illusion must and will be broken. Worlds crumble and rise again. The lies dissipate, the perspective changes violently, and the first new flowers emerge from the rubble as the dust settles. (Hundley et al. 310)
But the tower is a call to ascend and a path to transcendence. In the Western confusion of the concepts of evolution and hierarchical progress - we think that evolution and development are the same as linear progress on a hierarchical ladder when evolution unfolds in a network and without hierarchy - to achieve the much-desired exceptionalism impoverishes the ecological soul by the unidirectional effort to reach the top. Perhaps something is to be learned by humbly turning to the tower in the forest's depths and patiently waiting for new visions. (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism 622)
Integration of complementary opposites: Feminine and Masculine
The binary vision is, among other things, a subjectivity of the Western cultural psyche, which is why so much symbolism moves within this reductive structure that claims to be reality. The binary is just one polarization of a much more complex and diverse spectrum. However, because we are in this Eurocentric symbolic context, I will now give you a dual reading of the tower.
The tower's erect form makes it a prominent phallic symbol. Its vertical structure expresses hierarchies of superiority and consequent inferiority, power, and powerlessness (Chevalier and Gheerbrant). The tower, as a place of command over the place and of force over those imprisoned as punishment, brings us back again and again to the place of domination over the Other and the territory.
But the tower's interior evokes the women's container, in the tower-well version, with the dark dungeons below -which imprisoned the outcasts. The movement turns inwards, allowing for reflection and study. (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism 622; Chevalier and Gheerbrant) But being out of touch with the ground, living in an ivory tower - the white tower that originated in the Virgin Mary's preservation of purity - can transmute into a self-centered and hyper-individualistic self-isolation.
Psyche, Danae, Virgin and Saint Barbara
{female stories from the tower}
Psyche
In the story of Eros/Cupid/Love and Psyche, jealous Aphrodite/Venus gives the mortal girl Psyche the seemingly impossible task of descending into the underworld and bringing back a box containing the beauty of Persephone/Proserpine. Psyche is about to give up in despair when she is given instructions on following the security protocols to pass through the underworld via a sensitive tower. In her last and most challenging test, as the advice of the sentient tower helps her, she learns the traits of the tower that are sometimes necessary - being clairvoyant, having emotional distance and discernment, traits that are pseudo-objective and prestigious by the patriarchy as the only correct way to assess any situation. The tower tells her how to fulfill her mission, only warning her never to open the box (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism 622, Neumann, 110-11; Sherman 507; Haase 288).
Danae
The story of the Acrisius king, whose daughter was called Danae. An oracle warned Acrisius that Danae's son would be the one to kill him. Loving life more than his daughter, Acrisius locked Danae in a bronze tower with no door and only a tiny window. He thought his daughter would never marry or have children, leaving him safe from the prophecy. But a shower of gold came through the window of Danae's tower, transforming him into the splendid Zeus. The god and the mortal woman fell in love, and, in time, Danae gave birth to a son, whom she called Perseus, who killed Acrisius. (Sherman 624)
Virgin Mary
According to the Dictionary of Symbols: myths, dreams, customs, gestures, shapes, figures, colors, numbers, the Christian monotheistic tradition inspired military and feudal constructions, erected in towers, watchtowers, and turrets - the tower became a symbol of vigilance and ascension. We find the symbol of the tower in the litanies of the Virgin Mary, turris Davidica, turris eburnea , which brings the ivory tower, with its origin in the purity of the Virgin or the necessary isolation as a protection of high chastity, and the silence of the tower, which elevates the soul to God. (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism 622; Chevalier and Gheerbrant) In the Middle Ages, towers sought possible enemies, but let's not forget the staircase, the relationship between heaven and earth, united by steps. Each tower floor marked a stage in the ascent, the elevation from carnal weight to pure spirituality. (Chevalier and Gheerbrant) Fixed in a center (center of the world), the tower is, in the West, an ascension and transcendental myth. The steeple translates solar energy generated to the earth with each bell ring. (Chevalier and Gheerbrant, DAVR, 228, 229)
Saint Barbara
Finally, we have Saint Barbara, invoked for storms and protector of those who work with fire, firefighters and military personnel, miners, excavators, and tunnel builders, who bear the tower as her symbol. Her father didn't want her to live in an immoral and corrupt society, so he built a tower with two windows, where he locked her to guard her beauty and purity, avoiding contamination from outside degradation. After Barbara's conversion to Christianity, she had a third window opened in the tower, symbolizing the Holy Trinity, which infuriated her father and led to her martyrdom since Christianity was forbidden. Upon killing Barbara, her father was killed by a bolt of lightning. Santa Barbara's symbolism unites fire, the tower, and its underground catacombs.
The Tower in the Tales
The earliest written stories date back to the first millennium B.C.E. The Egyptian tale The Prince and His Three Fates or The Doomed Prince, dating from the reign of Seti I or Ramses II (c. 1314-1237 B.C.E.), includes themes such as the child/princess in the secret tower or, in some versions, in the tower/mountain of glass, who can only be saved by a true hero. This story is undoubtedly older than the written version. (Sherman 123) Here are some examples of tales that include towers.
Aucassin and Nicolette
An anonymous 13th-century troubadour created the popular medieval romance of Aucassin and Nicolette. The story begins with Count Bougar of Valence at war with Count Garin of Beauclaire. Count Garin's son, Aucassin, was in love with Nicolette, Count Bougar's goddaughter. Nicolette was a slave bought by Count Bougar from the Saracens and converted to Christianity. Count Bougar had planned to marry her off to a rich man, but Aucassin's father refused to allow his son to marry a former slave. Count Garin, disillusioned by his son's insistence, plans to kill Nicolette. To protect her, Count Bougar locks her in a high tower. Meanwhile, Nicolette had escaped from her lonely tower and hidden in the forest. (Sherman 41)
Princess in the Tower - Rapunzel
The popular motif of the Princess in the Tower is part of an ancient tale, where a princess is kept alone or imprisoned in a tower until she is rescued or conquered by the hero. In a variant of the basic story, the princess, or occasionally a prince, escapes from the tower at the story's beginning to find her destiny. The tower is built from diverse materials in different stories, can be made of glass or ordinary stone, and usually has no obvious entrance or exit. The first version comes from Egypt (see The Doomed Prince above), encompassing two motif variations. In the first, his father keeps the prince in a tower to protect him from his fate. In the second, her father keeps the princess in a tower so that only the best man can reach her.
The best-known version is the European tale of the Princess in the Glass Tower or at the Top of the Glass Mountain, in which the hero has to climb the mountain or rescue the princess from the tower. In this type of tale, the princess is merely a prize to be won. Perhaps the best-known version is the Brothers Grimm's Rapunzel, where Rapunzel's long hair is the only way in and out of the tower. (Sherman 367) Other authors point out that in tales told from a female perspective, the prince is often relatively passive, serving mainly to facilitate a royal wedding for the heroine, as in the original version of Rapunzel, first published in 1634 by Giambattista Basile in Lo cunto de li cunti. Basile's story depicts a young woman imprisoned in a tower by an ogre. A prince passes by and accesses the tower by climbing the heroine's long hair, and she triggers all the action. (Haase 811)
Sleeping Beauty
In the well-known tale of Sleeping Beauty, the first traces of the plot in literature appear in two anonymous works from the 14th century, the Catalan novel Frayre de Joy et Sor de Plaser and the episode of Troilo and Zellandine at the end of the third book of the French novel Perceforest. In both works, the fundamental elements of the plot appear in their initial form: a young beauty, called Sor de Plaser in the Catalan novel and Zellandine in Perceforest, falls into an enchanted sleep and is locked in an enchanted tower, where a young man finds her. In these variants, the young man impregnates her, and she gives birth long before her awakening and subsequent marriage to the young man. (Haase 923)
Stories by recent authors
In Princess Discreet or the Adventures of Finette, by Marie-Jeanne Lheritier de Villandon, three sisters are locked in a tower to protect their virtue. Finette's two sisters succumb to the seductions of the cunning prince and soon become pregnant. (Haase 164) Another tale, The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak (1875), tells the story of a lame prince who has been usurped and imprisoned in a tower by his uncle. The prince receives a magic cloak from his fairy godmother that allows him to fly all over the world, but without touching anything. After his uncle's death, he becomes king and rules wisely. (Haase 280) In the feminist poem Rapunzstiltskin, the heroine is self-sufficient, happy in her tower, and unhappy is the would-be hero who comes to “save” her. In this case, the combination and ironic revision of the two classic tales, Rapunzel and Rumplestiltskin, demonstrate the author's desire to subvert not only the original tales' traditional male and female roles, but also the conventional form of the tales themselves. (Haase 269)
The Tower in Portuguese Tales
In many tales, the tower also plays a role in the heroine's trials - linked to the cycles of blood, menarche, menstruation, and childbirth. In this case, the tower suggests the need for a different kind of far-sightedness, for patient endurance in solitude, because it represents the vulnerable moment of an inevitable metamorphosis. (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism 622)
The young girl or princess is imprisoned in a tower located in the middle of a forest or a land abandoned and devastated by war, in forced seclusion to preserve her virtue or in shame for her purity (as in pregnancy without marriage). Generally speaking, in Portuguese tales, the tower assumes a ghostly and dark place - of death, of crows, of sleepiness, of bad luck, of red waters - of a captivity from which one never returns. After all, the tower is also called the House of the Devil in the tarot. Here are some examples of tales:
The tale The Three Princes and the Maiden - She dies, but is resurrected by their united efforts. Unable to say which of the three she should give her hand to, she locks herself in a tower, and they do the same: “The maiden now came forward and said: ‘Since you three have the right to marry me, and since I can't have three husbands at the same time, I won't marry any of you’! The maiden shut herself up in a tower; the three princes, very disappointed and grieving, also retired to a gloomy tower." (PEDROSO 5, 66)
The tale of the Maid and the Black Girl - There was once a maiden imprisoned in a tower. She was very attached to a prince, who used to come every afternoon to talk to her. This girl let her hair down from the tower, and by this means, the prince could go up and have a chat with her. (PEDROSO 9)
The tale The Enchanted Maiden - (...) The enchanted maiden climbed to the highest tower, to say goodbye to him and to be able to see him for a long distance as he went. (PEDROSO 29)
The tale The Tower of Bad Luck - From which no one can return (PEDROSO 34) is also called the “Tower of Sleepiness”: Whoever goes there stays there and never returns. Whoever goes there never returns (PEDROSO 86).
The tale The Baker's Idle Son - “The princess then began to feel that she was pregnant, and the king was very displeased with her, and ordered her to be imprisoned in a tower with her bridesmaids.” (PEDROSO 52)
The tale The Slices of Fish - “The eldest brother, after traveling for many days without reaching any country, finally arrived at one where there was a very high tower. He stayed in a house, where at the end of a week he married the owner; and when he was already married, he asked his wife what tower it might be, and she told him it was the “Tower of Death”, because whoever entered it never came back alive." (PEDROSO 72)
The tale The Prince with the Head of a Horse - “(...) at that moment a crow flew in through the window and started beating the girl with its wings, saying: you ingrate! You're so ungrateful! You broke my spell! And if you ever want to meet me again you'll have to wear a pair of iron shoes on your way to the Tower of Crows;" (PEDROSO 74)
The tale of the Three Little Blue Stones - “the prince immediately sent him to prison, and put the queen and her sister in a tower;” (PEDROSO 81)
The Back of the Golden Apple - “The man who had stolen the apple, seeing the young man on the ship, had him arrested and shut up in a tower. The young man took his cat with him to the tower. The man who fed him only gave him one bean every day, and the boy ate half and gave the other half to the cat." (PEDROSO 84)
The tale of the seven deer - “(...) In agreement with the king, her father, the prince decided that she should be hanged. She was immediately put in a tower, and the next day, the king sent word that the princess was going to be hanged. Many people gathered around the gallows waiting for the princess (...) They waited and saw seven deer coming; the first one jumped over the gallows and immediately turned into a man; five more jumped over the gallows and changed into men; and the last deer, the smallest, had to jump three times to disenchant itself." (LAGES 149)
The tale I saw you, you didn't see me - “Once upon a time, there was a king and a queen who had no children and were very unhappy about it, but one day, after many promises, the queen had a beautiful daughter. But after three years, an old woman stole the daughter from the queen, handed her over to a nanny and put them both in a tower to be fed every day." (LAGES 158)
The tale The King's Godson - “The king immediately sent to find out who was playing. They told him it was his godson's servant, and the bald man went berserk and immediately told the king that his servant had told him he could go and disenchant the royal princess at the tower of the red waters." (LAGES 159) It should be remembered that, in the menstruation and female cycles in the tales, the pubescent maiden will fall under a reddish enchantment (possibly asleep or otherwise alienated) in her father's dwelling or appear locked in a tower/well/mountain of glass, or be handed over to some lunar beast, such as a dragon. (Haase 168)
The Tower - Anthropocentric, Colonial, and Patriarchal
The tower is a human and colonial construction, which speaks both of the conquest of the technique and extraction of materials to erect it, as well as the domestication and control of the surrounding space: "The strong walls of the towers once served as protective fortresses, from where enemies could be discovered from a distance. Gradually, cities grew up around the towers and everything beyond them was considered desert. Symbolically, these “towers of strength” have become the structures of society, where their organizations protect us from the return of the chaos that always seems to threaten in the distance. The skyscrapers of modern cities remain the proud signs of civilization. (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism 622)"
Conquest, extraction, domestication and control are brought in here, not in their widely celebrated side in the Western collective psyche of “civilizing”, but taking on their shadow side, the destructive and violent legacy that leaves ruins in its wake. In other words, recognizing the devastating consequences of these relentless civilizing actions through the toxic debris that remains in the illusions of superiority and that suffocates life.
The tower is an archetype of a hierarchical, exceptionalist, and human-centered psyche. In its primary movement of rising high, extending far upwards, it tries to get out, transcend the web of life, and prevail alone above the ecosystem. In antiquity, it referred to the movement of pilgrimages and spiritual and defensive watchtowers in the mountains - “Ziggurats, pyramids and stupas are ancient towers created in the image of the cosmic mountain (...) The towers and minarets of churches also pierce the heavens at the center of their spiritual worlds, from where the sounds of bells and prayers mark sacred space and time.” (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism 622).
Before the animals were placed in the category of inferior monsters, there was also the call of the heavens, to ascend through the flight of the hawks, “to fly high to swoop down on the prey”, or the larks “to fly high in the act of singing”. Over time, ascension ceases to be anchored in the body and the earth, in animals and the ecosystem, as a celebration of the diversity of the web of life, becoming a hierarchical imposition of the monoculture of the purity of the transcendent.
For example, the Tower of Babel motif can be found in southeast Africa (Zimbabwe and its neighbors): it was built to allow contact with the sky. (Haase 57) In the Judeo-Christian legacy, the tower of Babel, which Noah's descendants wanted to build in their ambition to reach heaven, led God to punish them by making them speak different languages and forcing them to stop building: "Sometimes, however, we can reach too high, seeking only the false gods of profit and empty progress. The biblical story of the Tower of Babel warns of the arrogance of building too close to heaven and the consequences of overstepping human boundaries. (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism 622)” This action by God, to punish with linguistic diversity, speaks to the ignorance of the Western psyche, where diversity is considered a threat to the established monoculture. It's interesting how the symbolic matrix of the tower can't stand diversity, as it has become a symbol of solitude, isolation, and seclusion.
Turris Eburnea - Western Paradigm Ivory Shadow
I began by looking for the tower's mythical and symbolic motifs, because I feel that I have been inside the tower, unable to communicate with the outside, in a mixture of chosen seclusion and imposed imprisonment. I can feel the thick walls separating the tower, see the horizon through the windows, and feel it imploding at the base, with fecund nature stubbornly erupting from its foundations. After all, the tower is often a female prison. I'm reminded of the lofty ivory tower, Turris Eburnea, which aims to preserve the purity of the Virgin Mary, by the act of enclosure and refuge in her important and valuable virtue and purity, also enunciating self-centered isolation. Turris Eburnea is the attempt to remain and fix purity, closing it off from the world's contamination, just as her father did to Saint Barbara, as an attempt at the inevitable and complex ecological intertwining and transdisciplinary intersectionality, crossing paradigms as part of the path of responsibility and cultural maturity.
Putting all the pieces together, and remembering that these symbolic structures are not (never have been) universal, but deeply contextual, I bring Turris Eburnea, the ivory tower, as an exceptionalist and individualistic shadow of the Western paradigm. Representing the encapsulation of the modern Western psyche in its unilateral and superior values of neutrality, objectivity and 'truth'.
Faced with the wicked problems created and nurtured by the culture that builds the tower, many of the experts produced by Western modernity and anchored in its official institutions remain locked in a paradigm that they think is pure, enclosed in invisible structures of anthropocentric, deeply racial, colonial, capitalist and patriarchal dogmas. If not, let's see:
The tower as a proto-city, as a representative of military buildings, of control, conquest, domination, and extirpation of the territory, domesticating its diversity, transforming it into a monoculture - from different languages to varied points of view, paradigms, or frames of reference; to reducing diversity in entire ecosystems in constant extraction of resources.
The tower like an enclosure imposed on the feminine on the premise of protecting her purity and innocence. In a patriarchal power play that holds women captive to an immaturity and morality that is a-corporal and a-sexual. The shame and pure virginity to be protected, making the figure of the old witch evil and ignoble.
The tower as the supposedly inevitable and natural hierarchical movement of ascension and transcendence in the monoculture of the divine, which unidirectionally rises above the earth and the body, in a perverse exile and forgetfulness of plural immanence.
The ivory tower with its racial and colonial background, where whiteness is considered a sign of virtue and purity, as opposed to blackness, which is taken as perversion, lies, and moral corruption (a violent racial pattern that merges and is present in all European tales); just like ivory, which after millennia of trade, is systematically usurped by imperial powers, in an imposition of slavery on the territory, its people and ecosystems - in a short and small example, just like the necro-capitalist and neo-colonial practices of mining metals for batteries, in a perverse illusion of energy transition that ignores violence, genocide, and ecocide.
But, just like from the top of the tallest tree or mountain, a living and integrated wider view is possible from the top of the tower. Can you see it?
I mean that our symbolic subjectivities are pre-defined by the cultural context. They are not accidental, free, or random. The symbols that run through our imagination, dreams, and visions are poured out by the cultural substrate to which we belong, hostage to beliefs and history. They are neither universal nor permanent but deeply contextual, with a richness unique to each living context. The tower is no exception.
When I felt trapped in the tower, I studied it, observed it, and touched on its vulnerability: like any element of civilization, it needs constant maintenance, to be preserved in its immobility, to defend itself, because otherwise it becomes a ruin, it falls, it is destroyed, it is corrupted - just like everything belongs to the natural cycle that includes decay and decomposition. The maintenance I refer to is also the stubbornness and addiction of not wanting, not being able, to see and be the world beyond the reductive lenses of modern Western culture, keeping us in the monoculture of the colonial legacy, sure of our moral and technical superiority in the ivory tower.
The tower as a liminal time-place of profound transformation in Portuguese tales - of death, of crows, of sleepiness, of bad luck, of red waters - “from which one may never return”, appears as a warning of the difficulty of changing frames of reference. And as a possibility of inevitable metamorphosis. We can humbly allow the tower to fall, returning to the cycle and web of life, changing the paradigm of conquest and progress, and returning to the ground, where life hatches cyclically. What grows in the rubble of the tower's control? What pulses in its catacombs?
The magic is that, without the thick walls of protection and seclusion, we can return to the body-place in participation and direct relationship with life. We don't need to stand out up there. We need to belong.
References
Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism. The Book of Symbols. Edited by Ami Ronnberg, et al., Taschen, 2010.
Chevalier, Jean, and Alain Gheerbrant. Dictionary of symbols: myths, dreams, customs, gestures, shapes, figures, colors, numbers. Ed. Teorema, 1994.
Haase, Donald, editor. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales. Greenwood Press, 2008.
Hundley, Jessica, et al. Tarot. Edited by Jessica Hundley, Taschen, 2020.
Lages, Mário F. Contos Populares Alentejanos Recolhidos Da Tradição Oral. Portuguese Catholic University, n.d.
Pedroso, Consiglieri. Portuguese Folk Tales. Folklore Society, 1882. WikiSource.org, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Portuguese_Folk-Tales#111. Accessed 24 8 2021.
Sherman, Josepha, editor. Storytelling An Encyclopedia of Mythology and Folklore. Sharp Reference, 2008.
https://www.ieed.com.br/post/o-simbolismo-de-santa-b%C3%A1rbara
https://www.infopedia.pt/dicionarios/lingua-portuguesa/torre
https://www.etymonline.com/word/tower
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