After the Tower comes the Star. Before the Tower comes the Devil

stories from the Tarot

Any good journey includes a map and a story to guide us, and the Tarot offers these in droves. Any good journey will change your life, and the Tarot knows this too.

The Tarot is made of two primary parts: The Minor Arcana is made of 4 suits, Ace through King. The Major Arcana is a journey of 22 archetypes, beginning with The Fool, card 0, progressing through 21 different archetypes to end at The World, card 21. Depending on the deck you use, the World card might be known with a different name. It’s The Universe card in the Thoth deck. In the deck I created, The Somatic Tarot, I renamed it The Multiverse. But while the names might change slightly, the map of this particular journey remains the same: 22 cards, in sequential order. 

A Tarot reading can take a nearly infinite number of shapes and offer countless stories. But the story of The Tarot, these 22 archetypes, remains constant. This means that even without a deck in front of you, the Tarot can be a guide. You just have to know the story. 

Stories are guides, and maps to meaning. We make sense of the world, ourselves, and each other, through stories.

In the Tarot, the Tower card represents chaos and destruction. Card 16. Nearly at the end of the story, but not quite. Everyone knows that in a good story, the seeming failure is only the moment when the hero must regroup and try again. 

In the Tarot, the Tower is followed by the Star. Transcendent beauty, shimmering and ethereal, and only possible once the Tower falls. 

After the Tower comes the Star. Hopeful thoughts in chaotic and destructive times. 

But before the Tower comes the Devil. Which means the way through chaos requires grappling with our own shadows. 

A less comforting thought. And if we are curious what it looks like when people have made a studied practice of projecting one’s shadows onto others to avoid looking at their own, we only have to look around. 

So we have the Star, card 17, preceded by The Tower, card 16, and the Devil, card 15. Face your demons before the chaos, says the Tarot. So that when the Tower falls, you don’t find yourself clinging to the crumbling walls in fear of what lurks in the darkness. So that when the walls of the Tower fall you can let them fall away, leaving you under the vault of the sky with only the stars above you. 

Easy to say. Easy to wax poetic about embracing our demons and our shadows. Hard to do, like anything that offers true transformation. 

We don’t have to start here. The Tarot doesn’t start with the Devil. It’s only after traversing over half of the journey that we are asked to face our demons. 

Before the Devil comes Death. Card 13. And between Death and the Devil is Temperance. Card 14. 

Let’s put aside the poetic and lay this out clearly: 

In the Tarot, one part of the second half of the story of the Major Arcana reads like this: 

Death. Temperance. Devil. Tower. Star. 

In a reading, Death rarely signifies a literal death, but always signals a significant change. The version of you from before has to die. You might not know exactly who you are becoming. That’s the lesson. Let go, and not because you know what you are falling into. You have to let go of the comfort of who you thought you were and what you thought your life would become. You have to let go into the abyss. Cling to what you were, and you’ll miss it. Resisting the inevitability of this change will only make your own heart harden. 

In this release of Death (call it an ego death if that makes it clearer) the structures and personas we’ve built around ourselves must loosen their grip. This is the repeated lesson of the entire journey of the Tarot, the one that begins with The Fool and is repeated again and again: let go of who you think you are. 

Without that release of Death, we will arrive at the Devil ready to fight the projections of our enemies rather than subvert the strata they grow from. The Devil loves to be pushed away. Feed it your attention, lose your vision into the tunnel. The Devil is hungry for it. 

If we miss the release offered by Death, when faced by the Devil we can only seek to try and prove that isn’t who we are, which only makes the Devil grow stronger. With the humility Death offers, we can face our own shadows where the Devil lives. That’s how the Devil is weakened. That’s how the Devil lets go of us. 

Between Death and the Devil is Temperance. An often overlooked card, not as flashy as the rest in this particular line-up, Temperance is, as its name suggests, an archetype of patience and quiet. A distillation of desire, rather than the heat and surge. In all the space offered by Death, in all that vast emptiness, here is where we are tasked with getting good and honest about why we want what we want. 

To put it bluntly: are you praying for what you long for? Or are you praying that what you fear doesn’t come? 

Temperance wants us to know the difference. 

We have just begun Sagittarius season, from 11/21-12/21. Sagittarius is ruled by Temperance. Today, November 25th, Mercury stations retrograde in Sagittarius until December 15th. Mercury Retrograde, the planetary transit everyone loves to hate and blame for every and any technical glitch and communication foible, is certainly a time to make back up plans and slow down as much as possible. Make the list, check it twice, not to figure out who’s naughty or nice but because at this stage in the global catastrophes if you have a working short term memory I want to know your secret. But along with taking the extra time to read for embarrassing typos before sending the email, and expecting travel delays and packing snacks accordingly, Mercury Retrograde in the season of Sagittarius, Temperance’s season, is a time to closely examine what is motivating our actions and our prayers. And to name what we want, not just what we fear. 

It takes effort to envision the world we long for. It’s easier to push back and reject the Devil and everything the Devil stands for, without searching for the ways the Devil lives through us. But if we don’t know the world we are reaching for then when the Tower falls we will cling to the walls in fear of our own troubled darkness, rather than embracing the vastness and the beauty of the stars. 

This Sagittarius season, and especially in this Mercury retrograde from 11/25-12/15, a question to ask yourself - with Tarot, with a journal, or taking yourself on a long walk with no one but the sky to hear you - what is the world you are dreaming of? Not in terms of what it isn’t, but what it is. Are you praying and moving and acting for that world to happen? Or are you praying and moving and acting so that the world we fear doesn’t happen? Defensive moves are part of any good strategy. But they aren’t enough. To really see us through the Tower and to the Star, we have to be clear on what is moving us. 

The cards pictured here are the Death, Temperance, Devil and Star from the newest edition of The Somatic Tarot, now available for pre-order and shipping in time for the holidays. Each deck comes with a full guidebook, and the first 100 orders come with a 2025 Moon Calendar. Order here.