The Blasted Tower
Related material
Images
The Marseilles cards
The Waite-Smith card
Summary - a "Hell" card
As a warrior-fool, you must become aware of the state of the world - how things got the way they are, for although the world is usual, it is far from normal. The four "Hell" cards describe the state of the world as it appears. The Fool's job is to then transcend these appearances and seek what is real, which is called the "Real I."
The Blasted Tower depicts something that is broken. The image stands for a broken state within a human being, a physical disaster that happened long ago, and lost teachings. It can also symbolize the result of foolhardy experiments with journeys of this kind where the earlier stages are not mastered before later ones are attempted.
The object that is broken has physical (a body in ill health), emotional (fear, anger, etc.) and intellectual (pride, self-importance) components. The story of the Tower of Babel, correctly understood, carries many of the the same meanings as this card.
The Image
What's going on here? Some people are falling (or have fallen) out of a tower that has had its top blasted away from its base by a bolt of lightening. But this tower isn't a real bricks and mortar tower, since the top is depicted instead as a crown. This is the first clue that there are different levels of meaning to this card.
First we might see that the tower represents a human being who has been disrupted in some way. The lower parts of the tower represent our earthly self: our physical body and the usually overwhelming sense that "I" am my body. But what, then, does the crown signify? We think of a king or queen wearing a crown, but originally a crown had different meanings. It meant the same as a halo - something spiritual or divine. So here is one story this card tells: Humans once had both a physical and a divine part, but awareness of the latter was destroyed, blasted away.
But what does it mean that the people are falling? You've heard about the so-called "fall of man" right? A tower + a fall = the Tower Of Babel in the Bible.