A discovery of witches

There is an idea in the pagan community, first put about by the Appalachian witch Byron Ballard a decade or so ago, that we are living through something called ‘Tower Time’. Named for the Tower tarot card, which in the Rider-Waite deck depicts a tower topped with a crown being struck by lightning and symbolic of misery, deception and calamity, Ballard defines this era as one in which old and toxic systems, both constitutive and ultimately destructive of civilisation as we know it, are collapsing under the weight of their own history. ‘It is,’ Ballard writes, ‘the death throes of patriarchy that we are experiencing, and it will die as it has lived – in violence and oppression and injustice and death.’