Deck: The Shakespeare Tarot
Card: The Tower XVI Macbeth
Answer: Evolutionarily, consciousness is the result of a living being's faculty to ascertain and evaluate a given scenario; it is the by-product of an entity's ability to respond to stimuli, itself a function of self-preservation and reproduction. Macbeth encapsulates the Tower of Babel aspect of the Tower card, that is: the hubristic attempt by man (ego) to ascend by force and subterfuge (ie - the wrong way) to godhood. Macbeth and his Lady violate the rules of law - the moral and temporal - so as to attain what they think is deserving of them. This in a sense is true - they are the most adept couple in the kingdom, and so arguably deserve to rule - but this is precisely where thinking falls down. The world does not turn on inarguable facts alone. Ratiocination is a tool to assess how the world works, it is not itself how the world actually works - as even evolution itself shows, being a random and imprecise system. If the Macbeths had properly pursued what the weird sisters predicted, they would've known that to behave the way they did would be destructive and contrary to their own good. Instead, they wielded the tool of their ego for vainglorious ends. In the end, their great sin was ignorance, their paucity of self-awareness. They were deaf and dumb to the noblest aspect of consciousness: knowing thyself. The result was insanity, alienation, and death - the exact opposite of what consciousness as an evolutionary tool was made to do.
At the bottom of this card we see a strange sight - a child being pulled from the abdomen of a woman by a human with the head of a fox. On one level, this is symbolic of Mabeth's killer, McDuff, who was "from his mother's womb untimely ripped". The fox, representing cleverness, suggests that Macbeth has been too clever by half - the world of his own making is cleaved in 2, while the world as it really is cleaves them back together minus Macbeth. With the strangeness of this image I was trying to capture some of the strangeness of the play itself - its supernatural qualities, its psychological forays, even its theatrical tradition of being cursed. This because there is something supernatural as it were about the Tower card and so, by extension, about consciousness itself. Recall the 17th Arcanum is also the House of God, whose roof is destroyed by Zeus' lightning bolt, or an act of god. Lightning is a momentary connection between the earth and sky, and in many decks the "lightning" of the Tower card is more a bouquet of multi-coloured feathers or a kaleidoscopic plume of smoke. Esoterically, then, the Tower can symbolize the correct route to godhood - that is, the awakening and ascent of the Kundalini. The crown being knocked off the top of the "tower" represents the opening of the crown chakra; the lightning bolt or feathers represent the divine energy or shakti. In this way the Tower is an epiphany, a mystical experience. Therefore, in answer to the question posed, the deeper "evolutionary" benefit of consciousness is spiritual liberation.
In an earlier incarnation of the Tower/Macbeth card, I had a fox contemplating a human mask with a sword (or dagger) of Damocles over his head. The image I went with in the end was - I hope - a synthesis of the ideas involved in both the card and the play, but the original image makes conspicuous the idea of the animal-self vis-a-vis the human ego and its endeavor through consciousness to attain self-realization, gnosis, bodhi, Truth, Spiritus Mundi.
.