Eliot and the Tarot

Abstract

Lines 43-55 of Waste Land introduce Sosostris, famous clairvoyante and her wicked of tarots. Over the years Eliot scholars have tended to lay more and more weight on this passage. Indeed Grover Smith now attributes major organizing functions to Madame Sosostris's cards. The plan was, he wrote in 1974, 'precisely, to use the Tarot pack to introduce a set of contemporary characters corresponding more or less to those figuring in the Grail legend, and, through a recherche du temps perdu portraying them in cameo, to compose a fantasia of Eliot's emotional life. Yet critics still seem surprisingly vague, not merely about the tarots, but about Eliot's knowledge and use of them.' Despite the oft-repeated claim that the symbols of Madame Sosostris's cards had a mysterious significance in ancient Egyptian vegetation ceremonies connected with the rise and fall of the waters of the Nile, there is no trace of an argument for an Egyptian provenance for tarots earlier than the eighth volume of Court de Gebelin's Monde Primitif, published in Paris in 1781. There de Gebelin asserted, with no more convincing display of egyptological knowledge than could be expected forty years before the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone, that La forme, la disposition, l'arrangement de ce Jeu et les figures qu'il offre sont si manifestement allegoriques, et ces allegories sont si conformes a la doctrine civile, philosophique et religieuse des anciens Egyptiens, qu'on ne peut s'empecher de le reconnoitre pour l'ouvrage de ce peuple des Sages. These assertions were uncritically reproduced in Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance.2 De Gebelin and Weston notwithstanding, however, historians of playing cards assign the tarots an unequivocally western, late medieval provenance. Some cards said to have been made for Charles VI of France in 1392 are often cited as the earliest tarots; but the first authenticated tarrochi (and the related minchiate cards) appear in fifteenth-century Italy. Tarots apparently produced about this time in Venice seem to have been the chief source of the French packs which, with exceedingly few exceptions, were the only tarots available in England between the eighteenth and the