.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
ELH.
http://www.jstor.org
ELIOT
BY ROBERT CURRIE
46
?
(1979) 722-733
1979 by The Johns Hopkins UniversityPress
early twentieth century. During this period, while the cards were
used for fortune-tellingby some, they were employed by others,
notably Etteilla in the eighteenth century,and E1liphas Levi in the
nineteenth, in the construction of esoteric systems: and in consequence, by 1900, tarots had been elevated to "the Tarot,"' a symbolic pattern of mysterious significance indeed.3
Italian and French tarot packs consist of 78 cards, 56 of which
compose four suits of 14 cards: ace, 2-10, knave (or page), knight,
queen, and king. The pips of the suits are batons (or sceptres or
wands), cups, swords, and coins (or pentacles), but there is little to
suggest that these are much other than variants, more or less fanciful, on the traditions that give us clubs, hearts, spades and
diamonds. The court cards of the suits bear conventional pictorial
representations of their peculiar dignitaries. The number cards
have occasionally displayed emblematic designs, or even caricatures; but they have not, until the twentieth century, borne any
systematic symbolic or narrative pictorial elements. There are,
however, beside the suits, 22 atouts, "trumps,"' or "keys": highly
symbolic picture cards, 21 of which have numbers, and all of which
have titles.
Two major symbolic systems dominate the Franco-Venetian
atouts. Firstthere is a systemof symbols drawn fromChristianityand
the Bible: Le Pape (No. 5), L'Ermite (No. 9), Le Diable (No. 15),
and so on. Yet many of these symbols are apparently heterodox: La
Papesse (No. 2), for example, and Le Monde (No. 21), in which a
naked woman (or youth), holding a wand, dances within a garland
surrounded by the emblems of the four evangelists.
That the cards which bear such symbols do not belong to the
world of orthodox religion is confirmed by the openly divinatory
nature of the second, astrological, system of symbols offeredby the
atouts. This sytem is seen in the cards forthe planets, such as La
Lune (No. 18) and Le Soleil (No. 19). It is also seen in the use of
zodiacal signs, such as Libra (8. La Justice), Leo and Virgo (11. La
Force). Finally at least four and perhaps 10 of the 22 atouts reproduce the conventional symbols of the houses of the horoscope. For
example, card 10, La Roue de Fortune, reproduces the wheel of the
eleventh house (Benefacta). Card 1, Le Bateleur, which depicts a
man in a broad-brimmed hat, who holds a wand and stands before a
table covered with various objects, is very like the merchant beside
his laden table of the second house ofthe horoscope (Lucrum). And
the notorious card 12, Le Pendu, which depicts a man hanging from
Robert Currie
723
literatureof occultism," but, in "the most catholic" way, "the presentation of universal ideas by means of universal types." "I have
taken the cards on the high plane of their more direct significance
to man, who-in material life-is on the quest of eternal things," he
declared. In tracing that quest, Waite treated of "the Ancient of
Days," "the Fall of Man," "the sweet yoke and light burden of
Divine Law," "the Mystery of God," "the Light of the World,"
"rebirth in Christ," "the Secret Church," and "the confidence of
those whose strengthis God, who have found their refuge in Him."
Meanwhile, as Waite elevated the religious, he disparaged the astrological elements in the cards: reserving, for all species of divination, a wry disapproval not at all diminished by the pleasure
which he took in the poetical possibilities of the divinatoryarts. For
he insisted that the cards were to be understood poetically rather
than by means of a rigid occult or emblematic hermeneutic. The
Tarot, he argued, presents not emblems but symbols; and, he observed, "As poetry is the most beautiful expression of the things
that are of all the most beautiful, so is symbolism the most catholic
expression in concealment of things that are the most profound in
the sanctuary." Hence, Waite concluded, a fixed schema or "process" of understandingthe Tarot was less valuable than "individual
reflection"on the cards: for"the pictures are like doors which open
into unexpected chambers, or like a turn in the open road with a
wide prospect beyond."7
Had Eliot known Waite, he would have been much less sympathetic to the Egyptian theory of tarots than has commonly been
supposed; and, moreover,he would have used the tarotpack in The
Waste Land in ways not yet envisaged in the studyofthe poem. But
did Eliot know Waite? On the one hand, Grover Smith confesses, "I
have no idea whether Eliot knew this book"; on the other, David
Ward asserts-without evidence-that "Waite's was almost certainly the version of the Tarot which Eliot had seen."8
At firstsight Eliot's note on lines 43-55 of The Waste Land may
not suggest such knowledge. He wrote
I am not familiarwith the exact constitutionof the Tarot pack of
cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fitsmy
purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with
the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the
hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part
V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later.... The
725
Robert Currie
"the drownedPhoenicianSailor"
"Belladonna,the Lady ofthe Rocks"
"the manwiththreestaves"
"the Wheel"
"the one-eyedmerchant"
Eliot and Tarot
himself)."10
Robert Currie
727
Robert Curre'72
Robert Currie
729
The identification of the man with three staves with the WaiteSmith three of wands opens the possibility of a very tentative identificationof the two cards that otherwise seem foreignto the entire
history of tarots.
(a) "the drownedPhoenician Sailor"
is not to be found in Waite-Smith. Yet Waite's ten of swords, "A
prostratefigure, pierced by all the swords belonging to the card,"
and lying beside the sea, has the divinatorymeanings, according to
Waite, of "Whatsoever is intimated by the design; also pain, affliction, tears, sadness, desolation," and may, as Moakley indicated,
have come closest to Eliot's intentions. Finally
(b) "Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks"
is also absent fromthe Waite-Smith pack. Moakley associated this
card with Waite's two of swords: "A hoodwinked figure balances
two swords upon her shoulders," as she sits under the moon before
a rocky sea. The card may have the divinatory meaning, according
to Waite, of "Imposture, falsehood, duplicity, disloyalty." Yet this
strikingicon suggests a "Lady of the Swords" very much more than
a "Lady of the Rocks," a title more appropriate to the queen of
wands in Waite's pack, a flower-crownedwoman, bearing wand and
sunflower,enthroned, with her black cat before her, among rocks or
mountains. Her divinatory meanings, according to Waite, include
"a dark woman," signifyingin certain circumstances, "opposition,
14
jealousy, even deceit and infidelity."
Land
The seven tarots of The Waste
may then be, under Waite's
English titles,
(a) ten of swords(?)
(b) queen ofwands (?)
(c) threeof wands
(d) 10. Wheel of Fortune
(e) 1. The Magician (?)
(f) a blank card
(g) 12. The Hanged Man.
Four cards only are to be identified with certainty. Moreover,
Eliot's claim to have "departed" fromthe exact constitution of the
tarotpack suggests that at least one card has no original; and, in any
event, unless Madame Sosostris employed otherwise unknown
methods, she would have turned up more cards than those cited.
Thus the tarot sequence in The Waste Land seems incomplete.
730
Had Eliot read Waite, the association of the Hanged Man with the
TIHEHI\NGEDAMyN.
A Waitean influence on Eliot would affect the interpretation of at
least thirteen lines of Eliot's poem. Yet even those few writers who
Robert Currie
731
recognize the links between Eliot and Waite seem to regret them.
Moakley asserted that Eliot "evidently had no reason to go deeply
into the subject," on the incorrect assumption that Waite and Weston closely agreed. Moreover, she concluded that what she
strangely claimed to be Eliot's assumption that Waite's was "the
traditional tarot," together with his disclaimer of familiaritywith
the tarot pack, "implies that he gave Waite's book only superficial
attention." A closer reading of Eliot's note shows, on the contrary,
that Eliot was alive precisely to Waite's categories of "traditional"
and "authentic" tarots; and that Eliot's disclaimer was a discreet
acknowledgement of his own awareness that he knew the "traditional" tarots solely through the medium of Waite's "authenticity":
from which, however, the poet derived, in the man with three
staves, a visual symbol of no less a person than the Fisher King. If
this is so, then Eliot cannot have treated Waite superficially.'6
Ward seems to think that Eliot treated Waite, not simply superficially, but with contempt. "Eliot didn't take the Tarot seriously in
the same sense as Yeats (who was wise and silly in differentways
fromEliot) or ArthurWaite, a member of the Order of the Golden
Dawn (which gave Yeats and its other members the opportunityto
indulge their tastes for mumbo-jumbo)," wrote Ward: who added
that Eliot "doesn't wish to be pinned down to the level of Arthur
Edward Waite." Since Ward himself claimed that the tarot section
of The Waste Land "forecasts the action in a real way," this seems a
little churlish to poor Waite, who apparently provided the material
for that section. It also seems to rest on a misapprehension of
Waite's work. For Waite was not simply a scholarly and literary
writer on recondite myths; he was above all a man who attempted
to give a Christian cast to the late Victorian occult arcana: and this
is seen especially in his "rectification" of the tarots.17
Now, much in The Waste Land goes to strengthen Lyndall Gordon's argument thatthe poem is the "spiritual autobiography" of its
author, who, at least in this period of his life, stood in a profoundly
problematical relationship to a Christian faiththathe glimpsed, still
darkly, in the hazy glass of metaphysics and mysticism. Waite's
"Tarot" is none other than a poetic, metaphysical and mystical,
Christian revision of the tarotcards: and it might be that this is the
Tarot of The Waste Land.18
Wadham College, Oxford
732
FOOTNOTES
1 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (London:
16
17
18
Robert Currie
733