Eliot and the Tarot

Eliot and the TarotAuthor(s): Robert CurrieSource: ELH, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Winter, 1979), pp. 722-733Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872487 .

Accessed: 20/12/2014 09:54

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toELH.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sat, 20 Dec 2014 09:54:27 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872487?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


ELIOT AND THE TAROT

BY ROBERT CURRIE

Lines 43-55 of The Waste Land introduce "Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante" and her "wicked pack" 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 contem- porary characters corresponding more or less to those figuring in the Grail legend, and, through a recherche du temps perdu por- traying 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 wa- ters 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 de- cipherment of the Rosetta Stone, that "La forme, la disposition, l'arrangement de ce Jeu et les figures qu'il offre sont si manifeste- ment 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

722

ELH 46 (1979) 722-733 0013-8304/79/0464-722 $01.00 ? 1979 by The Johns Hopkins University Press



early twentieth century. During this period, while the cards were used for fortune-telling by 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 conse- quence, 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 fanci- ful, 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 carica- tures; 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. First there is a system of symbols drawn from Christianity and 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 offered by the atouts. This sytem is seen in the cards for the 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 repro- duce 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 of the horoscope (Lucrum). And the notorious card 12, Le Pendu, which depicts a man hanging from

Robert Currie 723



(or, as in Court de Gebelin's tarots, tethered to) a wooden frame, readily suggests the man in the stocks of the 12th house (Carcer).4

These perhaps somewhat eclectic contents-heterodox-religious, zodiacal and astrological-both enhance the intrinsic sortitive possibilities of numbered cards and make of the tarots an incomparable instrument of revelation: a revelation which, in fact, has little if anything to do with Egypt, and a great deal to do with Christianity and Christian culture. This would not necessarily be relevant to Eliot's use of tarots in The Waste Land if, as Grover Smith claims, "the card pack did come from Miss Weston," and if Eliot knew no more of tarots than could be learned from her book. On that assumption it would be safe to conclude that he was little and ill- advised on the subject; and that he might well have employed tarots in the simple belief that they were somehow Egyptian in character. But that assumption is inadmissible: first, because The Waste Land displays much more knowledge of tarots than does From Ritual to Romance: and, secondly, because, given Eliot's well-documented knowledge of this work, it is difficult not to sus- pect that he might well have known of an altogether superior source. For, in the course of Weston's brief remarks on tarots the reader finds a footnote reference to "Mr. A. E. Waite, who has published a book on the subject."5

In 1910 Waite published both his book, The Key to the Tarot, and a tarot pack of his own devising, designed by Pamela Colman Smith, together with a manual summarizing the divinatory material presented in his book. A year later he reproduced Colman Smith's designs in black and white in an illustrated version of his book, called The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. Waite was a rosicrucian freemason, who had for some years been active in the Order of the Golden Dawn, where, consistently with the Christian symbolism of his rosicrucianism, he bore the Christian motto Sacramentum Regis. So far as The Waste Land is concerned, Waite's attempt at a "complete and rectified Tarot" had three salient characteristics: first, that he dismissed the Egyptian theory outright; secondly, that as well as altering the details of the trumps or atouts he also turned the number cards of the suits into picture cards; and, thirdly, that he interpreted the tarot pack as something like a visual sequence of Christian poetry.6

Waite argued that "the Tarot" expressed "Secret Doctrine in pictures": but he rejected any sectarian concept of that doctrine. On the contrary, the Tarot was not "a derivative of any one school or

724 Eliot and Tarot



literature of occultism," but, in "the most catholic" way, "the pre- sentation 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 strength is 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 divinatory arts. 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 ob- served, "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 "pro- cess" of understanding the 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 sympa- thetic to the Egyptian theory of tarots than has commonly been supposed; and, moreover, he would have used the tarot pack in The Waste Land in ways not yet envisaged in the study of the 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 cer- tainly the version of the Tarot which Eliot had seen."8

At first sight Eliot's note on lines 43-55 of The Waste Land may not suggest such knowledge. He wrote

I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my 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

Robert Currie 725



Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.

Yet this note strongly suggests that Eliot had read Waite. First, Eliot departs from the exact constitution of the tarot pack, to suit his own (poetic) convenience: a curious liberty to take with documents al- ready in the public domain, so to speak, were it not for the example of Waite, who had done just this a dozen years before the publica- tion of The Waste Land. Secondly, Eliot speaks of "the traditional pack," and of "an authentic member of the Tarot pack." The concept of the prevalent Franco-Venetian tarots as a traditional pack could scarcely arise except by contrast with an untraditional pack: and such a pack did not exist until the appearance of the Waite- Smith tarots, which contained, according to Waite, precisely "4au- thentic" yet untraditional members. Waite freely acknowledged that he had departed from what he called "the traditional form" of the cards; which, however, he claimed to have "rectified." For, by following the "Secret Tradition concerning the Tarot," he believed he could offer "the truth" previously concealed in "the wretched products of colportage," namely the "traditional" Franco-Venetian packs which alone had hitherto been available in England. Thirdly, despite the confidence with which Eliot manipulates the tarots, and uses the highly technical notions of traditional and authentic tarots, he disclaims familiarity with "the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards." Just such a disclaimer would be in order had Eliot known Waite, but not the older tarots. For the older tarots were not reproduced, either in the manual to the Waite-Smith pack, or in Waite's book, which gave brief verbal descriptions of earlier designs, sufficient to indicate the extent of Waite's innovations, but insufficient to assure the reader that he is apprised of the exact details of the older packs.9

This point was not taken in an otherwise very closely argued, and unfortunately neglected, article published by Gertrude Moakley a quarter of a century ago. Moakley escaped the Egyptian snares, set to trap the commentator on lines 43-55 of The Waste Land, by the simple device of studying Madame Sosotris's seven cards. They are

(a) "the drowned Phoenician Sailor" (b) "Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks" (c) "the man with three staves" (d) "the Wheel" (e) "the one-eyed merchant"

726 Eliot and Tarot



(f) "this card / Which is blank," and (g) "The Hanged Man."

The fourth and seventh cards,

(d) "the Wheel," and (g) "The Hanged Man,"

correspond to 10. La Roue de Fortune and 12. Le Pendu: the "Wheel of Fortune" and "Hanged Man" in Waite's pack. Moreover,

(e) "the one-eyed merchant"

might be an exceedingly subtle allusion to 1. Le Bateleur ("The Magician" in the Waite-Smith pack), were Eliot to have known, not only the tarots, but their relationship to the horoscope. That would seem unlikely on a superficial reading of Eliot's disclaimer. F. 0. Matthiessen indeed, wrote that "I have never seen a Tarot pack (and, if I had to bet, my money would say that neither had Eliot himself) ."10

But the sixth card,

(f) "this card / Which is blank,"

suggests that Matthiessen would have lost his money. As Waite recorded, The Platonist, a journal published not two hundred miles from Eliot's birthplace, carried in August 1885 an article on "The Taro," whose anonymous author remarked that

We have said that there are 78 cards, of which 22 are keys but these are only the exoteric keys. It is known to adepts that there should be 22 esoteric keys, which would make the total number up to 100.... On this point an earnest English neophyte, who has attained to a considerable degree of lucidity, suggests that when the artist has arrived at a certain stage of perfec- tion ... supernal intelligences themselves furnish the 22 esoteric keys, or impress their symbolic signature on 22 blank cards prepared by the student.

Moakley thought that Eliot might have learned of the blank card-which had appeared nowhere else in the literature of tarots-from Waite's bibliography: which discussed this article at some length. This is, of course, possible; though it is a supposition which scarcely accords with Moakley's own claim that Eliot "gave Waite's book only superficial attention." In any event, had Eliot read of blank tarots, he might have read of them in The Platonist itself.1'

Robert Currie 727



Yet there is a distinctly less complicated explanation of the sixth card in The Waste Land. Waite's own tarot pack included 80 cards: four suits of 14 cards; the 22 atouts; and two blank cards. Of these last, unique items, his book said nothing. Thus Eliot might have read either The Platonist or Waite, or both; he might have seen the Waite-Smith set, with its blanks; and he might have seen another pack with blanks. But on the evidence now available the second hypothesis is the simplest, and therefore to be preferred. And con- firmation of any of these hypotheses would destroy the conventional picture of an Eliot who picked up a smattering of tarot-lore from Jessie Weston's version of Court de Gebelin.

Eliot provides his own evidence. His precise definition of what Helen Gardner has called "the enigmatic 'man with three staves'" as an authentic "member of the Tarot pack" establishes his knowledge of Waite-Smith. For there is, as Moakley concluded, only one satisfactory solution to the problem of this card. Since Eliot stated that he associated

(c) "the man with three staves"

"quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King," it is reasonable to assume that he had in mind the three of wands in the Waite-Smith pack, described by Waite as

A calm, stately personage, with his back turned, looking from a cliffs edge at ships passing over the sea. Three staves are planted in the ground, and he leans lightly on one of them.

Eliot could not have been sure that the man with three staves was an authentic member of the tarot pack unless he had seen this card. For no such figure has ever appeared, either among the tarot atouts, or, until the Waite-Smith pack, among the number cards of the tarot suits. 12

The design and interpretation of the three of wands in the Waite-Smith pack may, moreover, explain both Eliot's association of this card with the Fisher King, and his recognition that the association was arbitrary. The Fisher King is rich, but languishing; and his cure rests upon the hallows of Christ's crucifixion. Waite described the personage depicted on the card as a "<merchant prince"; and Pamela Colman Smith showed him (Figure One) with a chaplet or circlet about his head. Though the merchant prince is upright, he does hold, or lean on, a stave as if for support, such as might be needed out of languishment, illness or injury. On this

728 Eliot and Tarot



card, as throughout the Waite-Smith suit of wands, the staves are starting into new leaf as if to suggest a renewal of life, or resurrec- tion from death. To strengthen the Christian symbolism of this card, there are of course three staves (or trees), each higher than the merchant prince's head: as, indeed, there are three ships sailing by. Just as these staves, planted on a cliff or height, suggest Calvary, so it could be an indication of the Fisher King's problematical relationship to Christianity that the merchant prince rests not on the central but on the righthand stave. Thus the card reinforces both the maritime and the grail themes in The Waste Land. Yet the divinatory meaning which Waite attached to the card-"established strength, enterprise, effort, trade, commerce, discovery," or, if re- versed, "the end of troubles, suspension or cessation of adversity" -are either irrelevant to, or too positive for, Eliot's own symbolic intentions. Hence perhaps Eliot's admission that the association he wished to make was arbitrary.13

Robert Curre'72

Robert Currie 729



The identification of the man with three staves with the Waite- Smith three of wands opens the possibility of a very tentative identification of the two cards that otherwise seem foreign to the entire history of tarots.

(a) "the drowned Phoenician Sailor"

is not to be found in Waite-Smith. Yet Waite's ten of swords, "A prostrate figure, pierced by all the swords belonging to the card," and lying beside the sea, has the divinatory meanings, according to Waite, of "Whatsoever is intimated by the design; also pain, afflic- tion, 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 from the 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 striking icon 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-crowned woman, 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," signifying in certain circumstances, "opposition, jealousy, even deceit and infidelity." 14

The seven tarots of The Waste Land may then be, under Waite's English titles,

(a) ten of swords (?) (b) queen of wands (?) (c) three of 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" from the exact constitution of the tarot pack 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 Eliot and Tarot



Perhaps its most significant aspect is the absence of the Hanged Man. (Figure Two). Of this card Waite wrote:

I will say very simply on my own part that it expresses the rela- tion, in one of its aspects, between the Divine and the Universe.

He who can understand that the story of his higher nature is imbedded in this symbolism will receive intimations concerning a great awakening that is possible, and will know that after the sacred Mystery of Death there is a glorious Mystery of Resurrec- tion.

Had Eliot read Waite, the association of the Hanged Man with the hooded figure on the road to Emmaus is scarcely surprising. And it would have been scarcely surprising, too, for Madame Sosostris's querent to have concluded, when this card did not turn up, that he was in a waste land indeed.15

TIHE HI\NGED AMyN. 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 Wes- ton 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 familiarity with 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 different ways from Eliot) or Arthur Waite, a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn (which gave Yeats and its other members the opportunity to 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 Gor- don's argument that the 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 faith that he 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 tarot cards: and it might be that this is the Tarot of The Waste Land.18

Wadham College, Oxford

732 Eliot and Tarot



FOOTNOTES 1 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (London: 1970), pp. 64ff; Grover Smith,

T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, A Study in Sources and Meaning (2nd edn.; Chicago: 1974), p. 307.

2 A. J. Wilks, A Critical Commentary on T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (London: 1971), p. 36; A. Court de Gebelin, Monde Primitif, Analyse et Compare avec le Monde Moderne, VIII (Paris: 1781), pp. 366-67, 387-88, 405; Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: 1920), pp. 74-76.

3 Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Being Fragments of a Secret Tradition under the Veil of Divination (London: 1911), passim; Catherine Perry Hargrave,A History of Playing Cards and a Bibliography of Cards and Gam- ing (Boston and New York: 1930), passim.

4 Hargrave, pp. 32, 228; Robert Eisler, The Royal Art ofAstrology (London: 1946), p. 39.

5 Grover Smith, p. 307; Weston, p. 74. 6 Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn, A Documentary History of a

Magical Order, 1887-1923 (London: 1972), p. 296; Arthur Edward Waite, The Key to the Tarot, Being Fragments of a Secret Tradition under the Veil of Divination (London, 1910); Waite, Pictorial Key, p. vii.

7 Waite, Pictorial Key . . . , pp. vii-viii, 42, 62, 68, 75, 76, 95, 103, 104, 124, 135, 160, 169.

8 Grover Smith, p. 326; David Ward, T. S. Eliot between Two Worlds, A Reading of T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (London and Boston: 1973), p. 86.

9 Waite, Pictorial Key . . ., vii, 24, 67-69. 10 F. 0. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, An Essay on the Nature of

Poetry (New York and London: 1958), p. 50; Gertrude Moakley, "The Waite-Smith 'Tarot,' A Footnote to The Waste Land", Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 58 (1954), 471ff.

" Moakley, p. 475; "The Taro," The Platonist, 2 (1885), 127. 12 Helen Gardner, "The Waste Land" 1972 (Manchester: 1972), p. 10; Brooks, p.

143; Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, A Study in Sources and Meaning (Chicago: 1956), pp. 77, 87-88; Waite, Pictorial Key . . ., p. 192.

13 The Waite-Smith tarots are reproduced by permission of U.S. Games Systems, Inc., New York 10016.

14 Moakley, p. 472; Waite, pp. 172, 234, 250. 5 Waite, pp. 116, 119.

16 Moakley, pp. 475. 17 Ward, pp. 86, 105. 18 Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years (Oxford and New York: 1977), p. 118.

Robert Currie 733



Documents

Eliot and the Tarot