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Few poems have been as thoroughly explicated as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which from its publication with Eliot's notes by Liveright seemed fated to a life of commentary. After more than seventy-five years, lines and images continue to provoke exegetical comment. The final lines of the Madame Sosostris section of "The Burial of the Dead" (II. 43-59) are a case in point: "If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,/ Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:/ One must be so careful these days" (II. 57-59).1
As is well known, Eliot acknowledged the source of the name Sosostris to be Aldous Huxley's novel Crome Yellow (1921) wherein the decidedly unreligious Mr. Scogan dresses as "Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana" for a Bank Holiday charity fair held at Chrome.2 Since Scogan is a man dressed as a woman, Sosostris in Eliot's poem has been read as a sexually ambiguous character who, for most commentators,3 represents a debased religion or a parodic distortion of genuine prophets such as the Sibyl of Cumae or Tiresias.4 The whole Sosostris episode, in turn, is seen to reflect the degenerate spirituality of the Waste Land's inhabitants, while the Tarot pack's cards offer symbolic resonances that are felt throughout the poem, and so render-given the meanings of the cards found in Sosostris's reading-Eliot's claim that he is "not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards" disingenuous.5 Most commentators, though, despite their dismissal of Sosostris as "absurd,"6 a "fake,"7 or a "fraud,"8 take the cards quite seriously.
Since the Sosostris episode concludes with the lines, "If you see dear Mrs. Equitone' Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: / One must be so careful these days" (II. 57-59), we realize that Sosostris also practices astrology, although the rich symbolic potential of astrology, unlike that of the Tarot, is not exploited in Eliot's poem. (In "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," however, Eliot concludes his essay by noting that the mythical method "is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious."9) Sosostris' last reminder that "one must be so careful these days" easily fits into the poem's thematic patterning wherein we see caution, diffidence, and stasis to be the norm. Again, commentators differ in their readings of this line, but a basic similarity...