This critical post may come out being more like a chronos, but I found this gem of information and couldn’t pass it up. “The Trials of Astrology in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: A Gloss on Lines 57-59″ by Brian Diemert (On JSTOR) discusses T.S. Eliot’s intentions behind “If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,/Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:/ One must be so careful these days.”
I should have put that line under the “appreciate but don’t understand category” for our quiz last Monday, because I’ve always been a little confused by it. Diemert does a quick, and helpful, run through of the literary conversations surrounding these lines before he makes an assertion:
“As is well known, Eliot acknowledged the source of the name Sostris to be Aduous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow (1921) wherein the decidedly unreligious Mr. Scogan dresses as ‘Sesostris, the Sorcesress of Ecbatana…(175)” It is commonly discussed in literary articles about The Waste Land the importance of Eliot’s decision to make Madame Sosostris a sexually ambiguous character because it contributes to the sexual stagnancy that prevails throughout.
Eliot himself says that he didn’t know much about the tarot, in his footnotes so many literary critics have settled with the idea that Eliot believed Sosostris and mysticism were fake. However, the evidence against that is rather staggering. For instance, Madame Sosostris’ prediction comes true later in the poem.
Diemert argues that Sosostris was a common public figure of the early 1900s. Around the time Eliot was composing this poem the Times of London reported several cases of “astrologers and other ‘fortune tellers’ (crustal gazers, tarot readers, and the like” were frequently arrested and brought before the courts on chargers of fraud for ‘pretending and professing to tell fortunes (176).” So, that may be why Eliot may have chosen to say “One must be so careful these days,” because literally fortune tellers had to watch out. Apparently Eliot was known to take interest in mysticism and “the world of the occult,” during this time in his life as well, so it is probably that he would have read such stories in the paper.
One of the reasons Madame Sosostris would have wanted to “bring the horoscope” herself may have because if she had sent in the mail (as it was commonly done at the time) she could have been charged with mail fraud (177).
Diemert lists several examples of fortune tellers and the like that were tried on pages 175-177. It’s interesting if you want to check it out.
In the last part of Diemert’s article he talks about a woman named Evangeline Adams. She was apparently the atrological rockstar of Eliot’s time and chances are he at least knew about her because they ran in the same circles in Harvard (179). In fact, she may be the reason Eliot seems to believe in the ability of fortune telling in The Waste Land (Madame Sosostris’ warning comes to fruition in section IV “Death by Water”). See, Evangeline Adams was arrested twice for fraud due to her fortunes. The first time the case was dropped, but the second time Adams decided to appear in court instead of pay a fine. When she arrived she brought reference books to explain her findings and raise “Astrology to the dignity of an exact science.” The judge gave her only an anonymous person’s birthday and Adams read his birth chart while making predictions. The anonymous person ended up being the judge’s son and he dropped the case. After said case the number of arrests for fortune tellers and such dropped considerably (178).
It is Diemert’s theory that Madame Sosostris and her reliable fortunes may have been heavily based on Mrs. Adams. In any case tarot readers did indeed need to “be very careful.”
I like this glimpse into how freighted those lines are with cultural meaning that we might not otherwise catch. The obsession in the poem with fortune-telling is interesting given Eliot’s concerns in the poem with prophet figures (Tiresias) and with the figure of the poet as a sort of prophet of the waste-land-apocalypse. Thanks for filling in these details!