Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow
Overview[]
Madame Sosostris figure is a reference to Jessie Weston’s book. Tarot cards are a special type of cards intended for divination. A tarot deck has four suits—cup, lance, sword, dish—which can be related to the sacred objects found in the castle which holds the Holy Grail. The Tarot cards were originally used to determine the events of the highest importance to a person. Madame Sosostris is a mock Egyptian name suggested to Eliot by “Sesostris, the sorceress of Ecbatana in Aldous Huxley’s novel Chrome Yellow”.
Connection to The Waste Land[]
Madame Sosostris is a gypsy who tells fortunes at a fair. She is ironically referred to as the “wisest woman in Europe”. T.S. Eliot was not familiar with the full tarot deck and invented several cards which do not exist, including “Belladona, the lady of the rocks” and “the Phoenician sailor”. To a reader, this may come off as evidence of Madame Sosostris’ ineptitude—like she is making up the names and significances of cards because she’s not sure what they actually are. She finds that the protagonist’s card is the Phoenician Sailor and warns him against death by water, not realizing that for other inhabitants of the modern waste land, the way into life may be by death itself. The drowned Phoenician sailor is a type of fertility god whose image was thrown into the sea annually as a symbol of the death of summer.