In Michelle Tea’s The Modern Tarot, she interprets the meanings behind each Tarot card. To briefly contextualize, there are 78 cards in the Tarot; each card has two potential positionings and usually three potential associations with each position, meaning that each reading has a potential of 156 outcomes and each outcome has 468 total possibilities. The Tarot is a divination tool that predicts or foresees the future; it was traditionally associated with other occult techniques such as seances in order to channel the outworld and discover hidden knowledge. As we discover in Tom Gibson’s “Tarot Identified,” despite the “presum[ed]” disclaimer that Eliot “had never seen a Tarot pack,” Eliot held great familiarity with the cards, especially the major arcana (which are considered to be the most powerful in the deck.
In the scene with Madame Sosostris who is often lauded as a false prophet, we see allusions to thirteen different Tarot cards, notably “the Tower, the High Priestess, the Moon, the Lovers, the Hermit, and the Star. In addition, one of the most notable cards that Eliot references is the “Hanged Man” (564). Gibbons points out that “the Hanged Man is not a man hanged by the neck until dead, but a living man suspended by one leg from a cross” and that “the Hanged Man . . . may well have led Eliot to a central motif of The Waste Land: the fusion of Christ and certain pagan vegetation-deities into one sacrificial figure” (563-564). Michelle Tea in her work elaborates upon Waite’s description: “A person in a tunic hangs by the ankle from a leafy tree—and looks pretty chill about it. Is this some sort of ancient yoga move, or perhaps a sadomasochistic ritual of yore? Um, in a way, sort of” (87). She continues, “The Hanged Man represents all situations in which you’ve put yourself somewhere on a spectrum between slight discomfort and deep pain, and you’ve done it consciously because you know at the end of your bondage a new and improved reality awaits you” (87). The Hanged Man is a seer within the Tarot, a seeker of enlightenment through new knowledge; taken in this context, I see the Tarot angling toward Eliot’s depiction of the fissures in modern humanity.
Interestingly, Tea elaborates in her history that this card also “rules meditation,” a common spiritual practice of the East (which we know Eliot points toward by the end of the poem); additionally, the appearance of the Hanged Man “recommends retreat” (88). An encounter with the Hanged Man means that one must give up in order to reach where they must go, to retreat from the common understandings of rationale and strategy, to “surrender” and “let go” (89). It ultimately—like Gibbons established—still signifies a sacrifice, but what Gibbons fails to mention and that Tea picks up is that the card also promises reward.
ENGL 8203: The Waste Land -- Sources & Contexts 