Madame Sosostris in T.S. Eliot's Poetry

Madame Sosostris in T.S. Eliot's Poetry

This article relates to Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted

In Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted, Londoner Viv meets the infamous clairvoyant Madame Sosostris while she is giving readings at the Cholmondeley Room of the House of Lords. Guests are frightened and awed by the accuracy of her gift, calling her "the most dependable clairvoyant in the country," as she has helped correctly predict certain country-wide phenomena, from policy decisions to World Cup winners. They also praise her specialty in predicting the successes and failures of relationships. As the title character of Ben Okri's novel, Madame Sosostris may just be a name for some, but others will recognize the reference to a clairvoyant with the same name who appears in T.S. Eliot's famous poem The Waste Land.

Published in 1922, The Waste Land is a poem in five parts about the aftermath of World War I, particularly the physical and spiritual destruction of the City of London. Madame Sosostris appears in "Part 1: The Burial of the Dead" and is shown to be pulling tarot cards: the drowned Phoenician Sailor, the Belladonna, the man with three staves, the Wheel, the one-eyed merchant, and one more that can't be seen, on which a figure carries an unknown something on his back. It is noted that The Hanged Man card does not appear, and the following prediction is made, with a note for Mrs. Equitone, a client of Madame Sosostris:

"Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days."

Notably, Madame Sosostris' name is similar to that of a clairvoyant in Aldous Huxley's novel Chrome Yellow, in which the character Mr. Scogan disguises himself as a fortune teller under the name Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana. While many scholars interpret Eliot's Madame Sosostris—with her connotations as the one-time alter ego of Mr. Scogan—to imply sexual ambiguity, the character has also been connected to the idea of fake fortune tellers, particularly given the last line of the stanza: "One must be so careful these days." The more obvious interpretation of the line is a warning to believers: be careful of Madame Sosostris, as she could be a false prophet. However, others believe it might be a warning for fortune tellers themselves. In his article "The Trials of Astrology in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: A Gloss on Lines 57–59," Brian Diemert notes that fortune tellers were arrested en masse on charges of fraud during the early 1900s, which is around the time the poem was written.

Eliot's own belief or disbelief in mysticism and tarot are still up for debate, and this seems to trickle down to Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted. Although she is introduced as the fortune teller behind five successful prime ministers, her presence in the novel not only sows doubt between the novel's main couples, but also raises questions about whether fortune telling is even useful. Despite this, Madame Sosostris' influence feels very real in both poem and novel. Her prediction does come true in Part 5 of The Waste Land, titled "Death by Water," in which the drowned Phoenician reappears, as well as the image of the wheel in reference to another tarot card. Additionally, her strange appearance in Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted seems to indicate that Okri, at the very least, is intrigued by the magical potential of fortune telling.

Tarot cards referenced in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land
Images from Rider-Waite tarot deck, compiled by Crossroads Tarot

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This article relates to Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted. It first ran in the March 12, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.