Common Symbols in Literature

About Esoteric Symbols; The Tarot in Yeats, Eliot and Kafka

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Many common symbols in literature really belong to the Tarot. But the intriguing connections between common symbols in literature and the Tarot remain eclipsed by the stigma of the Tarot cards. Most people think that Tarot cards and the symbols on the cards are only used by fortune-tellers dressed-up like gypsies at carnivals and fairs. However, writers like William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot and even Franz Kafka used Tarot symbols in their works. Recognizing literary symbols which belong to the Tarot is an exciting journey of discovery.

Franz Kafka uses the Tarot symbol of The Hermit in his novel Amerika.

He also uses the Tarot card called The Judgement and the cabalistic Tarot card called The High Priestess.

There are many Tarot cards in The Waste Land by T.S Eliot. Since most of them appear in the hands of Madame Sosostris, the fortune teller, they are called Madame Sosostris's Tarot. Some of the cards in her hand seem to have been made up by Eliot or at least altered so they bear little resemblance to the authentic cards. The Drowned Sailor is one of these contrived cards. The One-Eyed Merchant may be another. Most readers concentrate on these cards and symbols which Eliot fabricated. However, other cards in Madame Sosostris's hand really do belong to the Tarot. They are true symbols.

 

The fourth card that Madame Sosostris draws in part one of The Waste Land, a card that most readers ignore, is The Wheel or Wheel of Fortune.

The card is full of literary symbols. Around the Wheel is God's four lettered name in Hebrew and English. The card suggests that God exists. God makes the wheel of life turn and the destiny of each person. The four creatures on the corners of the card which derive from the vision of Ezekiel suggest that God can be known through certain signs. The Wheel sticks out all the more in Eliot’s poem because it lies on Madame Sosostris’s parlor table alongside common symbols in literature which state that truth cannot be known. The Wheel suggests that the misery in The Waste Land has after all divine meaning and signification. It is ignorance of the divine meaning which causes human suffering.

As the poem was written six years before Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, such a theological statement in Madame Sosostris’s Tarot would seem to be astonishing. When Eliot wrote the first sections of The Waste Land, he was a skeptic who believed that there is no meaning to be found anywhere. Why then is The Wheel, a common symbol in literature, sticking out of the empty terrain of The Waste Land with its message about the existence of God?