Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, 45
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations. 50
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. 55
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

Madame Sosostris (her name is a parody of egiptian sorceresses' names) is a modern cheater clairvoyant degrading ritual divination to materialistic superstition. Madame Sosostris, as a fortune teller, is connected to the prophetess Sibyl invoking death and to Tiresias in part III (Fire Sermon) who says: ‘'Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest/I too awaited the expected guest (...) I Tiresias have foresuffered all''.
As said before, Madame Sosostris ‘'the wisest woman in Europe'' is a cheater and the reader becomes aware of that right from the start. Firstly the first three lines are ironic : ‘' Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant/ Had a bad cold, nevertheless/ Is Known to be the wisest woman in Europe''. Secondly she doesn't see a card (‘' And this card/ Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,/ Which I am forbidden to see) and she doesn't find another one (‘'I do not find The Hanged Man'').
It is important to say that the symbols on Tarot cards ( a Tarot desk is composed by 78 cards) date back to ancient Egypt and fertility rites.
Cards:
1) The drowned Phoenician Sailor
2) Belladonna, The lady of the rocks, The lady of situations
3) The man with three staves (Fishing king), it belongs to the traditional tarot deck
4) The Wheel (of fortune)
5) One-eyed merchant
6) Blank card, something the one-eyed merchant carries on his back
7) The Hanged Man - not found (it belongs to the traditional tarot deck)

The first card is the ‘'drowned Phoenician Sailor''. He introduces the recurrent theme of death by water, later explained in part IV (Death By Water) and prepares the reader to the warning at line 55: '' fear death by water''. Actually the Phoenician Sailor is an anticipation of Phlebas the Phoenician, died by drowning in part V(Death by water).
In addition both the figures of the drowned Sailor and Phlebsas are connected with the line 191 (part III - The Fire sermon) which is a quotation from The Tempest by Shakespeare : ‘' Musing upon the king by brother's wreck/ And on the king my father's death before him.''
The line 48 ‘'(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)'' is another quotation from Shakespeare's The Tempest and it recalls the theme of symbolic and miraculous regeneration: eyes become pearls and bones become coral. This quotation is repeated in the part II - (A game of chess) at line 124 : ‘' I remember/ those are pearls that were his eyes''.
The fifth card is the ‘'one-eyed merchant''. He appears in part III as Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant :
‘' Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant/ Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants/ C.i.f. London: documents at sight,/ asked me in demotic French/ To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel/ Followed by a weekend at the Metropole''.
In fact Mr.Eugenides- ‘'one-eyed merchant'' is the modern degraded Phoenician Sailor, who in antiquity had commercial duties but also diffused through the Mediterranean his religion, connected with the rites of vegetation.
He was an adept of Attis' mystery cult. Attis-Adonis was the Phrygian god of fertility ( volumes 5-6 of Frazer's Golden Bought - ‘'Adonis, Attis, Osiris'').
In the modern age he doesn't carry out his duties but carries ‘'currants''. As said before Mrs. Sosostris can't see what the merchant is carrying ( ‘'and this card,/Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,/ Which I am forbidden to see.'') because he carries unnecessary things, like currants, and not what he should (Attis' cult of fertility).
The second card is ‘'Belladonna/The Lady of the Rocks/ The Lady of situations''. She introduces the element of the Rock (objective correlative?) already presented at line 24: ‘' And the dry stone no sound of water. Only/ There is shadow under this red rock,/ (Come in under the shadow of this red rock)''. Rocks are a symbol for waste, desert, desolation, sterility but in this case (‘' Come in under the shadow of this red rock'') they are also a sort of refuge for those people who feared April and ‘'kept warm'' by winter.
In the third part (What the Thunder Said) rock and water are present again, at line 330:
‘' Here is no water but only rock/ Rock and no water and the sandy road/ The road winding above among the mountains/ Which are mountains of rock without water (...) Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think/ (...) /
If there were only water amongst the rock/ (...)/ Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit/ (...) / If there were water/ And no rock/ If there were rock/ and also water/ And water/ A spring/ A pool among the rock/ If there were the sound of water only.''
The Lady of the Rock recalls in the reader's mind Mona Lisa or the Virgin of the rocks by Leonardo. About her T.S. Eliot said ‘'all the woman are one woman'' maybe identifying the Lady of the Rocks (The Lady of the Waste Land) as the epitome of all women in the Waste Land. The ‘'Belladonna'' (also known as Deadly Nightshade) is a poisonous plant, deadly if eaten, but it was used in the past as a cosmetic in form of eye-drops. This mean that the women of the Waste Land are beautiful but dangerous. Perhaps the warning ‘'Fear death by water'' can be interpreted as ‘'Fear by woman''. The hyacinth girl and the woman at the beginning of ‘'A game of chess'' are both connected to Belladonna. ‘'And drowned the senses in odours '' ( part II- lines 89) means that the woman is connected to water (‘'drowned'') and water to death. The topic of drowning stimulates the reader to make an intertextuality with The Love song of J.Alfred Prufrock : ‘' Till human voices wake us, and we drown''. In my opinion the people of the Waste Land, so also Prufrock, need and perhaps desire water and fertility (beach, mermaids, chambers of the see, Sea-girls ) but they can't stand it, they fear it, they consider it ‘'cruel'', they drown.
The third and fourth cards are ‘'The man with three staves'' and ‘'the Wheel ''. T.S.Eliot says in his notes to The Waste Land that the man with three staves is a symbol for the Fishing King. The man with three staves probably coincides to the card of the Pope, which holds a scepter with three staves.
The Last card Madame Sosostris cannot find is the ‘'Hanged Man''. The hanged man corresponds both to Frazer's hanged God and to the disciples on the road to Emmaus appearing in part V (What The Thunder Said). It is meaningful that Madame Sosostris doesn't find the Hanged man-God's card because he represented, in fertility rites, the God of sacrifice and redemption. Indeed the Hanged man represents that hero who would safe the kingdom of the Fishing King from waste. The absence of the Hanged man, symbol of regeneration, prepares to the warning : ‘'fear death by water''. The hero- ‘' Hanged man'' can be associated to the knights of the Grail and to the disciples on the road to Emmaus at line 359: ‘'Who is the third who walks always beside you?/ When I count, there are only you and I together/ But when I look ahead up the white road/ There is always another one walking beside you/ Glinding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded/ I do not know whether a man or a woman/ But who is that on the other side of you?''.
Madame Sosostris also speaks about some ‘' crowds of people, walking in a ring''. They may be the same people the dramatis personae sees on the London bridge some lines later (61): ‘' Under, the brown fog of a winter dawn,/ A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many/ Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled''.
There is also an interesting reference about a crowd in the part V (What The Thunder Said), at line 368: ‘' Murmur of maternal lamentation/Who are those hooded hordes swarming/Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth''. Who are these people? The people of the waste land. The crowd of people waking and ‘'the maternal lamentation'' evoke the sacrifice of Christ and his Via Crucis. It also recalls the ritual death of fertility Gods like Osiris and Tammuz. Actually the ritual death and resurrection of such Gods of fertility (Osiris, Tammuz, Attis, Adonis) represented the periodic regeneration of vegetation in spring.
Summing up fertility is not possible because: there is no Hanged man (the hero who saves the kingdom from sterility) and there's no vehicle of Attis' vegetation rites (one eyed merchant-drowned Phoenician Sailor).
Even if Madame Sosostris is a fake clairvoyant her prediction and her tarot will come partly true.