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52. THE ONE-EYED MERCHANT. See Waite, Tarot†: The Six of Pentacles shows the one-eyed profile of a merchant giving coins to those around him. He represents gratification and vigilance, and is “one who must not be relied on.” Compare the Smyrna merchant at line 208, and see note 219 for a spectrum of perceptiveness.
53. THE BLANK CARD, not part of the Rider deck (see note 50), is an extra card that says nothing or at least shows nothing that the card reader can see. This would seem to describe the fraudulent “clairvoyance” of Madame Sosostris herself, a fortune teller who cries out “Look!” but fails to see beyond the crowds of people around her (lines 54-56, 60); contrast this with Tiresias, who is blind yet foresuffers (see lines 218 and 219, and see lines 218-248 for what the merchant carries).
55. THE HANGED MAN represents life in suspension; see Waite, Tarot†, describing him as a “seeming martyr.” Eliot’s Hanged God of Frazer (see note 46) refers to a description in Frazer, The Golden Bough**, of the annual hanging in effigy of Artemis, the goddess of fertility. Eliot also associated the hanged man, whom Madame Sosostris fails to find, with the one who walks beside the disciples (line 360). See also the epigraph, with its opening image of the Sybil “hanging in a cage” (note 0.3).
FEAR DEATH BY WATER: This, the fortune-teller’s final conclusion, refers both backward (line 47) and forward (lines 312-321) to the drowned Phoenician Sailor, which is also the limited description of “your card” (see note 47). Given the attention to water and the reader’s accompanying warning, the closest Tarot correspondence to “your card” might be the King of Cups, which shows a floating king holding a scepter and chalise, and of which Waite, Tarot† says, “Beware of ill will ...and of hypocrisy pretending to help.” Compare this to the call at line 76 to “you, hypocrite lecteur,” or hypocrite reader.
57. MRS. EQUITONE is, by her name at least, a more even-tempered person than Madame Sosostris; compare Tiresias’s “lovely woman,” who, after her lover leaves, “smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone” (see lines 255-256).
59. FORTUNE-TELLING had been prohibited in London since the 1824 Vagancy Act and punishable by three months’ hard labor, but the law had been in flux in the years after World War I. See Blewett Lee, Spiritualism and Crime , Columbia Law Review 22: 444-445 (1922): The courts had briefly allowed a “good faith” defense in 1918 but then retracted this a few years later, holding that “professing to tell fortunes is an offense without regard to whether or not the person so professing believes he has the power to tell fortunes.” For the deciding case, see Stonehouse v. Masson, 2 K.B. 818 (1921), overturning Davis v. Curry, 1 K.B. 109 (1918).
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**see note 0.2 †see note 46
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