Hacettepe University Graduate School of Social Sciences

Hacettepe University Graduate School of Social Sciences
Department of English Language and Literature
English Language and Literature
RE-FORMING REALITY: T.S. ELIOT’S USE OF MYTHS AND
LEGENDS IN THE WASTE LAND
Fatma Aykanat
Master’s Thesis
Ankara, 2007
Hacettepe University Graduate School of Social Sciences
Department of English Language and Literature
English Language and Literature
RE-FORMING REALITY: T.S. ELIOT’S USE OF MYTHS AND
LEGENDS IN THE WASTE LAND
Fatma Aykanat
A Master’s Thesis
Ankara, 2007
KABUL VE ONAY
Fatma Aykanat tarafından hazırlanan “Re-Forming Reality: T. S. Eliot’s Use of Myths
and Legends in The Waste Land” başlıklı bu çalışma, 12 Eylül 2007 tarihinde yapılan
savunma sınavı sonucunda başarılı bulunarak jürimiz tarafından Yüksek Lisans Tezi
olarak kabul edilmiştir.
______________________________________________
Prof. Dr. Burçin Erol (Başkan)
______________________________________________
Prof. Dr. Himmet Umunç
______________________________________________
Doç. Dr. Huriye Reis (Danışman)
______________________________________________
Yrd. Doç. Dr. Hande Sadun
______________________________________________
Yrd. Doç. Dr. Ayça Germen
Yukarıdaki imzaların adı geçen öğretim üyelerine ait olduğunu onaylarım.
Prof. Dr. Đrfan ÇAKIN
Enstitü Müdürü
BĐLDĐRĐM
Hazırladığım tezin tamamen kendi çalışmam olduğunu ve her alıntıya kaynak
gösterdiğimi taahhüt eder, tezimin kağıt ve elektronik kopyalarının Hacettepe
Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü arşivlerinde aşağıda belirttiğim koşullarda
saklanmasına izin verdiğimi onaylarım:
Tezimin tamamı her yerden erişime açılabilir.
Tezim sadece Hacettepe Üniversitesi yerleşkelerinden erişime açılabilir.
Tezimin 2 yıl süreyle erişime açılmasını istemiyorum. Bu sürenin sonunda uzatma
için başvuruda bulunmadığım takdirde, tezimin tamamı her yerden erişime açılabilir.
12.09.2007
______________________________________________
Fatma AYKANAT
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to my thesis advisor Assoc. Prof. Huriye REĐS for
her patience, invaluable guidance and sincere encouragement. I am grateful to her for
being my light as I was trying to find my way out among the fragmants of The Waste
Land.
I would like to give special thanks to Research Assistant and my dearest friend Pınar
TAŞDELEN who shared my enthusiasm and gave me moral support troughout my
study.
Moreover, I am indebted to all my friends and intructors at Hacettepe University and
my colleagues at Çardaklı Y.Đ.B.O. for their support and encouragement during my
academic studies.
Lastly, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my parents, grandparents and all
my relatives for their understanding, love, moral support and encouragement during all
stages in the preparation of this thesis and throughout my life.
i
ÖZET
AYKANAT, Fatma. Gerçekliği Yeniden Oluşturma: T. S: Eliot’ın The Waste Land
(Çorak Ülke)’inde Mit ve Efsaneleri Kullanımı. Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Ankara, 2007.
Bu tezin amacı T. S: Eliot’ın The Waste Land adlı şiirinde, mit ve efsaneleri,
Avrupa’nın yirminci yüzyıl başlarındaki düzensiz, kaotik savaş sonrası atmosferine
düzen getirme araçları ve birleştirici öğeler olarak kullanımını analiz etmektir.
Yirminci yüzyılın başları önceki yüzyılın yerleşik değerleri ile gelen yüzyılın yeni
eğilimleri ve hızlı değişimleri arasındaki çatışmayı beraberinde getiren bir geçiş
dönemidir. Birinci Dünya Savaşı, tüm Avrupa’da sebep olduğu ekonomik zararın ve
insan kaybının miktarı ve ani bilinç krizi düşünüldüğünde, yirminci yüzyılın ilk
çeyreğindeki en önemli tarihi olay sayılabilir. Birinci Dünya Savaşının tetiklediği çeşitli
alanlardaki hızlı değişim dalgaları, hem fiziksel hem de ruhsal olarak yerleşik normlar,
sistemler ve inançları, yerlerini dolduracak herhangi bir seçenek sunmaksızın yıkma
eğilimindeydiler. Bu durum, tüm Avrupa’da kaotik, parçalanmış ve toplu bir
düzensizlik ortamı, modern insan üzerinde de bir boşluk hissi ve inanç krizine sebep
olan genel bir etki yarattı. Eliot, 1922’de yazdığı The Waste Land’de, bir savaş sonrası
Avrupa panoraması sunmayı ve yirminci yüzyıl başlarındaki bu parçalanmış, kaotik
savaş sonrası atmosferi yansıtmayı amaçlamıştır.
Yüzyılın başında, antropoloji, etnoloji gibi yeni bilimlerin ortaya çıkması ve önem
kazanmasından ve bu sebeple eski kültür ve geleneklere, özellikle mit ve efsanelere
karşı olan yaklaşımın son dönemdeki değişiminden etkilenen Eliot’ın eski kültürlere
karşı ilgisini artırmıştır. Eliot, The Waste Land’de, iki önemli eser ana referans kaynağı
olarak kullanır: Frazer’ın The Golden Bough (Altın Dal) ve Weston’ın From Ritual to
Romance (Ritüelden Romansa) adlı eserleri. Eliot, mit ve efsanelerin, belirsizliklere ve
açıklanamayan doğal fenomenlere alternatif çözüm ve düzen getirici olma işlevlerini
vurgular. The Waste Land’de Eliot mitsel metodu izleyerek, pek çok mit ve efsaneye
gönderme yapar, günümüz dünyasıyla geçmiş arasında bir paralellik kurar. Birinci
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Dünya Savaşı sonrasındaki psikolojik kuraklığın ve verimsizliğin ana sembolü olarak
balıkçı kral mitini kullanır. Birinci Dünya Savaşı sonrasındaki dönemin yaşamında
geleneksel değerlerin aşınması ve düzen eksikliği gözlemleyen ve medeniyetlerin
insanlarını bir arada tutmak için bu değerlere ihtiyaç duyduklarına inanan Eliot, eski
kültürleri, özellikle mit ve efsaneleri, modern yaşamın karmaşasına ve verimsizliğine bir
çare olarak önerir ve The Waste Land’de mit ve efsaneleri mevcut düzensizlik
ortamında hissedilen parçalanmış gerçeklik anlayışının yeniden oluşturulması amacıyla
kullanır.
Anahtar Kelimeler:
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (Çorak Ülke), modernist şiir, mit, efsane, verimlilik
ritüelleri, J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (Altın Dal), J. Weston, From Ritual to
Romance (Ritüelden Romansa), balıkçı kral miti.
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ABSTRACT
AYKANAT, Fatma. Re-forming Reality: T. S: Eliot’s Use of Myths and Legends In The
Waste Land. M. A: Thesis, Ankara, 2007.
The aim of this thesis is to analyze T. S. Eliot’s use of myths and legends in The Waste
Land as the unifying principles and means of bringing order into the disordered, chaotic
postwar atmosphere of the early twentieth-century Europe.
The early decades of the twentieth-century was a period of transition experiencing a
clash between the established values of the previous century and the new trends and
rapid changes of the following century. The First World War can be regarded as the
most important historical event in the first quarter of the twentieth-century, considering
the scale of the economical damage and human loss and the sudden crisis of
consciousness that occured throughout Europe. Triggered by the First World War, rapid
changes in various fields tended to deconstruct the established norms, systems and
beliefs, both physical and spiritual, without offering any alternative. This created a
cumulative effect on modern man causing a sense of emptiness, a crisis of belief, and a
chaotic, fragmentary atmosphere, and total disorder throughout Europe. Eliot, in The
Waste Land, written in 1922, aims to give a postwar European panorama and to present
the possibility of re-forming the postwar chaotic, fragmentary atmosphere of Europe, in
the early twentieth-century.
Influenced by the introduction of new fields of science, such as anthropology and
ethnology at the turn of the twentieth-century, and thus, the recent changes in the
understanding of past cultures and traditions, especially of myths and legends, Eliot
believes in the reconstructive power of myths and past traditions. He chooses two
important works, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual To Romance, and Frazer’s The Golden
Bough, as the main important sources of reference in The Waste Land. Eliot emphasizes
the function of myths and legends in bringing order, and alternative solutions to the
uncertainties of the postwar period. Developing “the mythical method” throughout The
Waste Land, Eliot alludes to many myths, legends and fertility rituals and draws a
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parallel between the contemporary and ancient worlds. He uses the Fisher King myth as
the main symbol for the sterility and spiritual dryness after the First World War. Eliot,
observing the lack of order and erosion of traditional values in contemporary life after
the First World War, and believing that civilizations need these common values to keep
their people together, offers past traditions, especially myths and legends, as remedy for
the sterility and chaos of modern life. He, thus, re-constructs the modern reality through
myths and legends in The Waste Land.
Key Words
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, modernist poetry, myth, legend, fertility rituals, J. G.
Frazer, The Golden Bough, Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance, the fisher king
myth.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ÖZET……………………………………………………………….……………
i
ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………….……….
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ………………………………………………………..
v
INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………................
1
CHAPTER I: T.S. ELIOT’S SEARCH FOR ORDER IN THE PAST TRADITIONS:
AND “THE MYTHICAL METHOD” USED IN THE WASTE LAND…………. 16
CHAPTER II: A STUDY OF THE FISHER KING MYTH: THE DEATH AND
REVIVAL OF THE FERTILITY GOD IN THE WASTE LAND………………...
46
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………... 105
WORKS CITED …………………………………………………………………. 109
1
INTRODUCTION
The early decades of the twentieth-century were definitely a period of transition which
was witnessing the clash between the established values of the previous century and the
new trends and rapid changes of the new century. Indeed, socio-political and cultural
developments helped to form the new wave in literature and art at the turn of the
century.
In the early twentieth-century, a new wave of technological innovations followed the
earlier industrialisation movement, which had already begun before the turn of the
century. Motor transport, aviation, electricity, telephone, wireless radio etc. brought or
promised new comforts and freedoms (Calder 11). The petrol-driven taxi, the motor-bus
and the electric tram were more comfortable, more efficient and cheaper than the
carriage or coach with horses appearing in the streets. The cinema, still ‘silent’,
presented moving pictures to great and ever-growing urban audiences (Calder 11). The
literary arena would soon witness the reflections of these rapid changes, those high
voices and cinematographic descriptions in poetry and prose.
On the other hand, there were also some other innovators who believed that beneath the
flowering of Europe and of scientific man, it seemed that the primitive, uncontrollable,
and even ‘barbaric’ men were lying (Calder 12). Among the most responsible
revisionalists was Charles Darwin who, with his On the Origin of Species (1859),
removed the mind (human or divine) from the origin and development of life. Friedrich
Nietzsche in his The Birth of Tragedy (1872) argued that like all other organisms,
human beings are merely creatures of environment and chance, and declared that God is
dead. Sigmund Freud in the Interpretation of Dreams (1899), suggested a model of
human nature in which the irrational, the unconscious and the violent were foundational
(Brooker 235). Before the First World War, Freud had started to make an impression
with his analysis of the irrational element in human behaviour and feeling. The term
‘Oedipus complex’ linked modern man to the violent myths of the ancient Greeks
(Calder 12). George Frazer in The Golden Bough (1890) argued that religion evolved
from magic and was in turn being replaced by science. In the place of an ordered
universe, scientists, such as Max Planck and Niels Bohr, claimed the people is ruled by
2
chance in a universe consisting of tiny and unpredictable bits of energy (Brooker 235).
Furthermore, German historian Oswald Spengler argued in his The Decline of the West
(1918) that civilizations were organisms that go through stages of youth, maturity and
decay, and then, like all organisms, they die, and it is clear that Western civilization
shows the diagnosis of being in the very late stage of decay (Spengler 12).
Fragmentation is observed in the field of religion, too. New fields of science offered
alternative explanations to religious doctrines, though they could not offer an
alternative. For example, as Calder states “psychology put the Christian doctrine of the
original sin aside, but it could not offer an alternative to the established Christian
theology and ethics” (12). The established religion and faith were not only influenced
by the new-found sciences like psychology and ethnology, but also by the change in the
social order. As Calder further states the Church of England and its European
counterparts were part of a social order which was threatened by many social groups;
such as the middle-class, identifying civilization and morality with their own way of life
(13). Also, the industrial working classes, under the influence of communist or anarchist
ideals, organised as a powerful force. Moreover, the movement for women’s liberation,
especially with their gaining right for vote, challenged the prevailing concept of family
dominated by the male breadwinner. This was also a challenge to the established social
order on the microcosmic level (Calder 13). So, it can be stated that in the early
decades of the twentieth-century a tendency to deconstruct the established systems,
norms and beliefs, without offering any alternative was observed. This created a chaotic
atmosphere in Europe triggering a cumulative effect on the modern man causing a sense
of emptiness, a sudden crisis of consciousness.
Considering its spread almost all over the European continent and the amount of the
economical damage and the human loss it caused, and its long lasting consequences in
many fields of life, the First World War can be regarded as the most important historical
event in the first quarter of the twentieth-century (Coote 25). As Coote states, the First
World War, yet, was not the ‘cause’ of the sudden crisis of consciousness in Europe. It
was itself a product of this crisis (26).
3
The war ended in 1918; yet after that date, Europe as a whole suffered from the postwar
wounds, both physical and spiritual, for years. Apart from the economically negative
consequences of the war, the spiritual effects of the war and its aftermath were heavily
destructive. The postwar Europe experienced “the death of the civilization” as defined
by the German historian Oswald Spengler (12) and this situation triggered a spiritual
erosion. The massive collapse of traditional values resulted in a breakdown of faith in
the existence of God, in the goodness of humanity, and in the possibility of progress and
the disappearance of people’s sense of belonging to a universal human family (Spengler
13). The results were disillusionment, disappointment, and social discomfort, since the
postwar era suggested nothing to replace what was destroyed. Chaos, despair, and a
feeling of emptiness were inevitable.
The shattering of the ideas and principles that had long served as the foundation of
Western civilization, erosion in the traditional values, and the disillusionment,
instability, uncertainty, pessimism, and hopelessness felt commonly in the face of recent
developments characterize the early decades of the twentieth-century. The pre-war
anxieties about the uncertain route of the Western civilization and humanity in general
were fed with the outcomes of the scientific developments and the new fields of study
brought forth in the opening of the new century and gave way to a collective attitude of
cynicism, despair and further social discomfort (Pinion 28).
The reality of the First World War came slowly into English poetry. After a flood of
patriotic verse at the beginning of the war, there slowly appeared indications of a more
realistic attitude (Daiches 61). Faced with the disappointment and emptiness in many
fields, and sharing the pessimistic and chaotic assumptions about the nature of the
universe set on randomness, together with a lack of a certain, unifying principle,
modern man started to search for values or rituals to fill the emptiness in their inner
worlds. As the realities in life changed, the reactions to and expressions of these social
realities started to change, too. It was in this atmosphere that the modernist movement
in poetry began to take shape “as the struggle of the imaginative man to hold within his
own mind a picture of that previously shattered world as a whole” (Feder 68), and to
find new forms of expression.
4
Although the so-called modernist movement covers the early decades of the twentiethcentury, its roots go back to the closing of the nineteenth century, to the 1890s. With the
introduction of new fields in science like anthropology, psychoanalysis, ethnology etc.,
people in the nineteenth century gained new knowledge and greater sophistication, and
developed new approaches to the social realities. This change in the perception of
reality found its reflection in the literary field. The changing values provoked the
nineteenth century writers to reject many of the traditions of nineteenth century
literature. They began to question the established values and ideas. The turn of the
century, according to a group of literary men pioneered by Ezra Pound, was a time to
experiment with fresh themes, fresh literary styles. "Make it new," suggested the
American poet Ezra Pound, the London representative of Chicago's Poetry magazine
(Smith 75). Pound's advice at the turn of the twentieth-century became the cry of a
generation of writers on both sides of the Atlantic (Smith 75). Pound’s ‘imagism,’
together with some other specific movements, like French symbolism, vorticism, the
avant garde movement, Italian futurism, impressionism, contributed to the development
of the modernist movement (Ayers x).
Imagism was born in the spring of 1912 in a tea shop in Kensington, where Ezra Pound
called the two young poets, H.D. and Richard Aldington as ‘Imagistes’ (Perkins 330).
Imagism has been described as “the grammar school of modern poetry” (Perkins 333).
The first public statement of Imagist principles was printed by Poetry, written by Pound
in March 1913 (Perkins 333). The Imagist manifesto included qualities such as the
direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective, leaving all other things
that do not contribute to the meaning (Perkins 328-9). In this respect, it shows an
interest in Chinese and Japanese poetry in which poets use free, suggestive, visual
imagery in short and concise forms such as haiku. Following Hulme’s direction that
‘poetry must be precisely phrased and the essential means for briefness is metaphor’
(Perkins 329), an imagist poem requires concision; that is, saying what you mean in the
fewest and the clearest words, and creating concrete images stirring the reader to create
the assumed picture in his mind. In this respect, the imagist poetry, and modernist
poetry in a more general point of view, tends to have a kind of orientation to visual arts,
5
like painting and sculpture. As a result, the Imagists use free verse and colloquial
language in their works and they reject poetic diction and rhetoric (Perkins 333).
The importance of Imagism as a movement lies in that it provides an alternative
combining all the contemporary controversies between the old and the new effectively.
Imagism became an accessible way to be the ‘new’ and the ‘modern’ in a period of
transition, a period of new experiences and new questions and answers, clashes and
controversies between the old and the new, a period of so many movements. Although
Imagism was born out of Britain, it was one of the styles that formed the modernist style
in English poetry. It reached back into the nineteenth century, to the poetry of
Baudelaire or the music theatre of Wagner and even to the Greek and Latin classics
(Ayers x). Modernism was not a movement confined only to poetry, but covered
literature, theatre, music and art of the first half of the twentieth-century in Europe,
America, and beyond. Modernism can be regarded as one of the most intercultural and
intertextual movements in the literary scene. Its multi-layered nature also provides it a
plurality of materials. As Ayers points out, various themes about “the nature of the
selfhood and consciousness, the autonomy of language, the role of the art and the artist,
the nature of the industrial world, and the alienation of gendered existence formed
themselves as a set of concerns to be handled by a range of modern authors” (x).
However, the message, as Reeves emphasized, was not in the content, but in the
method; in other words, not in what you write, but how you write it (69).
In other words, after the war, how people looked at the world and the happenings
around, and how they reacted to these were completely changed. This change in the
perception of reality was observed in the expressions of that reality. Cubists, for
example, do not just analyse the structure of the objects, they also impose on the objects
the simplifying, abstracting yet multi-layered way of seeing things
which is their own and which they claim to be surely modern because
it represents the approach to things of men living in a scientific,
analytic, abstracting age, their absorption in the mechanics of things,
their alienation from nature, and the simplifying effect on vision of
living in an age of speed. (Spender 134)
6
To be more precise, Picasso's cubist paintings can be taken as examples of this new way
of perception of the contemporary reality. Picasso breaks things into component parts.
They showed the angles and planes that made up an object, an action, or a human form.
The Dadaists, who came after the Cubists, saw the world as a meaningless ‘jumble.’
One method of Dadaist composition is simply to cut up words, put them in a hat, and
remove them in haphazard order to form a poem (Reeves 70). The modernist poets were
influenced by techniques developed in other arts, such as the leitmotiv in music, and the
collage in painting (Perkins 450). Likewise, in modernist poetry, discontinuity,
juxtapositions, fragmentary structure, allusions from and references to other texts are
used to present the same shattered and chaotic perception of the contemporary reality.
T.S. Eliot is considered to be the counterpart in poetry to Joyce in modernist novel,
Picassso in modernist painting, and Stravisky in music, and to other major creators of
the modernist revolution in their arts (Perkins 498). Eliot is considered as one of the
pioneers among modernist poets. Perkins states that modernist poetry is “really a
synthesis of diverse types of poetry including the London avant-garde in 1890s, the
impressionism and dandyism of the same group, and the early uses of symbolism in
Yeats, together with the growing awareness of French Symbolist Poetry” (450).
Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is the prototype of the “modern” in poetry. Juxtaposition
of apparently unrelated fragments, symbolism, myth, and allusion were components of
the style of modernism (Perkins 513) All these make the poem rather complex.
According to Perkins, this fragmented and disordered nature of The Waste Land reflects
the condition of modern man in postwar Europe. The poem is fragmented, disordered,
fast-paced and thus hard to follow, because life in the early twentieth-century Europe is
like this. In other words,
meanings are ambiguous, emotions ambivalent; the fragments do not
make an ordered whole. But precisely this, the poem illustrates, is the
human condition, or part of it. Men and women emerge and disappear;
our encounters with them are brief and wholly external, for we
apprehend them only as bits of speech overheard or gestures
spotlighted. But this is the mode and extent of human contact in
general, as the poem represents it. The protagonists in the poem are
isolated from each other or they make part of a faceless crowd. When
7
they speak there is no dialogue, for the other person, if one is present,
does reply…. It presents modern civilization and culture by objective
methods. (Perkins 513)
Fragmentation is one of the chief characteristics of modernist poetry. Reeves defines
fragmentation as “a tendency to present human experiences in fragments that readers are
to piece together in their own minds” (69). Fragmentation is observed in Eliot’s poems
as a technique. For example, Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, published in 1922, is his
metaphor for the state of culture in the postwar twentieth-century Europe. As an
American originated poet, who moved from the USA to Europe at the turn of the
century, he witnessed the postwar consequences in Europe, and felt that the basis of
cultural unity had disappeared, that the glue that had held Western civilization together
had dissolved (Brooker 239). Thus, the importance of The Waste Land comes from its
value as a picture of modern civilization and the crisis that it documents.
In The Waste Land, the reader is presented with many fragments, which are pictures and
sounds of the contemporary life as well as allusions from the antique or classical texts.
Many fragments in the poem deal with wasted landscapes and also with city scenes.
Eliot does not actually state, “London (or Paris or New York) is a waste land”, but he
clearly suggests that these cities are places where life does not flourish (Carpentier 240).
By simply placing these fragments side by side without comment, Eliot suggests that
the modern city is a waste land. The idea is reinforced by portraying various people
living in the modern city as sterile, loveless and isolated (Carpentier 241).
Suggestiveness is another important quality of The Waste Land. In the poem, Eliot does
not discuss the impact of historical events or social institutions on the human psyche. As
Perkins states, Eliot does not speculate about the effect of new anthropological,
psychological, and scientific studies, but he tries to explain “how the human spirit has
been wounded in modern times” (513). Comparative religion and mythology,
psychology, the war, industrialized conditions at work and urbanized life are concretely
reflected in the poem, and so are the effects to which they often contribute –the
weakening of identity and will, of religious faith and moral confidence, the feelings of
apathy, loneliness, helplessness, rootlessness, and fear (Perkins 514).
8
Eliot’s use of the modern city as setting is another modernist quality, since modernist
poetry is urbanized. Moreover, Eliot’s verse reflects the influences of new social
sciences-like anthropology and psychology- introduced in the early twentieth-century to
poetry, and of the new literary styles in the same period. His Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock (1917), for example, takes the form of a dramatic monologue. It offers the
fragmentary interior thoughts of a character's stream of consciousness. Eliot's long
poem The Waste Land (1922) stands as a monument of the despair and bitterness of the
“lost generation” (Reeves 75).
The “material of art,” states Eliot, in Tradition and the Individual Talent, “is always
actual life” (1975, 38). He and many other modernist writers in the first decade of the
twentieth-century felt that they had not a proper method for shaping their material, the
chaos of their lives, the chaos of contemporary history into art. As Brooker states, Eliot
usually discusses this modernist crisis in terms of an absence in contemporary life (109110). Sometimes Eliot calls the missing factor belief, sometimes myth, sometimes
tradition (Brooker 110). Whatever the missing factor in modern life is called, its
absence creates disorder in the spiritual sphere of modern life. What made Eliot anxious
most in contemporary life was its lack of order, its lack of any hierarchy of values, and
thus, his poetic career represents a search for these things, to achieve order in a world of
chaos was Eliot’s aim (Daiches 105). The Waste Land is a product of this aim by Eliot.
In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot simply describes the atmosphere of postwar Europe in the
early decades of the twentieth-century and presents the situation of the modern man
trying to find a unifying principle in such a chaotic, disordered atmosphere.
As the unifying and ordering principle for the fragmented and disordered structural
pattern of The Waste Land, and as the substitute for the missing factor in the modern
man’s life, T.S. Eliot turns to myths and legends (Meisel 45). Pinto argues that in The
Waste Land Eliot’s problem is to create a myth that can give adequate expression to the
pity and terror of a comprehensive view of a devitalised society (152). To this end,
Eliot makes use of two typically modern fields of science, of psychology and
anthropology, and their materials, among which were myths (Pinto 152).
9
Eliot emphasizes the importance of myth in a demythologized age in which the modern
man has lost all his bonds with nature and with God. He believes in the fact that myths
can provide modern man a tie with “the missing sense of an ultimate frame of
reference” (Righter 96).
Myths, in general, are concerned with the universal concerns of man in the early stages
of civilisation, the creation of the world, and of man himself, gods and mortals, their
conflicts, victories, defeats, the productivity of the earth, death, and resurrection. Myth
is a form of expression which reveals a process of thought and feeling that describes
man’s awareness of the universe, his relations with others, and the happenings around
him as well as in his inner world (Carpentier 80). Myth is a projection in concrete and
dramatic form of fears and desires undiscoverable and inexpressible in any other way
(Carpentier 80).
Structurally, all myths and rituals express deep emotional experiences in a stylised
form; they are in a way “an identification of personal anxiety or helplessness with a
social problem; an expression of a struggle to control and command both the external
environment and the inner self” (Feder 167). Eliade emphasizes the value of myth
especially on three bases: myths are valuable in the cultures they are born into, since
they are considered to be sacred, since they provide concrete examples to be followed
on certain instances, and since they present meaningful expressions (2001, 9). Modern
man’s fears and anxieties may spring from causes far different from those of his
ancestors in the ancient past, but the symptoms are similar (Feder 167). In the twentiethcentury, the mysteries and the natural phenomena which once gave birth to the ancient
myths changed their character. In other words, those myths and rituals turned from the
supernatural powers or unexplainable phenomena to the continuously changing reality
and so, unperceivable, unpredictable social conditions. What is similar between
antiquity and modernity is the uncertainty felt by the individuals and their suspicious
way of perceiving the world (Feder 168). In this respect, myth functions as a device for
the individual –modern or ancient- to set, or re-set, the balance between his physical
and psychological worlds which once were somehow destroyed and in need of repair.
10
Righter, too, emphasizes the power of myth in the modern context. He states the need
for some rich and imaginative form of life in a world grown pale, mechanical and
abstract (31). In Jungian terms, man needs myths to explain where reason can tell him
nothing, to give “helpful and enriching pictures” which are neither right nor wrong but
myths present a concrete possibility in a world of abstract questions (quoted in Righter
31). This, according to Eliade, is one of the most important qualities of myths;
providing models for human behaviour when faced with certain instances (2001, 10). In
other words, faced with questions to which man has no answers and for which
explanations are not explanatory, but rather confusing, myths present an alternative
explanation within a story. The story proves nothing in relation to the questions in
people’s mind; yet it has a certain force, its own logical story line and logical solution
(Righter 94). In this way, uncertainties are somehow illuminated, and made
understandable. As Perkins notes, the mythical story “provides a third language, beside
naturalistic presentation and symbolism, in which the state of affairs can be conceived”
(508). Thus, the story of the sick king and sterile land is presented by Eliot as a concrete
and imaginative way of speaking of the condition of the modern man (Perkins 508).
Moreover, Northrope Frye emphasizes the function of myths in literary works as
ordering principles. In his Anatomy of Criticism, Fry notes that there are two aspects in
myths: “the role of myth in the establishing and ordering of literature as a systematic
body of knowledge, hence providing the ground of interpretation, and the functioning of
this mythical sort of ordering in the interpretation of literary works” (147). Therefore, as
Campbell states, it can be argued that myths, no matter how primitive they are on the
surface, are systematic bodies of knowledge and have their own logic, thus, they can be
accepted as relatively satisfactory explanations to various everyday matters (1969, 4689). In this respect, myths can function as means capable of making the modern postwar
uncertainties explicable on the metaphoric level, and thus, of holding shattered postwar
Western civilization together.
Eliot uses myths methodically and sets the structural pattern of The Waste Land upon
them, especially upon the Fisher King myth. The myths alluded to in The Waste Land
function as the unifying element in the fragmented structure of the poem. Eliot arranges
11
these mythical elements deliberately to form a specific method; that is, “the mythical
method.”
Eliot first describes ‘“the mythical method”’ in his essay “Ulysses, Order and Myth” as
being “simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to
the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (1975,
177). Eliot applies “the mythical method” in The Waste Land by drawing parallels
between contemporary and ancient worlds. The mythical dimension of The Waste Land
takes its basis from “the historical sense” that Eliot explains in his “Tradition and the
Individual Talent”:
the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of
the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to
write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a
feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and
within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a
simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This
historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the
temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what
makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a
writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his
contemporaneity. (1975, 38)
With such an awareness, Eliot tries to apply products of the past traditions in his
modern work; The Waste Land. With the hope of reminding the twentieth-century
postwar man, who is spiritually lost, of his place and helping him to re-set his lost bonds
with his past, Eliot turns to ancient literary works as his sources of reference in The
Waste Land. As Perkins states, it is useless to refer to past in a literary work; the past
could have meaning only in relation to the present, as well as the present disconnected
from the past is equally insignificant (509). In this respect, myths perform this unifying
function between the past and the present. In other words, as Eliot states in his
definition of “the mythical method,” myths provide “a continuous parallel between
contemporaneity and antiquity” (177).
The basis of The Waste Land is a multiple myth, deriving largely from Jessie L.
Weston’s work From Ritual to Romance and partly from other sources, such as Frazer’s
12
The Golden Bough and The Upanishads. The myths which are alluded to express the
barrenness and dryness of modern civilization, the need for refreshment and a new spirit
which is longed for but cannot come until regeneration has been achieved. With that
moral regeneration it is hoped that the rain will finally fall and the long drought will
come to an end. Eliot does not intend to express this theme in a simple fable form, he
mixes certain mythical stories –the story of the Grail, primitive vegetation myths, the
Christian story of the resurrection, and many others- each of which has the same moral;
that is, the desire and need for regeneration (Daiches 120).
Almost all the great myths of the world are called into service, and by alluding to them
following a planned pattern, Eliot tries to solve the problem of cultural dryness of his
time. In a poem stating the problem and its solution, Eliot aims
to speak with the voice of the ages, with the voice of universal man,
using all tongues, employing all myths, bringing the whole of the past
into the present. If the contemporary world has no generally accepted
myth, no common background of belief to hold it together, then Eliot
will write in terms of all beliefs, committing himself not to any
specific one of them of them but to a belief in the importance of
belief. For Eliot the idea of faith, is always more important than any
specific faith, the concept of order more important than any given
order, the sense of the past more important than any one aspect of the
past. So, in The Waste Land he rolls all previous orders and beliefs
into a ball and tosses it into the modern world. (Daiches 121)
In The Notes On The Waste Land, Eliot states that he used two important referential
sources while setting the mythical structure of the poem
not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental
symbolism….. were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on
the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance…..To another work of
anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our
generation profoundly; I mean [Sir James Frazer’s] The Golden
Bough…….. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will
immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation
ceremonies. (1970, 70)
Moreover, Eliot states in Vanity Fair in 1924 that the great achievement of Frazer was
to disclose the mind of the primitive man, “he [Frazer] extended the consciousness of
13
the human mind into as dark a backward and an abysm of time as has yet been
explored” (qtd. in Perkins 510). In The Golden Bough, Frazer demonstrates that the
apparently different myths may be traced back to the same underlying and original one.
Eliot puts this idea in 1921 in his review of Stravinski, “Frazer revealed that vanished
mind of which our mind is a continuation;” in other words, the “vanished”, or in some
sense, the primitive mind, still survives in “the obscurities of the soul” (quoted in
Perkins 510). In a similar way, myths somehow represent important, ordinarily
disregarded dimensions of reality (Perkins 510); and maybe for this reason, those
ancient myths appeal also to this primitive subconscious in the modern mind. In Jungian
terms, myths can be regarded as “the collective unconscious,” because “myth is, at
varying levels of consciousness and degrees of articulateness, a way of describing the
foundations of social behaviour; the identification of the myth is the art of catching the
essence of a situation, of putting one’s finger on the heart of the matter” (qtd in Csapo
96).
Eliot uses especially what Frazer calls the myth of the dying and the reviving god as the
background myth in The Waste Land. It is also the myth that was used by Weston to
interpret the medieval romances of the quest for the Holy Grail. This myth provides a
shadow plot and a shadow hero. Eliot, in The Waste Land, alludes repeatedly to
primitive vegetation myths and associates them with the Grail legend, and the story of
Jesus (Perkins 506). The Fisher King myth which Eliot uses in The Waste Land is an
ancient fertility myth and as Eliot states in his Notes On The Waste Land, this myth
provides him with the title of his poem and his major symbol (1970, 70). In the
underlying myth of the poem, a land is described as cursed with sterility, a land in
which crops will not grow, women cannot bear children, cattle cannot re-produce. The
sterility in the land and its inhabitants is connected in some mysterious way to the
impotence of the ruler of the land. The king, in a way, is the embodiment of his country,
thus, the sexual incapacity of the king affects his entire kingdom by depriving it of
regenerative power. The curse can be lifted, if a hero comes and undergoes certain trials
in order to find the wounded ruler and asks him some ritualistic questions. When the
ritualistic quest is successfully completed, the healed ruler is allowed to die, and under
14
these circumstances the transmission of his power is guarantied, as well as his
resurrection or revitalization (Brooker 241).
The central problem of the waste land in the Fisher King myth is sexual impotence as
the cause of infertility in the land. This myth, which has been studied many times by
contemporary anthropologists, provides a symbol for the spiritual sterility of the modern
world. By this way, Eliot also shows that a modern poet can effectively make use of
mythology, which is an antique concept, combining it with the contemporary and
modern disciplines like psychology and anthropology (Pinto 153). However, as Pinto
further states, the old use of mythology either as a simple tale or an allegory was clearly
impossible for a poet like Eliot, who tries to bring something new in form and
technique, but in a sophisticated way. (153). What is distinguishing about the method of
the poem is that The Waste Land does not tell the mythical stories but only alludes to
them, and then Eliot makes use of the mind, the imagination of the readers who are
familiar with those stories instrumentally in order to make them fill in the blanks, set the
semantic relations and realize the similarity between the myths and the real life
situations (Vickery 132). For this, the reader’s familiarity with the allusions and
symbols related to the myths used in The Waste Land is crucial.
The mythic structure of The Waste Land, in revealing the sterility of modern society and
the futility of man’s search for meaning in his personal life, offers neither explanation
nor resolution; it merely leads to a ritual quest, the goal of which is the unity of the
individual with his missing divine essence. The myth shows a similarity with the
figuratively naturalistic description of the modern, urban world, which is a dry, sterile
land, and the fictional waste land in the mythical story. From this point of view,
identified with Jesus Christ, the Fisher King performs a similar role as a survivor in The
Waste Land. As Vickery states, in identifying with the Fisher King, who is one of the
mythic heroes in The Waste Land, trying to cultivate the land, planting through practical
behaviour, the modern man makes an inner journey so that he can have control over a
small section of the vast universe. Through his control, he manages to survive
physically (129). Through this ritual act he attempts to put his inner universe in order.
Moreover, through repeated and prescribed acts the modern man can manage to achieve
15
stability and a metaphorical immortality in the face of inevitable ignorance, sickness
and death (Vickery 129-30). In other words, the symbolic quest presents the pessimistic
atmosphere of the twentieth-century postwar Europe, as well as the emotional panorama
of the modern individual trying to survive in such an atmosphere
Consequently, this thesis argues that in The Waste Land, Eliot presents the postwar
panorama of Europe in the first decade of the twentieth-century as sterile, disillusioned,
pessimistic, chaotic and in need of reform. He uses myths and legends as unifying
principles to impose order on the chaos and disintegration he perceives in the modern
world, in other words, he uses myths to re-form the reality which started to shatter after
the First World War. The Fisher King myth supported with allusions to the ancient
dying and reviving fertility gods provides Eliot with the central symbol of revitalization
for postwar waste lands of Europe.
In the first chapter of this study, definitions of myth, and Eliot’s perception of myths
within the framework of “the mythical method” is examined. Moreover, Eliot’s two
main sources of mythical reference, that is J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, J.
Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, and other supporting mythical references are
introduced. In the second chapter of this study, an analysis of the allusions to the dying
and reviving fertility gods, vegetation rituals, and the Fisher King myth in The Waste
Land are presented. The way how the mythical method is applied is explained. As a
conclusion, it is argued that the allusions to the Fisher King myth and the fertility rituals
in The Waste Land constitute the mythical framework that unites the fragmentary
structure of The Waste Land, as well as providing the remedy that Eliot suggests for the
shattered, fragmentary, chaotic postwar reality of the early twentieth-century Europe.
16
CHAPTER I: T.S. ELIOT’S SEARCH FOR ORDER IN THE PAST
TRADITIONS AND “THE MYTHICAL METHOD” USED IN
THE WASTE LAND
Eliot’s The Waste Land, written in 1922, just four years after the First World War, can
be taken as one of the most important works presenting the postwar atmosphere of early
twentieth-century Europe. Northrop Frye describes The Waste Land as “a vision of
Europe, mainly of London, at the end of the First World War,” and as “the climax of
Eliot’s infernal vision” (1991, 140).
As well as presenting the postwar European panorama, The Waste Land exemplifies the
early twentieth-century intellectuals’ and especially the modernists’ search for new
patterns in order to reflect the perception of new realities of life which were emerging in
the first decade of the twentieth-century. Sharing the common literary anxieties with his
contemporary modernist poets, that is, giving expression to the modern fragmented
culture and the chaotic atmosphere of postwar Europe, Eliot searches for a new way of
expressing this fragmented reality and of structuring his material in The Waste Land.
For this purpose, he applies what he calls “the mythical method.” This chapter deals
with “the mythical method” that Eliot uses in The Waste Land and analyses Eliot’s use
of the myths and legends in the main sources of The Waste Land.
Aiken describes Eliot as one of the most individual of contemporary poets, and at the
same time, one of the most traditionalist:
by individual I mean that he can be, and often is aware in his own
way…. Everywhere in the small body of his work, is similar evidence
of a delicate sensibility, somewhat shrinking, somewhat injured, and
always sharply itself. But also, with this capacity or necessity for
being aware in his own way, Mr. Eliot has a haunting, a tyrannous
awareness that there have been many other awarenesses before; and
that the extent of his own awareness, and perhaps even the nature of it,
is a consequence of these. He is, more than most poets, conscious of
his own roots… And finally [besides in his other works], in The
Waste Land, Mr Eliot’s sense of the literary past has become so
overmastering as almost to constitute the motive of the work. (93)
17
The stories of ancient mythology have always been a source of inspiration for the
literary artists. However, Eliot brings a new perspective into poetry and handles these
mythical stories through what he calls “the mythical method.” Eliot states that he owes
his conception of myth and “the mythical method” to the introduction of new sciences.
He states, in Ulysses, Order, and Myth, that
Psychology, ethnology, and [anthropology] The Golden Bough have
concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years
ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use “the mythical
method.” (1975, 178)
Triggered by the increase in the quality and quantity of the available data provided by
the newly developed neighbouring sciences -ethnography, geology, comparative
philology, and archaeology-, anthropology was gradually formed as a formal discipline.
The modern anthropologists’ approach to myth in the early twentieth-century influenced
Eliot’s approach to modern reality (Csapo 12). Eliot argues and “seriously believes” that
“the mythical method” and the use of myths in literature are “a step toward making the
modern world possible for art; toward that order and form” (1975, 178).
Modern research on myth has changed completely the conception of its origins, its
nature and its function. As Drew notes, through anthropology, it is recognized that
“myth is not a dead form, a relic of antiquity, an empty survival” (21). The
anthropologists rescued the myths, which are the major cultural productions of primitive
societies, from the view that had seen these ancient narratives so far either as
the decorative brio of simple folk, or as the narrative mirrors of heroic
society. Instead, myth was reconceived as the narrative thematics of
prerationalist cosmologies that provided an account of the relationship
between the human and the divine. (Cooper 233)
The idea that the motives of custom and myth in primitive societies could illuminate
those of the more developed cultures became the driving force behind the growing
interest towards learning more about the ancient cultural heritages (Kirk 3). Myth is
important especially in the modern age in which the modern man lost all his bonds with
nature and with god. As Righter states, it can provide the modern man a tie with “the
missing sense of an ultimate frame of reference” (96).
18
Definition of myth varies from one theory of myth to another. Myths, in general, are
concerned with the universal concerns of man in the early stages of civilisation such as
the creation of the world, and of the man himself, gods and mortals, their conflicts,
victories, defeats, the productivity of the earth, death, and resurrection. As Frye states,
myths are stories, usually, about gods and other supernatural beings (1960, 186),
however they are products of human beings. As Campbell states:
Myths are stories about gods. [Yet], a god is a personification of a
motivating power or value system that functions in human life and in
the universe. The myths are metaphorical of spiritual potentiality in
the human beings and the same powers that animate the life of the
world. [Thus], there are two totally different orders of mythology.
There is the mythology that relates you to your nature and to the
natural world, of which you are a part. And there is the mythology that
is strictly sociological, linking you to a particular society. You are not
simply a natural man, you are a member of a particular group. We
need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group
but with the planet. The individual has to find an aspect of myth that
relates to his own life. (1988, 22)
By this way myth performs a sociological function; that is, supporting and validating a
certain social order:
When the story [of myth] is in your mind, then you see its relevance to
something happening in your life. It gives you perspective on what’s
happening to you. These bits of information from ancient times, which
have to do with the themes that have supported human life, built
civilizations and informed about religion, have to do with deep inner
problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage, and if you
don’t know what the guide signs are along the way, you have to work
it out yourself. But once this subject catches you, there is such a
feeling from one or another of these traditions, of information of a
deep, rich, life-vivifying sort that you do not want to give up.
(Campbell 1988, 4)
Eliade considers that “the foremost function of myth is to reveal the exemplary models
for all human rites and all significant human activities” (Myth and Reality, qtd in Allen
189). In this respect myths can be accepted as forms of expression which reveal a
process of thought and feeling that describes man’s awareness of the universe, his
relations with others, and the happenings around himself as well as in his inner world.
Eliade emphasizes this explanatory quality of myth in his definition of myth:
19
Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in
primordial time, the fabled time of the beginnings. In other words,
myth tells how, through the deeds of Supernatural Beings, a reality
came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the Cosmos, or only a
fragment of reality –an island, a species of plant, a particular kind of
human behaviour, an institution. (Sacred and the Profane 97)
So, according to Eliade, myth is always related to a creation, “it tells how something
came into existence, or how a pattern of behavior, an institution, a manner of working
were established; this is why myths constitute the paradigms for all significant human
acts” (Myth and Reality, qtd. in Allen 184). On the other hand, Carpentier defines myths
as projections, in concrete and dramatic form, of fears and desires undiscoverable and
inexpressible in any other way (80). In other words, structurally, all myths and rituals
express deep emotional experiences in a stylised form; they are in a way “an
identification of personal anxiety or helplessness with a social problem; an expression
of a struggle to control and command both the external environment and the inner self”
(Feder 167). As Drew argues, “long before man developed a logical discourse and
intellectual interpretation, the happenings in the outer world which were perceived
through senses, were moulded into mythical stories and by this way they were given
meaning” (21).
The complexities in the outer worlds of physical nature and in the inner world of man,
his conscious and unconscious responses to these complexities, were formed and
developed into symbolic configurations, into metaphorical conceptions and expressions.
(Drew 21) Thus, myths are accepted as the presentations of experience in symbolic
forms, the earliest and the most direct forms of human expression. The mythical stories
and the legendary figures which Eliot alludes to in The Waste Land contribute to the
same aim; they are the symbolic representations of man’s inner complexities, of the
anxieties he experiences and his responses to these complexities. Every single myth and
legend alluded to in The Waste Land presents another state of early twentieth-century
Europeans who experienced the First World War. Especially, the Fisher King myth, in
which a sick king, who was once potent and powerful, is now in need of healing,
symbolically represents the postwar European atmosphere of moral decay and sterility.
20
As Drew argues myths are means of ordering man’s life:
It [myth] was the first step of primitive man towards order and form;
the giving of imaginative shape and significance to the totality of his
experience. Since the main aim of myth is to give shape and meaning
to his inner and outer experiences, primitive myth always creates a
pattern in which man brings himself into a significant relationship
with mysterious forces outside his understanding (21).
This quality of myths provided the application of myths to other fields of study. Thus,
myths are not to be taken as “loose groupings of images and allusions that represent the
mind’s escape from the world of logic and practical experience” any more, but as
acceptable forms of order in the study of literature (Cooper 66). Fry emphasizes the role
of myth in
establishing and ordering of literature as a systematic body of
knowledge hence providing the ground of interpretation, and the
functioning of this mythical sort of ordering in the interpretation of
particular literary works. (Anatomy of Criticism 66)
What Eliot deduced from this new understanding was that myth provided a unifying
structure that could make sense, equally of the state of a whole culture and of the whole
structure of the individual mind (Cooper 233). The function of myths as the ordering
principles was Eliot’s main concern in The Waste Land. Eliot applies this idea to The
Waste Land, and constructs the poem according to “the mythical method”. In his article,
Ulysses, Order and Myth, which first appeared in The Dial in the November of 1923,
Eliot defines “the mythical method” in detail:
[Using the myth] is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving
a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and
anarchy which is contemporary history. (1975, 177)
Using myth, according to Eliot, is “manipulating a continuous parallel between
contemporaneity and antiquity” (177). Through “the mythical method,” Eliot creates a
fictional parallel, a figuratively naturalistic description of the modern, urban world,
21
which is a dry, sterile land and the fictional waste land in the mythical story. Thus, the
structure of The Waste Land is built upon the contrasting scenes from modern life set
against the memories of the mythical past.
By this way, Eliot creates contrasts between the past and the present. Sometimes, the
fears and anxieties of the primitive people and their way of handling these provide Eliot
a parody of his age. Though the reasons of the anxieties of primitive which are
expressed through ancient myths changed their character, the feeling of uncertainty and
the suspicious way of perceiving the world is common both in antiquity and modernity
(Feder 168). Thus, as Carpentier argues, the myths and fertility rituals alluded to in The
Waste Land do not merely constitute allegories for modern experience; rather myths, as
felt and lived by the modern writer, could provide an antidote to the sterility of modern
life (2). From this point of view, the power of myth in the modern context is highly
remarkable. As Righter accordingly argues, the need for some rich and imaginative
form of life in a world which has grown pale, mechanical and abstract can be satisfied
through myths (31).
Believing that the contemporary world lacks a generally accepted myth, a common
background of belief to hold it together, Eliot chooses to write in terms of all beliefs,
not picking out any specific one of them, but alluding to a number of samples from
ancient cultures. In the postwar European atmosphere of shattered beliefs, Eliot believes
in the importance of belief. Thus, in The Waste Land, Eliot employs all previous
traditions and beliefs for the sake of a common unifying element, both for his poem and
for the fragmented postwar European society. Almost all the great myths of the world
are called into service. The basis of The Waste Land is not a single myth, but a
combination of many, deriving largely from Jessie L. Weston’s book From Ritual to
Romance and partly from other sources, such as Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the Bible,
and the Buddhist sacred texts, like The Upanishads. Eliot, in The Waste Land, alludes
repeatedly to the primitive vegetation myths and associates them with the Grail legend,
and the story of Jesus (Perkins 506). Eliot combines certain mythical stories of those
important works –the story of the Grail, primitive vegetation myths, the Christian story
of the resurrection, and many others- each of which has the same moral. He switches
22
from one to the other and refers to one while employing the other throughout the poem
(Dainches 120).
As stated above, Eliot does not tell mythical stories in The Waste Land, but just alludes
to them. However, Eliot’s allusions to myths do not constitute the core of the poem.
That is, although Eliot combines in The Waste Land a number of figures and images
taken from the myths, legends and vegetation rituals, and although every single myth
and legend, and their own messages are important for the general message of The Waste
Land, what is emphasized by Eliot is not the myths on their own, but the message when
they come together in the framework of The Waste Land. This increases the importance
of the way through which these allusions are brought together; that is, of “the mythical
method.” The allusions to myths, the chosen lines of poetry or figures from history are
put into a completely new context. The intended result through these allusions is, as
Blackmur argues, presenting “an experiment of soul;”
[Eliot] has imported figures from history and legend, has borrowed,
giving them a new significance, many remarkable lines from older
poetry; not to make a picture of history or an outline of literature but
to give point and form to an individual “experiment of the soul”. A
line of poetry or a figure from history is chosen to enforce again in a
new context the whole area of feeling and experience to which it was,
for those already familiar, the key –to what, depends on the reader’s
knowledge and temper. (77)
This soul is of the early twentieth-century European man who experienced a war and its
consequences. Thus, in The Waste Land, myths and rituals express the dramatic tension
that results from shifting perceptions of and responses to reality. As Feder states, “the
changing of social masks reminds him [the individual] of older and deeper change,
when new gods rose from the murder of old ones, and with them new hope from the
symbolic control of decay and despair… from the order prescribed by nature and rite.”
(220)
While setting the mythical structure of The Waste Land, Eliot uses two important
referential sources: anthropologist James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and Jessie L.
Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. As Eliot states in The Notes On The Waste Land
23
that the title, plan and most of the symbols of The Waste Land are borrowed from these
two works (1970, 70).
In his new conception of myth to be the ordering principle in The Waste Land, Eliot
owes much to The Golden Bough. Frazer (1854-1941) is considered to be one of the
pioneers in using myths for anthropological studies, and his work The Golden Bough is
one of the great works of modern anthropology. It was originally published in two
volumes in 1890, expanded to three in the second edition of 1900, to twelve in a third
edition of 1911-15, and finally acquired a further supplement volume in 1936 (Csapo
36). James Frazer’s comparative method used in The Golden Bough became highly
influential in the study of myth. As Kermode states, The Golden Bough is an innovative
work,
[by gathering and comparing] similar myths from different regions,
repeated patterns become apparent; thus myths that had long seemed
bizarre and inexplicable when isolated, are suddenly comprehensible
when shown in their place among the well-marked and consistent
structures of the human mind. (280)
In The Golden Bough, Frazer emphasizes the recurring common patterns in various
myths and rituals practiced by different cultures. In other words, the mythical stories
and rites, states Frazer in The Golden Bough, in name and detail vary from place to
place, from culture to culture, but in substance they are the same. Various myths, rituals
and fertility cults created and performed in various times and places share some
common principles in their mythical structure and in their reasons of creation. (Frazer
6).
In ancient times, a different attitude was accepted towards the natural phenomena. The
soil, the seed, the crops, the man, and the supernatural powers were all part of the world.
Divine beings were everywhere. Seasons did not come and go because of the movement
of the earth and its rotations about the sun. The life-giving rain was not the result of the
interactions of air currents, clouds, and high and low pressure areas. Rivers did not rise
because of heavy rains in the regions of the headwaters. The increase of crop-eating
insects did not call for spraying with insecticides, which were unknown. All of life was
24
seen in terms of relationships. Seasons came and went because ancient mythic patterns
were repeated in a cyclic rhythm. As seasonal gods rose and fell in power and influence,
that rise and fall reflected in the natural life. Rain came because the fertility god was
rising and was pleased to send down life-giving waters. Rivers rose and fell according
to the moods of the river god, and the swell of waters could be beneficent or
malevolent. Hords of insects might be interpreted as punishment from the gods or an
invasion by demonic powers (Larue 11).
In every case, relationships with those forces in nature were involved, and human
survival depended on maintaining right relationships and setting peace within the world.
So, those powers that could bring destruction and chaos could not be ignored. To
maintain order within this world of various powers, certain rites, attitudes,
performances, and patterns of behaviour were necessary (Larue 11). In other words, the
basic intention underlying these fertility cults was that the weakened potency could
indeed be restored if man was in harmony with gods. The question why it was so
important for the ancient people to re-set the disturbed balance between man and nature
-or God- is the key point in understanding the nature of fertility rituals, and of The
Waste Land in which Eliot alludes to them very often.
Eliot found in Frazer’s The Golden Bough a deep analysis of the fertility cults, and in
his Notes On The Waste Land, he states that among the twelve volumes of this work, he
used especially the two volumes; Adonis, Attis, Osiris(I-II). Frazer explains the common
anxiety in fertility myths in Adonis, Attis, Osiris as follows;
The spectacle of the great changes which annually pass over the face of
the earth has powerfully impressed the minds of men in all ages, and
stirred them to meditate on the causes of transformations so vast and
wonderful. At a certain stage of development men seem to have
imagined that the means of averting the threatened calamity were in
their own hands, and that they could hasten or retard the flight of the
seasons by magic art. Accordingly they performed ceremonies and
recited spells to make the rain fall, the sun to shine, animals to multiply,
and the fruits of the earth to grow. In the course of time the slow
advance of knowledge, convinced a huge proportion of mankind that
the alternations of summer and winter, of spring and autumn, were not
merely the results of their own magical rites, but that some deeper
cause, some mightier power, was at work behind the shifting scenes of
25
nature. They now pictured to themselves the growth and decay of
vegetation, the birth and death of living creatures, as effects of the
increasing and decreasing strength of divine beings, of gods and
goddesses, who were born and died, who married and begot children,
on the pattern of human life.(3)
The primitive people believed that by performing certain magical rites they could aid
the god, who was considered as the principle of life, in his struggle with the opposing
principle of death. They believed that the desired effect could be produced by merely
imitating the natural process. In other words, the essence of the vegetation rituals is the
dramatic representation of the natural process which they wished to create. Through
these fertility rituals, they set forth the fruitful union of the powers of fertility; the sad
death of one at least of the divine partners, and his joyful resurrection (Frazer 4). James
states that the rituals performed in the hope of attaining a mystical union with the source
of life may be in the form of frenzied dancing, wild music, and sexual symbolism
in the guise of a sacred marriage for the purpose of re-awakening the
productive forces in nature after their slumber in the long dark night of
winter, brought into conjunction with the death and resurrection of the
sacral king symbolizing the annual decay and revival of vegetation.
(299)
The rites performed with this intention vary from place to place in name and detail, but
in substance they are the same. All those rituals focus on the supposed death and
resurrection of the deity whose name changes from culture to culture but whose nature
remains essentially the same (Frazer 6).
The Sumerian-Babylonian god Tammuz, the Phoenician-Greek Adonis, the Phrygian
Attis and the Egyptian Osiris were all expressions of the primitive imagination which
conceived of the cycle of the seasons as the life of a god who controlled the energies of
nature, and who nevertheless had to submit to the power of death. Yet, death was not
permanent, it was followed by resurrection. The worship of the god was accompanied
by certain rituals composed of ceremonies of mourning and rejoicing. Since water was
the basic necessity to those agricultural communities, the resurrection of the god
coincided with the coming of the spring rains which is the central symbol of the fertility
process (Drew 86).
26
Attis originated in Phrygia and his cult was widely taken up by the Roman Empire;
Osiris was Egyptian. All three figures are essentially similar; they are the divine, yet
mortal lovers of the greatest of powers, the Mother Goddess who, as Ishtar, Cybele or
Isis, personified the various potencies of nature (Coote 94). It was the union of this
goddess with his lover which ensured the fertility of the land. It was the death and
sexual maiming of the god and his consort’s subsequent search for him in the
underworld that were the origins of winter and its infertility. The gods departed and the
world was a waste land. It was the belief of all their worshippers that by simulating the
death and resurrection of the male –be he Adonis, Attis or Osiris- they could ensure the
return of the goddess and hence the return of life to their land (Coote 95).
The worship of Adonis takes an important part in fertility rituals. Although there were
local variations in the worship of Adonis, the nature of his rites was essentially the
same. There were two great centres of his cults: one in Cyprus and a second in Byblus,
the holy city of the Phoenicians. It is of the rites at this latter temple that Eliot mentions
Phlebas the Phoenician and Mr. Eugenides the Smyrna merchant. The worship of
Adonis was practised by the Semitic people of Babylonia and Syria, and the Greeks
borrowed it from them as early as 7 B.C. the true name of the deity was Tammuz: the
name of Adonis is a derivation of the Semitic Adon, “lord,” a title of honour by which
his worshippers addressed him (Frazer 6). However, the tragic story and the rites of
Adonis are better known from the descriptions of Greek writers than from the fragments
of Babylonian literature.
In Greek mythology, this oriental deity appears as the young lover of Aphrodite. In his
infancy the goddess hides him in a chest, which she gives in charge to Persephone who
is the queen of the underworld. When Persephone opens the chest and beholds the
beauty of the baby, she refuses to give him back to Aphrodite. Aphrodite, the goddess
of love, descends to hell in order to bring her lover Adonis back. The dispute between
the two goddesses of love and of death is settled by Zeus, who declares that Adonis
should live with Persephone in the underworld for one part of the year, and with
Aphrodite in the upper world for another part. Later, the fair youth is killed in hunting
27
by a wild boar, or by the jealous Ares, who turns himself into the likeness of a boar in
order to compass the death of his rival. Bitterly Aphrodite laments over her lover
Adonis. Thus, the struggle between the divine rivals for the possession of Adonis
appears to be the essence of the yearly cycle of seasons (Frazer 11).
In the religious literature of the Babylonians the same mythological story is told with
different names: Tammuz substituted for Adonis, and Ishtar for Aphrodite. Moreover, in
the Babylonian religious texts the mortal lover’s annual death and how the Mother
Goddess’ death followed him to the underworld “to the land from which there is no
returning, to the house of darkness, where dust lies on door and bolt” is mentioned
(Frazer 38). During this time, the potency of the land was severely threatened, since
sexual functions of the animal and human kingdoms were wholly dependent on hers.
The revival of the dead god is described by Frazer as follows
The mourners of Adonis –who were chiefly women- made images of
him and dressed them to resemble his corpse. At the great temple at
Byblus, as the spring rain washed down the red earth from the
mountains and so seemed to stain the river with his blood, the women
carried out the corpse of Adonis as if for burial and threw it to the sea.
The god was drowned, but it was believed that he rose again on the next
day and ascended to heaven in the sight of his worshippers. Thus, the
fertility of the land was restored. (38-39)
As Frazer states the Phrygian cult of Attis may be as old as that of Adonis-Tammuz and
both may have derived from the worship of a common origin or, despite their common
features, they may have developed independently:
The annual death and revival of vegetation is a conception which
readily presents itself to men in every stage of savagery and
civilisation: and the vastness of the scale on which this ever-recurring
decay and regeneration takes place, together with man's most intimate
dependence on it for subsistence, combine to render it the most
impressive annual occurrence in nature, at least within the temperate
zones. It is no wonder that a phenomenon so important, so striking, and
so universal should, by suggesting similar ideas, have given rise to
similar rites in many lands. (323)
The death and resurrection of Attis were annually mourned and rejoiced over at a
festival in spring, usually at the spring equinox. Attis was said to have been a fair young
28
shepherd or herdsman beloved by Cybele, the Mother of the Gods. There are two
different accounts of his death: in one he castrated himself under a pine-tree and bled to
death. In the other, he was, like Adonis, killed by a wild boar, and hence his followers
abstained from pork. He was subsequently changed into a pine-tree and therefore such a
tree, decorated with violets, was deeply respected during the spring festival (Frazer 223224).
The rites of Attis –and those of the Mother Goddess Cybele- were known from the
earliest times; at least from 4 B.C. Then, they were widely spread during the Roman
Empire, being celebrated from Africa to Europe. Frazer describes the accepted form of
these rites of Attis in The Golden Bough. According to Frazer, on 23 March a pine tree
was carried into the Temple of Cybele. This was wrapped like a corpse and decorated
with violets. An effigy of Attis was then tied on it. On the third day of the ceremony, the
Day of Gore, the high-priest of the cult slashed his arms and presented his blood as an
offering (266). Frazer’s description of the rest of the ceremony is highly picturesque:
Nor was he alone in making this bloody sacrifice. Stirred by the wild,
barbaric music of clashing cymbals, rumbling drums, droning horns and
screaming flutes, the inferior clergy whirled about in the dance with
wagging heads and streaming hair, until rapt into a frenzy of excitement
and insensible to pain, they gashed their bodies with potsherds or
slashed them with knives in order to bespatter the altar and the sacred
tree with their flowing blood. The ghastly rite probably formed part of
the mourning for Attis and may have been intended to strengthen him
for the resurrection…. Further, we may conjecture, though we are not
expressly told, that bit was on the same Day of Blood and for the same
purpose that the novices sacrifice their virility. Wrought up to the
highest pitch of religious excitement, they dashed the severed portions
of themselves against the image of the cruel goddess. These broken
instruments of fertility were afterwards reverently wrapped up and
buried in the earth or in subterranean chambers sacred to Cybele, where
like the offering of blood, they may have been deemed instrumental in
recalling Attis to life and hastening the general resurrection of nature,
which was then bursting into leaf and blossom in the vernal sunshine.
(268-269)
Frazer adds that the effigy representing Attis was once the high-priest himself who was
actually killed on the sacred tree. Frazer goes on to draw a parallel with Norse
mythology, and describes how in the sacred grove in Upsala, human victims dedicated
29
to Odin were hanged or stabbed and then tied to a tree and ritually wounded with a
spear. It was from this ceremony that the god derived his name of the Lord of Gallows
or the God of the Hanged (Frazer 289-290). A similar analogy can be set between the
ritual of hanging the God Attis and the Hanged Man that Frazer mentions in The Golden
Bough:
The God Attis was hung in effigy each year on a pine-tree. The tree is a
symbol of the mother as the source of all sustenance; those who die on
the tree are therefore being reunited with their source, through which
they may be reborn into new life. By sacrificing his life the Hanged
Man opens the way to his rebirth into the immortality of the spirit.
(Coote 106)
In addition to Greek Adonis and Phrygian Attis, the third fertility god that Eliot uses to
in The Waste Land is the Egyptian god Osiris. He was a vegetation god – a corn god
who was buried during seedtime so that he would rise again with the corn. When the
corn was cut, it was the custom of the reapers to beat their breasts and lament over the
first sheaf while calling on Isis, the wife of the god whom they were now putting to
death. However, the particular significance of Osiris lies less in his function as a fertility
god – the guarantor that The Waste Land of harvest will be redeemed – than in the great
leap of metaphor by which a god of fertility came to be seen as a god of human
resurrection (Coote 97). Frazer supports this idea through the archaeological findings of
the Osiris cult that
just as images of Osiris were buried in the fields to ensure the rebirth of
the corn, so seed-covered models of his carefully mummified form
were buried in human tombs as a pledge of resurrection to an afterlife.
As the corn would rise again, so too, it was believed, would the human
body. From the sprouting of the grain the ancient Egyptians drew an
omen of human immortality. (5)
These cults had centred on the union of a Mother Goddess, who is the personification of
all reproductive energies of nature, with a divine but mortal male whose death and
sexual inadequacy caused her to withdraw from the world and so impose sterility on the
land. In the most ancient civilizations, particularly those of the eastern Mediterranean, it
was believed that the dead god could be resurrected by a process of sympathetic magic
30
which may once have involved a real victim for whom an effigy was later substituted.
Though the name of this deity changed his resurrection took place after a ritual death –
whether through drowning, hanging or stabbing (Frazer 58).
Moreover, Eliot draws a parallel between the Hanged God that Frazer mentions in The
Golden Bough and the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ. Christ’s sacrificial death
for the sake of his people and the vegetation cults in which deities or their symbolic
representations are hanged as a sacrifice for the well-being of the folk have many
common features. Thus, Easter in Christian culture comes from the same origins with
the spring festivals which are the parts of the fertility rituals. In Christian countries,
Easter is celebrated commemorating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the son of God.
But the celebrations of Easter have many customs and legends that are pagan in origin
and have nothing to do with Christianity. Jackson states that scholars, accepting the
derivation proposed by the 8th-century English scholar Bede, believe the name Easter to
come from the Scandinavian “Ostra” and the Teutonic “Ostern” or “Eastre,” both
goddesses signify spring and fertility and their festivals are celebrated on the day of the
vernal equinox (Pagan Origins). Traditions associated with the festival survive in the
Easter rabbit, a symbol of fertility, and in coloured Easter eggs, originally painted with
bright colours to represent the sunlight of spring (Pagan Origins). So, crucifixion and
resurrection of Christ are presented by Eliot as another metaphor for the sacrificial death
with a hope of revival in order to strengthen the theme of death and rebirth in The Waste
Land.
Eliot draws a parallel between the deaths of Jesus Christ and Phlebas, the drowned
Phonecian sailor. Christ’s resemblance to Phlebas, the drowned Phoenician sailor is
especially implied in the section called “Death by Water.” Weston’s From Ritual to
Romance tells the ancient myth of the Fisher King, who lived as the impotent king of
the waste land. The myth introduces a figure called the “Deliverer” who is also known
as Phlebas the Phoenician Sailor, who must sacrifice his life to save that of the dying
Fisher King in hopes of restoring the dry and fertile land once again. Although based on
an ancient myth, the poem is dominated by biblical references and symbolic characters
31
that offer connections to the life and death of Christ leading any reader to believe that
Phlebas has every right to represent the person of Christ (A Wasteland).
Reel argues that the Gospel was meant for Jews and Gentiles (A Wasteland). This was a
concern during biblical times due to the fact that there was separation between the Jews,
who were thought to be God's chosen people, and the gentiles, who were believe to be
heathens and not worthy of Christ. However, when Jesus Christ came to earth and then
died for the sins of the people, without any distinctions. So, salvation is a promise for
anybody. The fact that Eliot even mentions Jews and Gentiles supports Phlebas being
the example of Christ. Furthermore, if Phlebas is taken as the common man, the fact
that Eliot addresses in The Waste Land “Gentile or Jew” means for everyone. No one is
kept away from the hope of salvation or life after death (A Wasteland).
Whether a mortal or symbol of Christ, essentially the same questions of self-sufficiency,
death, and salvation arise from both interpretations of Phlebas. By putting Phlebas into
the state of a mere mortal, it is easier to relate and connect the poem to the human
condition and the existence of a real wasteland. Reel states that Phlebas as a human is
the essence of The Waste Land (A Wasteland). Humans running back and forth, never
really accomplishing anything because they sense no greater purpose of meaning (A
Wasteland); they live in a dry, weary, compromised world; that is, much like the life
Eliot describes in part five where peoples faces “sneer and snarl” (The Waste Land 344).
In this respect, The Waste Land is entirely a search, a struggle for the truth, for salvation
of the dry, arid, and deserted time in which Eliot lives. Eliot recognizes that some sort
of renewal, a salvation that is offered to all are needed in the modern world. He
establishes the first part of that renewal in Death by Water section with the death of
Phlebas. Reel argues that whether we look at Phlebas as Christ and his sacrifice for the
world, or we see Phlebas as a mere mortal, we see that in order to bring peace, rebirth,
and renewal, death must precede that new beginning (A Wasteland).
On the contrary, Eliot presents a contrasting atmosphere in The Waste Land, in which a
similar process of resurrection can no longer be performed. When the risen god appears
–whether Attis, Adonis, or Christ- he even cannot be recognized for what he is.
32
Tammuz, Adonis, Osiris, Christ are no longer alive in the modern world. Mankind,
whose life was fertilized and enriched through these symbolic concepts so far, no longer
responds to the happenings in nature. Instead, the twentieth-century postwar individual
is locked in the sterile period after the death of god and he never believes in any kind of
resurrection, or rebirth following such a destructive period. In his world, sex has been
devalued, ritual is a cheat, and the modern man is in a “psychosomatic chaos,” that is, a
disorder caused by mental distress. The best are those who know only how sick they
are, and for them the revival of spring is an infinitely painful matter (Coote 99).
The second important source of reference for “the mythical method” that Eliot uses in
The Waste Land is Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. Weston’s book deals
with the origins of the Grail legend, and the pagan and Christian elements in it. Weston,
using her own research and those of other scholars, argues that the Grail legends are
Christianized versions of beliefs which go back to the antiquity. She traces their origins
to the vegetation rituals and fertility rites of primitive cultures, and the mystery religions
of the ancient world, from which early Christianity adopted much of its own ritual and
symbolism (Drew 85). Weston argues that the origins of Grail imagery are in the
vegetation cults analysed by Frazer:
. . . after upwards of thirty years spent in careful study of the Grail
legends and romances I am firmly and entirely convinced that the root
origin of the whole bewildering complex is to be found in the
vegetation ritual, treated from the esoteric point of view as a life-cult,
and in that alone. (56)
Thus, Weston in From Ritual to Romance explains the ritualistic elements in the Fisher
King myth, which is accepted as the basis of many Grail romances. In other words,
Weston tries to find answers for the question, “how did these experiments in mystic
ritual become the stuff of medieval romance?” (118).
There are a great number of these Grail romances, and some, like Parzival of Wolfram
von Eschenbach and the tales of the Knights of the Round Table which concern the
quest for the Holy Grail are among the important works of medieval romance tradition.
The legend appears in various and confusing forms in medieval literature. Eliot does not
state he is following a certain version of the Grail romances. He states that he only takes
33
Weston’s From Ritual to Romance as his source of reference. Thus, he leaves the
questions why the Fisher King is sick and what happens eventually to the Fisher King
open-ended. In all versions of the Grail legend, the central character, generally termed
Le Roi Pescheur (The Sinner King), is sometimes described as in the middle of his life,
and in full possession of his bodily powers, sometimes, while still comparatively young,
he is incapacitated by the effects of a wound, and is known also by the title of Roi
Mehaigne (or The Maimed King). Sometimes, he is in extreme old age, and in certain
versions two ideas are combined. So, a wounded Fisher King, and an aged father, or
grandfather is presented as the central character (Weston 118-119).
Though the Grail legend and the Fisher King myth vary in medieval romances, it always
concerns a land which has gone dry by a curse so that it is infertile and waterless,
producing neither animal nor vegetable. Its plight is linked with that of its ruler, the
Fisher King, who, as a result of his illness or wound, has become sexually impotent.
The curse is removed when a Knight appears who must ask the question as the meaning
of the Grail and the Lance – said in Christian terms to be the lance which made a wound
on Christ’s side at the Crucifixion, and the cup from which he and the disciples drank at
the Last Supper. In some versions merely asking the question cures the King and saves
the land. In others, the king or knight must go through various difficult experiences,
ending in the Chapel or Cemetery Perilous (Drew 84). The medieval narratives surround
the Grail with the mystery and various dangers that hide an important spiritual truth. To
attain this knowledge or spiritual truth, the person must undergo a quest in which his
qualities are tested. In some way, the Grail provides the Food of Life, and to be worthy
of receiving it, the hero must have passed through a waste land similar to the Valley of
Death (Coote 99). As Loomis states, the details of the Grail legends may vary from one
author to another:
… we perceive that there were not only two main themes which tended
to combine in bewildering associations, but several subordinate
disharmonies contributed to the mystification of both the authors and
their readers. There was a wounded King for the hero to cure; there was
a slain King for him to avenge. Yet they seemed to bear somewhat the
same name. The King's infirmity or death caused his land to be sterile
and waste; yet, strange to say, he possessed a talisman of inexhaustible
abundance. There were two damsels in the King's household, one
34
whose function was to serve his guests with the talismanic vessel, to
assume a monstrous shape when the hero failed in his task of healing
the King, and violently to rebuke him; the other whose function was to
spur the hero on to avenge a kinsman's death. The task of healing
required the hero to ask a spell-breaking question; the task of
vengeance required him to unite the fragments of a broken sword. (10)
Despite the variations of the Grail stories, the main purpose of the quest of the hero is to
restore to health the king who is the guardian of the Grail and whose sickness, for some
unexplained reason, reduces his kingdom to the desolation of drought and death; to a
waste land.
Considering that the Fisher King is believed to be the Grail’s guardian, Weston relates
the Tammuz-Adonis cult of Frazer to her own Grail legends by associating the guardian
of the Grail with the priest-kings who, in the very earliest days of the vegetation cults,
actually played out the role of the dying god. Weston states that it was the sickness of
the Grail’s guardian that had reduced his country and that it was the redemption of him
and his diseased realm that was the central and most significant motif of the stories
(102). Weston emphasizes the point that the wound suffered by Adonis was in his
genitals, and adds that this accounts for the infertility of the land. By association, the
wound of the Fisher King was similar (133). Weston supports these analogies by
drawing parallels between events in the Grail castle –the dead or wounded ruler, the
sterility of his kingdom, the loud lamentation of women and, in one scene, the
appearance of a maiden who had shaved her hair – and the rituals of the vegetation cults
in which the dying hero was similarly presented surrounded by weeping women who
had shaved their heads and who loudly mourned the death of their god. Such similarities
between Tammuz-Adonis, on the one hand, and the Fisher King, on the other, are
sufficient in Weston’s view to call the figures one and the same (135-136).
In The Golden Bough, Frazer mentions the figure of the dying and reviving god and
presents possible answers to questions like why being sick is so catastrophic for a king and even for his folk- and why he should be cured immediately. Primitive people
believed that their safety and even that of the world was bound up with the lives of gods
or of the mortal representatives of gods (Frazer 9). Therefore, their lives should be given
the highest care, out of a regard for the mortals’ life. Yet, no amount of care and
35
precaution will prevent the man-god from growing old and weak and finally dying
(Frazer 9).
The king’s life or spirit is so bound up with the prosperity of the whole country that if
the king feels ill or grows weak because of old age, the cattle will sicken and cease to
multiply, the crops will rot in the fields, and men will die of widespread disease (Frazer
27). Hence, the only way of preventing these calamities is to put the king to death while
he is still healthy, in order that the divine spirit which he has inherited from his
predecessors may be transmitted in turn by him to his successor who has not yet been
weakened by disease or old age. The particular symptom which is commonly heralding
the king’s sickness is highly interesting; when he can no longer satisfy the passions of
his numerous wives, in other words, when he has lost the energy to be able to reproduce
his kind, it is time for him to die and to make room for a more energetic successor
(Frazer 27). To sum up,
the fertility of men, of cattle, and of the crops is believed to depend
sympathetically on the generative power of the king, so that the
complete failure of that power in him would involve a corresponding
failure in men, animals, and plants, and would thereby entail at no
distant date the entire extinction of all life, whether human, animal, or
vegetable. (Frazer 27)
Thus, the situation of the king either as sick, impotent, or showing the signs of any
weakness is taken by his people as one of the main reasons to put their king to death.
Despite all these variations of the Fisher King myth, they all represent a more or less
coherent survival of the Nature ritual. As Weston states, in the great majority of these
versions, the representative of the Spirit of Vegetation is considered dead, and the object
of these ceremonies is to restore him to life (119). The quest for restoring the fertility
god to life is stated as “the key” to The Waste Land, since Eliot
to describe Weston's version of the grail quest, in which a knightly
questor must find the grail to renew a sterile land ruled by an impotent
king, then draws on the notes to trace images of this waste land
through the poem. The grail quest becomes the "key" to the poem.
Because this concrete image of a spiritual drought enables Eliot to
36
hear in his own parched cry the voices of all the thirsty men of the
past" and so transmutes his personal despair into an expression of the
sensibility of his civilization.(Kaiser 82)
In addition to the Fisher King myth, which is used in The Waste Land symbolically as
the central myth combining myths and legends of the dying and reviving nature, there
are other mythical allusions of sacrificial deaths and life-giving ends. The stories of
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde opera and Stravinsky’s famous ballet work The Rite of
Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps) are two of them. Both works include themes of healing
through rites and sacrificial deaths for the sake of promised rebirth.
Stravinsky in his The Rite of Spring follows a similar method to Eliot’s in The Waste
Land. He turns to primitive customs for his material. The Rite of Spring opens in
inspiring awakening of the first promise of spring and concludes in sharp scene of
human sacrifice. Ugly pagans sacrifice a maiden to appease the gods of spring.
Furthermore, Guttmann states that “the choreography, costumes and sets boldly handle
primitive rituals of spring, and presented without any euphemism in the name of grace
and beauty, awkward, primitive starkness” (Stravinsky).
Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is composed of two parts, describing the coming of
spring and the rituals performed for it. Following the storyline will provide a chance of
comparison with the fertility rituals described by Frazer in The Golden Bough.
Fundamental elements are common in both representations of the rituals. Part I of The
Rite of Spring is called “The Adoration of the Earth,” and consists of nine sections. In
“the Introduction,” the vivid music symbolizes the stirrings of elemental life in the
warming soil and “the Introduction” suddenly bursts into “The Harbingers of Spring”
through the heavy beats. In the “Dances of the Adolescents,” the world slowly settles as
a group adolescents initiate a Spring Festival, dancing in a state of rising excitement. In
“Mock Abduction” part, suddenly the mood turns to a upheaval, the orchestra stirs in a
sensational way. Young men seize girls to perform a kind of primeval marriage. With a
round-dance “Spring Rounds” section begins. With the sound of tam-tam, the slow
movement of Part I reaches its climax. The following “Games of the Rival Tribes”
section, introduced with the sounds of tuba and tympani, announce the climax of the
37
festivities. It is the most stirring passage in entire ballet. Fearsome shrieks fill the air. In
“Procession of the Sage,” the Sage in attendance of young maidens arrives. The
following section “Adoration of the Earth,” presents a break in the brief stillness. The
Sage blesses the Earth. In the last section of Part I called “Dance of the Earth,” the
scene is dominated by a frenzied celebration as drums, trumpets, horns and strings rise
and fall ecstatically (The Rite).
Part II is called “the Sacrifice,” and consists of five sections. In the Introduction section,
it is pre-dawn and the Earth is in a state of sleep. “Mystical Cycles” opens with the
dance of the young figures. The men gradually draw back, leaving the maidens to circle
alone. In “the Glorification of the Chosen One,” a sudden rising thunder of heavy tunes
and strings fix on one maiden – the chosen, who now remains motionless as the other
maidens glorify her with their dance in intense delight. In “the Evocation of the
Ancestors” section, the maidens are inactive as the Elders ask for blessing from the god.
In “the Ritual of Ancestors” section, the Elders make ritual preparations. In “the
Sacrificial Dance,” suddenly the chosen one begins making violent movements. She
begins to dance hesitantly, and then with increasing frenzy. She turns into both victim
and the instrument of sacrifice. Her vital energies are consumed in a self-destroying
passion. Exhausted, she staggers and stumbles until at last she stands upright for a
moment and then she falls, releasing her life force to fertilise the Earth. (The Rite).
These kinds of exhibitions on the stage were unusual and quite new for the audience in
the first decade of the twentieth-century. It shocked the audience. Probably, Eliot, too,
saw one of the representations of The Rite of Spring, and was highly impressed by it.
Guttmann states the reaction of the audience as follows
at first there were a few boos and catcalls, but then a storm broke as
the outraged audience reacted by yelling and fighting. Diaghilev tried
to appease the disturbance by switching the house lights on and off
while Nijinski tried to sustain the performance as best he could by
shouting out numbers and cues to the dancers, who couldn't hear the
music, loud as it was, over the din. Stravinsky was furious and
stormed out of the theater before police arrived to end the show. what
shocked the audience in 1913 would seem pretty mild stuff two
generations later (Stravinsky)
38
Stravinsky does not set out to destroy tradition, but his rough rhythms, wild harmonies
and violent dynamics pushes music into a new dimension. In the process, he gives birth
to the music of modern times:
In The Rite of Spring, there was something new, and that was the
compact use of all these: polytonality, metric irregularity,
polyrhythms, discord, and percussiveness, thrusting the traditionally
dominant component of music - melody - into the background, and
cumulatively expressing a wholly original primitive brutality. Some of
the Stravinsky’s effects were innovative, notably the rapid repeating
notes. (The Rite)
Wagner’s famous opera Tristan und Isolde, provides another source of allusion for
Eliot. Wagner, in Tristan und Isolde, tells a romantic love story combining the themes
of consequences of fatal passion, sexuality and death. The story of Tristan and Isolde is
one of absolute and perfect love, a mixture of tragedy and fate. Tristan and Isolde's tale
is one of the most popular stories in the Middle Ages. Variations of this tale include
significant changes. Waldron summarizes storyline is as follows: Tristan, a Breton,
leaves his family’s castle, Kareol, and becomes one of the knights of King Mark of
Cornwall. In King Mark’s service, he kills Morold, who is an Irish knight engaged with
Isolde to marry. After his victory, Tristan arrogantly returns the severed head to Ireland.
However, Tristan is wounded by Morold’s sword, and the only person able to heal his
wound, Isolde, who has healing powers. Yet, Isolde swears vengeance against her
lover’s killer. Tristan changes his name to Tantris and in disguise, visits Ireland to be
healed by Isolde. However, Isolde notices that a notch in Tristan’s sword matches a
splinter extracted from Marold’s head and realizes that Tantris is really Tristan, the
murderer of her fiancé. She is, however, unable to kill Tristan with the sword resting in
her hand, since looking into Tristan’s eyes, she is disarmed. She falls in love with
Tristan. On his return to Cornwall, Tristan tells about the beautiful Isolde who nursed
him back to health. Upon Tristan’s praises about Isolde, King Mark desires to have
Isolde brought to him to be his wife. The lovers are discovered, betraying Mark who is
to marry Isolde, when Tristan brings her to Cornwall. Tristan is wounded once again by
the sword of Melot (a knight of King Mark’s). He sends for the true Isolde to heal him,
knowing that only she has the power to do so. Tristan’s companion and liegeman, asks
39
the Shepherd to pipe his merriest tune, if he sees the sail of Isolde’s ship (427-30). In
some versions Tristan und Isolde, the ship comes, and the Shepherd gets to sing his
vigorous happy tune. In another version, the end of the story is different. Knowing that
white sails mean Isolde of Ireland, her rival, is aboard and seeing those white sails,
Isolde of the White Hands reports that the sails are black, signifying that Isolde is not
on the ship. Tristan dies of despair. When Isolde of Ireland comes into the room and
finds her beloved dead, she dies of grief, too. The two are buried side by side. From
Tristan's grave a vine grows and from Isolde's a rose. The two plants intertwine and
grow together as a living symbol of their passionate love (Dana 270).
Dana points to two aspects in Eliot’s interest in Wagnerian operas as his sources of
allusion: both Wagner’s and Eliot’s concern with comparative religion and cultural
anthropology, on the one hand, and their common interest in myth and symbolic
expressions (267). Dana argues that what is appealing for Eliot in Wagner’s style is his
approach to myth and his use of leitmotiv (269-71). As Dana further states: “In
Wagner’s compositional style, the leitmotiv is a melodic phrase that characterizes and
represents a theme, person and object and that is capable of variations as well as
connections with other motifs to form a web of interrelationships” (271). In this respect,
Wagner’s style in music is quite similar to Eliot’s in poetry.
On the other hand, as to Coote states, the atmosphere, which the story of Tristan and
Isolde provides for Eliot in The Waste Land, is more important than the precise details
of the opera’s plot (125). “Feelings of hatred and vengeance turned to a passionate love
above all social constraints, but is at the same time, a fatal one, leading to death” is
theme expressed in the story of Tristan and Isolde (Coote 125). Against Eliot’s main
theme of sterility and decay, through his quotations in the first section of The Waste
Land; “Burial of the Dead,” this tragic story of desire leading to death is expressed. The
first act of Tristan und Isolde takes place on the boat in which Tristan is taking Isolde
from Ireland to marry his uncle in Cornwall:
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind
Wo weilest du?
40
[Fresh blows the wind
To the homeland;
My Irish child,
Why do you tarry?]
(The Waste Land 31-34)
The relation of passion to the sea that is implied in Wagner’s opera, is also an important
image in The Waste Land, which presents a strong contrast both as the most longed
thing in the poem to extinguish the fires of sterile passion, and as the most feared thing
bringing death (Schwarz 99). Isolde, who cannot come on time to heal Tristan with her
ship, brings him death. “Oed' und leer das Meer” (The Waste Land 42), a watchman
reports, signifying the absence of any sign of Isolde’s approaching ship.
The last important source of reference that Eliot uses in The Waste Land is
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which is one of the most ancient sacred texts. Eliot alludes
to the three sacred orders in this ancient Sanskrit text. “Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata,”
translated, in Notes On The Waste Land, as “Give, Sympathize, Control” (1970, 75).
Eliot completes the final section of The Waste Land, “What the Thunder Said,”with
those Sanskrit words. In this last section of The Waste Land, after the disappointment of
the empty Grail chapel, the narrator sees a flash of lightning followed by a sound of
thunder which can easily be interpreted as a promise of rain. In fact, this time what the
thunder said is not a promise of rain but, as Eliot states in his Notes On The Waste
Land, the orders of the Hindu god Prajapati which are originally spoken out in the
sacred book of Buddhism, Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (1970, 75).
In Buddhism, Prajapati is believed to be the Lord of Creation. The passages from the
Upanishads make it clear that he is a force rather than an incarnate deity. Hinduism
recognizes the difficulty of visualizing a pure spiritual divine being and so allows
incarnation in many forms as an aid to worship. In this particular case, the incarnation
of the source of life as Indra, a deity who could take on an endless variety of forms at
will, is important since he is the god, who with his thunderbolt in his right hand, is the
creator of thunder and lightning (Coote 122). Indra is the god of rain and fertility who is
constantly at war with drought. It is this figure who thus recalls the vegetation gods
who have their roles in the earlier sections of The Waste Land. Indra, the God of
41
Thunder, suggests the promise of a waste land redeemer through rain, but he is more
than this. He comes in the lightning, and the lightning is an Indian symbol of
enlightenment. The enlightenment that he brings is the moral teaching of the
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. “The divine voice of thunder repeats the same Da Da Da,
that is, Be subdued, Give, Be merciful. Therefore, let the triad be taught; subduing,
giving, mercy” (Coote 122). As Coote argues, those orders themselves do not bring
rain, but in Eliot’s interpretation, they are close to some of the narrator’s spiritual
experiences (122). The original story in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, is as follows:
The threefold descendants of Pragâpati, gods, men, and Asuras (evil
spirits) dwelt as Brahmakârins (students) with their father Pragâpati.
Having finished their studentship the gods said:
“Tell us (something), Sir.” He told them the syllable Da. Then he said:
“Did you understand?” They said: “We did understand. You told us
“Dâmyata,” Be subdued. “Yes,” he said, “you have understood”. Then
the men said to him: “Tell us something, Sir.” He told them the same
syllable Da.
Then he said: “Did you understand?” They said: “We did understand.
You told us, “Datta,” Give. “Yes,” he said, “you have understood.”
Then, the Asuras said to him: “Tell us something, Sir”. He told them
the same syllable Da. Then he said: “Did you understand?” They said:
“We did understand. You told us, “Dayadham,” Be merciful. “Yes,”
he said, “you have understood.”
The divine voice of thunder repeats the same, Da Da Da, that is, Be
subdued, Give, Be merciful. Therefore let that triad be taught,
Subduing, Giving, and Mercy (Brihadaranyaka).
To sum up, the original story tells of the encounter of three orders of being –gods, men,
and demons- with Prajapati, who is often described as lord of the creatures. When they
demand from him a statement of the nature of truth, he responds only in the voice of the
thunder, “Da.” These Sanskrit orders “Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata,” are the products,
answers or interpretations of three different groups in response to the Thunder’s order
“Da;” of demons, men and gods. Each of them listens to the original sound “Da” and
receives it as a particular word or message for themselves. The three Sanskrit terms are
those each group hears or interprets in the sound of the thunder, and when the groups,
in turn repeat the lesson, Prajapati responds with “Om,” signifying that each has fully
understood. In other words, each of these answers; that is the returning voice of the
thunder is confirmed as true and complete (Kearns 220).
42
Eliot combines in The Waste Land the Fisher King myth in Weston’s From Ritual To
Romance with the ancient fertility cults including the myth of “the dying and the
reviving god” in Frazer’s The Golden Bough. He adds these two major sources of
reference some biblical references, images and quotes from Indic traditions implying
death and revival of gods or sacrificial deaths of leaders for the sake of his people. Eliot
combines all these allusions and references in The Waste Land to support the central
myth, that of the Fisher King. The Fisher King myth provides him the title of his poem The Waste Land- and his major symbol standing for the sterility of the early twentiethcentury postwar Europe.
Frazer claims that “the hero-saviour of a culture or society is traditionally regarded as a
representative of his people; in a way, as a microcosmic equivalent of the nation or
tribe” (92). Similarly, Birlik states that
in this respect, the modern quester parallels the function of the questing
knight in the Grail legend, because if he reaches a destination at the end
of the quest, this will also apply to his community. He is, in fact, more
than an individual, he is the spirit of a community. The modern questing
knight witnesses the contemporary reality with an awareness of the past,
and he recognises that his function will relate to everybody living in the
same reality. (54)
In identifying with the Fisher King, who is one of the mythic heroes in The Waste Land
and who is trying to cultivate his land, the modern man sets on a metaphorical inner
journey. Eliot, in The Waste Land, gives the portrait of a civilized and sensitive mind
examining its own troubled state through a series of poetic images and mythical
allusions (Schwarz 63). Throughout the poem, the twentieth-century individual
performs a kind of pseudo-ritualistic act through which he attempts to put his inner
universe in order. According to Vickery,
through repeated and prescribed acts he manages to achieve stability
and a metaphorical immortality in the face of inevitable ignorance,
sickness and death. In this way, he can have control over a small
section of the vast universe, through his control he manages to survive
physically. (129)
43
Thus, the symbolic quest of the Fisher King presents the chaotic and pessimistic
atmosphere of the twentieth-century postwar Europe as well as the emotional panorama
of the modern individual trying to take breath in such an atmosphere. On the other hand,
Coote describes the ritualistic experience throughout the poem as follows
once there was potency and the means of ensuring its continuance.
Now the neurotic ego is left alone in a desert with only broken
promises for company. Well-being was once guaranteed by ritual. So,
sexual love and spiritual health were preserved. Now the voices of the
past era are only deformed echos: Madame Sosostris blindly
advertising devalued gods, Mr Eugenides offering bribes in return for
a fake love, the grass singing by the empty chapel. As the Narrator
hears and sees these things, he is at one with the maimed guardian of
the Grail. His suffering is unredeemable. All he [the modern man] can
do is sit and survey the potent past of which he knows himself to be
the bankrupt inheritor. (103)
The use of mythical elements in a new context provides Eliot various benefits.
Structurally, Eliot chooses his figures from the well-known myths, like the disabled
king, the wasteland, the questing knight or hero of the Grail legends. The underlying
myth of The Waste Land, the Fisher King myth, is implied throughout the poem by
words, allusions and symbols. The allusions and symbols guide the reader in following
the central theme of the dying and reviving fertility god throughout the poem, and
correspondingly the mythical allusions of The Waste Land function as unifying
principles on the fragmented structure of the poem. The Fisher King, on the other hand,
provides a central symbol through which all those figures in the ancient fertility rituals
can be combined, and also the pity, terror, and chaotic atmosphere of a sterile,
devitalised society can be expressed adequately. In a way, it becomes a concrete
personification expressing the barrenness and dryness of modern civilization and the
need for refreshment and new spirit which is longed for but cannot be achieved
(Vickery 132). So, combined under the implied presence of the Fisher King myth, all
the myths alluded to through certain phrases, symbols and images sprinkled throughout
The Waste Land perform the common function of structurally unifying the fragmented,
multivocal form of the poem (Cuddy 233).
44
Moreover, “the mythical method” frees Eliot from the necessity of having to draw a
detailed story-line and enables him to concentrate more on his characters’ mental and
emotional states. For this reason, The Waste Land does not tell the mythical stories but
only alludes to them (Vickery 132). In other words, what Eliot is interested in is not the
myths themselves, but the common feeling or hidden message in them. Revealing the
underlying element of their mythical structure, Eliot makes use of the myths in order to
deepen and universalize The Waste Land. Yet, this intention can be achieved, “if only
the reader is alert to the feelings which those various myths raise and if only the reader
can sense how these feelings relate to the present” (Coote 56), that is, the reader can
perceive, in Eliot’s words, “the continuous parallel between contemporaneity and
antiquity.” It is only in this way possible to make those ancient myths functional again
in the modern world, and to comprehend The Waste Land wholly. As Coote states, “the
task of the reader would be alike of the anthropologists’ collecting old tales” (56); that
is, to find the principle unifying various myths and to use it in ordering the fragmented
material at hand.
Moreover, “the mythical method” enables Eliot to stand back from his experience and to
generalize it into a view of life. Furthermore, it helps him to get closer to his experience,
that is, to deal with matters which would have been too painful to approach in any more
direct way” (Scofield 132). Hence, the use of a mythical story provides a third language,
beside naturalistic presentation and symbolism, in which the state of affairs can be
conceived (Perkins 508). The story of the sick king and sterile land is a concrete and
imaginative way of speaking of the condition of the modern man. The Fisher King
myth, as a metaphorical sacrifice for the sake of a community, and a spiritual quest done
for this purpose can be interpreted as an antidote for the sterility of the modern man. In
a general sense, the myths, when their underlying message is received, can function as
means capable of holding spiritually shattered Western civilization together (Righter
77), and re-forming the deformed perception of reality in the twentieth-century postwar
Europe.
In conclusion, it can be stated that Eliot uses a series of allusions, references,
quotations, symbols and images taken from various works written in a large span of
45
time and place. Evidently they are chosen not for the sake of merely creating a collage
of literary masterpieces, but especially for the sake of the common elements they
include. Only then, they are used by Eliot for the benefit of his universal goal. Eliot
tries to reflect the prevailing situation in early twentieth-century Europe after the First
World War, by way of a very similar representation, that is chaotic and fragmentary.
Achieving to provide the structural and thematic unity of The Waste Land by way of
alluding to a number of myths and legends throughout the poem under the framework
of “the mythical method,” Eliot hopes that these ancient traditions perform the same
function; that is, they function as the remedy, or at least explanation, for the distorted
reality and chaotic atmosphere in the twentieth-century postwar Europe.
46
CHAPTER II: A STUDY OF THE FISHER KING MYTH: THE
DEATH AND REVIVAL OF THE FERTILITY GOD IN
THE WASTE LAND
The Golden Bough appeared in twelve volumes between 1890 and 1915, and was
abridged in one volume in 1922 with its subtitle being A Study in Magic and Religion.
This important anthropological work begins with a murder and then sets out to identify
the murderer:
At Nemi, near Rome, there was a shrine where, down to imperial
times, Diana, goddess of woodlands and animals and giver of
offspring, was worshipped with a male consort, Virbius. The rule of
the shrine was that any man could be its priest, and takes the title of
the King of the Wood, provided he first plucked a branch –The
Golden Bough- from a certain sacred tree in the temple grove and then
killed the priest. This was the regular mode of succession to the
priesthood. (Frazer18)
The aim of The Golden Bough is to answer two questions: why did the priest have to
kill his predecessor, and why did he first have to pluck the branch? Because there is no
simple answer to either question, Frazer collects and compares analogies to the custom
of Nemi. By showing that similar rules existed all over the world and throughout
history, he hopes to reach an understanding of how the primitive mind works, and then
to use his understanding to shed light on the rule of Nemi (Fraser 37).
The ceremonies that Frazer is most interested in are those of vegetation; and the kind of
myth he is most interested in is that concerning a fertility god and goddess. In his
analysis of these ancient customs, Frazer chooses as the model of the Phoenician/Greek
story of Adonis and some versions of the same myth in various cultures –of the
Sumerian-Babylonian god Tammuz, of the Phrygian Attis, of the Egyptian Osiris, and
also indirectly of Jesus Christ. He believes that such comparisons across cultures can be
made since the primitive human urge to myth-making is essentially the same (Coupe
22) Moreover, as Coupe further states, Frazer’s claim to be able to do such crosscultural comparisons overlaps the spirit of modernism (22).
47
As Eliot states in The Notes On The Waste Land, he owes to The Golden Bough and
From Ritual to Romance “not only the title but also the plan and the good deal of the
incidental symbolism” (1970, 80). Thus, as Eliot further states, anyone acquainted with
Frazer’s and Weston’s books “will immediately recognize in the poem certain
references to vegetation ceremonies” (1970, 70). The common purpose in all of Frazer’s
examples in The Golden Bough was to restore fertility and the “hope that the lost one
would come back again” (Frazer 130). Similarly, as Coupe argues, “despite its
reputation for obscurity and experimentation, The Waste Land is a poem which centres
on the need for hierarchy, completion and order,” and that “the means to this for Eliot is
the paradigm of fertility” (30). It was the use of the myths as the unifying pattern that
attracted Eliot in Frazer’s study. Thus, the mythical base of The Waste Land is
important, as Manganaro states:
Devoid of such a paradigm [of fertility myths], the imaginative logic
of the poem would lack its resonance. The cultural breakdown which
it conveys could not be recognized as such without a basis of primitive
harmony. Modernism, unlike modernity, needed its “roots”. (1-5)
This chapter presents an analysis of the symbols and images of the fisher king myth and
the fertility rituals as the unifying patterns in the fragmentary structure of The Waste
Land.
Ironically, the inhabitants of the waste land are ignorant of the need for vegetation
ceremonies as the restorers of the harmony in nature, and thus The Waste Land itself
stands for the tragic presentation of an age that seems to be content with their
forgetfulness. Although allusions to these vegetation ceremonies continue their
existence throughout The Waste Land, they are presented unrecognized and meaningless
by Eliot. By deliberately sprinkling these allusions and symbols borrowed mainly from
Frazer and Weston throughout The Waste Land, Eliot aims to remind the twentiethcentury individual the forgotten or lost bond between him and his traditions (Coupe 5).
While reflecting the chaotic atmosphere of the age in which it was written, The Waste
Land is actually about early twentieth-century Europe’s need for order. Thus, Eliot uses
“the waste land” as a metaphor for the postwar sterility of his age, and the fertility
myths and rituals as the unifying framework in the postwar chaotic atmosphere of
48
Europe. The repeated themes and images of death and rebirth in these myths and rituals
contribute to this intention of Eliot. They are related to the central theme of the search
for order in The Waste Land. As Schwarz states, “death,” whether physical or spiritual,
is a fact in the twentieth-century postwar Europe, and “rebirth” is only a symbolic
possibility (61) Thus, throughout The Waste Land, to be reborn sometimes carries
connotations of approaching enlightenment, as well as a search for significance and
order (Schwarz 61). Both achieving order and fertility in the land, and spiritual
enlightenment and significance in life are implied as the rewards at the end of the quest
in the Fisher King myth. Thus, each of the five sections of The Waste Land includes
various implications, images, allusions, symbols and quotations related to the Fisher
King myth and the fertility rituals which, as a whole, contribute to the idea of achieving
order in life.
The first section of The Waste Land, “The Burial of the Dead,” describes largely the
anxieties of spiritual death and the difficulties of rising from it. The rising from spiritual
death can be taken in two ways; symbolically in the sense of being reborn and
practically in the sense of gaining insight. Yet, such an insight is impossible to gain
except through resignation in faith (Coote 57). On the other hand, as Coote states,
throughout The Waste Land, failed understanding of the symbols of life delays the act of
rebirth and characters in the poem give the impression of the living deads (57). The
epigram in the very beginning of “The Burial of the Dead” strengthens this impression:
Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla
pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent.
(The Waste Land)
[For, with my own eyes I saw the Cumean Sibyl suspended in a
bottle, and when the boys asked her, “sibyl, what do you want?” she
replied, “I want to die”.] (The Waste Land)
This epigram tells about the fate of the Cumean Sibyl. The Cumean Sibyl is mentioned
in the forty-eighth chapter of The Satyricon by Petronius. According to the story,
Trimalchio, in The Satyricon, scoffs at this ancient seer of Cumae, who when granted
one wish by Apollo, wished for as many years as grains in a handful of sand. She got
49
her wish but unfortunately she had neglected to ask also for prolonged youth and so she
withered into a creature shrunken small enough to fit into a large bottle (Coote 57).
Considering the implied death in life theme in the story of the Cumean Sibyl, it can be
argued that, this epigraph, in fact, belongs not to “The Burial of the Dead” but The
Waste Land as a whole. Thus, “The Burial of the Dead” develops the idea of birth
through death. As Frazer states, young age is an indication of strength, and thus, one of
the reasons to put the king to death in ancient cultures (350). Instead of letting him to
die of old age and disease, putting the king to death is preferred. The mortal
representation of the god, the king, must be killed as soon as he shows the symptoms of
old age when his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a
young successor. (Frazer 350).
The title phrase, “burial of the dead,” refers to the Anglican service for the dead, which
derives from the fifteenth chapter of the first book of “The Corinthians”. This chapter of
“The Corinthians” deals with the resurrection of Christ and with the resurrections of the
baptized dead following it. It is said in “The Corinthians” that “the dead shall be raised
incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1:5). However, as Schwarz states, in order to
be raised, people must be baptized into faith (74). So, death can be interpreted as the
first step toward rebirth. In this respect, burial of the body in The Waste Land is likened
to the sowing of a seed as in the Persephone myth:
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
(The Waste Land 71-73)
Demeter, the goddess of the cornfield, bore Core, afterwards called Persephone, to her
brother Zeus. Hades falls in love with Persephone and asks Zeus’ consent to marry her.
Zeus fears to offend his eldest brother by a straight refusal, but also knows that Demeter
will never forgive him if he gives his consent. He, therefore, answers politically that he
can neither give nor withhold his consent. Thus, Hades abducts the girl as she is picking
flowers in a meadow. Demeter seeks Persephone for nine days and nights, but the only
news she can get comes from Hecate, who one morning hears Persephone crying “A
rape! A Rape!” but on hurrying to rescue, finds no sigh of her. Later on, Demeter learns
50
the truth that Hades is the villain. She is so angry that she forbids the trees to give fruit
and the herbs to grow, until the race of men stands in danger of extinction. She swears
Zeus that the earth will remain barren until Persephone has been restored. Thus, Zeus
sends Hermes with a message to Hades saying he should restore Persephone
immediately. The answer is that Demeter may have her daughter on one single
condition that she has not yet tasted the food of the dead. Out of a trick, Hades makes
Persephone eat pomegranate. However, Demeter rejects to return Persephone, otherwise
to remove the curse from the land. Thus, Zeus persuades Demeter that Persephone will
spend three months of the year with Hades in the Underworld, and the remaining nine
with Demeter in the Upper world. This agreement provides the cycle of seasons on earth
(Graves 90-91).
The belief of planting with the hope of making the corn spring from the earth has an
ancient origin. The believers of the Osiris cult were following a similar practice:
… just as images of Osiris were buried in the fields to ensure the rebirth
of the corn, so seed-covered models of his carefully mummified form
were buried in human tombs as a pledge of resurrection to an afterlife.
As the corn would rise again, so too, it was believed, would the human
body. From the sprouting of the grain the ancient Egyptians drew an
omen of human immortality. (Frazer 5)
In the first lines of The Waste Land, the central conflict between spiritual death and the
agony of rebirth, enlightenment, and insight is introduced:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
(The Waste Land 1-4)
Eliot, distorting the traditional meanings of the images and symbols creates sharp
contrasts in The Waste Land. For example, April represents the season of spring. Spring,
in ancient cultures, suggests the death of the divine but mortal lover of the fertility
goddess and her following withdrawal to the underworld and the period of agonized
waiting till the goddess and her lover’s reunion at the spring time. This reunion is
51
followed by the resurrection of the nature and forces of life. As Weston notes, lilac is a
symbol for the revived fertility gods (62), and April, as the period “breeding lilacs out
of the dead land” (The Waste Land 1-2) is, thus, expected to be a period of joy and
happiness. As Weston further states, it is also the traditional month of Easter, time of
the resurrection of Christ (62), who can be considered another dying and reviving god.
Thus, the life-bringing powers of rain and water can be taken as the signs of baptism
and resurrection that modern man desperately needs.
However, Eliot implies that such a revival will not take place in the modern world.
Although spring will return, it will bring no joy or rebirth, since myths have lost their
magic and sustaining power. As Coote argues, because of the death of once potent
culture of myth in which mankind used to live, the modern man survived disinherited
(35). Thus, when it is time in The Waste Land for the cycle of seasons to turn from
winter to spring, the consequences are not the same any more:
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
(The Waste Land 5-7)
Winter is a season of a dry, half-dead, and a hardly warm life. April, on the other hand,
is the month of rebirth, both vegetative and spiritual. With the stirring of life in spring
comes the revival of “memory and desire” which are the things winter had buried in
“forgetful snow.” Having forgotten the meaning of spring in the winter period which
covers earth and man “in forgetful snow,” April is defined as “cruel.” April is cruel
because, it threatens us with new life, something which, on the symbolic level, both
wanted and feared. Thus, as Coote states, the vegetative and spiritual rebirth coming
with Spring are represented by Eliot both as a joy and as a threat (32).
The expectation of rain is repeated as a theme throughout the poem. Rain is another
symbol that evokes possibilities of regeneration:
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain;
(The Waste Land 8-9)
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Just like scenes in a dream, the location changes. The scene is Munich, where Eliot
stayed a while in the real life. Storm clouds roll over the Starnbergersee, a lakeside
resort just outside town. The scene beginning on the shores of Starnbergersee, proceeds
directly into the Hofgarten, a public park in Munich. Soon, the storm is gone with its
promise of rain, there is sunshine now:
we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
(The Waste Land 9-11)
As Schwarz states, this scene is a fragment emphasizing the contrast between the
expectations of rain and the storm gone without bringing the expected shower of rain
(79). In this respect, the inhabitants of modern Europe who are waiting for a
metaphorical rain to revitalize their spiritually dry lives can be identified with the
inhabitants of the waste land in the Fisher King myth who are waiting for the life-giving
rain in their sterile land. Just like in the land of the Fisher King where the order in
nature is somehow broken, in modern Europe a spiritual disorder is experienced by the
twentieth-century individual.
The disorder in modern man’s life sometimes manifests itself as being caused by lack of
faith. In this respect, Eliot combines the geographical descriptions of the waste land in
the Fisher King myth with the biblical descriptions of dead land in the deserts of the Old
Testament:
…..where the sun beats
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
(The Waste Land 23-24)
Through these biblical allusions, Eliot, also, combines both the physical and spiritual
aspects of the dryness and sterility. It can be argued that the spiritual dryness of the
modern man is reflected on the physical descriptions which are alluded to in The Waste
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Land. In this respect, the allusions to symbolic water in dry deserts symbolize the
twentieth-century postwar individual’s need for revival in his spiritual world:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?
(The Waste Land 19-20)
Can papyrus grow where there is no marsh? Can reeds flourish where
there is no water? While yet in flower and not cut down, they wither
before any other plant. Such are the paths of all who forget God: the
hope of the hypocrite shall perish. He thrives before the sun, and his
shoots spread over his garden. His roots twine about the stoneheap; he
lives among the rocks (Job 8:11 16-17).
As Coote states, the early decades of the twentieth-century was a time without a
redeemer and symbolic water, that people turned their backs on God (32). Thus, as
Coote argues, infertility and destruction can be interpreted as the punishments for such
spiritual blindness (33). In the punishing dryness of the desert (both actual, and in the
poem metaphorical) crisis of faith drives people to terror and to “fear in a handful of
dust” (The Waste Land 30). The phrase “fear in a handful of dust” can, also, be
identified with the grains in a handful of sand, the number of which spelled the years of
life to which Cumean Sibyl was sentenced. Moreover, as Reeves states, dust can be
associated with death and destruction (23). Through his use of the image of dust, Eliot,
also, deconstructs the ancient belief of death as the starting point for spiritual rebirth.
Contrary to the ancient belief, death is perceived, in the modern world, as something to
be afraid of. In this respect, Eliot’s use of the dust image contributes to the chaotic and
fragmentary presentation of the early twentieth-century postwar Europe.
Eliot, as stating lack of faith in the modern world, he presents the spiritual dryness and
the crisis in faith of the twentieth-century individual as a result of postwar trauma. He
sometimes uses the biblical allusions in The Waste Land to present the paradox of
faithlessness and faithfulness:
Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
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And the dry stone no sound of water.
(The Waste Land 20-24)
The Biblical phrase of “son of man” is the address of God to Ezekiel, who can be taken
as everyman. There are numerous references in the Bible to the breaking of images, the
suppressing of the pagan religions and the reaffirmation of the true god of the Hebrews.
Ezekiel 6:4 tells about the Lord’s judgment of Israel for idolatry: “And your altars shall
be desolate, and your images shall be broken, and I will cast down your slain men
before your idols.” Eliot combines this with Isaiah 25:12: “For thou hast made a city of
a heap; of a defenced city a ruin: a palace of strangers to be no city, it shall never be
built.” In both cases, as Schwarz states, the key words carry connotations of
faithlessness and the desolation that comes from it (34). There is no promise of shelter
or water in this waste land, in other words, there is no promise of salvation.
Lack of faith is presented, in The Waste Land, as one of the reasons of the uncertainties
in the modern man’s spiritual world. The need for shelter in the desert can be
interpreted as the modern man’s need for order when faced the uncertainties of his age.
Eliot’s use of tree as the symbol of shelter in The Waste Land (lines 23-24) contributes
to the idea of lack of faith and need for something to hold on to in the modern world.
The symbol of tree that Eliot alludes to has biblical implications. Several passages in
the Bible refer to a divine source of salvation as the tree of life: “Neither let the son of
the strangers, that hath joined himself to the Lord, speak, saying, The Lord hath utterly
separated me from his people: Neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree”
(Isaiah 56:3). God promised even the eunuch salvation. In Revelation 2:7-10, tree is
symbolically equated with Christ: “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit
saith unto the Churches: To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life,
which is in the midst of the paradise of God.” Moreover, in Psalms 56:3 God is seen as
a shelter: “For thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong tower from the enemy.” As
Schwarz states, tree as a symbol of salvation is functional only for the faithful; as for
the faithless or the indifferent, God, through Christ symbolized by the tree of life, will
give no shelter (36). So, lack of faith is implied in this part of The Waste Land as the
cause of spiritual sterility in the land.
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The idea that in a spiritually waste land man can find shelter only in faith is
strengthened furthermore through the following lines:
Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock)
(The Waste Land 24-26)
The rock is conceived as a symbol of God and also of Christ as in Isaiah 32:1-2:
“Behold, a King shall reign in righteousness, and princess shall rule in judgment. And a
man shall be as a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest: as rivers
of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” So, the rocks
and their shadows that provide shelter in the desert is a combination of symbols for the
presence of God and his promise of salvation. Through all these biblical references the
need in the waste land for a metaphorical shelter is emphasized. However, it is
suggested by Eliot that if the metaphorical meaning of these symbols of shelter is
neglected, they are useless as sources of salvation.
Moreover, rocks and stones have been associated with various magic potencies in
ancient cultures. Large rocks and rock formations, because of their size, have inspired
religious awe among many ancient people. Frazer in The Golden Bough describes the
centre of worship of the fertility god Attis in Asia Minor as a road running through a
range of mountains “torn here and there by impassable ravines, or broken into
prodigious precipices of red and grey rock” (40), which is located “at the mouth of a
deep ravine enclosed by great precipices of red rock” (Frazer 41). Another source for
the red rock image, as stated by Smith, is the “roche de Sanguin” in Chretien de
Troyes’s Perceval (55). This is the red castle, where Perceval killed Partinans who in
turn had killed the brother of the Fisher King. On beholding the head of Partinans, the
Fisher King is cured of his malady, tells Perceval he is his uncle, and makes him his
heir (Smith 55). So, it can be stated that rocks have strong religious implications
creating horror and religious respect. As, Dana states, Eliot describes a pitiless world
where there is not even the illusion of shelter, and the characters look for something
vital and protective in this world (274). As Dana further states, the only things which
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can be found are fragmentation and disorganization (274). That is why “under the
shadow of the red rock” (The Waste Land 26), which is expected to offer a hiding place
and be a reminiscence of god’s presence, Eliot reveals “fear in a handful of dust” (The
Waste Land 30). Being left alone in a desolated land without a possibility of guidance,
either physical or spiritual, creates horror in man. This illustration contributes to the
description of the early twentieth-century man’s situation as having lost his way in the
modern world and needing spiritual guidance.
This part of The Waste Land is followed by two allusions from Wagner’s Tristan und
Isolde. As Dana states, the first of these allusions, in a way, brings fresh winds and hope
of homeland and love into the barren, waste land (274):
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind
Wo weilest du?
[Fresh blows the wind
To the homeland;
My Irish child,
Why do you tarry?]
(The Waste Land 31-34)
These are from the Sailor’s song at the beginning of Act I of Tristan und Isolde. The
wind moves the ship toward Cornwall, as carrying the unwilling Isolde away from her
homeland and toward her unwanted marriage to King Mark. Interpreting the Sailor’s
song as the mockery of her own feelings toward Tristan, Isolde reproaches Tristan for
his betrayal (Dana 275). The story of Tristan and Isolde and the story of the hyacinth
girl meet in this part of The Waste Land, and the hyacinth girl speaks also words of
reproach:
Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.
(The Waste Land 37-42)
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The fragment ends with the closing lines of Act I of Tristan und Isolde, “Oed und leer
das Meer” (qtd. in Waldron 428) in which the wind blows the sails of Isolde’s ship
towards Ireland, where Tristan is waiting for her. Tristan is mortally wounded, waiting
for Isolde, who has the gift of healing (Waldron 429). Kurwenal, Tristan’s companion
and liegeman, asks the Shepherd to pipe his merriest tune, if he sees the sail of Isolde’s
ship. “Oed und leer das Meer” [Desolate and empty is the sea] is reported by the
Shepherd, as he looks out over the sea, shading his eyes with his hand. The sea is empty
and desolate because the shepherd is unable to see any sign of Isolde’s ship. Tristan
dies from his wound, for Isolde arrives too late (Waldron 430) As Waldron further
states, what is crucial for Eliot is not the separation of the lovers as lovers, but Isolde’s
being the only nurse who can revive the dying Tristan. The point is crucial, because it is
this more than physical wound which links Tristan with Amfortas of Parsifal, and thus
with the Fisher King of The Waste Land. “Oed und leer das Meer” can be interpreted as
the absence of the only person who can heal the wound. In other words, the line 42 of
The Waste Land, “Oed und leer das Meer” [Desolate and empty is the sea] emphasizes
the same kind of disappointment of a person who is urgently in need of cure. In a way,
Eliot suggests the crucial step in the Grail legend is failed. In this last step of the Grail
legend, the quester meets the bearer of the Grail, fails to ask the right question and thus
misses his opportunity of success (Waldron 431). Tristan loses his chance of being
healed. Just like him, the Fisher King loses his chance of being healed and, thus, his
country loses its chance of regaining its fertility.
Eliot, in this part of The Waste Land, combines the stories of the dying Tristan and the
dying fertility god. He also uses the metaphor of dying and reviving god in order to
unify Tristan and Isolde allusions thematically and structurally with the rest of The
Waste Land images. It can be argued that through the use of hyacinth in The Waste
Land as an image of vegetation rituals, Eliot suggests the themes of rebirth through
death and expectations of regeneration:
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.
(The Waste Land 35-36)
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As Graves notes, the name of the flower hyacinth stems from Hyacinthus, the Greek
god of fertility. He is a Greek vegetation divinity who was loved by both Apollo and
Zephyrus. He returns the love of Apollo, but not of Zephyrus. When he and Apollo are
throwing the discus together, Zephyrus blows Apollo's discus out of its course. It
crashes the head of Hyacinthus and kills him. From his blood Apollo makes spring up a
flower, the hyacinth (78). On the other hand, in The Golden Bough, Frazer mentions
another version of the story of Hyacinth or Hyacinthus. According to the legend:
Hyacinth was the youngest and the most handsome son of the ancient
king Amyclas, who had his capital at Amyclae in the vale of Sparta.
One day playing at quoits, which was a game based on throwing ring
to encircle a peg, with Apollo, he was accidentally killed by a blow of
the god’s quoit. Bitterly the god lamented the death of his friend. The
hyacinth, that sanguine flower inscribed with woe, sprang from the
blood of the unlucky youth, as anemones and roses from the blood of
Adonis, and violets from the blood of Attis, like these vernal flowers it
heralds the coming of spring and brings a promise of resurrection thus
fills the hearts of men with joy. (Frazer 314)
As Frazer states the annual festival of Hyacinthia was held in the month of
Hecatombeus, which seems to have corresponded to May (315). May is a month of
spring which is believed to be the season of rebirth. The ceremonies of the festival of
Hyacinthia long for three days. On the first day,
the people mourned for Hyacinth, wearing no wreaths, singing no
song of triumph, eating no bread, and behaving with great gravity. It
was on this day, probably that the offerings were made at Hyacinth’s
tomb. Next day, the scene was changed. All was joy and bustle. The
capital was emptied of its inhabitants, who poured out in their
thousands to witness and share the festivities at Amyclae. (Frazer 315)
According to Frazer, this show of joy may be supposed to have celebrated the
resurrection of Hyacinth and perhaps his ascension to heaven. This ascension takes
place on the third day of the festival and is represented on the tomb of the deity (317).
Moreover, the sister who went to heaven with Hyacinth is identified by some with
Artemis or Persephone. So, the representation of his ascension to heaven in company
with his sister suggests that, like Adonis and Persephone, he may have been to spend
one part of the year in the underworld of darkness and death, and another part in the
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upper world of light and life (Frazer 316). Thus, according to Frazer, “as the anemones
and the sprouting corn marks the return of Adonis and Persephone, the flowers to which
he gave his name may herald the ascension of Hyacinth” (317). Eliot’s allusion to
hyacinths and the hyacinth girl, thus, can be interpreted as the signs of the dead fertility
god, as well as his expected rebirth. Also, Weston suggests the interpretation of the
hyacinth girl as the grail bearer (55). The hyacinth girl is described as coming from a
place of water and flowers, and thus, bringing regeneration (Weston 55).
Thus, in addition to its implication of Isolde’s late arrival to heal Tristan, the line 37 of
The Waste Land, “Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden” can be
interpreted in the way that the expected rebirth of the dead fertility god, of which
hyacinth is the symbol, has not come true. The dying fertility god does not reborn, thus,
spring and fertility do not come back to the land. So, as Waldron states, there is not
such transfiguration through death in The Waste Land (430). The problem is that the
early twentieth-century individual, who is culturally disinherited, does not have the
knowledge of connecting these fertility symbols in a meaningful pattern and putting an
end to the sterility in his life. Thus, the reality of life he perceived is fragmentary and
chaotic.
Another example of the attempt to read the design of reality is represented in The Waste
Land through the fortune teller Madame Sosostris and her tarot cards:
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards.
(The Waste Land 43-46)
The “pack of cards” Eliot refers to in line 46 is the Tarot pack, of 78 cards, sometimes
increased to 100. Tarot is first known to have been used in France and Italy in the
fourteenth century, although many of the symbols and figures are of ancient origin,
some of them are said to derive from Egyptian inscriptions, and all of which have been
connected with fertility rites (Weston 78). As Weston states, the original use of these
cards was not to foretell the future, but to predict the rise and fall of the waters which
brought fertility to the land:
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Traditionally, it [tarot] is said to have been brought from Egypt; there
is no doubt that parallel designs and combinations are to be found in
the surviving decorations of Egyptian temples, notably in the
astronomic designs on the ceiling of one of the halls of the palace of
Medinet Abou, which is supported on twenty-two columns (a number
corresponding to the keys of the Tarot), and also repeated in a
calendar sculptured on the southern façade of the same building, under
a sovereign of the XXIII dynasty. This calendar is supposed to have
been connected with the periodic rise and fall of the waters of the Nile
(78).
Traditionally, tarot cards are divided into four suits. They are:
Cup (Chalice, or Goblet) – Hearts
Lance (Wand, or Sceptre) – Diamonds
Sword – Spades
Dish (Circles, or Pentangles, the form varies) – Clubs
(Weston 77)
Weston states that these four suits, especially the Cup and the Lance are ancient life
symbols, and thus form part of a ritual dealing with the process of life and reproductive
vitality; the Lance or Spear, representing the male, and the Cup or Vase representing the
female reproductive energy.
I would suggest that, while Lance and Cup, in their associated form,
are primarily symbols of Human Life energy, in conjunction with
others they formed a group of fertility symbols connected with a very
ancient ritual, of which fragmentary survivals alone have been
preserved to us. (80)
Moreover, considering it as an attempt to read the design of reality, fortune-telling can
be interpreted as another aspect of the quest for significance (Schwarz 100). As Coote
argues, the inquirer’s visit to the card reader, Madame Sosostris, can be interpreted as
“the feeble attempt of modern man to seek spiritual enlightenment” (34). Faced with the
uncertainties in many fields, and thus, lost his way and hope for the future, the modern
man is in need of attaining significance in life and a hopeful view of future. Eliot uses
Tarot as the parody of the modern man’s desire for achieving the knowledge of his
future. Contrary to its traditional function, Eliot represents, in The Waste Land, that the
ancient mysteries of Tarot, in other words, fertility symbols, are now reduced to comic
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banality of fortune-telling. As Weston states, “being principally used for purposes of
divination, today Tarot has fallen somewhat into disrepute” (78). Modern man has
abused the traditions of the fertility cults and thus is away from the real meanings of the
Tarot figures (Coote 34). Thus, the things that the card reader Madame Sosostris is
“forbidden to see” (The Waste Land 54) point to “her inadequacy as the conveyer of the
spiritual traditions of death and resurrection passed on by the Phoenicians and absorbed
into Christianity” (Coote 34).
On the other hand, Eliot admits, in his Notes On The Waste Land, his unfamiliarity with
Tarot’s “exact constitution” and states that he has changed it “to suit [his] own
convenience” (1970, 65). So, the figures from Tarot cards that Eliot alludes to in The
Waste Land complete the other fertility symbols in the poem and thus, contributes to the
thematic unity of the poem. The first card drawn by Madame Sosostris’ visitor is “the
drowned Phoenician Sailor” (The Waste Land 47). The drowned Phoenician Sailor is a
type of the fertility god whose image was thrown into the sea annually as a symbol of
the death of summer. As Frazer states, at the festivals of Adonis, which were held in
Anatolia and in the Greek lands, the death of the god was annually mourned, mostly by
women (130). To carry out his symbolic burial, images of him were thrown into the sea
or into springs, then his symbolic revival was celebrated on the following day. This
symbolic drowning is believed to bring fertility to the land (Frazer 130).
Considering the meaning behind the fertility rituals mentioned above, it can be argued
that death by drowning is believed in ancient cultures to be not an end but a
transformation which is expected to result in rebirth. In this respect, as Mayer states, the
allusion to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is another reference to the possibility of
transformation (270):
…here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
(The Waste Land 47-49)
Here, Eliot quotes the song from The Tempest. Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, has
been living on a primitive island with his fifteen-year-old daughter, Miranda, for the
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past twelve years. His dukedom has been usurped by his own brother, Antonio, whom
Prospero had entrusted to manage the affairs of government while he was concentrating
on his study of the liberal arts. With the support of Alonso, King of Naples, Antonio
conspired against his brother to become the new Duke of Milan. Prospero and his threeyear-old daughter were put on “a rotten carcass of a butt” without a sail. They
fortunately arrive an island, and have been living on this island since then. On a stormy
day, nearby the island, a ship is struck by the lightning. Miranda asks her father to do
anything he can to help the poor souls on the ship. Prospero sends the airy spirit Ariel to
bring Ferdinand, prince of Naples, to the island he lives on. Through the airy spirit,
Ariel, who is under Prospero’s order, the ship carrying Ferdinand and his father the king
is brought upon the shores of Prospero’s island. Ferdinand believes that his father is
drowned. Thus, Ariel, who is invisible, sings:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those were pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
(The Tempest I.ii. 396-401)
Considering the aspect of transformation in both cases, what Shakespeare calls “seachange” in The Tempest can be identified with the rebirth of drowned fertility god
through death which is mentioned by Frazer in The Golden Bough. As Mayer states,
like Hyacinth transformed by Apollo into a flower associated with
spring and rebirth, with remembrance in art, and through Easter
hyacinths, with resurrection and eternal life, the protagonist through
death may experience transformation, though whether by literal or
symbolic death is unclear (270).
It is emphasized that both drowned figures are believed to transform into “something
rich,” and somehow to be reborn (Coote 139).
Belladonna, The Lady of the Rocks, is the next card:
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Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
(The Waste Land 50-52)
Due to her description as the lady of the rocks, Belladonna can be identified with the
Madonna in Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks, in which the Blessed Mother sits directing
the meeting between Christ the child and St. John the infant (Schwarz 103). On the
other hand, Belladonna can be interpreted as a female symbol, and in this respect, as
Mayer argues, the Belladonna card can be combined with the following one, The Man
With Three Staves, which is the male symbol:
Belladonna (beautiful lady, poisonous drug used to enlarge the
pupil of the eye) suggests that a woman who is poisonous to him
[man] may also enlarge his vision. The man with the phallic
staves points up his allegiance. (270)
Moreover, Belladonna can be associated with the deadly plant of belladonna as well as
with the cosmetic made from it and used in ancient times. According to old legends, the
plant belongs to the devil who takes care of it as the need arises, and only takes a night
off once a year. That date is Walpurgis, which is a spring festival in northern Europe.
Walpugris is derived from pagan spring customs, where the arrival of spring was
celebrated with bonfires at night. Traditionally, the plant of belladonna is used as an
antidote to many poisonous substances, including chloroform, opium, and the deadly
insecticide, parathion. Before World War I, the belladonna industry was important in
northern Europe. Belladonna is also known as Atropa, which comes from the Greek
word Atropos. Atropos is one of the Fates who held the shears to cut the thread of
human life and cause death, which is a reference to the poisonous nature of belladonna
(Belladonna). Eliot’s allusion to belladonna is two-edged. He uses belladonna’s both
positive and negative connotations at the same time; in other words, belladonna can be
interpreted both as an antidote to the deadly sterility of early twentieth-century postwar
Europe and as the symbol having the power to end man’s life. Thus, belladonna is a
symbol both of life and of death.
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The next card, the Wheel, drawn by the visitor of Madame Sosostris is an important one
symbolizing the cycle of life: birth-death-rebirth. The Wheel, as Schwarz states, in
many systems of ancient mythology symbolizes eternity through the idea of neverending line, and in this respect, the Wheel card can be associated with the Wheel of
Fortune (106). The Wheel suggests the endless round of birth, death and rebirth, and can
be interpreted as a positive symbol. However, the Wheel can be interpreted as another
two-edged symbol. Mayer associates the Wheel with the Eastern Wheel of Repetition,
thus, as he argues it as a sign of entrapment in the cycles of life (270). In this respect,
the situation of Madame Sosostris’ visitor is similar to the Cumean Sybil’s who is
entrapped in an endless life but suffers from growing old. Similarly, the modern man is
entrapped in the routine of a sterile life and thus, leads a kind of death in life.
Combined with the Wheel card preceding it, it can be argued that the One-eyed
Merchant in the Tarot pack signifies commerce and business life and strengthens the
Wheel’s metaphorical meaning of routine. As Schwarz states, the One-eyed Merchant
can be interpreted as “indicating a continued commitment to commercial enterprise”
(106). Thus, for Eliot, who worked for a long time as a bank clerk, and for many
twentieth-century individuals, the One–eyed Merchant can be associated with the
business world. Eliot describes the routine of the people in the business world as
follows: “crowds of people, walking round in a ring” (The Waste Land 56). On the
other hand, the One-eyed Merchant in the Tarot card can be associated with the fertility
rites. As Mayer argues, the One-eyed Merchant can be interpreted as “a debased version
of the Phoenician sailors and Syrian merchants who spread the cult mysteries,
reminding us of the power of these life-rites” (270). Thus, the walking crowd in a “ring”
of repetitive routines, unaware of the real meaning of the cards that can break the cycle
and carry out the transformation is destined to be trapped in the endless rounds of this
world. As Mayer states,
the seeker’s reluctance to enter into April’s renewal prefigures his
turning from the life of the Wheel. Together, the cards profile one
living in the world of the fertility cults, but who with the knowledge
may be transferred and delivered from his place upon the Wheel. The
remaining cards pose barriers to transformation. (271)
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The card that forms a barrier to this transformation is the next card drawn by the visitor,
the Hanged Man. Considering the traditional meaning of Tarot as a means predicting
the rise and fall of waters and thus the fertility in the land, and the traditional meanings
of the Tarot cards alluded to by Eliot so far as fertility symbols, the expected result is
revival of nature and its regenerating powers. Among other Tarot cards, The Hanged
Man can be considered as the card which is most directly related to the fertility cults.
The Hanged Man card is defined by Madame Sosostris as follows:
…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.
(The Waste Land 52-55)
Traditionally the Hanged Man figure is illustrated on Tarot cards as a man suspended
head-downwards from a gibbet, to which he is attached by a rope around his ankles. The
arms are bound behind him, and one leg is crossed over the other (Schwarz 108). Eliot
states in The Notes On The Waste Land that he associates the Hanged Man arbitrarily
with the god sacrificed by hanging described by Frazer in his study of the fertility
myths, hence, he says, the Hanged Man is also associated with the Fisher King:
the Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in
two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God
of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the
passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor
and the Merchant appear later; also the "crowds of people," and Death
by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an
authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with
the Fisher King himself. (Eliot 1970, 70)
Frazer, in The Golden Bough, describes the hanging scene, which Eliot alludes to, in
The Waste Land, as follows:
… the god Attis is hung in effigy each year on a pine tree. The tree is
a symbol of the mother as the source of all sustenance; those who die
on the tree are therefore being united with their source, through which
they may be reborn into new life. By sacrificing his life the Hanged
Man opens the way to his rebirth into the immortality of the spirit.
(267)
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The Hanged Man figure presenting the idea of rebirth through death also defines the
reincarnated Christ. In Christian belief, it is accepted that Jesus Christ dies in order to
save the lives of mankind. Similarly, the Hanged God has to die in order to be reborn
and to bring fertility to the land, in other words, to regenerate life in the sterile land. In
this manner, the hanging of the fertility god has a sacrificial aspect, and this connects
the Hanged God of Frazer with Christ. It also provides the link that Weston underlines
with Christian mystery and pagan rituals (Coote 106). Considering Eliot’s use of the
myth of the dying and reviving god as a symbol to represent modern man’s need for
spiritual revival, Madame Sosostris represents modern man’s attempt to see his future.
Her attempt to put the fertility symbols in Tarot cards into order and achieve a
meaningful message can be identified with modern man’s desire to achieve order and
significance in life. However, Madame Sosostris’, in other words, the modern fortune
teller’s, inability to see the Hanged Man card can be taken as Eliot’s criticism on the
modern man’s turning away from spiritual insight and his lack of knowledge of the real
meanings of the fertility symbols. Consequently, in the Tarot card section, we see
modern man trying for spiritual vision through superstition. Since the traditions of faith
are corrupted, modern man cannot create a meaningful pattern from the fertility symbols
in Tarot cards, and leaves Madame Sosostris’ table without answers, but a warning “fear
death by water” (The Waste Land 55).
Contrary to the fearful and deadly connotations that Eliot suggests through Madame
Sosostris’ last words, water is one of the ancient symbols of life. As Frazer states, there
are especially two aspects of water to be emphasized: the sacrificial aspect and the
purifying aspect (82-88). On the other hand, drowning, as described by Frazer many
times in The Golden Bough, was one of the ancient methods to perform the ritualistic
sacrifice for fertility. An effigy of the fertility god is cast into the river to ensure lifegiving spring rains for the following year. Symbolic drowning of the god is therefore
like sending the spirit back to the source to renew itself or to refresh water with the lifegiving force (Frazer 429). As for the purifying aspect, water has always been regarded
as the universal cleansing agent (Frazer 711). It has been part of many rituals of
purification from ancient to modern times. Baptism is one of the most well-known
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example of this. According to Christianity, those who were baptized have their sins
washed away and can be reborn pure on the Day of Judgment (Schwarz 110). In both of
these aspects, water is a means of life, whether material or spiritual. To fear death by
water is thus to fear rebirth. Madame Sosostris does not find the Hanged Man card,
indicating that the modern man’s death by water, or symbolic drowning will not bring
him rebirth but death.
Water, like other symbols of fertility alluded to by Eliot in The Waste Land, cannot
function as a symbol of life. On the contrary, all fertility symbols Eliot suggest as the
remedy for the sterility of the modern waste land are either meaningless or things to be
afraid of. Thus, the death-in-life situation of the modern man continues. For his reason,
Eliot describes the atmosphere in the European cities as unreality of the modern waste
land by associating it with Baudelaire’s Fourmillante Cité [Unreal City] and Dante’s
Inferno. As Brooks states, in Baudelaire’s city, dream and reality seem to mix, as well
as the descriptions of life and death (134). The brown fog over the city is a symbol of
urbanization and thus, it can be argued that “the Unreal City” is located in a modern
setting. Similarly, in Eliot’s London representing all cities of the twentieth-century
Europe, which are at the edge of spiritual decline, people seem to live death in life
(Brooks 134):
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.
(The Waste Land 61-63)
Eliot states the connection between the modern London of The Waste Land and Dante’s
through the lines 63 and 64 in The Waste Land. The line, “I had not thought death had
undone so many” (The Waste Land 63) is an allusion from the Third Canto of Infeno,
and the line 64 “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled” (The Waste Land) is from
the Fourth Canto:
The third Canto deals with Dante’s Limbo which is occupied by those
who on earth had “lived without praise or blame. They share this
abode with the angels who were not rebels, nor were faithful to God,
but were for themselves.” They exemplify almost perfectly the secular
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attitude which dominates the modern world. Their grief, according to
Dante, arises from the fact that they “have no hope of death; and their
blind life is so debased, that they are envious of every other lot.” But
though they may not hope for death, Dante calls them “these wretches
who were never alive.” The people described in the Fourth Canto are
those who lived virtuously but who died before the proclamation of
the Gospel –they are the unbaptized. They form the second of the two
classes of people who inhabit the modern waste land: those who are
secularized and those who have no knowledge of the faith. Without a
faith their life is really a death. (Brooks 135)
Thus, it can be argued that London of the poem is Dante’s Hell, in which modern man
has been living death-like lives, without the hope of rebirth, even unaware of such a
possibility. The protagonist of this fragment of The Waste Land, like Dante in Inferno,
sees among the inhabitants of the contemporary waste land someone whom he
recognizes; someone with the name of Stetson:
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
(The Waste Land 69-70)
Mylae is the name of a battle between the Romans and the Carthaginians in the Punic
War. The Punic War was a trade war, and in this respect, can be compared to the First
World War (Matthiessen 110). Thus, as Matthiessen states, it can be argued that
Eliot, in having the protagonist address the friend in a London street
as one who was with him in the Punic War rather than as one who was
with him in the First World War, tries to suggest that all the wars are
one war, all experience, one experience. (111)
In this respect, Stetson can be interpreted as everyman. Thus, the condition of modern
man can be identified with the conditions of the figures from Baudelaire’s Unreal City
and Dante’s Inferno. Eliot uses the scenes from important literary works written in
various times and places to create juxtapositions with the contemporary people. In other
words, as Dana states, he uses the past to parody the present (279). Presenting the
disorder and chaos in the lives of the characters from different cultural and historical
backgrounds, Eliot hopes to shed light on the chaotic atmosphere of his age. For this,
Eliot sometimes deconstructs the traditional meanings of the symbols he uses in The
Waste Land to create sharp contrasts between the past and the present. However, there is
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always construction where there is deconstruction. For example, through the following
lines
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
(The Waste Land 71-73)
Eliot alludes to the god of the fertility rites, who is buried to grow out renewed and thus,
to bring fertility to the land. However, ironically, Eliot deconstructs this expectation and
suggests that, in The Waste Land, the burial of the dead is just a sterile planting without
hope of rebirth. Having lost its meaning, planting the corpse in the garden is no longer a
ritualistic act in the modern world. Thus, it is useless to expect it to “bloom” and
regenerate life.
The planting of the corpse can be associated with the religious rituals of burying dead
bodies, also a reference to the title of the first section, “The Burial of the Dead.” As
Shahane states, it also alludes to the Egyptian ritual: of the disposal of the dead body of
Osiris, the Egyptian fertility god (59). The corpse that is planted is warned against the
Dog:
Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
(The Waste Land 74-75)
The Dog reference is to the Dog Star or Sirius, which, according to Frazer, appeared
above the horizon when the Nile valley was flooded. It is thus related to the Egyptian
fertility cults and to the rising and falling of the waters of the Nile. Also, it is a star
heralding the festival of Sed, which is an ancient Egyptian ceremony which was held to
celebrate the continued rule of a pharaoh. This festival intends, according to Frazer, “to
procure for the king a new lease of life, a renovation of his divine energies, a
rejuvenescence” (153). However, the planting of the corpse in the modern waste land is
no longer ritualistic. The dog, too, has become destructive in the sense that it wants to
dig up the corpse with the intention of preventing it from blossoming into new life
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(Shahane 59). However, dog is another two-edged allusion in The Waste Land, which
has positive as well as negative connotations. As Schwarz notes, a negative imagery of
Sirius, the Dog Star is used in The Aeneid “in The Aeneid, Sirius burns the sterile fields
and lays the land to waste. It therefore carries the opposite implication” (119); that is,
not to herald the coming fertility and rebirth but to prevent fertility, or to destroy the
fertile land. Dog has negative implications in the Bible, too. Psalms 22:20 reads:
“Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog”, and
Philippians 3:2 warns: “Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers.” Dogs, in ancient
times, were eating carcass and they created uneasiness around, because they were wild
and were wandering in packs (Schwarz 120). So, Eliot, in The Waste Land, uses both
the negative connotation of the dog image as the disturber of the buried corpse and the
positive one as the herald of the rise of waters, and thus of fertility.
To conclude, “The Burial of the Dead” is mainly about spiritual death and the
difficulties of rising from it. The theme of being reborn in the symbolic sense is actually
Eliot’s criticism of his age and the twentieth-century individual, who is numb and blind
in practise to gaining insight into the design of prevailing postwar realities. Thus, in
many parts of “The Burial of the Dead,” search for order and search for significance in
life stand very close to each other. It is suggested in The Waste Land that gaining
spiritual insight and significance in life are parts of the modern man’s attempt to put his
chaotic life in order. Thus, The Burial of the Dead can be concluded that in this section
of The Waste Land, Eliot uses the allusions to fertility rituals and the Fisher King myth,
on one hand, to introduce a search for significance; on the other hand, to impose order
and thus re-form the chaotic postwar reality.
On the other hand, the second section of The Waste Land, “A Game of Chess,” deals
more directly with the problem of infertility in the modern world, and presents a more
concrete illustration of the sterility through the marriage relations of twentieth-century
men and women who are coming from different social classes and environments. In this
section, life in rich and luxurious settings of queens, and life in the low and vulgar
settings of a London pub provide a contrast. Yet, in both of them life has lost its
meaning. Eliot deliberately chooses illustrations from both low and high social classes
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to emphasize the idea that cultural degeneration and spiritual sterility are not problems
of a certain class in the twentieth-century European society, but the whole society.
In this section, Eliot uses especially the act of sex as a symbol to illustrate the modern
world’s decline into sterility. As Coote states, “among the wealthy and cultured it [sex]
has become debased and neurotic; among the lower classes it is a matter of abortions
and promiscuity” (38). It seems that sex has lost its real meaning in the modern world.
However, in the ancient cultures, sexual activity was considered as a ritualistic act
sustaining productivity, and thus, the cycle of life on earth. The most famous of these
ancient rituals of sex is the Hieros Gamos, or Sacred marriage ritual. Records of this
ceremony have been dated as far back as early Sumerian, about 5500 years ago (A Brief
History). In this ritual the high priestess acting as representative of the goddess has sex
with the ruler of the country to show the Goddess's acceptance of him as a ruler and
caretaker of her people (A Brief History). Moreover, Frazer states that sexual energy of
people affect the vegetation, too (180). As Frazer further states, the ancient belief in the
sympathetic influence of sex on vegetation led some people to use their passions as a
means of fertilizing the earth:
In some parts of Amboyna, when the state of the clove plantation
indicates that the crop is likely to be scanty, the men go naked to the
plantations by night, and there seek to fertilize the trees precisely as
they would impregnate women, while at the same time they call out
for “More cloves!” This is supposed to make the trees bear fruit more
abundantly. (180)
Moreover, as Weston states, in some versions of the Fisher King myth it is the sexual
impotency of the Fisher King that lead the sterility in his land (116-118).
So, sex is important for the continuation of life, and sexual potency is a sign of fertility.
On the contrary, “A Game of Chess” is dominated by illustrations of meaningless and
sterile sex and women’s stories of tragedy and despair in their relationships with men. It
opens with an allusion to Cleopatra, which is a reference to Shakespeare’s description of
Cleopatra in her royal barge, “the barge she sat in, like a burnished throne” (Anthony
and Cleopatra, II. ii. 190):
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The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
(The Waste Land 77-79)
The description of Cleopatra in a luxurious setting is followed by the showy description
of another queen; that is, Dido, the Queen of Carthage. As Eliot describes in The Notes
On The Waste Land, the lines,
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
(The Waste Land 91-93)
allude to Virgil's description of the banquet given by Dido, the Queen of Carthage, for
her Trojan lover, Aeneas. Eliot quotes two lines from Virgil’s Aeneid, which he
translates: “blazing torches hang from the golden paneled ceiling, and the torches
conquer the night with flames”(Eliot 1970, 71). The section ends with a Shakespearean
reference, that is, Ophelia’s last words before committing suicide by drowning: “Good
night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night” (The Waste Land 172).
These are the farewell words of Ophelia, in her madness, to the ladies of the court of
Denmark. Hamlet accuses Ophelia of being a whore and tells her to “retire to a
nunnery,” which is, in Shakespearean time, a slang word for a brothel. Ophelia’s suicide
is another death by water, but this time her death is self-destruction, not a baptism or
regeneration into new birth (Drew 104). The common point of Dido and Cleopatra and
Ophelia is that all of them committed suicide for love. These three royal women chose
death rather than life without love (Drew 102).
What Eliot criticises in the contemporary waste land is the violation of love. Making
love was once believed to be a ritualistic act providing productivity and fertility. It
turned, in the modern world, into a simple, lust-driven satisfaction. Thus, in the modern
world sex and love lost their meaning and turned into forms of pain and artificiality. As
Coote states, modern man’s failure to make sense of his emotional and physical needs
brings forth the spiritual sterility in the twentieth-century postwar Europe (36).
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Degeneration of love into a lust-driven satisfaction is suggested by Eliot through
another mythical allusion. The picture in the woman’s room presents a reference to a
famous Greek myth. It represents the seduction scene of Philomel by Tereus:
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced;
(The Waste Land 97-100)
Philomel is the daughter of Pandion, king of Athens. His sister Procne, wanting to see
her after along separation, asks her husband, Tereus, king of Thrace, to take permission
from Pandion to bring her to Thrace. This Tereus does, but on the way from Athens he
rapes Philomel and, after cutting out her tongue, leaves her in a lonely place to die.
According to the version of the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which is Eliot’s source
of reference, as he states in The Notes On The Waste Land (Eliot 1970, 71), Tereus even
rapes Philomel a second time, after removing her tongue so that she cannot relate his
crime to anyone. However, Philomel weaves these terrible happenings into a tapestry,
which she then sends to her sister. To take revenge from her husband, Procne murders
her son and serves him up for dinner to his father. Upon learning his wife’s way of
revenge, Tereus draws his sword upon Procne and her sister Philomel. But, as soon as
he does, he turns into a hoopoe, Procne into a swallow, and Philomel into a nightingale
(Ovid VI. 440-668)
As Schwarz states the rape of Philomel represents innocent love which is degenerated
into empty lust and violence” (135). The Philomel allusion has further significance. It
brings a commentary on how the waste land became waste. Weston points out in The
Quest of the Holy Grail that a section of one of the Grail manuscripts tells how the court
of the rich Fisher King was withdrawn from the knowledge of men when certain of the
maidens who frequented the shrine were raped and had their golden cups taken from
them. The curse on the land follows from this act. Weston suggests that this may be a
statement, in the form of a parable, of the violation of the old mysteries which were
probably once celebrated openly, but were later forced underground (qtd. in Drew).
Weston states the same story in From Ritual To Romance, too. Philomel is described in
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The Waste Land as being “so rudely forced” (100). Moreover, the word “force” appears
in a discussion of the Elucidation in Weston’s From Ritual to Romance:
The Elucidation is a Grail text often prefixed to the poem of Chretien
de Troyes’, Perceval. It opens with a passage quoted above in which
Master Bhilis utters his solemn warning against revealing the secret of
the Grail. It goes on to tell how aforetime there were maidens
dwelling in the hills who brought forth to the passing traveler food and
drink. But King Amangons outraged one of the maidens, and took
away from her the golden Cup: “One of the maidens he took by force/
And from her seized her golden cup.” His knights, when they saw
their lord act thus, followed his evil example, forced the fairest of the
maidens, and robbed them of their golden cups. As a result the springs
dried up, the land became waste, and the court of the Rich Fisher
which had filled the land with plenty, could no longer be found. (121)
So, the degeneration of love, which was once a ritualistic act, into lust and violence is
presented in “A Game of Chess” as one of the causes for the sterility in the waste land.
The title of the section derives from Thomas Middleton’s play Women Beware Women,
which tells the seduction of the married Bianca by a duke. The seduction occurs while
the attention of Bianca’s mother is being diverted in a chess game (Schwarz 126).
Chess, as Smith Jr. states, is a symbol, often used by Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatists, for man’s life and government in the world (129). The allusions to the
neglected or degenerated significance of sex in ancient fertility rituals are combined
with Eliot’s use of chess symbol as a means of seduction in The Waste Land. As Smith
Jr. argues, this is a suggestion that “the people in The Waste Land belong to a drama
they do not understand, where they move like chessman toward destinations they cannot
foresee” (129). This turns the life in the modern world into a static game of chess.
To conclude, as illustrated through the relationships of couples from different social
classes, meaningless sexual activities in the modern world create disappointment and
unhappiness in the modern man’s life, and also problems in his relationships with
others. This situation can be interpreted as another reason for disorder in the modern
man’s life. In this respect, chess is presented by Eliot as a metaphor for the need of
order and management in modern man’s life. Sex is presented in “A Game of Chess” as
one of the values which has lost its meaning in the modern world and degenerated into
sterility. Through allusions to the fertility rituals in which sex as a part of these rituals is
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believed to have a fertilizing function, Eliot presents the real meaning of sex, thus he
suggests a solution to the sterility in the modern waste land.
In contrast to “A Game of Chess,” in which sexual disappointments are presented from
various points of view, the thematic core of “The Fire Sermon” is lust. Eliot uses fire as
a symbol of lust; yet, his allusions to fire in “The Fire Sermon” are only illustrations of
the sterile burning of lust. In this section, for the images and allusions Eliot turns to
more religious and spiritual sources of enlightenment, since he sees faith as an element
which lacks in the twentieth-century postwar Europe. This absence of faith or spiritual
nourishment of individuals is one of the reasons of spiritual sterility from which postwar
Europe suffers.
The fire sermon which provides Eliot’s title to this section is one of Buddha’s first
expressions of his enlightenment. The fire sermon which Eliot alludes to was actually
preached to a group of Indian fire-worshippers whose beliefs formed the imagery. In
this sermon, he takes fire as a symbol of desire, not just for sex but for any form of
attachment to worldly things. In the sermon, Buddha describes how burning desire
binds men to the world and to illusion and suffering (Coote 119). As Coote states, “such
a burning with needs binds man forever to the wheel of cause and effect and hence
forbids him any means of liberation and happiness” (39). Thus, freedom from these is
the goal of the wise man:
All things are on fire; the eye is on fire, forms are on fire, eyeconsciousness is on fire; the impressions received by the eye are on
fire, and whatever sensation originates in the impressions received by
the eye is likewise on fire. And with what are these things on fire?
With the fires of lust, anger and illusion, with these they are on fire,
and so were the other senses and so was the mind. Wherefore the wise
man conceives disgust for the things of the senses, and being divested
of desire for the things of the senses, he removes from his heart the
cause of suffering (Coote 120).
The figures in “The Fire Sermon” section are described as being consumed with lust.
Their experience of lust is similar to those of Buddha and St. Augustine’s. Eliot uses a
juxtaposition of St. Augustine and Buddha, who are the two representatives of eastern
and western aestheticism (Schwarz 156).
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At the heart of Buddhism lies the self enlightenment of Buddha himself. As Schwarz,
argues, freedom from desire, particularly sterile sexual desire, just as Buddha personally
managed to achieve, is a way out of the waste land (157). Buddha’s self-enlightenment
can be summarized as follows:
Born a prince and sheltered from knowledge of the world’s ills, the
inevitable contact with age, illness and death roused in him an
irresistible desire to find the causes of suffering and their solution. To
this end, he gave up the life of his palace and for six years mediated
on the problem of pain, imposing on himself the greatest physical
austerity. Despite such discipline he found no answer. Eventually, at
the age of thirty-five, he seated himself under a tree in the lotus
position of mediation and vowed not to rise until he had achieved
enlightenment. After a night of profound spiritual experience, he rose
the next day as the All-Enlightened One. Suffering and freedom from
suffering provide the essence of the Buddhist vision. According to
Buddhism, the cause of suffering is selfish desire. Each person sees
himself as separate, unique, individual, and this self is the centre of his
interest. A man may long to do good works or he may be consumed
with lust. (Schwarz 157)
So, it can be argued that through the allusions to Buddha’s enlightenment, Eliot
suggests the modern man a similar way to follow in order to get himself free from
sterile sexual desire.
In addition to alluding to an eastern figure of spiritual enlightenment, Buddha, a
religious figure from the west, St. Augustine, who is one of the greatest figures of early
Christianity is alluded to. St Augustine is mentioned briefly at the close of “The Fire
Sermon” section, but his place is important for The Waste Land as a whole. St.
Augustine was born into the collapsing world of classical culture of Rome. This
background is similar to the context of The Waste Land. Confessions presents St.
Augustine’s struggle towards Christian faith and uncertainty in the atmosphere of a
decaying world. As Coote states, St. Augustine, in The Confessions, criticises false
intellectual standards of paganism and the sexuality of Carthage (127). In this respect,
Eliot draws a parallel “between contemporaneity and antiquity” (Eliot 1975, 177), as he
mentions in the definition of “the mythical method.” Eliot’s allusions to the city of
Carthage and St. Augustine provide a chance of comparison between the past and the
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prevailing reality in the first quarter of the twentieth-century. In both, man is depicted in
a spiritual and emotional breakdown in a great city.
Eliot’s reference to Carthage is based on St. Augustine’s description of the city in The
Confessions and gives a picture of a sexually aware teenager desperate for love and
adventure:
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning
(The Waste Land 307-11)
At the age of sixteen, St. Augustine was sent to Carthage in order to study rhetoric. The
Confessions reads this part of St. Augustine as follows:
I went to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing
cauldron of lust. I had not yet fallen in love, but I was in love with the
idea of it, and this feeling that something was missing made me
despite myself for not being more anxious to satisfy the need. I began
to look around for some object for my love, since I badly wanted to
love something. I had no liking for the safe path without pitfalls, for
although my real need was for you, my God, who is the food of the
soul. I was not aware of this hunger. I felt no need for the food that
does not perish, not because I had had my fill of it, but because the
more I was starved of it the less palatable it seemed. Because of this
my soul fell sick. I broke out in ulcers and looked out desperately for
some material, worldly means of relieving the itch which they caused.
But material things, which have no soul, could not be true objects for
my love… I also fell in love, which was a snare of my own choosing.
My God, my God of mercy, how good you were to me, for you mixed
much bitterness in that cup of pleasure. My love was returned and
finally shackled me in the bonds of its consummation. In the midst of
my joy I was caught up in the coils of trouble, for I was lashed with
the cruel, fiery rods of jealousy and suspicion, fear, anger, and
quarrels. (Augustine 161)
As St. Augustine’s description of the city presents, the restraints and sense of order
which the earlier classical world had enjoyed were no longer powerful in Carthage.
Civilization as it had been known was in a state of collapse. To the young, there
remained the possibilities of professional ambition and sex (Coote 128). Similar to
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Eliot’s presentation of sex in the modern world in the previous section, “A Game of
Chess,” St. Augustine states, in The Confessions, that sex is not a sufficient end, since it
corrupts into a restless and deeply painful lust (168). The need for love can be satisfied
by another human being, though it is not really complete until that person is loved as a
fellow child of God rather than for his or her own sake. As St. Augustine further states,
a heart without faith is a cause of pain for the soul (169-170). Eliot emphasizes the
problem of postwar Europe as spiritual sterility, and thus, he alludes to ancient eastern
and western aesthetics to present the sterility prevailing in his own age. The solution of
both Buddha and St. Augustine to the problem of sterile burning of lust is aesthetic and
spiritual. However, the twentieth-century postwar man has turned his back on the
spiritual issues and even on any means of redemption. Sex as a life-proceeding means is
devalued and turns into a lust-driven, meaningless activity. The modern man, in such a
world, is personified in Sweeney on his way to Mrs. Porter’s brothel accompanied with
the sounds of horns and motors:
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
(The Waste Land 197-200)
In fact, “The Fire Sermon” opens with a description of an actual waste land; a brown
and leafless desert swept by the wind (172-74). A vision of a modern river, of the
Thames, follows. However, present condition of the Thames can no longer be thought
of the same as the Thames in the Renaissance period. Eliot’s reference to Thames in The
Waste Land is based on Spenser’s Prothalamion, which is a poem written to celebrate
the forthcoming marriage of the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester in 1596 (Eliot
1970, 72). As Schwarz states, a prothalamion is a song to be sung before a wedding in
which joy and ideals of marriage are celebrated (156). In Spenser’s Prothalamion, the
Thames is a place of natural sexual joy and high culture, a place of order, marriage and
celebration:
And let fair Venus, that is queen of love,
With her heart-quelling son upon you smile,
Whose smile, they say, hath virtue to remove
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All love’s dislike, and friendship’s faulty guile
For ever to assoil.
Let endless peace your steadfast hearts accord,
And blessed plenty wait upon your board,
And let your bed with pleasures chaste abound,
That fruitful issue may to you afford,
Which may your foes confound,
And make your joys rebound,
Upon your bridal day, which is not long:
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
(Prothalamion 99-111)
The nymphs, who are getting prepared for the wedding, are described as the “lovely
Daughters of the Flood” (Prothalamion 21). On the contrary, Eliot describes Thames as
a place around which beautiful ladies wandering with their boy friends, who are “the
loitering heirs of city directors” (The Waste Land 180), in other words, the idle sons of
the rich.
It can be argued that Eliot often uses the parallelisms between the past and the present to
create sharp contrasts and by this way to make people realize what is wrong in their
contemporary lives. So, compared with the past, the present condition of London in
Eliot’s time, and the people living in it enjoying themselves with meaningless sex
creates a similar contrast. The river Thames is an important symbol contributing to this
intention of Eliot. Playing on the traditional and contemporary images of the river
Thames, gives Eliot a chance to create a contrasting picture to illustrate and emphasize
contemporary social decline. In Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Thames is a polluted river,
corrupted like the rest of the city:
The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
(The Waste Land 173-81)
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As Schwarz states, the “tent” image used in the contemporary description of the river
Thames can be interpreted in two ways: physically, “tent” is a visual image of the
shelter provided in summer by the leafy boughs of trees overhanging the river (156).
This shelter is now “broken” by the loss of the leaves at the close of the year. It can be
interpreted as the forthcoming winter; the death season (Schwarz 157). In this respect,
the broken tent carries connotations which strengthen the waste land description. On the
other hand, in the Old Testament, arising from the use of a tent as a portable tabernacle
by the wandering tribes of Israel in the wilderness of the deserts, “tent” metaphorically
means shelter, or holy place (Schwarz 158). In Isaiah, the “river” is linked with “tent”
as an image of the power and security that God offers to his chosen people:
Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities: thine eyes shall see
Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken down;
not one of the stakes thereof shall be removed, neither shall any of the
cords thereof be broken. But there the glorious Lord will be unto us a
lace of broad rivers and streams. (xxxiii, 20-21)
On the other hand, biblically, tent can be interpreted as a shelter for the sacred
testimonies. As Schwarz notes, the Ark of the Covenant, which is the chest containing
the tablets of law, given by God to Moses was carried in the tabernacle [tent]. These
tablets are referred to in Exodus as “two tablets of testimony, tablets of stone, written
with the finger of God” (xxxi, 18). However, in the modern Europe, the word
“testimony” ironically refers to the rubbish floating over the river Thames. The only
testimony it carries is not something sacred, but empty bottles, sandwich papers, silk
handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends and other testimony of summer nights
(The Waste Land 76-78). It can be stated that polluted and surrounded by the signs of a
dying season, and a corrupted civilization, the river Thames itself has been
demythologized and has already lost its value. Thus, it can be interpreted as a symbol
presenting both the broken order and degenerated values in modern life.
On the other hand, identification of the waters of the river Thames with the waters of
Lake Leman As Schwarz states, “leman” which is Middle English originated word, also
means sweetheart, mistress or prostitute; thus, the waters of Leman can be taken as a
phrase associated with the fires of lust (159). The figure in this part of “The Fire
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Sermon” states that “by the waters of Leman I sat down and wept” (182). Eliot bases
this line on Psalm:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we
remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows the midst
thereof. For they that carried us away captive required of us a song;
and they that washed us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of
the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange
land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her
cunning. (cxxxvii, I)
Lake Leman is the old name of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. By associating Leman
with Babylon, in other words, by associating the waters of an ancient eastern lake with
those of the one in modern Europe, Eliot seems to imply that modern Europe is a place
of captivity, where the soul cannot sing of joy but of sorrow, and the people living there
are like strangers in this land which has gone waste (Schwarz 158). So, when the
semantic connection and the activities of meaningless sex around the river Thames and
the twentieth-century London are considered the waters of the Thames can also be
associated with those of Leman.
This situation is emphasized by another illustration derived from the fisher king myth:
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening
(The Waste Land 185-90)
The castle of the Fisher King was always located on the banks of a river or on the
seashore. The title “fisher king,” as Weston states, originates from the use of fish as a
fertility and life symbol (125). Brooker argues that this meaning, however, is often
forgotten, and so his title in many of the later Grail romances is accounted for by
describing the king as fishing (98). The reference to fishing in “The Fire Sermon” is
part of the realistic detail of the scene, but to the reader who knows the Weston
references, the reference is to that of the Fisher King of the Grail legends. Eliot uses the
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reference to fishing for the reverse effect. As Brooker states, the figure “fishing in the
dull canal” (The Waste Land 189) is the sick and impotent king of the legends; yet, his
attempt to catch fish in the dull canal is, thus, a useless activity (98). Through this
allusion, Eliot presents a period of mourning and sterility, of the impotence of the world
in the absence of a redeeming spirit. Thus, the period described in The Waste Land is a
period which is not simply physically, but also emotionally and intellectually collapsed
(Brooker 100).
In addition to the Fisher King, the figure “fishing in the dull canal” (The Waste Land
189) can also be associated with Ferdinand of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who sits
upon the bank of the waters and weeps over his father whom he mistakenly believes to
be dead by drowning. Ferdinand mourns in The Tempest:
Where should this music be? i’ the air or the earth?
It sounds no more; and sure, it waits upon
Some god o’ the island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father’s wreck,
This music crept by me on the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air: thence I have followed it,
Or it hath drawn me rather. But ‘tis gone.
No, it begins again.
(The Tempest I.ii. 387-402)
This part of The Waste Land concentrates on the sense of loss. Following the allusions
to the lost beauty of the river Thames, through a Shakespearean allusion to Ariel’s song
including the line “those were pearls that were his eyes,” Eliot suggests Ferdinand’s
lament over his father’s death by drowning. Moreover, the theme of lamenting over the
dead father or brother is mentioned in some versions of the Grail legend. In Wolfram
von Eschenbach’s Parzival, for example, the lamenting figure is the hermit Trevrezent,
who is the brother of the Fisher King –Anfortas. He tells Parzival that he weeps
evermore for Anfortas. Their father Frimutel is already dead, and now the bother
Anfortas; that is, the Fisher King is about to die (qtd. in Schwarz 163). So, these lines of
“The Fire Sermon;” “Musing upon the king my brother's wreck / And on the king my
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father's death before him” (191-92) can be based both on The Tempest and the Fisher
King myth.
However, Eliot uses these allusions describing different aspects of the sense of loss to
create a reverse effect. Loss can be interpreted as giving way to hope. In this respect,
Ariel’s song can be interpreted as a suggestion that death shouldn’t be taken as an end,
but a way of transformation into something rich (Coote 139). Similarly, Frazer states
often in various parts of The Golden Bough, that lamenting over the dead vegetation god
is part of the ritual performed for the sake of his revival. In other words, such
lamentations are ritualistic and temporary. From this point of view, as Davidson states,
the fear of death is replaced by the belief in change and metamorphosis which follows
death (74).
On the other hand, the hopeful connotations of death and the sense of loss following it
are temporary in the modern world. The allusions to death presented in The Waste Land
do not bring possibility of revival, since they have lost their ritualistic significance in
the early twentieth-century Europe. In this respect, the bones “rattled by the rat’s foot
only, year to year” (The Waste Land 195) provide a concrete image of a sterile death
from which no life comes.
The implications of sterile death without the hope of revival are interrupted by a
soldiers’ song. The foot-washing theme in the song is, in fact, a symbol of fertility. The
lines “O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter/ And on her daughter / They wash their
feet in soda water” (The Waste Land 199-201) are the distorted fragment of an
Australian soldiers’ song:
O the moon shines bright on Mrs. Porter
And her daughter,
For she’s a snorter.
O they wash their feet in soapy water,
And so they oughta,
To keep them clean….
(qtd. in Schwarz 168)
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The song has a second version in which the phrase “soapy water” changes into “soda
water” (Schwarz 168). When combined with the following line in French; that is, “Et O
ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole! [And O those children’s voices singing in
the dome]” (The Waste Land 202), the theme of feet washing can be interpreted as an
allusion to the Fisher King myth and the Grail legend. As Brooks states, “the sound of
the children singing in the dome heard at the ceremony of the foot-washing, which
precedes the restoration of the wounded Anfortas (the Fisher King) by Parzival and the
taking away of the curse from The Waste Land” (99). Parsifal overcomes the
temptations of lust and cures the king of his wound. Now, he adores the Holy Grail,
while a choir of children sings from within the chapel (Schwarz 168). Eliot states in The
Notes On The Waste Land (Eliot 1970, 72) the source of this allusion as Verlaine’s
Parsifal sonnet:
Parsifal a vaincu les Filles
[Parsifal has conquered girls],
Et sa pente Vers la Chair de garçons vierde
[and his bent Toward virgin boys’ Flesh]
Il a vaincu la Femme belle, au Coeur subtil
[He has conquered the beautiful woman, with the subtle heart]
Il a vaincu l’Enfer
[He has conquered Hell]
Avec la lance qui perça le Flanc supreme!
Il a gueri le roi, le voici roi lui-meme
[With the lance that pierced the supreme Side/
He has conquered the king, has become king himself]
(qtd. in Schwarz 169)
So, possessing the grail itself, Parsifal prepares to worship, as the voices of children are
heard singing in the chapel. With “Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!”
[And O those children’s voices singing in the dome], Verlaine alludes to the conclusion
of Wagner’s Parsifal opera, where,
the hero has been anointed after his feet-washing ritual, restores the
wounded Amfortas [the Fisher King] to health by touching him with
the sacred spear, and announces that he is to succeed him as the
keeper of the Grail. The restoration of the kingdom is shown in the
glow of the Grail, the downpouring of a halo over the whole scene,
and hovering of a white dove over the head of Parsifal, as a sign that
he is God’s chosen. All, including the boys high up in the dome, join
in a sacramental song, and with it the work closes in spiritual triumph.
(Pinion 128)
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In this respect, the French quotation in The Waste Land (202) completes the allusion to
the Fisher King mentioned earlier in “The Fire Sermon” in line 189: “While I was
fishing in the dull canal.” It is ironic that a phrase symbolizing the return of fertility to
the land and the restoration of sick Fisher King’s health takes part in a soldiers’ song.
Eliot, thus, uses this allusion to create a contrast which present the need of life-giving
symbols in dead civilization of the twentieth-century.
To continue this contrasting effect, instead of the white dove, which is the sign of the
spiritual triumph achieved and the fertility in the land restored, Eliot uses another image
of bird in juxtaposition to this:
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd.
Tereu
(The Waste Land 203-206)
This allusion can be associated with the barbarous King Tereus and the ravished
Philomel mentioned in the previous section, “A Game of Chess.” Philomel who is
rudely forced by the lustful Tereus turns into a nightingale, a bird which is considered
as the herald of spring (Pinion 129). Since myths and rituals of fertility have lost their
meaning and importance in the early twentieth-century Europe, simply performing them
cannot give the expected results. Thus, instead of a spring, a season of rebirth and
fertility, contemporary London still stays “Under the brown fog of a winter noon” (The
Waste Land 208).
Another important figure for the Grail legends is introduced by Eliot in line 209 of The
Waste Land, that is, the Smyrna merchant Mr. Eugenides, whose name means well-born
(Coote 41). Smyrna is modern Izmir, in western Turkey. Formerly, Smyrna was one of
the great trading ports of Asia Minor. After World War I, Izmir was claimed both by
Greece and Italy. When the Greeks were authorized to govern the area, conflicts
happened between the Turks and the Greek. The constant struggle between the Turks
and the Greeks ended in a war in 1921-2. The Turks became victorious, and by the
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treaty of Lousanne on 24 July 1923 the Turks were given full sovereignty over the
territory (Schwarz 170). For Eliot, these events belong to the process of the decline of
Europe. Schwarz claims that “the political turmoil in Smyrna was tangible evidence of
the further waning of the classical order to which the city had in ancient times
contributed” (170). Taking into consideration the same historical background, Smith
adds that “the merchant is from a city of turmoil, another Unreal City, perhaps
connoting the decay of the Hellenic fertility cults” (132). On the other hand, Mr.
Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, can also be associated with the one-eyed merchant
mentioned by Madame Sosostris in “The Burial of the Dead:”
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. (52-54)
It can be argued that being a one-eyed person as a defect corresponds somewhat to
Madame Sosostris’ “bad cold” mentioned in line 44 of The Waste Land (Brooker 99).
Like the fortune-teller Madame Sosostris, who is unaware of the real function of Tarot
cards in ancient fertility cults, Mr. Eugenides is a corrupted representative of the fertility
cults: the seer with one-eye. In other words, both Madame Sosostris, the fortune-teller
and Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant have a limited sight (Brooker 99). Moreover,
as we learned from Weston’s book From Ritual To Romance, the Syrian merchants
were along with slaves and soldiers, the principal carriers of the mysteries which lie at
the core of the Grail legends (143). The cults of Attis and Mithra, too, were spread
throughout the Roman Empire partly by these Syrian merchants (164-7). Yet, in the
modern world, we find the representatives of the fertility rituals and mystery cults in
decay and ignorance. What the one-eyed merchant carries on his back (The Waste Land
53) and what the fortune-teller is forbidden to see (The Waste Land 54) is probably the
knowledge of these sacred mysteries. However, Mr. Eugenides himself is hardly aware
of it, while Madame Sosostris is unaware of the importance of her Tarot card’s and her
own function. In contrast to his former function as the carrier of the secret of life, Mr,
Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, invites the protagonist not into a ritualistic act, but
into a “weekend at the Metropole” (The Waste Land 14). His invitation carries heavy
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homosexual implications. Thus, the end of this false ritualistic act is not life but,
ironically, sterility (Brooker 99).
The Waste Land is a multi-vocal poem which has many fragments including a number
of poetic personas from all ages and places, but one of them is said to be both distinct
from the rest of them and a personage who unites all of them. This important figure is
Tiresias, the ancient seer. Eliot states in The Notes On The Waste Land that
Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a "character," is yet
the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as
the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician
Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of
Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in
Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.
(1970, 72)
The figure of Tiresias is, thus, a special example of Eliot’s use of “the mythical
method;” of his “manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and
antiquity” (Eliot 177). As Matthiessen states
in this way [Eliot] can at once suggest the extensive consciousness of
the past that is inevitably possessed by any cultivated reader of today,
and, more importantly, can greatly increase the implications of his lie
by this tacit revelation of the sameness (as well as the contrasts)
between the life of the present and that of other ages. (110-11)
Thus, the extreme old age of Tiresias, who has lived many experiences, makes him the
embodiment both of the personal histories of contemporary men and women, and of all
mankind from all ages (Coote 59). This makes him, as Drew’s notes, “a universal
contemplative consciousness” (94). Tiresias appears as a figure in classical sources like
Sophocles, Homer, and Ovid. In Oedipus Rex, it is Tiresias who recognizes that the
curse of infertility which has come upon the Theban land has been caused by the sinful
sexual relationship of Oedipus and Jocasta. Oedipus’ sin has been committed in
ignorance, and knowledge of it brings horror and remorse (Brooker 99-100). In the
Odyssey, he “walked among the lowest of the dead” (Book 11, 116-118) and avoided
predicting Odysseus’ death by water; the encounter of Odysseus with Tiresias was
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somehow necessary for Odysseus’ homecoming. In Metamorphoses, he undergoes a
change of sex for watching the coupling of the snakes (Ovid III. 324-46). In The Notes
On The Waste Land, Eliot quotes the Latin text of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (III. 324-46),
which tells the story of Tiresias’ bisexuality and the prophetic powers (1970, 72-73).
According to the myth, Tiresias comes across two snakes copulating in a forest. He hits
them with his staff and is turned to a woman. Seven years later, he sees the same two
snakes and hits them again. As he hoped, he is turned back into a man. On account of
Tiresias’ male and female experience, Jove calls him in as an expert in order to settle a
quarrel with his wife Juno. Jove argues that in love woman enjoys the greater pleasure,
Juno claims the other way. Tiresias supports Jove. Out of spite, Juno blinds him. To
make up for this, Jove gives him the power of prophesy, and long life (Ovid III. 32446).
On the other hand, in the early twentieth-century London, what Tiresias witnesses is not
the copulation of snakes, but a picture of casual, loveless sex in a rented room:
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest
(The Waste Land 215-29)
As Coote states, the intercourse of the typist and the house agent’s clerk is a
meaningless ritual described by a blind and sexually ambiguous old man. “Through
Tiresias we see how The Waste Land of Thebes, its sterility and sexual sin, is at one
with The Waste Land of modern London, and by association, with the other cities of the
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poem: Carthage, Vienna, Paris” (109). This evidently is the reason why Eliot vocalizes
Tiresias towards the end of “The Fire Sermon” as follows:
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
(The Waste Land 43-46)
Eliot suggests that corrupted and devalued sex is timeless and everywhere. Moreover,
the consequences are similar; while Oedipus’ sin brings physical infertility and sterility
in his country Thebes, the early twentieth-century man’s sins and ignorance bring a
spiritual sterility over Europe. Tiresias, who plays the observer part, is, in The Waste
Land, a suffering, ambiguous, timeless presence. He is blind; yet, he represents the eye
of the mind (Kenner 186). He knows, but somehow he withholds his knowledge
(Kenner 186). As Coote states, Tiresias takes part in The Waste Land, neither to cure
Europe, to tell the truth or to prophesy what will eventually happen, nor to remove the
curse of sterility over it (109). He is not a redeemer, on the contrary, he is the
personification of what he sees (Coote 109). In other words, his vision is an inner sight
revealing not the appearance of things but their spiritual significance (Schwarz 175).
Thus, Tiresias can be interpreted as the personification of the blind, sexually
ambiguous, unredeemed experience of the modern man (Coote 109). However, his
knowledge and power of intuition are useless in the twentieth-century postwar Europe,
where people have already forgotten the spiritual significance of the ritualistic acts they
keep ignorantly performing just in appearance.
On the other hand, as Schwarz states, the sound and vision of the fishermen, who are in
fact the workers of the Billingsgate fish market, may be interpreted as the signs of life
for the sick Fisher King as well as the presence of hope, though faint, for the corrupted
London (180):
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
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Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold
(The Waste Land 259-65)
The fishermen figures and the river in which they are fishing can be interpreted as the
possibility of hope for the modern man, though faintly implied. In contrast, Eliot
presents the river as polluted and sterile: “The river sweats oil and tar” (The Waste Land
266), instead of providing nourishment for the fishermen. Thus, as Schwarz argues, “the
fate of the river, in a real sense, is our [modern man’s] fate” (180). Both of them seem
to be corrupted. On the other hand, another two-edged allusion follows the river image.
The mention of the Isle of Dogs, can be associated with the Dog symbol in “The Burial
of the Dead” as the threat of the buried to dig up or expose (Schwarz 182) as well as the
implication of Dog Star, which is taken as a part of the fertility cults as the herald of the
rise of the Nile’s waters, and thus, the fertility on the country (Frazer 153).
Consequently, the modern man of the early twentieth-century is presented as being
surrounded by fertility symbols, but living sterile life without knowing their meanings
or functions. Thus, these symbols, once ordering the daily life in ancient cultures, do not
have the power to put the lives of the modern man in order.
Towards the end of the section, Eliot returns to the theme of lust, through the cries of
the Rhine Maidens. Their voice is heard by the passers-by of the Isle of Dog: “Weialala
leia / Wallala leialala” (The Waste Land 277-78 and 290-91). As he states in The Notes
On The Waste Land (1970, 73) Eliot refers to Götterdammerung 3.1, which is one of
Wagner’s four operas that forms Der Ring des Nibelungen [The Ring of the Nibelung]
for the song of the Rhine Maidens (Schwarz 182). These are the imitations of the
playful cries of joy of the Rhine Maidens, before the sacred gold that they guard is
stolen from them; in other words, before they are symbolically violated (Schwarz 183).
Their story can be summarized as follows:
A ring forged from the gold would give its wearer rule over the world.
Alberich, the ugly dwarf whose overtures the maidens spurn,
eventually steals the gold, and this violation ultimately brings about
the twilight of the gods. Again, there is a tragic implication of lust,
whether for power (the surface motive here) or sex (the symbolic
undertone), that is not realized until it is too late; in this instance,
when the Rhine Maidens each in turn tell their tales. (Schwarz 183)
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As Schwarz further states Eliot modifies Wagner’s opera to suit his own needs and turns
the Rhine Maidens to English women representing different social classes. This allusion
creates a fantastic atmosphere waving between myth and reality (183-185), thus,
contributes to Eliot’s main intention that he expresses in the definition mythical method:
of drawing parallelisms between contemporary and ancient ages.
The reference to the wind, especially to “the Southwest Wind” (The Waste Land 286)
has further significance. The wind, which was mentioned previously in “The Fire
Sermon,” as being “unheard” in “the brown land” (175), is a familiar Christian and
Judaic symbol of the breath of God or Holy Spirit (Sultan 176). Especially, the south
wind is a biblical phrase, appearing five times in the Bible, usually with favourable
connotations. However, as Schwarz states, Eliot’s southwest wind allusion can be
identified with its mention in Luke, when its implication of bringing heat rather than
rain to the sterile waste land is considered (184). It is said that “And when ye see the
south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass” (Luke 12:55). This
is the only biblical use of the phrase with negative connotations. On the other hand,
wind as an image has connections with the Grail legend. As Sultan states, “in some
versions of the Grail legend including the perilous chapel, the quester arrives in a storm;
storm normally include rain, lightning, then the thunder of that lightning; and they begin
with wind” (177). In this respect, as the bringer of rain, wind carries positive
connotations. Thus, it functions as a reminder of the Fisher King myth, which is the
central myth of The Waste Land, and unites this part to the rest of The Waste Land.
“The Fire Sermon” closes with references to “burning” and “Carthage”:
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning
(The Waste Land 307-11)
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In Buddhist view, the situation of individuals, who are involved so much in material
things and are consumed with greed, possessiveness, and other attitudes that bind them
to appearances which they take as reality is described with a symbolic fire. Unless they
free themselves from the practises of attachment, their illusions will keep them in the
karmatic cycle of endless rebirth (Schwarz 190). In Christianity, too, as Eliot implies
through allusions to St. Augustine and Carthage (The Waste Land 307-311), burning
carries connotations of lust. According to St. Augustine, “the unholy loves of Carthage
are painful and untrue, since they are not directed to God”(162). It is worth mentioning
that Aeneas, too, comes Carthage burning with the love for Dido, just like Dido is with
love for him. When Aeneas leaves Carthage and Dido, she literally burns, throwing
herself upon a lighted pyre (Schwarz 190). So, in both of these examples fire is shown
as something destructive and dangerous.
On the other hand, Frazer, in The Golden Bough, mentions fire many times as
something sacred playing a principal part in some rituals:
On the one view, the fire like sunshine in our latitude, is a genial
creative power which fosters the growth of plants and the
development of all that makes for health and happiness; on the other
view, the fire is a fierce destructive power which blasts and consumes
all the noxious elements, whether spiritual or material, that menace the
life of men, of animals, and of plants. According to the one theory, the
fire is stimulant, according to the other it is a disinfectant; on the one
view its virtue is positive, on the other it is negative. (841)
Frazer tells about the fire festival in various cultures and states his assumption that the
fires kindled at these festivals were primarily intended to imitate the sun’s light and heat
as regard to the purificatory and disinfecting qualities of the sunshine (841). Having lost
its ritualistic meaning, fire turns to a symbol of lust and, something to be avoided.
As a conclusion, Eliot, through the allusions from the representatives of the western and
eastern aestheticism, underlines the spiritual barrenness of the early twentieth-century
Europe, and suggests a final peace that can be found in the man’s withdrawal from the
world of sensual desire, which is symbolized by the image of fire in this section of The
Waste Land. In other words, “The Fire Sermon” suggests that spiritual barrenness can
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be cured only in the spirit. The absence in the spiritual world of the modern man should
be filled.
The next part in The Waste Land, “Death by Water” is a close adaptation of the last
seven lines of a French poem by Eliot, Dans le Restaurant, written in May-June 1918;
that is, four years earlier than The Waste Land:
Phlébas, le Phénicien, pendant quinze jours noyé,
Oubliait les cris des mouettes et la houle de Cornouaille,
Et les profits et les pertes, et la cargaison d'etain:
Un courant de sous-mer l'emporta tres loin,
Le repassant aux étapes de sa vie antérieure.
Figurez-vous donc, c'etait un sort penible;
Cependant, ce fut jadis un bel homme, de haute taille.
(Dans le Restaurant 25-31)
[Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight drowned, forgot the cry of
gulls and the swell of the Cornish seas, and the profit and the
loss, and the cargo of tin. An undersea current carried him far,
took him back through the ages of his past. Imagine it –a terrible
end for a man once so handsome and tall.] (qtd. in Schwarz 182)
“Death by Water,” which is the shortest section of The Waste Land, is dominated by the
image of water and its connotations. In contrast to the water symbols in “Death by
Water,” “The Fire Sermon” is dominated by the symbolism of fire. In this respect, it
provides a sharp contrast with “The Fire Sermon” preceding “Death by Water.”
The title of the section carries clear implications for the fertility rituals that Frazer
mentions in many parts of The Golden Bough. In ancient cultures, water was believed to
be a symbol of life. Effigies of certain vegetation gods were cast into the water with the
hope that they would absorb the life forces therein and return in the following spring in
the guise of general fertility over the land (Frazer 130). Moreover, Weston states, in
From Ritual to Romance, that each year in Alexandria, an effigy of the head of the god
was thrown into the sea as a symbol of the death of the powers of nature. The head was
carried by the current to Byblos. It was then revived and worshipped as a symbol of the
god reborn (164-174). Schwarz states that Phlebas is a grecification of the Latin,
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“flebas,” the third person indicative of “flebere;” to weep or lament (199). This creates
an association between Phlebas, the Phoenician, and the weeping women of Attis cult
over the death of their vegetation god in order to bring fertility over their country. So, in
this respect, Phlebas’ death by water can be read as a sacrifice.
Water was also believed to be purificatory (Schwarz 79). Another powerful tradition of
a life-bringing death through water is contained in Christian sacrament of baptism:
“Know ye not that so many of us were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his
death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death” (Romans vi, 3-4). In
Christianity, it is believed that Jesus Christ sacrificed himself for the sins of mankind.
As Kearns suggests,
coming just after the suggested need for purification of the ego in the
refining fire at the end of Part III [the Fire Sermon], this death may be
read as the poem’s essential preparation for the peace and unity of Part
V… Just so, Phlebas suggests the possibility of holding with equal
mind the “profit and loss”. (210-11)
In addition to being a symbol of sacrifice, the drowned Phoenician sailor in “Death by
Water” contributes to the poem’s recurring sign of metamorphosis. As Mayer states, the
drowned Phoenician sailor Phlebas both represents those who live by the cult of the
vegetation god, and symbolizes those who by the waters of death turn from this world’s
life (274). Thus, he is both a symbol of life regained through death and of life ended in
death. On the other hand, during his decomposition in the whirlpool, Phlebas lives an
experience of passing the stages of age and youth. As Mayer further states, this
experience is a kind of Buddhist detachment from the worldly things and thus, a kind of
purification (275). In this respect, Phlebas’ death, just like Ariel’s song implies in “The
Fire Sermon,” can be interpreted as a kind of transformation, not an end.
On the other hand, the title of “Death by Water” can be associated with Madame
Sosostris’s warning of “fear death by water” during her Tarot reading in “The Burial of
the Dead” (The Waste Land 55). The warning symbolizes contemporary spiritual
blindness since, in ancient cults, this form of death is a prelude to resurrection and the
renewal of the fertility of the land. However, these myths are no longer functional and
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powerful in the early twentieth-century; in other words, the images of drowning are
devalued in the modern world (Coote 43). Thus, “Death by Water” can be interpreted as
a reminder of the resurrected fertility god after drowned in the Nile. Yet, as Hay notes,
since the mythical mind of the past has vanished, as a sacrificial death, drowning cannot
bring the desired results (199). Considering Weston’s claim that the Grail mysteries
were carried to Europe by the merchant sailors, death of Phlebas, who is a Phoenician
sailor, symbolically disinherits modern man. In other words, as Smith notes, “Phlebas
dies in the capacity of a Syrian merchant, carrying, according to Jessie L. Weston’s
theory, the Grail mystery to Britain” (134). Thus, the modern world remains unaware of
the mysteries of life that will carry out its spiritual rebirth.
“Death by Water” ends with the idea of a peaceful surrender to death. Thus, the end of
the end of “Death by Water” creates a contrast with the end of “The Fire Sermo.” In this
respect, Death by Water can be interpreted as a relief from the previous section’s, “The
Fire Sermon”s, anxiety of rebirth. Yet, neither the ending with burning nor with a death
by water is the last word of The Waste Land (Davidson 77).
“What the Thunder Said” is the final section of The Waste Land. Eliot states in The
Notes On The Waste Land that in the first part of “What the Thunder Said” (lines 32294) three themes are employed (1970, 74-5). First, the story told in Luke xxiv, 13-31 of
the two disciples travelling on the road to Emmaus, which is a village some distance
from Jerusalem, on the day of Christ’s resurrection. Christ joins them, but remains
unrecognized until he blesses their evening meal. Meanwhile the disciples talk about the
recent events – the trial, the crucifixion and so on. The second theme is the approach to
the Chapel Perilous. This is the final stage of the Grail quest. The knight is tested by the
illusion of nothingness. This theme is interwoven with the Emmaus story. The third
theme is the decay of Eastern Europe in the modern world.
The section begins with the picture of the killed god and the consequent period of
mourning and infertility before his resurrection. Eliot takes Christ as his representative
deity and alludes to his arrest in the garden of Gethsemane:
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After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
(The Waste Land 322-30)
Christ’s trial just before his crucifixion is juxtaposed with the images of spiritual death.
The barren, mountainous world with its waterless landscape of rock and sand is similar
to the deserts of the Old Testament:
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
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
(The Waste Land 331-40)
The opening of “What the Thunder Said,” “After the torchlight red on sweaty faces /
After the frosty silence in the gardens” (322-23) illustrates the moment of Judas’
betrayal to Christ. When Judas brings the Roman soldiers to the garden at Cedron where
Christ comes with his disciples after the prayer:
When Jesus had spoken these words, he went forth with his disciples
over the brook Cedron, where was a garden, into which he entered,
and his disciples. And Judas also, which betrayed him, knew the
place: for Jesus ofttimes resorted thither with his disciples. Judas then,
having received a band of men and officers from the chief priests and
Pharisees, cometh thither with lanterns and torches and weapons.
(John 18:1-3)
On the other hand, as Vickery states in The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough, this
passage can be interpreted in Frazer’s mythological context (73-74). Relying on
Frazer’s description of a pagan festival, which includes references to boating parties on
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the river, their licentious conduct, watery rites of purification and baptism, “the
torchlight red on sweaty faces” (The Waste Land 322) can be associated with the
participants to the ancient fire ceremonies in the great Midsummer festival, which
Frazer calls “a festival of lovers and fire” (161). According to Frazer, the three great
features of the Midsummer celebration are “the bonfires, the procession with torches
around the fields, and the custom of rolling a wheel into water” (161). The same
symbolism is found in the Christian celebration of St. John’s Day for which, as Frazer
notes, “this day will have three persons; one must perish in the air, one in the fire, and
third in the water” (27). Similarly, as Vickery states, the crucifixion can be interpreted
as a death in the air (74), and thus, has a ritualistic nature.
Considering the royal festivities on the river and the consuming fires of St. Augustine
and Buddha, the Midsummer festival has parallels with “What the Thunder Said.”
However, instead of the fertilizing rain expected at the end of the festival, the sound of a
“dry sterile thunder without rain” (The Waste Land 341) is the only voice heard in the
silence atmosphere of “What the Thunder Said.” As Schwarz states, “the thunder of
spring over distant mountains” (The Waste Land 327) can be interpreted as a sign of the
vegetation myths, of the approaching rebirth of the parched dead land through the lifegiving rain (210). Thus, he who “is now dead” (The Waste Land 328) is not Christ
alone, but the slain vegetation god; he is Adonis, Osiris, Attis (Schwarz 211). On the
other hand, the following line “We who were living are now dying” (The Waste Land
329) connects the past to the present and express the drying lives of the early twentiethcentury postwar Europeans. Thus, the image of thunder, which is normally heralding the
approaching rain, and fertility, is here described as “dry” and “sterile.” On the other
hand, as Schwarz states, thunder is usually associated with the voice of God in his
fearful aspect (210-11). Thus, this description can be interpreted as the lack of God’s
grace and the promise of salvation in the modern Europe (Schwarz 211). This means the
continuation of the lack of faith in modern world, and thus, the continuation of the need
for order in the spiritual worlds of the early twentieth-century individuals.
On the other hand, thunder and storm can be interpreted as the approaching
enlightenment, since in many versions of the Grail legend, the quester meets a storm
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before reaching the Chapel Perilous, where he is supposed to achieve the knowledge of
the Grail. During his visit to the Chapel Perilous, the knight sees the vision of the black
hand that puts out the altar light, and escapes (Weston 175-6). The black hand can be
interpreted as the lack of redemption (Schwarz 207). In other words, although the
essential sacrifice has been made and the ritualistic acts are performed, the redeeming
vision has not been attained in The Waste Land. There is still an explicit desire for water
to relieve the sterility of The Waste Land and there seems to be no way to create water:
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
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
(The Waste Land 346-59)
As Schwarz notes, “the cicada” that Eliot alludes to (The Waste Land 354) is also
known as the harvest-fly, since it appears in the late summer and early autumn which
are the harvest seasons (209-10). Moreover, the cicada is often used as a religious
symbol in the East (Schwarz 210). Thus, it can be argued that Eliot uses cicada in The
Waste Land to suggest a contrast between the notion of harvest and the barrenness in the
modern world (210). Moreover, longing for water appears in the hallucinated sounds of
dripping: “Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop” (The Waste Land 358). The
onomatopoeic echo of water may function as an attempt to create water, or rain through
the sympathetic magic; that is, imitating it in order to create the effect of what is
imitated (Frazer 48-49). Yet, there is neither water nor any sign of rain.
At this point, Eliot makes a reference to Jesus Christ, who can be considered as another
dying and reviving god, on the disciples’ journey to Emmaus:
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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
Gliding 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?
(The Waste Land 360-66)
The scene is told in Luke as follows:
And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called
Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs. And
they talked together of all these things which had happened. And it
came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus
himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holden
that they should not know him. (24:13-15)
As Coote states, the re-appearance of the resurrected Christ can be interpreted as the
return of the god and, thus, the possibility of redemption for the lost fertility in The
Waste Land (45).
Drawing an analogy between the past and the present, Eliot compares the First World
War and the spiritual decline of Europe with the Crucifixion and its aftermath. Thus, the
sounds “high in the air” (The Waste Land 367) suggest war planes that drop bombs that
flash light, “bursts in the violet air” (The Waste Land 373), and falling the towers of
Jerusalem, Athens Alexandria, Vienna, and London (The Waste Land 375-76). The war
is out of time and space boundaries; thus, all cities are one city, and all are “unreal”
(Schwarz 218). These sounds mix with the “Murmur of maternal lamentation” (The
Waste Land 368); that is, both the lamentations of mothers for their dying children, the
weeping of Mary for crucified Jesus, and the cries of women for the vegetation gods
Tammuz, Osiris, and Attis (Schwarz 217). The image of a woman drawing “her long
black hair out tight” (The Waste Land 368) can be associated with “the lamenting
women” (The Waste Land 368), and thus, with the lamenting women behind the dead
fertility god. It can be stated that hair is both a symbol of fertility and an object of
sacrifice to the fertility gods. In The Golden Bough, Frazer states some practises related
to hair which are performed with the hope of fertility:
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In the interior of Sumatra rice is sown by women who, in sowing, let
their hair hang lose down their back, in order that the rice may grow
luxuriantly and have long stalks. Similarly, in ancient Mexico a
festival was held in honour of the goddess of maize or “the longhaired mother,” as she was called. It began at the time when the plant
had attained its full growth, and fibres shooting forth from the top of
the green ear indicated that the grain was fully formed. During this
festival the women wore their long hair unbound, shaking and tossing
it in the dances which were the chief feature in the ceremonial, in
order that the tassel of the maize might grow in like profusion, that the
grain might have correspondingly large and flat, and that the people
might have abundance. (36)
Frazer further identifies an interesting primitive practise determining the connection
between hair cutting and the expectation of rain:
Amongst the Maoris many spells were uttered at hair-cutting; one, for
example, was spoken to consecrate the obsidian knife with which the
hair was cut; another was pronounced to avoid the thunder and
lightning which hair-cutting was believed to cause… The person who
cuts the hair is also tabooed; his hands having been in contact with a
sacred head, he may not touch food with them or engage in any other
employment; he is fed by another person with food cooked over a
sacred fire, He cannot be released from the taboo before the following
day. (307)
The allusions to fertility and lack of fertility are deliberately mixed by Eliot in this part
of “What the Thunder Said.” By this way, the possibility of redemption for the modern
man becomes an ambiguous matter. Eliot suggests that myths and allusions to fertility
symbols present what lacks culturally in the modern world as well as they present
exemplary illustrations of how the same absence is filled by people from other ages and
places. These allusions can be functional, if only the modern man revive his interest in
these allusions from the forgotten past.
The allusion to the Perilous Chapel, which is considered as the end of the Knight’s
quest of the Grail, in a way, foreshadows the end of modern man’s spiritual quest as
well as the closing end of The Waste Land:
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And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells
(The Waste Land 383-85)
As Schwarz states, tower and bells can be interpreted as a kind of proclamation of faith,
which is lacking in the twentieth-century Europe (222). Considering that Weston’s
From Ritual to Romance argues the medieval tales as the direct descendants of the
fertility cults analysed by Frazer. From this point of view, the quest which is set out for
the restoration of the Fisher King’s health and potency, and by this way, restoration of
his land’s fertility is combined with the quest of significance in life which can also be
taken as a path to follow and move on. Thus, the knight questing for the Holy Grail
turns to a seeker of truth. Truth can also be interpreted as a kind of religious, or spiritual
enlightenment. Yet, neither aim is achieved in the end, the quester finds the chapel
empty:
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
(The Waste Land 386-89)
The chapel is now only the wind’s home. Since the traditions are dead, the seeker finds
nothing to revive his dead life. The only thing in the chapel is a cock on its roof (The
Waste Land 392). The cock in the traditional symbolism stands for the herald of dawn
(Schwarz 225). In Biblical symbolism, on the other hand, the cock is the symbol of the
resurrected Christ (Mayer 215). So, as Mayer states, “the flash of lightning” (The Waste
Land 394) that follows can be interpreted as a flash of revelation for the protagonist
(275). In this respect, as Weston notes, the Chapel can be interpreted as an initiation
ritual; that is, a kind of final exam just before the revelation of a higher truth (182). This
truth which can be achieved after the initiation in the chapel can have double layers; on
the lower layer, it is a gate into the mysteries of generation, on the higher level, into the
spiritual divine life (Weston 182). As Mayer states, these lower and higher levels of
initiation that Weston has introduced can be applied to the Hindu fable quoted by Eliot.
The voice of thunder saying simply “Da,” on the lower layer, a noise, an appearance,
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but on the higher level, a sound, a sound to be carefully interpreted (276). The hearers ,
who are gods, humans, demons, interpret it in their own way: “Datta” [Give],
“Dayadhvam” [Sympathize], and “Damyata” [Control].
Eliot explains in The Notes On The Waste Land (1970, 75) the source of the Hindu fable
as being the Indian legend of Thunder in the sacred book Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad.
According to the story, three groups: gods, men, demons approach the creator Prajapati
and each in turn asks him to speak. To each group, he answers “Da.” Each group
interprets this reply differently: the gods understand it “Damyata;” control yourselves,
the men as “Datta;” Give alms, the demons as “Dayadhvam;” be compassionate (v, 2).
However, as Schwarz argues, Frazer may be another alternative for the inspiration of
Eliot’s allusion to the thunder (226) Frazer suggests that unlike Prajapati, the speaker is
Indra, Hindu god of thunder:
It has been plausibly interpreted as a description of the bursting of the
first storms of rain and thunder after the torrid heat of an Indian
summer. At such times all nature exhausted by the drought, longs for
coolness and moisture… The cloud-dragon has swallowed the waters
and keeps them shut up in the black coils of his sinuous body; the god
cleaves the monster’s belly with his thunder-bolt, and the imprisoned
waters escape, in the form of dripping rain and rushing stream (Frazer
107).
Eliot adds here the description of Ganga, which is the Hindu name for the Ganges
River. The Ganga, too, is waiting for the rain:
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
(The Waste Land 396-99)
The Ganges River is the most sacred river in India, and also, since the ashes of the burnt
dead are cast into its waters, it is thought to have healing powers (Schwarz 227). Even a
sacred river which has healing powers is in need of rain as the remedy for physical and
spiritual sterility of mankind. In a way, the world waiting for relief that the thunder will
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bring, is symbolically illustrated through he three groups of creatures –gods, men,
demons- waiting for answers that the Thunder will give them.
Through the illustration of the modern quester, who is setting on a shore and fishing
with the dry plain behind him and at the same time thinking whether he shall at least set
his land in order, the fisher king myth and the fertility rituals are combined. The Grail
quester completes his journey which is set in order to bring fertility to the land by
finding the cure for the Fisher King as well as in order to achieve the Grail as the source
of the knowledge of life. Campbell best summarizes the meaning of the title of The
Waste Land’s last section, “What the Thunder Said:”
The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and
release again of the flow of life into the body of the world. The
miracle of this flow may be represented in physical terms as a
circulation of food substance, dynamically as a streaming of energy or
spiritually as a manifestation of grace. An abundant harvest is the sign
of God’s grace; God’s grace is the food of the soul; the lightning bolt
is the harbinger of fertilizing rain, and at the same time the
manifestation of the released energy of God. Grace, food, substance,
energy: these pour into the living world, and wherever they fail, life
decomposes into death. (1949, 40).
The adventure of the hero-quester ends on a shore, but whether the quest is successful or
not is left open-ended. Although the quest and the necessary rituals are completed, there
is still no sign of rain at the end of The Waste Land. It seems to be the quest ended
unsuccessfully, since it brought no promise of fertility. However, as Campbell argues,
the two; the hero and his ultimate god, or the seeker and the found, are thus, understood
“as the outside and inside of a single self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the
mystery of the manifest world. The great deed of the supreme hero is to come to the
knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and, then to make it known” (1949, 39-40). As
Campbell further states, the hero himself is the symbol of divine creative and
redemptive image “which is hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and
rendered into life” (1949, 39). From this point of view, the modern quester’s adventure,
his ritual act can be considered as being completed successfully, only when of the real
meaning of his ritualistic journey throughout The Waste Land was understood. Only
when the time of the modern man’s spiritual enlightenment is achieved, the curse of
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sterility over Europe will be broken. Thus, ironically, “What the Thunder Said” ends in
an ironic silence: “Shantih shantih shantih” (The Waste Land 434).
To conclude, each section of The Waste Land describes a different aspect of the
fragmentary, disordered and sterile life in the early twentieth century postwar Europe.
Through allusions both from the past and the present, Eliot relates these problematic
aspects of the modern life to the storyline of the central myth of The Waste Land, that is
the Fisher King myth, as well as to the ritualistic practises of the fertility cults. By this
way, as “the mythical method” requires, Eliot creates a contrasting parallelism between
contemporary and ancient ages. Eliot presents the cultural and spiritual sterility of his
age, ironically, through symbols and images of fertility. Thus, he believes, reminding
the forgotten traditions and cultural values to the modern man and driving him to try to
understand the deeper meanings and hidden messages under these primitive practises
can be an antidote for the spiritual dryness in the modern world. Although Eliot mostly
emphasizes the absence or disfunction of fertility symbols in the early twentieth-century
postwar Europe, he is hopeful for the future. In The Waste Land, he suggests that the
sick Fisher King can be healed and his waste land can be revitalized.
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CONCLUSION
In the chaotic postwar atmosphere of the First World War, the early twentieth-century
European man was in search of a remedy for his loss of traditional values and an
element of unity for his shattered perception of reality. The ideas, principles and
traditions upon which the Western civilization was based had gone through a series of
rapid changes after the war. Since the change shattered the norms without providing any
replacement, this rapid change in the spiritual sphere turned out to be a kind of erosion
in cultural values and traditions. This situation manifested itself in the social life as
chaos, disillusionment, instability, uncertainty, pessimism, and hopelessness felt
commonly in the first decade of the twentieth-century Europe.
Inevitably, the change in realities in life created a parallel change in the reactions to and
expressions of these social realities. With the lack of a certain, unifying principle,
modern man started to search for values to fill the emptiness in their inner worlds.
Especially the introduction of new fields of study like anthropology, psychoanalysis,
ethnology in the nineteenth century, people had a chance to attain new knowledge and
new points of view. These developments in social sciences provided them new
approaches to the contemporary social realities. The change in the perception of reality
found its reflection in the literary field, too. In this atmosphere, the modernist
movement in poetry began to take shape with the aim of finding new forms of
expression.
T. S. Eliot is considered to be one of the most important figures in modernist poetry.
Eliot, taking his material of art from the real life, reflected the contemporary chaotic
atmosphere of his age in his postwar poem The Waste Land. In The Waste Land, Eliot
presents the reader many fragments, which are pictures and sounds of the contemporary
life and juxtaposes them with allusions from the antique or classical texts. In fact, the
fragmentary, complex and chaotic structure of The Waste Land is the reflection of the
real life. Early twentieth-century postwar Europe is fragmentary, disordered and
chaotic, too. As the unifying and ordering principle for the fragmented and disordered
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structural pattern of The Waste Land, Eliot turns to myths and legends. By turning to
past traditions and especially to myths, Eliot emphasizes the erosion in traditions and
cultural values, which he believes to be the missing factor in the modern man’s spiritual
life.
Eliot believed in the importance of myth in the early twentieth-century poswar Europe,
in which the modern man has lost all his bonds with nature and with god. Considering
myths as the forms of expression with their own logic revealing the process of thought
and feeling that describes man’s awareness of the universe, his fears and desires, his
relations with others, and the happenings around him as well as in his inner world
(Carpentier 80), as well as of ways of expressing personal anxieties or helplessness in
the face of a social problem (Feder 167), and their quality as providing concrete
examples to be followed on certain instances, and since they present meaningful
expressions (Eliade 2001, 9), Eliot
believed in the fact that myths could provide
modern man a tie with the missing factor in their spiritual life. Thus, myths could bring
order to the chaotic modern life.
By setting the structural pattern of The Waste Land upon myths, especially upon the
Fisher King myth, Eliot does not directly tell the myths, but alludes to them. These
mythical allusions are presented the reader through certain phrases sprinkled throughout
The Waste Land. So, the central myth can be followed throughout the poem. In this
respect, it functions as a unifying element in the fragmented structure of the poem. Eliot
arranges these mythical elements deliberately to form a specific method; that is, “the
mythical method.” Eliot described “the mythical method” in his essay “Ulysses, Order
and Myth” as being “simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and
significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary
history” (1975, 177). This method provided Eliot a means to express the fragmented
reality of his age, to present the modern fragmented culture and the chaotic atmosphere
of postwar Europe, as well as to unify the fragmented structure of The Waste Land.
Thus, the waste land image, he barrowed from Weston’s From Ritual to Romance,
when combined with the story of the sick king and sterile land, provided Eliot a
concrete metaphor and an imaginative way of speaking of the condition of the modern
107
man. Within the framework of the waste land image, Eliot combined the fisher king
myth with the fertility rituals and the myth of the dying and the reviving god that the
anthropologist Frazer deeply analyzed in The Golden Bough.
Eliot chose images and symbols mainly from these two works: From Ritual to Romance
and The Golden Bough. He supported them with other fertility symbols and stories of
regeneration from ancient sources, and sprinkled them throughout The Waste Land. As
the mythical method requires, Eliot does not tell mythical stories in The Waste Land,
but just alludes to them. However, Eliot’s allusions to myths are in a fragmentary
structure, too. They need a frame or skeleton to unify them, or put them in order. The
fisher king myth, which is an ancient fertility myth presenting the impotent king as the
embodiment of his country and the cause of the sterility in his land also provided the
background myth in The Waste Land, and the fisher king myth allusions which can be
traced throughout the poem provided the structural and thematic unity of The Waste
Land. Alluding to the fisher king myth and the dying and reviving fertility gods, Eliot
presents the barrenness and dryness of modern civilization, the sterility of modern
society and the futility of man’s search for meaning in his personal life, and the need for
refreshment which is longed for but has been achieved. Moreover, he makes the people
of his age be aware of the possibility of a spiritual rebirth as well as the possibility of
ordering their chaotic lives, re-forming their shattered perception of contemporary
reality. In this respect, search for order and search for significance in life can be taken
as closely related issues in The Waste Land.
The fisher king myth shows a parallelism with the figuratively naturalistic description
of the modern, urban world, which is a dry, sterile land, and the fictional waste land in
the mythical story. Thus, the mythic structure of The Waste Land, which is based on the
fisher king myth, is crucial in revealing the possibility of redemption and re-formation
in the early twentieth-century postwar European atmosphere. The curse of sterility on
the Fisher King’s land can be lifted, if a hero comes and undergoes certain trials in order
to find the wounded ruler and ask him some ritualistic questions. Similarly, the same
hope is preserved for the individual –modern or ancient- to re-set the balance between
his physical and spiritual worlds which once were somehow destroyed or needed to be
108
repaired. Modern man’s fears and anxieties derive from causes which are different from
those of the ancient man. Yet, the signs of these fears and anxieties and the
psychological reactions to them are similar in all ages. Thus, the consequences of fear in
the face of uncertainties are similar: chaos and disorder. Myths and rituals perform the
function of preserving social order and providing explanations to the inexplicable
phenomena in daily life. However, in the twentieth-century myths and rituals have lost
their meanings. This means a disbelief in the possibility of rebirth. If the underlying
meaning of myths can be perceived by the modern man, they can be functional once
more. Thus, almost all allusions of Eliot in The Waste Land are two-edged: as
emphasizing the death of cultural values, which make postwar Europe spiritually sterile,
they also imply the possibility or hope of rebirth. In this respect, the Fisher King myth
can be interpreted as a metaphorical sacrifice for the sake of a community, and the quest
of the Grail knight as a spiritual quest done for this purpose as an antidote for the
sterility of the modern man, and the dead of the vegetation gods can be taken as the
metaphorical ends for new, fresh beginnings. So, myths, when their underlying message
is received, can function as means capable of holding spiritually shattered Western
civilization together and re-forming the deformed perception of reality in the twentiethcentury postwar Europe.
Thus, it is possible to conclude that, in The Waste Land, Eliot presents the postwar
panorama of Europe in the first decade of the twentieth-century as sterile, disillusioned,
pessimistic, chaotic and in need of re-form. He uses myths and legends as unifying
principles to impose order on the chaos and disintegration he perceives in the modern
world; in other words, he uses the myths to re-form the reality which has started to
shatter after the First World War, and the Fisher King myth supported with the allusions
to the ancient dying and reviving fertility gods provides Eliot the central symbol of
revitalization for postwar waste lands of Europe.
109
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ÖZGEÇMĐŞ
Kişisel Bilgiler
Adı Soyadı
: Fatma Aykanat
Doğum Yeri ve Tarihi
: Kurşunlu/Çankırı 27.04.1981
Eğitim Durumu
Lisans Öğrenimi
: Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üni. Edebiyat Fak. Đng. Dili ve
Ed. Böl.
Yüksek Lisans Öğrenimi
: Hacettepe Üni. Edebiyat Fak. Đng. Dili ve Ed. Böl.
Bildiği Yabancı Diller
: Đngilizce (KPDS 96), Almanca (ÜDS 80)
Bilimsel Faaliyetleri
: -------
Đş Deneyimi
Stajlar
:Đngilizce Öğretmenliği Stajı – Çanakkale Cumhuriyet
Đlköğretim Okulu (2003)
Projeler
: -------
Çalıştığı Kurumlar
:Çankırı Atkaracalar Çardaklı Yatılı Đlköğretim Bölge
Okulu Đngilizce Öğretmenliği (2003-….)
Đletişim
E-posta Adresi
Tarih
12. 09. 2007
:harmonia_2001@hotmail.com