recourse to sorcery

Inferno Canto XX, The Waste Land, Tiresias, seers, clairvoyants

Johann Ulrich Kraus: engraving from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. 1690. Tiresias striking two snakes with a stick, gets transformed into a woman by the goddess Hera.

Madame Sosostris is a clairvoyant with a bad cold though “known to be the wisest woman in Europe.” She appears with her “wicked pack of cards” in the first section of Eliot’s The Waste Land and deal…