Madame SosostrisMadame Sosostris The name Madame Sosostris is reminiscent of Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana, from Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow, which was published in late 1921 while Eliot was working on The Waste Land. In Huxley’s novel, Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana is the moniker Mr. Scogan uses when he masquerades as a woman who tells fortunes at a fair. This cross-dressing gender play foreshadows the sexual ambiguity of the Tiresias figure, who appears later in the poem and whom some scholars take as its central consciousness. Madame Sosostris’s clairvoyance, even if she is merely a charlatan seer, further solidifies her connection to Tiresias and to the Cumaean Sibyl in the poem’s epigraph (taken from Petronius’s Satyricon)., famous clairvoyante,
The involvement of the fortune teller reflects the desperation of the modern era. People nowadays have lost faith in traditional religion so they have the urge to turn to a cheap spirituality and superstitions to find answers. It shows how low society now has fallen, like seeking guidance from a woman with so called "wicked pack with cards" instead of true wisdom of religion.