TAROT AND T.S. ELIOT IN STEPHEN KING'S DARK TOWER NOVELS. (2024)

Authors create myrtopoeic novels by developing a new orpre-existing mythology or fairytale. This development is not aboutstatic references to Arthur, Merlin, and Excalibur; it is about usingthe generative potential of such characters and elements in atransformative way as the primary substance of a narrative. Arthurianais among the favored inspirations for contemporary mythopoeia, oftendeveloped by way of the conventions of such popular genres as fantasy,gothic, science fiction, and western. In such novels, cartomancers andTarot cards (1) sometimes supplement or replace classical prophets andoracles. King Arthur and Merlin are among the many recognizable modelsfor characters in mythopoeia and the plight of the Fisher King is amongthe favored plots, sometimes reinvented by way of references to T.S.Eliot's (1888-1965) "The Waste Land" (1922). (2) StephenKing incorporates all of these elements in his mythopoeic Dark Towerseries: Arthuriana, the conventions of popular genres, acartomancer--albeit a villainous one--and Tarot, as well as themes morespecific to Eliot's poem, such as the linking of Tarot with theloss of memory. (3)

Eliot undoubtedly used the Rider-Waite Tarot (Waitinas 370-72,375), created by Golden Dawn initiate Arthur E. Waite and artist PamelaColman Smith and published in England in 1909, as the basis for hispoetic elaborations, and developed the fragments that make up his workfrom a wide range of literary sources. King too may have been familiarwith the Rider-Waite deck, as it was certainly available in 1970 when hebegan work on The Gunslinger. The earliest extant Tarot decks of thefifteenth century consist of four or more suits plus a set of trumpcards. While the earliest decks were unique, each being painted for aspecific aristocratic patron, cheap printed decks soon became available.What is now marketed as the "Marseilles" Tarot--the Grimaudedition is something of a modern classic--is not one deck but rather atype of deck characterized by a set of conventional card designs, withmany variations, that originated with these early printed decks.Following the publication of the Rider-Waite Tarot (with twenty-twotrumps and four suits--wands, cups, swords, and pentacles--of fourteencards each) and guidebook, Tarot become an increasingly popular fortune-or future-telling tool for both professionals and amateurs and began tomake regular, if not frequent, appearances as such in fiction and film.

Fictional cartomancy scenes tend to emphasize the trumps, and theDark Tower series (4) is no exception, but King also hints at anassociation between his Tarot and the suits of the deck used in the sameseries for playing a game called Watch Me (DTI 34; DTIV 17, 72, 171,563; DTV 559; DTVI 17), evidently a kind of poker with multi-handed,two-handed (DTIV 408), solitaire (DTVII 336), computer enabled (DTIII366), and chip inclusive (DTVI 627) variations. (5) The Watch Me decksuits include hearts, spades (DTI 34), diamonds (DTIV 171), and wands(DTVI 18), rather than the expected clubs. In a line added to therevised edition of The Gunslinger King refers to cups and wands, (6)which not only converts the suit hitherto called hearts into the cupsnow familiar in North America primarily as a Tarot suit, it alsoreinforces the existence of wands--also familiar today primarily for itsTarot association--as a Watch Me deck suit. Wands are also mentioned ina game in which the winner "had built Wands, the high run, and thecard on top was Madame Death" (DTVI 18). (7) As "the highrun," wands have more power or status than the other suits. (8) Theominous appearance of the Death card is an effective, if also familiar,trope associated with Tarot and, as this paper shows, with Roland. Theidentification of the card as female, however, seems to disassociate itfrom Roland and the Dark Tower divination deck, and generally makes theconnection between the Dark Tower Tarot and the Dark Tower Watch Me decksomewhat ambiguous.

Some of King's images and card descriptions suggest afamiliarity with Tarot decks other than the Rider-Waite, including theMarseilles deck or one of its variants, although commentators tend toemphasize his literary sources. King himself pays direct homage to bothEliot and Robert Browning, notably Browning's "Childe Rolandto the Dark Tower Came" (1855), in several of the Dark Towernovels, and there is no doubt of his admiration for Tolkien's Lordof the Rings. King does regard certain story elements as archetypes thatare generically identifiable as Tarot cards, but not necessarily as theconventional Tarot card titles and images. He prefers to write aboutsuch "Tarot" cards as "the Vampire, the Werewolf, and theThing Without a Name" ("Tales of the Tarot" 61), alongwith ghosts (and gunslingers, of course), rather than the classical andmundane contemporary types named and alluded to by Eliot. (9) Readersfamiliar with Tarot, however, whether inclined to recognize literary orvisual citations in King's work, will find it hard not to see itsfamiliar images throughout the series, particularly Death as rendered inat least two well-known decks and the Thoth Tarot Tower, which, with itsintense reds and glowering red eye, could stand as an illustration ofthe Dark Tower itself.

 TAROT IN T.S. ELIOT'S "THE WASTE LAND" [...] you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. (WL ll. 21-31)

"The Waste Land" is widely understood in relation to theFisher King, whose lands will die if he is not healed; indeed, Eliotidentifies the Rider-Waite Tarot 3 of Staves as the Fisher King (WL noteto l. 46). This and other cards are laid by the cartomancer MadameSosostris in Part I "The Burial of the Dead." The other twoprincipal seers in the poem are the Cumaean Sibyl who wishes for deathin the epigraph and the blind Tiresias, a man who lived as a woman formany years, in Part III "The Fire Sermon." (10) Of thesethree, Sosostris's cards are of primary interest here, butattention is given to the other two as they have counterparts in theDark Tower where their prognostications overlap with those of thecartomancer.

The Cumaean Sybil gives an account of her life to Aeneas inOvid's Metamorphosis 14.145-234. When Phoebus Apollo, who soughther affections, offered her whatever she wanted, she asked for as manyyears of life as there were grains of sand in the heap that she gatheredup. Unfortunately, she neglected to ask for youth during this time,estimated by some scholars as being 1,000 years, and was thus doomed tobe diminished by age until nothing remained but her voice. Eliot'sepigraph (WL p. 133), which is taken from Petronius's Satyricon,translates as: "For I actually saw the Sibyl at Cumae with my owneyes dangling in a bottle, and when the children asked her in Greek:'What do you want, Sibyl?' she used to answer: 'I want todie'" (48). Both the Sibyl and Eliot's expression of herdesire in the line "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"(WL 31) have echoes in King's Dark Tower novels.

Eliot provides a note about Tiresias in which he advises readers tolook again to Metamorphosis (3.409-452) for details relevant tounderstanding his poem. Ovid's passage describes an argumentbetween Jupiter and Juno about whether men or women derive more pleasureduring love-making. They regarded Tiresias as a good judge of thequestion because he had lived both as a man and as a woman. After heused his staff to strike two large copulating snakes he spent sevenyears as a woman. When he observed the same snakes going about the samebusiness, he struck them again and was turned back into a man. WhenTiresias agreed with Jupiter, the angry Juno struck him blind. Thedelighted Jupiter offered some compensation for this loss by grantinghim knowledge of the future. (11) In a note, Eliot says that hisTiresias is "a mere spectator and not indeed a character" butthat he

is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all therest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into thePhoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from FerdinandPrince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meetin Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact is the substance of the poem.(WL note to l. 218, p.148)

The Rider-Waite-linked Tarot cards from Madame Sosostris'soft-quoted reading that are most relevant to the discussion ofKing's Dark Tower novels are the "Phoenician Sailor,"probably based on Death or the 10 of Swords; "Belladonna, the Ladyof the Rocks, The lady of situations," thought to be the Queen ofCups (and perhaps also the Da Vinci painting "Virgin of theRocks"); the man of three staves or the 3 of Wands--the FisherKing; the Wheel, or the Wheel of Fortune; the Blank card; The HangedMan; and "death by water," which again may be either Death orthe 10 of Swords. Others include the "one-eyed merchant,"undoubtedly the 6 of Pentacles, and "people, walking in aring," which could only be the 10 of Pentacles. (12)

 Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring [...] (WL ll. 43-56)

Eliot refers to characters associated with each of these cardslater in the poem. For example, "Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,/ The lady of situations" seems to be associated with a marblethrone, a Cupidon, and glittering jewels (WL ll. 77 ff), and thus alsowith the Queen of Cups. His notes not only identify the 3 of Staves orWands with the Fisher King, they also link the Hanged Man toFrazer's Hanged God and to "the hooded figure in the passageof the disciples to Emmaus in Part V" (WL note to l. 46, p.147).

 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 [...] (ll. 359-363)

This "hooded figure" further suggests the Rider-Waite 6of Swords or the Hermit. The predicted death of the Phoenician sailor isrecorded in "Part IV Death by Water." (13) He is, as Eliotasserts in a note, associated with the one-eyed merchant who has alreadyforgotten about "the profit and loss" (l. 314) though he hasonly been dead for a fortnight. In this brief section, Eliotsimultaneously invokes Fortuna--"O you who turn the wheel and lookto windward [...]" (l. 320)--and Sosostris's Wheel of FortuneTarot card.

Much of "The Waste Land" is about memory, includingmemories of the dead--as the Phoenician Sailor and the title of thefirst part suggests--and the loss or absence of memory. References tothe loss of memory and to the Tarot reading of Part I are explicit inPart II "A Game of Chess," which includes a dialogue between awoman and an unknown person. The woman asks "Do / you know nothing?Do you see nothing? Do you / remember / Nothing?" (ll. 121-123),and the answer is only "I remember / Those are pearls that were hiseyes (ll. 124-125). The next questions are: "Are you alive, or not?Is there nothing in your head?" (l. 126). The "pearls"line was first spoken by Sosostris (l. 48) about the Phoenician sailor,which in turn suggests that the only thing the interlocutor remembers isdeath.

Further, and more specifically, Eliot's notes link line 126with those about pearls (ll. 48, 125), and an earlier observation aboutreturning late from the Hyacinth garden (l. 37) when the narrator's"eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing[...]" (ll. 39-40), which immediately precedes the introduction ofSosostris (l. 43). As Allyson Booth (2015) observes:

What these three moments have in common is experience that hoversbetween life and death, neither one nor the other, but somewhere inbetween. This half-dead-half-not-quite-dead state is one of thepoem's persistent patterns, troubling many of its characters andinflicted by multiple causes. (Booth 21)

The line itself "Those are pearls that were his eyes"comes from Ariel's song "Full Fathom Five" inShakespeare's The Tempest: "Full fathom five thy father lies;/ Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes;[...]" (1.2.399-402). Notably, Ariel is using the song to try tomake Ferdinand believe that he is the only survivor of a shipwreck andthat his father is dead, when, in fact, he is alive. Eliot made his debtto Ariel explicit in "Dirge," one of the poems he originallyintended to incorporate into "The Waste Land.""Dirge" begins "Full fathom five your Bleistein lies /Under the flatfish and the squids. / Graves' Disease in a deadjew's eyes! / When the crabs have eat the lids. / Lower than thewharf rats dive / [...] Lobsters hourly keep close watch / Hark! Now Ihear them scratch scratch scratch / Those are pearls that were his eyes.See!" (WL pp. 121-23). These lines further suggest the Tarot Mooncard with its crayfish or lobster crawling out of the deep. This cardand others used by Eliot seem to have made an impression on StephenKing, as did the Tarot Tower and perhaps the falling and fallenstructures of "The Waste Land": "London Bridge is fallingdown falling down falling down" (l. 426) and "he Princed'Aquitaine a la tour abolie" [The Prince of Aquitania, histower in ruins] (l. 429). (14)

Stephen King's Dark Tower Novels

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslingerfollowed.

The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to thesky for what might have been parsecs in all directions. White; blinding;waterless; without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of themountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grasswhich brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstonesign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its waythrough the thick crust of alkali had been a highway and coaches hadfollowed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.(DTI 11-12)

Stephen King's Roland Deschain, the Fisher King/gunslingerdescendant of "Arthur of Eld," travels through a world thatshares much of the topography of "The Waste Land." Hisbackstory, which is told by way of personal reminiscences and campfiretales, follows him as he moves from his boyhood at the political-socialcenter of a semi-feudal post-Arthurian-roundtable world to increasinglydistant hinterlands, filled with images and events suggestive offantasy, horror, occult, tech-noir, western, and other genres. TheArthurian elements are underscored when we learn that Roland'smother had an affair (albeit an unwilling one) with a man (who, unlikeLancelot, is a villain) of her husband's court, and thatRoland's guns were made for Arthur of Eld from the metal ofExcalibur (DTVII 608). (15) Roland's Grail is the Tower:"There were such things as rape in the world. Rape and murder andunspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloodygood, for the myth, for the grail, for the Tower" (DTI 111). Hisquest is to see and climb the Tower; in fulfilling this quest, he alsosaves the Tower and, since the Tower is a nexus of all universes, hesaves them from destruction too. Time is flexible in most of theseuniverses, but in the two key worlds--those of Roland and the writerStephen King--time is supposed to travel in only one direction. Kingwrites himself into the series as a kind of twin to Roland, and as themeans by which Roland's tale is told, with the emphasis--at leastat first--on the writer as merely a conduit for recording the workingsof Gan; Gan being a sort of prime mover or creative force. (16) King asauthor can "see" the story as it unfolds and anticipate thetrials his characters will undergo, but Roland is gifted with anextraordinary capacity to physically see into the distance and theminute details of things at hand with great precision. (17)

In Roland's world, beams of power run from the Tower out totwelve points arranged in a circle around it. These points were onceprotected by twelve guardians--an image that suggests the Wheel ofFortune Tarot card, as do the frequent assertions of the power of"ka" or fate over the protagonists. Roland, with the help ofsome unlikely companions, prevents the villains from destroying theTower's beams (or spokes) and thus causing it to fall. Once theTower is safe, the last of his companions leaves him, and he approaches,enters, and climbs it alone. On the long way up, he passes many roomscontaining his memories. At the top, he finds a door with his name onit, opens it, instantly realizes the meaning of what lies on the otherside, makes a futile attempt at resistance, and is grasped by Gan andflung back to the first line of the first novel, The Gunslinger:"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslingerfollowed." His memories of the quest just completed rapidly vanish;(18) but he retains his determination to see and climb the Tower andthis time, unlike the last, he has the Eld horn or Horn of Deschain thathe lost in the long-ago Battle of Jericho Hill. This variation suggeststhat the success of Roland's quest is never certain until it isachieved.

Seeing "in part"

The entire Dark Tower series is filled with signs and portents, allof which serve to emphasize Roland's quest as his destiny, the truepurpose of which is to save the Tower and to then choose to go inside,climb the stairs, and commit himself to saving it all over again. In thefirst novel, The Gunslinger, Roland receives information about thefuture from three seers, all having parallels to those in "TheWaste Land": the sibyl wishing for death becomes a demon in a wall;Madame Sosostris becomes the man in black; and the blind gender-shiftingTiresias becomes a succubus.

Roland encounters the demon at an abandoned desert waystationwhere, suffering from dehydration and heat stroke, he almost shoots theboy Jake before collapsing. Jake had been pushed to his death by aserial killer named Jack Mort (19) and then brought to the waystationthrough a world-linking portal by the man in black, who hopes that Jakewill undermine Roland's resolve to complete his quest. Jake rescuesRoland from death by dehydration and later Roland sets about retrievingfood from a cellar that Jake is too frightened to enter. There, he hearsthe rocks groan, sand pours from the cracks, and the groan becomeslouder: "an abstract noise of ripping pain and dreadfuleffort" (DTI 125). When it stops, he demands the creature'sname, but instead of answering, it offers a warning.

"Go slow," a dragging, clotted voice said from within thewall. And the gunslinger felt the dreamlike terror deepen and growalmost solid. It was the voice of Alice, the woman he had stayed with inthe town of Tull. But she was dead; he had seen her go down himself, abullet hole between her eyes. Fathoms seemed to swim by his eyes,descending. "Go slow past the Drawers, gunslinger. While you travelwith the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in hispocket." (DTI 126) (20)

In warning him about the "drawers," or a specific aspectof the waste lands that lie ahead, the demon is comparable to the Sibyl,whose words warn readers that the fragmented images that follow are notfor the faint-of-heart. Roland then--"the custom was strict,inviolable. The dead from the dead, as the old proverb has it; only acorpse may speak"--punches through the wall and pulls out a rottedjawbone (DTI 126-27). (21) The last sand has trickled through thehourglass of the demon/Sybil's life with its service to the lastgunslinger.

Later in their journey, Roland consults a succubus that comes tohis attention when it threatens Jake (DTI 182-83). In exchange for theopportunity to take advantage of him sexually, the succubus informsRoland that the number of his fate is three, and identifies some of hisfuture companions, while repeating the caution that she can only see"in part"--King, unlike Eliot, writes in fully developed proseand consigns "fragments" to prophetic visions.

"We see in part, and thus is the mirror of prophecydarkened."

Tell me what you can.

The first is young, dark-haired. He stands on the brink of robberyand murder. A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN.[...] "We see in part, and thus is the mirror of prophecydarkened." There are other worlds, gunslinger, and other demons.These waters run deep.

The second?

She comes on wheels. Her mind is iron but her heart and eyes aresoft. I see no more.

The third?

In chains.

The man in black? Where is he?

Near. You will speak with him.

Of what will we speak?

The Tower.

The boy? Jake?

Tell me of the boy!

The boy is your gateway to the man in black. The man in black isyour gate to the three. The three are your way to the Dark Tower. [...](DTI 182-83, italics in original)

Roland asks how Jake might be spared, and is told that to save Jakehe must give up his quest. He thinks this impossible as he is sworn totake revenge on Marten, the man who corrupted his mother and betrayedhis father, but the succubus tells him that Marten is gone, his soulhaving been "eaten" by the man in black. Roland insists hemust continue as he has sworn to do. "Then you are damned"(DTI 184), the creature declares. Changing genders, as Tiresias did, itreturns later in male form to impregnate one of Roland'scompanions, Susannah; this is how Mordred, the shape-shifting boy-spiderfathered by both Roland and the Crimson King who defends the Tower,comes to be born.

After the succubus is finished with Roland, he and Jake continueon.

For Jake, the gateway had been a strange death in another world.For the gunslinger it had been a stranger death yet--the endless huntfor the man in black through a world with neither map nor memory.Cuthbert and the others were gone, all of them gone: Randolph, Jamie deCurry, Aileen, Susan, Marten [...]. Until finally only three remained ofthe old world, three like dreadful cards from a terrible deck of tarotcards: gunslinger, man in black, and the Dark Tower. (DTI 197)

Thus, the remains of the old world include two mythopoeic elementsin familiar forms: "Arthur" in the person of the lastgunslinger and the grail in the form of the Tower. Readers also find aMagician--suggesting the Tarot card--in the man in black, but althoughthey are led to expect him, they "do not find" Merlin. The manin black has been and has possessed many men, including Marten, Walter,and others, and is sometimes called a wizard and sometimes called"Maerlyn," but while in the guise of the Ageless Stranger, heasserts that he is not and was never Merlin. (22) The man inblack's frequent use of priest's robes also aligns him withthe Hermit Tarot card.

Near the end of The Gunslinger, Jake dies a second time when he andRoland are crossing a rotten railway bridge, an image that evokesEliot's falling London Bridge. They are almost across when the manin black deliberately startles them, so that Jake loses his balance anddangles by one hand over the pit: "All chips on the table. Everycard up but one. The boy dangled, a living Tarot card, the hanged man,the Phoenician sailor, innocent lost and barely above the stygiansea" (DTI 280). Roland, who could probably have saved Jake,abandons him to his fate; and then spends an unnaturally prolonged nightwith the man in black, who reads his future in a Tarot deck. (23) Manybooks later, King compares this night with Roland's last beforereaching the Tower, referring to that long ago occasion when the man inblack "read a bleak fortune from an undoubtedly stacked deck"(DTVII 762).

The cartomancer lays seven cards, the first in the middle, fourmarking the corners around it, one over that in the center, and a finalcard that he throws in the fire (DTI 282). Card one is the Hanged Man,whom the man in black says is Roland and that

in conjunction with nothing else, it signifies strength and notdeath. You, gunslinger, are the Hanged Man, plodding ever onward towardyour goal over all the pits of Hades. You have already dropped oneco-traveler into the pit, have you not?" (DTI 178)

King previously associated this card with this veryco-traveler--Jake--whose absence at the time of the reading, like thedisassociation of Merlin from the man in black, again recalls the wordsof Madame Sosostris: "I do not find The Hanged Man."

The second and third, and probably the fourth cards identify thecompanions Roland will draw to his quest through magic portals like theone that brought Jake to him in the desert. The second card is TheSailor which the cartomancer says is the already deceased Jake:

The Sailor. Note the clear brow, the hairless cheeks, the woundedeyes. He drowns, gunslinger, and no one throws out the line. The boyJake." (Gunslinger 280)

These Tarot-based references to Jake as a sailor and the Phoeniciansailor who drowns, point readers to Eliot's Tarot card of a drownedPhoenician sailor. Although the "clear brow" and other facialfeatures are not in evidence in either, the Rider Waite Death and 10 ofSwords both show dead people near water. (24) King treats the Sailor asa unique card that combines elements of the conventional Hanged Man(which is appropriate given the close bond between Roland and Jake),Rider-Waite Death (which also makes sense given how often Jake dies andnearly dies in the series), and the Rider-Waite 10 of Swords (alsosuitable as the card that looks, more than any other, even Death, likeDeath itself and like Death delivered many times over). In the thirdbook in the Dark Tower series, not incidentally titled The Waste Lands,King establishes that the card in the spread does refer to the future,rather than the recent past, as the man in black suggests. However,before readers get to that book, there is card three "ThePrisoner."

The Prisoner card is described as a baboon with a whip riding on ayoung man's shoulder. Shadows make his face "seem to move andwrithe in wordless terror" (DTI 281). "'A trifleupsetting, isn't he?' the man in black said, and seemed on theverge of snigg*ring" (DTI 281). None of the Rider-Waite Tarot cardsfit the description of Eddie exactly, but the Wheel of Fortune is ofteninterpreted as the card of addiction by way of its visual suggestion ofthe idiom "falling off the wagon," (25) and Eddie is, as thesuccubus predicted, addicted to heroin. He is also a talented carver andtranslates one of his dream images into magically empowered form. AfterEddie dies, he is replaced by the artist Patrick Danville who has asimilar talent. Roland does not bring Danville through a magic portal,he and Susannah find him imprisoned by a vampire-like creature thatrepeatedly tortures him so that it can feed off of his emotions (seeDTVII). Thus the "prisoner" label and its associated image areapt, psychologically and literally, to two characters, but only Eddie isaddicted to heroin.

Card four shows

A woman with a shawl over her head sat spinning at a wheel. To thegunslinger's dazed eyes, she appeared to be smiling craftily andsobbing at the same time.

"The Lady of Shadows," the man in black remarked."Does she look two-faced to you, gunslinger? She is. A veritableJanus." (DTI 281) (26)

This is Susannah Dean, a kind of unification of her previouslysplit personalities: Odetta and Detta. Detta appeared after Jack Mort,the same serial killer who pushed Jake to his first death, dropped abrick on Odetta's head when she was a child. As an adult, Odettalost her legs when Mort pushed her under a subway car: she subsequentlyhad to spend much of her time in a wheelchair. After Roland brings herthrough the portal into his world, they move on to the next door, whichis labelled "The Pusher," rather than Death as Roland expects.There Detta escapes to a "shadowy den" (DTII 329) located"nearly a hundred and fifty yards above" (DTII 305) Roland,Eddie, and the door. From this vantage point, she observes and plans hernear-deadly assault on them. Roland, however, orchestrates thereunification of Detta's and Odetta's personalities andshe--Susannah--agrees to join Roland's quest (DTII 386-89).Eventually, she becomes the last survivor of his original humancompanions and the only one to choose to leave him rather than die inthe quest. Susannah's three personalities suggest Eliot'stri-named card. As Belladonna--also the name of a nightshade plant usedto make poison--she suffers two nearly fatal assaults and then becomes adeadly gunslinger. As the Lady of the Rocks, she fiercely resistsRoland's conscription and then becomes steadfast in her commitmentto his quest until she can do no more to further it. Also, she is theone who recognizes Patrick's unique artistic talents, therebyaffirming the notion that the Lady of Shadows is a reinvention of theQueen of Cups. As the lady of situations, Detta keeps secrets fromherself/Odetta and has a way of surfacing when her energy and force arerequired to deal with the situation or circ*mstances at hand.

The fifth card, Death (27)--"A grinning reaper clutched ascythe with bony fingers"--seems to identify another companion, butthe cartomancer says only "Yet not for you" (DTI 282). Rolandquite reasonably associates this card with Jack Mort for a time,although he enters Mort's consciousness through a door labelled"The Pusher," rather than Death. In addition, the Rider-WaiteDeath card shows a drowned man lying above a water bank, and achild--suggesting Jake--and a woman who seems to be missing part of herlegs--suggesting Susannah--nearby: both Jake and Susannah wereMort's victims. Later, Roland comes to think of the Death card ashimself, since his quest seems to cause the deaths of all those heloves.

Death ... but not for you. That was what Walter, clever as Sataneven at the end, had said. A lawyer's answer ... so close to thetruth that the truth was able to hide in his shadow. Death was not forhim, death was become him.

The Prisoner, the Lady.

Death was the third.

He was suddenly filled with the certainty that he himself was thethird. (DTII 318)

The four cards--The Sailor, The Prisoner, The Lady of Shadows, andDeath--reinforce and add to the information provided by the succubus.The succubus's words suggest three companions, evidently Eddie andSusannah, and one who is "in chains" that might be Patrick.The card reading suggests three or four companions: Jake, Eddie (andperhaps Patrick as his replacement), Susannah, and a fourth that mightbe Mort (however unwillingly and briefly he serves the quest) and mightbe the man in black, or might be, as Roland believes, Roland himself.The fourth--Death--may also be linked to Jake (after his resurrection)and the billy bumbler Oy (see below), both of whom die as stand-ins forRoland, doing what needs to be done for the quest when Roland cannot,just as Patrick fulfills a part that Eddie might have played had he notalready died in the quest.

Like the Hanged Man, cards six and seven--the Tower and theSun--describe Roland. The man in black silently places the Towerdirectly over the central Hanged Man. The lines describing the scene anddialogue accompanying the Sun differ somewhat between the first (DTI282-83) and the 2003 edition (DTI 278) of the book. The added lines areinside square brackets.

A sun rose in a luminously blue sky. Cupids and sprites sportedaround it. [Below the sun was a great red field upon which it shone.Roses or blood? The gunslinger could not tell. Perhaps, he thought,it's both.]

"The seventh is Life," the man in black said softly."But not for you."

"Where does it fit in the pattern?"

"That is not for you to know," the man in black said."Or for me to know. [I'm not the great one you seek, Roland. Iam merely his emissary.]" He flipped the card carelessly into thedying fire. It charred, curled and flashed to flame. The gunslinger felthis heart quail and turn icy in his chest. (DTI 282-83)

The cards that are identified by conventional Tarot cardlabels--Hanged Man, Tower, Death, and Sun--sum up Roland's fate tonever die and to live only to find and save the Tower. That there isDeath, but not for Roland, and Life, but not for Roland, returns us toEliot's "The Waste Land" with its descriptions of a stateof being between life and death: when the narrator's "eyesfailed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing [...]"(ll. 39-40).

Beyond the Doors

The man in black tells Roland that all he has to do to continue hisquest is walk another twenty miles to the sea. Then he hypnotizes andputs Roland in a deep sleep while he prepares another trick: he dressessome old bones in his own clothes so that when Roland wakes, it willseem that the night has lasted so long that the man in black has diedand rotted away--this scene may be taken as confirmation that the Deathcard refers to the man in black, or more specifically, the Tarot tropethat the Death card does not really mean death, or at least not rightaway. (28) Roland isn't fooled by the man in black's joke,although readers might be, at least for a time. (29) Even so, muchtime--a favored theme in the series--has passed by the time he wakes bythe dead campfire. He finds "himself ten years older. His blackhair had thinned at the temples and gone the gray of cobwebs at the endof autumn. The lines in his face were deeper, his skin rougher"(DTI 303).

Roland goes to the sea, falls asleep on the beach, and dreams. Hewakens at the beginning of The Drawing of the Three, a book laid out insections identified by King's made-up card titles: The Sailor, ThePrisoner, The Lady of Shadows, and The Pusher [Death], alternating withthe headings: shuffle, reshuffle, and final shuffle, and punctuated withechoes from the prophecies of The Gunslinger. Roland wakes as he isattacked by vicious lobster-like creatures (30) that sever the index andmiddle finger of his right hand (DTII 17)--his shooting hand--and hisright big toe. Although the card is not mentioned, these images andevents powerfully evoke the Tarot Moon card with the creature crawlingout of the sea and the pathway off between distant tower-like gates.They also restate Roland's status as the wounded Fisher King--theMan with 3 staves or the Man with 3 fingers (technically, 2 fingers anda thumb). He survives and starts walking down the beach, where he findsfirst one and then another two-dimensional magic door labelled, like twoof the Tarot cards, "The Prisoner" and "The Lady ofShadows." These doors are the portals that he uses to enter theminds of first Eddie and then Susannah and to bring them back to hisworld, where his consciousness immediately returns to his own body.

Tower imagery plays an important role in Roland's responses toaspects of Eddie's world and to Eddie's subsequent propheticdream imagery. For example, Eddie's boss, Balazar, likes to buildcard towers (DTII 117 and 120) and when Roland, who is hitch-hiking inEddie's mind, sees a neon Tower at Balazar's bar, he thinks itis a sign that they are in the right place (DTII 121), and he thinks thesame when he sees the card tower on Balazar's desk (DTII 127). InThe Waste Lands, Eddie dreams of Balazar in front of a magic shop calledthe House of Cards (DTIII 51). The window display includes a tower builtof Tarot cards with a King Kong model on top sporting a radar dish onits head (DTIII 51-52). That very day, Roland's party is confrontedby one of the former guardians, the gigantic bear Shardik, a roboticcreature spouting a radar dish on its head, running amok as its braindeteriorates.

Roland assumes that he will discover another companion at the thirddoor, but when he finds it labelled "The Pusher," rather than"Death" as he expected, and goes through it, he realizes thathe has piggy-backed into the mind of the serial-killer Mort--the sameman who assaulted Odetta and murdered Jake. Roland uses him for his ownpurposes and kills him; specifically, he kills Mort BEFORE Mort has achance to push Jake to his first death under a car (DTII 386). In thethird book in the series, The Waste Lands, it becomes clear that thisalteration in Jake's life has created a debilitating psychologicalsplit in both Jake's and Roland's minds: one side with, andthe other without, Jake's death. Previously, Jake (or "a"Jake) had been transported at the moment of his death in his own worldto Roland's where he died a second time; but now, with that momentof his first death erased, he, like Roland, is neither dead nor alive.

In The Waste hands "Book One," titled "Jake: Fear ina Handful of Dust," the neither dead nor alive Jake writes a finalessay for school called "My Understanding of the Truth," whichreferences the Tarot cards the man in black drew for Roland and openswith the epigraph "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"attributed to "T.S. 'Butch' Eliot," followed by aline from "Robert 'Sundance' Browning" (DTIII 97).Eliot's line first appears just before the Tarot section in"The Waste Land." Jake mutters the words to himself as heenters the haunted house containing the door by which he will rejoinRoland

A snatch of poetry occurred to him suddenly [...]. It was supposedto be about the plight of modern man, who was cut off from all his rootsand traditions, but to Jake it suddenly seemed that the man who hadwritten that poem must have seen this house: I will show you somethingdifferent from either / Your shadow in the morning striding behind you /Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; /I will show you ...

"I'll show you fear in a handful of dust," Jakemuttered, and put his hand on the doorknob. (DTIII 195)

Both man and boy know they will go completely mad if they do notrejoin each other. Jake follows his intuition and dream cues, and Rolandand his companions, especially Eddie, follow theirs to a portal betweentheir respective worlds. Jake makes his way past the obstacles to theportal, which is a locked door labeled "The Boy" in a hauntedhouse, drops the key (DTIII 201), recovers it, and unlocks the door,only to be confronted by a wall of earth (DTIII 206). While Jakestruggles with the murderous doorkeeper, Eddie draws a door (DTIII 194),including a keyhole and the label "The Boy" (DTIII 202), whichimmediately becomes a real door. His hand-carved key requires someadjusting before it works, just in time for Roland to dive forward anddrag Jake through to safety (DTIII 210-11).31 Later, in the fourth bookof the series, Wizard and Glass, Roland explains how he and Jake werehealed on that occasion: "'We went back to time'spool,' the gunslinger said, 'and pulled him out before hecould drown'" (DTIV 78). The time's pool/drowningmetaphor reaffirms Jake's association with the card of the Sailor,and Roland and his companions thwart the man in black's predictionbecause they do throw out the line and Jake lives.

When Jake is resurrected into Roland's world, he also fulfillsthe Death card's happier prediction that death is not final andthat even dire circ*mstances present opportunities for new beginnings.Thus, two cards in the Tarot reading--both Sailor and Death--may beidentified with Jake, both the Jake killed by Mort, transported by theman in black to undermine Roland's quest, and whom Roland allowedto die; and the Jake that Mort did not kill and whom Roland himself drewinto his world. Jake dies a third time much later in the final book:Roland tries to save Stephen King from a fatal hit-and-run car accidentso that he can finish the Dark Tower books, but his arthritis preventshim from doing so. This arthritis has progressed rapidly, crippling himso badly that it is less and less likely that Roland will complete hisquest as it becomes simultaneously less and less likely that King willever finish writing about it. When Roland's body fails him, it isJake who dives forward and simultaneously dies in the author'splace and cures Roland of his disease. Since Jake died the first timewhen Mort pushed him under a car, it seems his ka has brought him fullcircle, but to an end he chooses and with a more noble purpose.

Soon after Roland and his companions rescue Jake, a billy bumbler,a small animal that behaves something like a dog, joins the quest (DTIII220-22). They name it Oy for its faulty imitation of the word"boy." It bonds closely with Jake and after Jake's deathsaving Stephen King and after Susannah's departure near the end ofthe journey, he dies saving Roland and Patrick from Mordred (DTVII769-70). Roland foresaw this death, as readers learn when he tells thestory of his youth to his companions in The Wizard and Glass, book IV ofthe series. He had come into possession of a magical orb, one of the"thirteen glass balls in [Maerlyn's Rainbow]--one for each ofthe Twelve Guardians, and one representing the nexus-point of theBeams" (DTIV 437). When he dares to look into it he sees, amongmany other things,

an iron chair (to Roland it looks like a torture device) equippedwith wheels, and the boy gunslinger thinks The Lady of Shadows withoutknowing why he thinks it or what it means. [...]

Ahead is a tree like a crooked, clutching hand; on its topmostbranch a billy-bumbler has been impaled. It should be dead, but as thepink storm carries Roland past, it raises its head and looks at him withinexpressible pain and weariness. "Oy" it cries, and then it,too, is gone and not to be remembered for many years. (DTIV 571-72)

Although Oy may not have a card of his own, his last crucial rolein the quest is thus shown following a vision of the wheelchair used byThe Lady of Shadows aka Susannah. Another orb, known as Black 13, entersthe story in the fifth book of the series, Wolves of the Calla. Readerslearn that shortly after Jake and Roland left the waystation together inThe Gunslinger, the man in black used the door there, which is labeled"Unfound," to bring a man named Pere Callahan to the samelocation. He forces Callahan to carry the orb through to another door ina cave near Calla Bryn Sturgis, thinking it to be another way to makesure that Roland dies without completing his quest (DTV 458-65).

In the seventh book, The Dark Tower, when The Lady of Shadows cardappears on an electric cart that Susannah uses to help destroy thecompound where psychics are busily working to destroy the Tower'sradiating beams, Roland knows, and knows correctly, that the man inblack is finally dead (DTVII 250). He was killed by Mordred, who hasbeen following Roland and waiting for an opportunity to murder him.Perhaps not incidentally, the reappearance of the Lady of Shadows cardtakes place at the mountain caves where the group is able to both hideand study the compound occupied by enemies of the Tower that they planto attack and destroy. The scene echoes that shortly after Rolandbrought Odetta into his world when Detta watched from a high den for achance to kill both Eddie and Roland.

Toward the very end of this final volume, Susannah dreams of Eddieand Jake, both of whom have died helping to save the Tower: she seesthem thriving as brothers on an alternative world. In her dream, theyshow her a door labeled both "Unfound" (in hieroglyphics) and"The Artist" (DTVII 725). It was at their last encounterbefore arriving at the Crimson's King's castle--the last stopbefore the Tower itself--that Roland and Susannah had rescued Patrick.Just as Eddie's stick-drawn door became real, what Patrick drawsappears in real life, and what he draws and erases, disappears.Susannah--the Lady of Shadows cum the Queen of Cups--who discovers thistalent, asks him to draw the door Eddie and Jake showed her in a dreamand when he does it appears in reality. She goes through it to joinEddie and Jake; memories of their adventures with Roland immediatelybegin to fade, although she knows they will remember enough to remainsure that their adventures on Roland's world really did happen.

When Roland arrives at the Tower with Patrick--after burying Oy--hefinds it standing in a field of roses, "its windows gleamed in thesun." A road forms a circle around it; other roads run off from thecircle in each of the four cardinal directions: "From above, theDark Tower would look like the center of a blood-filled gunsight"(DTVII 782). (32) Patrick helps him defeat the mad Crimson King whostill guards it by the expedient of drawing the Tower and the King andthen erasing the King, except for his eyes, which, being rendered withred pigment made from a rose, refuse to respond to the eraser (DTVII800). The artist then treks back the way they came as Roland directs himto do, leaving Roland to approach the Tower door, which he finds islabelled Unfound and then changes to Found (DTVII Coda 820).

Conclusions

Stephen King works constantly with images of twins, triplets, andeven larger multiples. Some live in the same body, as Susannah, Odetta,and Detta do. Some are from different worlds, as are Roland and StephenKing. Some are look alikes, as the various Jakes are, and some, likeEddie Dean and Patrick Danville, are not. (33) The twins or counterpartsto the Tarot cards include their predecessors in the conventional deckand in Eliot's poem and successors in and beyond the magic portals.The cards in King's and Eliot's decks include some that arenot in the traditional Tarot, and there are Doors that, if they arerepresented on the cards in the man in black's hands, he does notchoose to show to Roland. The cards with traditional labels and summingup Roland's life do not appear as doors, but those with inventedlabels do. The cards, shown and not shown, the doors, found and unfound,also seem to be memory portals. Susannah, the only one of the questersto leave Roland's world permanently by using a door, quickly beginsto lose most of her memories of it. When Roland goes through the Towerentrance marked "Found," he effectively leaves his own world,and embarks on a passage through his memories, only to leave them allbehind when he goes through the final door with his name on it.

The man in black lays cards for Roland as a trick and believes heis sending him on to certain death at the sea, but the cards play trueto their cartomantic purpose, in spite of being stacked, asRoland's entire life seems to be, and guide Roland to those whowill help him to save the Tower and all the worlds it maintains. Oncethe Tower is saved, Roland's personal goal of climbing the Tower ishis to achieve and the fate that comes to him when he does--that is, thereturn to the beginning--is the result of this exercise in what passesfor free will in his life. The final card in the spread--theSun--suggests an enlightenment waits for Roland somewhere on his quest,but does not show him what will happen after he opens the last Towerdoor. The cards really only show what he already knows of himself andpoint to the companions who will help him on a journey through his--theFisher King's--lands that he has forgotten, though he has taken itat least once, and perhaps many times before.

Works Cited

Auger, Emily E. A Filmography of Cartomancy and Tarot 1940-2010.Valleyhome Books, 2016.

--. "Arthurian Legend in Tarot." King Arthur in PopularCulture. McFarland, 2002. 233-48.

--. Cartomancy and Tarot in Film 1940-2010. Valleyhome Books, 2016.

--. Tarot and Other Meditation Decks. McFarland, 2004.

Bell, Michael. "An Analytic Note on Myth in Modernism: TheCase of T.S. Eliot." Religion and Myth in T.S. Eliot's Poetry,edited by Scott Freer and Michael Bell, Cambridge Scholars Publishing,2016, pp. 65-76.

Blistein, Burton. The Design of The Waste Land. University Press ofAmerica, 2008.

Booth, Allyson. Reading The Waste Land From the Bottom Up. PalgraveMacmillan, 2015.

Cameron, Alan. Greek Mythography in the Roman World. Oxford UP,2004.

Elliot. T.S. T.S. Eliot The Waste hand A Facsimile and Transcriptof the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Editedwith an introduction by Valerie Eliot, Harcourt Brace, 1971.

Furth, Robin. King's The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance,foreword by Stephen King, Scribner, 2006.

Huxley, Aldous. Chrome Yellow. 1922.http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1999

Kenner, Hugh. "The Waste Land." T.S. Eliot's TheWaste hand Updated Edition, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 2007,pp. 7-34.

King, Stephen. The Dark Tower: The Dark Tower VII. Scribner, 2004.

--. The Drawing of the Three: The Dark Tower II. Penguin Books,1987.

--. The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I. 1982. Penguin Books, 1989

--. The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I. Revised edition, Scribner,2003.

--. "The hittle Sisters of Eluria" (1998).Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales, Scribner, 2002, pp. 145-209.

--. The Song of Susannah: The Dark Tower VI. Donald M. Grant, 2004.

--. "Tales of the Tarot." Danse Macabre, Everest House,1981, pp. 60-88.

--. The Waste hands: The Dark Tower III. Penguin Books, 1991.

--. The Wind Through the Keyhole. Scribner, 2012.

--. Wizard and Glass: The Dark Tower IV. Penguin Books, 1997.

--. Wolves of the Calla: The Dark Tower V. Donald M. Grant, 2003.

Murphy, Russell Elliott. A Critical Companion to T.S. Eliot: Ahiterary Reference to His Life and Work. Facts on File, 2007.

Ovid. Metamorphosis: A Norton Critical Edition, translated andedited by Charles Martin, W.W. Norton & Co, 2010.

Petronius. The Satyricon and The Fragments, translated andintroduction by John Sullivan, Penguin, 1965.

Strengell, Heidi. Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic toLiterary Naturalism. University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

Vincent, Bev. The Road to the Dark Tower: Exploring StephenKing's Magnum Opus. New America Library, 2004.

Waitinas, Catherine. "Tarot as 'Secret Tradition' inT.S. Eliot's The Waste hand: 'These fragments I have shoredagainst my ruins.'" Tarot in Culture, vol. 2, ValleyhomeBooks, 2014, pp. 367-410.

Weston, Jessie. From Ritual to Romance. 1920.http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4090

(1) I discuss Tarot in association with popular genres at length inTarot and Other Meditation Decks (2004) and the associations ofArthuriana with Tarot in "Arthurian Legend in Tarot" (2002).

(2) All quotations from T.S. Eliot's poetry and poem linenumbers are taken from T.S. Eliot The Waste Land A Facsimile andTranscript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of EzraPound, and identified with the abbreviation WL. Eliot acknowledged theimportance of Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920) to"The Waste Land." Weston's book, however its scholarlycontent or its influence on Eliot may be judged today, has beentremendously influential for its attention to the grail and wastelandmotifs and the origins of the King Arthur legends, and notes on Tarot.See Booth's (2015) chapter on Weston's book and Eliot'spoem (23-26). "The Waste Land" is readily understood asmythopoeic; Michael Bell (2016) offers a critical discussion of thatassessment.

(3) Those who have read but not made a study of the Dark Towerseries may find Robin Furth's (2006) guide useful. Bev Vincent(2004) describes the main appearances of Tarot cards in the Dark Towernovels. Heidi Strengell (2005) provides a detailed assessment of theDark Tower novels as a fairytale using Propp's functions (114 ff).

(4) Stephen King's Dark Tower series in story order and withabbreviations used in this paper include:

 "The Little Sisters of Eluria" (1998)DTI The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I (1982)The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I (2003)DTII The Drawing of the Three: The Dark Tower II (1987)DTIII The Waste Lands: The Dark Tower III (1991)DTIV Wizard and Glass The Dark Tower IV (1997) The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012)DTV Wolves of the Calla: The Dark Tower V (2003)DTVI The Song of Susannah: The Dark Tower VI (2004)DTVII The Dark Tower: The Dark Tower VII (2004)

"Little Sisters of Eluria" (1998) and The Wind Throughthe Keyhole (2012), sometimes called Dark Tower 4.5, do not addsignificantly to the Tarot references in the core novels. "LittleSisters" includes a note from King informing his readers that hehas just finished Wolves of the Calla. The fourteen stories inEverything's Eventual, an anthology that includes "LittleSisters of Eluria," were organized by King by using the suit ofSpades plus the Joker to make up fourteen cards. His publisher had senthim a numbered list of the stories, so he shuffled the fourteen cardsand dealt them out and, by co-relating them with the numbers on hispublisher's list, invented the order of the collection. He alsopromises that his next collection will be "selected by Tarot"(7). If such an anthology exists, I have missed it.

(5) "Watch Me" is the phrase with which the winnerdeclares their hand and can also mean "you have a deal"outside the game (DTIII 278). Having a "Watch Me" face seemsto be the equivalent of a poker face (DTVI 38). Having a "WatchMe" card up one's sleeve suggests having a winning gambit(DTIV 17). King also throws in a few pithy aphorisms about cards andlife, including a picture of "Arthur, the Great King of Eld astridehis white stallion, and a sign which read (in a curious mixture of Highand Low Speech): ARGYOU NOT ABOUT THE HAND YOU ARE DELT IN CARDS ORLIFE" (DTIV 171). In the final book, Moses Carver, Susanna'sgodfather, tells Roland, "I'd give a great lot, gunslinger, tosee my goddaughter again, but I don't guess that's in thecards, is it? Unless we meet in the clearing" (DTVII 508-509).

(6) In The Gunslinger, a preacher's rousing sermon comparesthe Interloper, the person who turns the cards in a "faro or aWatch Me game," to the devil who tempted Eve and also Moses'speople, and who fosters alcoholism and other vices. Soon after, Rolandthreatens to shoot her if she does not tell him what he wants to know.She screams that he wouldn't dare, and he responds "Want tobet?" (DTI 69). In the new edition, this line is followed by"As the gambler said when he laid down a handful of cups and wands,just watch me" (82).

(7) This game is one including Rosalita (DTVI 18), one of those whoaids Roland along his way: "'Watch Me,' said Rosalita,and laid down her cards. She had built Wands, the high run, and the cardon top was Madame Death" (DTVI 18).

(8) Eliot refers to the "Man of Three Staves" card. AsWaitinas points out, this identification indicates Eliot'sfamiliarity with Waite's guidebook, where Wands are titled as suchin the relevant headings but called staves in the card descriptions, aswell as the cards which are labelled as Wands (371).

(9) In his essay "Tales of the Tarot," first publishedjust before the first edition of The Gunslinger, King discusses thecreatures of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, and Dracula (thatis, the Vampire, the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name) as "analmost perfect Tarot hand representing our lusher concepts ofevil." The addition of the Ghost might make this a perfect, ratherthan an "almost perfect" hand, but King observes that"the Ghost is an archetype (unlike those represented byFrankenstein's monster, Count Dracula, or Edward Hyde) whichspreads across too broad an area to be limited to a single novel, nomatter how great. The archetype of the Ghost is, after all, theMississippi of supernatural fiction, and although we will discuss itwhen the time comes, we'll not limit its summing-up to a singlebook" (61).

(10) Kenner (2007) discusses the Sibyll and Tiresias in "TheWaste Land" in some detail.

(11) Murphy (2007) discusses Eliot's choice of Ovid as asource for his poem (459-63). The story was reportedly elaborated by apoet named "Sostratus" in a lost work such that Tiresiasunderwent seven sex changes (Cameron 56). The name of Eliot'scartomancer, whose reading comes between the Sibyl's words and theappearance of Tiresias, is suspiciously similar to that of the poet saidto have exaggerated Tiresias's experiences, but Eliot may haveborrowed the name from Aldous Huxley, whose like-named clairvoyant playsa role in his satirical Chrome Yellow (1922) (Blistein 98-100).

(12) I have used the card associations given by Waitinas (2014).While many authors have speculated about the cards Eliot intended toidentify in this passage, Waitinas proposes that he also meant the cardsto be understood in terms of a celtic-cross spread. See Blistein (2008)for a comparison of Eliot's treatment of the Hanged Man and occultmeanings assigned to it (318-19) and the Tower (332-33).

(13) These lines first appeared at the end of Eliot's poem"Dans le Restaurant." The effects of these lines in theirfirst context is compared with that in "The Waste Land" inBooth (187-91).

(14) This latter line is taken from a poem by Gerard deNerval's "El Desdichado" (Booth 243-45).

(15) King-the-character offers further clues about the quest to theother characters in the last book when he provides them with a copy ofRobert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark TowerCame" (1855), along with a note from himself pointing out thepassages that inspired him to write their latest adventure (DTVII 689ff). Roland's life suggests that of Oedipus, as well as the FisherKing, since he killed his mother while he was still a youth.

(16) After Roland and Jake save him from death in a car accidentspecifically so he can finish the Dark Tower series, King proves himselfmore than a mere conduit when he interferes with Roland'sadventures by leaving various messages intended to aid him.

(17) This ability, however, means that he cannot see what is on atelevision screen, as one of his quest allies discovers: "Sheturned on the television, thinking it would divert him, and was shockedby his reaction [...] It wasn't until he told her that he heardvoices, yes, but saw only lines which made his eyes water that sherealized he was telling her the literal truth: he could not see thepictures on the screen" (DTVII 480).

(18) In The Gunslinger (2003) Vannay, one of Roland'steachers, taught him that "Time's the thief of memory"(160). Certainly, Roland is old, perhaps a thousand years old or more,but his experience in the tower is an almost instant and selectivememory wipe, not part of a natural aging process. In his "Tales ofTarot," King identifies, among others, Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,Dracula, and Frankenstein as stories about immorality, "[o]ne ofthe most common themes in fantastic literature" (60). Rolandlikewise, and like the Cumaean Sibyl, seems to be immortal or nearly so.

(19) Jake evidently came through the same door used by Callahan(DTV459, 461). Jake thinks that the man dressed as a priest--the man inblack--whom he encountered in the desert was the one who pushed andkilled him in his home world. However, Roland later realizes it was JackMort/The Pusher. As Roland also eventually realizes, Jake'sconfusion of the two men arose from the fact that when Mort pushed Jaketo his death he was dressed in priest's robe of the kind also wornby the man in black at the desert waystation (DTIII 6162).

(20) The warning about the drawers is justified by events in BookOne, Part I of The Waste Lands. In The Gunslinger (2003) the Demon inthe wall also warns Roland about the taheen which figures prominently inlater books.

(21) The jawbone later serves briefly as a protective amulet, butit does not offer any more warnings or predictions.

(22) The man in black is Marten Broadcloak, a member of the courtof Roland's father Steven Deschain: "Walter was Flagg andFlagg was Marten and Marten ... was he Maerlyn, the old rogue wizard oflegend? On that subject Roland remained unsure" (DTV 412). In theAfterword of The Waste Lands, King says that Walter is also the AgelessStranger (422). In the second last chapter of the same book, the AgelessStranger says he is a "man of many handles" including"Merlin or Maerlyn--and who cares, because I was never that one,although I never denied it, either. I am sometimes called the Magician... or the Wizard ... [.]" (DTIII 387-88, italics in original).

(23) The man in black also gives Roland a vision, which isdescribed in some detail, and promises to read his future in the runes,which readers of the novel learn nothing more about.

(24) The card is distinct from the Hanged Man in Eliot as it is inKing, as both authors cite the Hanged Man card separately from that ofthe drowned Phoenician sailor.

(25) For example, in the movie Bewitched (2005), Samantha, who isstill trying to kick the habit of using magic to solve her problems,draws out a Tarot Wheel of Fortune and uses it as a credit card to payfor the nice things she has bought for her new home--where she isplanning to live without using magic (see Auger, A Filmography ofCartomancy and Tarot 20).

(26) In The Drawing of the Three, King identifies this as the fifthcard (254), but it is actually the fourth in the spread laid in TheGunslinger. In The Gunslinger (2003) the man in black also says that"she broke the blue plate." This reference is to the blue"for-special plate" mentioned frequently in The Drawing of theThree. There are several Tarot cards from different decks that feature awoman spinning, but all those I have found postdate The Gunslinger.

(27) In The Drawing of the Three, King identifies this as the sixthcard (301), but it is actually the fifth in the spread laid in TheGunslinger.

(28) For more on some of the familiar treatments of the Death cardin popular culture, see Auger, Cartomancy and Tarot in Film 1940-2010,140-46.

(29) In The Gunslinger (2003) Roland expresses specific doubts thatthe bones belong to the man in black.

(30) These creatures sound "weirdly like human speech:plaintive, even desperate questions in an alien tongue.'Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham? Ded-a-check?'"(DTII 16). At the end of "What the Thunder Said" Eliot usesthe terms Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata, meaning "give, sympathize,control: three sorts of giving. To sympathize is to give oneself; tocontrol is to give governance" (Kenner 28). Once started on acomparison of "The Waste Land" and the Dark Tower series, itis hard not to read the strange language and behavior of King'slobster-like creatures as a dark corruption of these words andEliot's use of them.

(31) Eddie first sees the key before the confrontation with Shardik(DTIII 48-50).

(32) Roland and Susannah had seen two of Patrick's paintingsbefore meeting him in person: one a fantasy showing Mordred with hisfoot on the corpse of Arthur of Eld's horse, an animal that onceornamented the flags of Gilead (DTVII 549). The other was of the tower,a dark soot-coloured spiral around six hundred feet high standing at thefar end of a field of roses. Windows followed the spiral around andthere was a multi-colored oriel window at the top, each color matchingone of those of the wizard's glasses. The pink of the orb thatRoland had looked into was just outside the center, and the center wasBlack Thirteen (DTVII 550).

(33) Fans of the series will recognize Roland's former friendCuthbert as part of this set.

Caption: Thoth Tarot. Aleister Crowley and Frieda Lady Harris(artist).

1944. U.S. Games edition, 1978.

Caption: Top two rows: Cards referred to by Madame Sosostris inT.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"

Bottom row: Additional cards suggested by lines T.S. Eliot's"The Waste Land." Pamela Smith (artist) and Arthur Waite.Rider Waite Tarot[R]. 1909. [c]1971 U.S. Games Systems.

Illus. reproduced by permission of U.S. Games Systems. Furtherreproduction prohibited.

Caption: Pamela Smith (artist) and Arthur Waite. Rider WaiteTarot[R]. 1909. [C]1971 U.S. Games Systems.

Illus. reproduced by permission of U.S. Games Systems. Furtherreproduction prohibited.

Caption: Marseilles Tarot. Grimaud. 1963. Based on designs of the15th century.

Caption: Left: The Book of Thoth (Grand Jeu de Oracle des Dames).1870. [C] 2003 ho Scarabeo; Right: Pamela Smith (artist) and ArthurWaite. Rider Waite Tarot[R]. 1909. [C]1971 U.S. Games Systems.

Illus. reproduced by permission of U.S. Games Systems. Furtherreproduction prohibited. (The Tarot Magician is usually shown as a manpresiding over the suit symbols. The Book of Thoth version is somewhatunique for its suggestion of the creation of a doppelganger.)

Caption: Pamela Smith (artist) and Arthur Waite. Rider WaiteTarot[R]. 1909. [C]1971 U.S. Games Systems. Illus. reproduced bypermission of U. S. Games Systems. Further reproduction prohibited. Thisspread recreates--with Rider-Waite cards--that drawn by the man in blackfor Roland in The Gunslinger. See additional Tarot images below foralternative cards and versions of these cards.

Caption: Etteilla. Grand Etteilla Tarot. B.P. Grimaud, Paris, 1910.Public domain. An ape-like creature presides over the Grand EtteillaFortune or Wheel of Fortune card. One of the labels for the Tower cardof the same deck is Prison. Neither is quite Eddie's "ThePrisoner," but conflated together they suggest King's inventedcard.

Caption: Left: Marseilles Tarot. Grimaud. 1963. Based on designs ofthe 15th century.

Right: 1JJ Swiss Tarot. [C] 1972 AGM-Urania/Koenigsfurt-Urania

Verlag GmbH, www.tarotworld.com.

Caption: Left: Marseilles Tarot. Grimaud. 1963. Based on designs ofthe 15th century. Right: Etteilla. Grand Etteilla Tarot. B.P. Grimaud,Paris, 1910. Public domain. The Sun card of the Rider-Waite deck shows achild carrying a banner on a horse, but the more conventional image indecks based on the 15th century Marseilles type shows twins facing eachother in front of a brick structure. In the Grand Etteilla revision, thecard shows two children facing each other before a large structure witha star shining above.