I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is so, so much more than a poem about the decay of modern civilization. It’s a manual to restarting the universe. You’ll probably want to find a copy of it, so you can bear with me. Got it? Okay, now for starters, take a look at just how many archetypes are mentioned throughout the poem. I’ve got at least the Merchant, the Mother, the Mystic Hermaphrodite, the Savage, the True King, and the Warrior, and odds are there’s some I’ve missed. The most important parts of the poem are the tail end of the Fire Sermon, which essentially describes the beginning of the process of the world’s rebirth; Death by Water, which pretty much spells out the role of Le Comte de Saint-Germain, as symbolized by the drowned Phoenician sailor, in the rebirth of the world; and What The Thunder Said, which is the closest glimpse into the next world as you’ll ever get. No one’s sure how Eliot managed to figure this all out, but it’s well known that he wrote The Waste Land following a nervous breakdown – maybe he discovered something that his mind wasn’t able to handle, which he was only able to deal with by putting it into the form of a poem.