who is the third?

Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus

Eliot's Notes refer us to the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, who described an incidence of "Third Man Syndrome" in which stress and exhaustion causes the mind to imagine that an unseen additional person is present:  during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.

In the Gospel of St Luke, two disciples are walking the road to Emmaus after the Crucifixion when they encounter a third person who walks with them and encourages them not to despair. Only when they have a meal at Emmaus do they recognise him as Christ, risen from the dead. Caravaggio's great painting shows the moment a beardless, youthful Jesus reveals himself.

In his note on the Tarot pack, Eliot explicitly associates the hooded figure (the third person on the road to Emmaus), with the Hanged Man card and thence the mythological Hanged God, whose death and resurrection symbolised the fertility of the land.

Madame Sosostris does not find The Hanged Man in the cards she deals: likewise, is the gliding hooded figure on the road to Emmaus as illusory as Shackleton's ghostly figure in the Antarctic waste land?

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