From Hermann Hesse's essay A Glimpse into Chaos:
Here Eliot unites two images that first appeared in Part I: the hooded figure and the faceless crowd. Both are found in the passage about the Tarot deck. In the stanza immediately preceding this one, the hooded figure is linked to Christ, and through Christ is linked to the prophets Sibyl, Madame Sosostris, and Tiresias that appear elsewhere in the poem. Here the hooded figures become a crowd, a sea of (evidently false) prophets running headlong toward their own destruction. If Christ is among them he cannot be distinguished.
Prophets in The Waste Land are a mixed bag. Sibyl's arrogance permits her miserable fate, Madame Sosostris is a fraud. Yet Eliot calls all-seeing Tiresias the most important character in the play and makes Christ (along with his resurrection, itself a prophecy) a prominent figure at the end of the poem. Eliot's note to this passage, with its crying seer, suggests not that the wisdom represented by these figures does not exist, but rather that we reliably fail to discern it from hucksterism.