Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded

by David Day

  All these mid-March festivities relate to the vernal equinox and suitably bring us back to the mythological identity of Alice as Persephone (or Proserpine or Eostre), the goddess of spring. The problem is, of course, the inaccuracies of solar calendars result in a slippage of timing of these festivals in relation to the spring equinox and consequently result in a major problem for Christian calendars: determining the date of the Easter holidays, the most important date in the Christian ecclesiastic calendar and, in medieval times, the beginning of the new year.

  Here we arrive at the true nature of the Mad Tea-Party. Given that we recognize that tea = t = time, what kind of time are we dealing with? Why is it necessary to have Alice point out that the tea partiers “keep moving round” and that the party is perpetual and cyclical?

  The tea party is meant as a charade. It is the answer to the riddle “What do you call a perpetually moving tea party?” And the answer, as the Reverend Charles Dodgson would recognize, would be a kind of ecclesiastical joke: “A movable feast.”

  A movable feast is a Christian holy day (that is, a feast day or fast day) whose date is fixed in the essentially lunar ecclesiastical calendar but each year must be moved to fit into the solar calendar, which is slightly longer. Consequently, if the Mad Tea-Party is a movable feast, then the tea table must logically be a perpetual rotating calendar-table of movable feast days. This is comparable to the ecclesiastic tabular lunar calendars that are used to calculate the dates for Easter Sunday and other movable feast days.

  The problem of finding dates for movable feast days would obsess Dodgson for his entire life—and would frequently result in ever-improved systems of calculation. In the last year of his life, Dodgson wrote to a colleague about his pamphlet “Rule for Finding Easter-Day for Any Date till AD 2499.”

  Writing in a Carrollian newsletter in 2012, the mathematician Francine Abeles observed that in the same letter: “Dodgson mentions the method he created ten years earlier for finding the day of the week for any given date. Such a method, together with a rule for finding Easter Sunday, is the main ingredient of a mechanical perpetual calendar which first appeared early in the twentieth century.”

  This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great disgust, and walked off; the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot.

  “At any rate I’ll never go there again!” said Alice as she picked her way through the wood. “It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!”

  Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees had a door leading right into it. “That’s very curious!” she thought. “But everything’s curious today. I think I may as well go in at once.” And in she went.

  Once more she found herself in the long hall, and close to the little glass table. “Now, I’ll manage better this time,” she said to herself, and began by taking the little golden key, and unlocking the door that led into the garden. Then she went to work nibbling at the mushroom (she had kept a piece of it in her pocket) till she was about a foot high: then she walked down the little passage: and then—she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flower-beds and the cool fountains.

  Chapter 8: The Queen’s Croquet-Ground

  “They’re dreadfully fond of beheading people here.”

  GAMES IN THE GARDEN When Alice finally finds her way into Wonderland’s “beautiful garden” and croquet ground, she discovers a white rose tree being painted red by gardeners in the form of animated and quarrelsome playing cards. Yet Alice does find something oddly familiar about this garden—and this surreal scene—undoubtedly because this chapter is largely a burlesque of the real Alice’s own family’s garden and croquet parties at the Deanery at Christ Church, Oxford.

  The Deanery garden was the site of many of the elaborate garden parties Alice Liddell’s parents, the Dean and Mrs. Liddell, held for all levels of British high society: academic, political, ecclesiastic, military and royal.

  It was also while gazing through a window in the college library that Lewis Carroll first caught sight of Alice and her sisters, on the Deanery’s croquet lawn. Later, he arranged to photograph Alice and her two sisters in the garden, wearing their best summer dresses and holding croquet mallets.

  Who’s for croquet?: Alice and her sisters.

  THE QUEEN’S CROQUET-GROUND.

  A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden: the roses growing on it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red. Alice thought this a very curious thing, and she went nearer to watch them, and just as she came up to them she heard one of them say, “Look out now, Five! Don’t go splashing paint over me like that!”

  “I couldn’t help it,” said Five, in a sulky tone. “Seven jogged my elbow.”

  On which Seven looked up and said, “That’s right, Five! Always lay the blame on others!”

  “You’d better not talk!” said Five. “I heard the Queen say only yesterday you deserved to be beheaded!”

  “What for?” said the one who had spoken first.

  “That’s none of your business, Two!” said Seven.

  “Yes, it is his business!” said Five, “and I’ll tell him—it was for bringing the cook tulip-roots instead of onions.”

  On the mythological level, Wonderland’s “beautiful garden” is the Garden of Elysium, the most desirable realm in the ancient Greek afterlife. In Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass (C. AD 155), Lucius Apuleius tells us how, as an initiate into the Eleusinian Mysteries, he “set one foot on Proserpine’s threshold…[and] entered the presence of the gods of the underworld.”

  Ruled by an underworld King and Queen, here were found the souls of heroes and heroines who, according to Homer and Pindar, could be observed engaged in games in the “blissful meadows” of asphodel lilies. Pindar gives us a fuller description of this place: “In Elysium where fields of the pale liliaceous asphodel, and poplars grew, there stood the gates that led to the house of Hades.”

  In Virgil’s Aeneid we are told that Elysium enjoys perpetual springtime and there are gardens and shady groves. By the Renaissance, Elysium had become a synonym for an eternal pagan paradise. The Champs-Élysées, meaning “Elysian Fields,” became the most celebrated avenue in Paris, and the Élysée Palace became the residence of the president of France.

  The Rose Garden of Philosophers: Don’t forget your key.

  Seven flung down his brush, and had just begun “Well, of all the unjust things—” when his eye chanced to fall upon Alice, as she stood watching them, and he checked himself suddenly: the others looked round also, and all of them bowed low.

  “Would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, “why you are painting those roses?”

  ROSICRUCIAN ROSE GARDEN It is significant that Alice first observes a garden with a rose tree with white roses being painted red. Wonderland’s royal rose garden is also the garden of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. One obvious parallel is that both Alice and the initiate must use a golden key to gain entry to the locked door into a rose garden.

  Remarkably, all the tea party theosophists wrote extensively about this secret garden. The Rosicrucian Mad Hatter, Robert Fludd, published “A Philosophicall Key,” which granted the initiate entry into that garden. The Rosicrucian March Hare, Michael Maier, also wrote about this secret rose garden and the golden key to its gate in his magnificently illustrated Atalanta fugiens (1617): “He who tries to enter the Rose-garden of Philosophers without the key is like a man wanting to walk without feet.”

  Maier also speaks of the revelation within the garden of the fountain flowing with the Rosicrucian “Elixir of the Red Rose and the White Rose.” This epiphany is comically transformed in Wonderland’s rose garden into a scene wherein quarrelling gardeners desperately employ a red elixir
(of sorts) to paint the white roses and transform them into red roses.

  Also as noted here, an elaborate engraving in the Rosicrucian Cabala, Mirror of Art and Nature: in Alchemy (1615) shows a rabbit being pursued into an underground world comparable to Wonderland. In the same document, there is a more detailed illustration of this philosopher’s rose garden on the pinnacle of the Mountain of Alchemy. This is the ultimate goal of the initiate: a rose garden with a hedge around the fountain of Mercury. The Wonderland garden with its white roses painted red, its “bright flower beds and cool fountains” and its King and Queen of Hearts is comparable to the Cabala’s rose garden with its flower beds and fountains and its Sun King whose emblem is the red rose and Moon Queen whose emblem is the white rose. And both are comparable to the lawns and fountain of Mercury before the entrance to Christ Church’s Deanery.

  Ultimate goal: On the summit of the Mountain of Alchemy.

  In the Wonderland garden, the denizens are—like those of the Garden of Elysium—also involved in the playing of games, in this case a peculiar card game and a very odd form of croquet. Wonderland’s Elysium is the Queen’s Croquet-Ground, where Alice watches the arrival of a royal procession of soldiers, courtiers, royal children, royal guests and the King and Queen of Wonderland themselves.

  There were also processions of this sort in the Eleusinian Mysteries, just before the revelations. As Lucius Apuleius describes them, “Presently the vanguard of the grand procession came into view” with all manner of costumes and emblems of deities.

  As the Wonderland procession passes by, Alice wonders “whether she ought not to lie down on her face like the three gardeners.” The real Alice would recognize the dilemma of a child’s attempting to determine appropriate rules of etiquette for such a procession. It was important for her to learn how to determine the rank of those arriving in the Deanery garden so she could address them in the appropriate manner.

  Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began in a low voice, “Why the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a red rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and, if the Queen was to find it out, we should all have our heads cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we’re doing our best, afore she comes, to—” At this moment Five, who had been anxiously looking across the garden, called out “The Queen! The Queen!” and the three gardeners instantly threw themselves flat upon their faces. There was a sound of many footsteps, and Alice looked round, eager to see the Queen.

  PYTHAGOREAN NUMBERS When Alice enters the garden, she discovers the numbers 7, 5 and 2 in the form of playing cards who are gardeners. Not illogically, the gardeners are spades, but what is the significance of their numbers?

  Lewis Carroll studied the Pythagorean theory of numbers through the translations and theosophical commentaries in Thomas Taylor’s Theoretic Arithmetic (1816). Pythagoreans believed that the first things were numbers, for nothing can exist or be discerned without number. Taylor succinctly summed up the Pythagorean theory by quoting Theon of Smyrna (c. AD 100), the disciple of Pythagoras and Plato: “Numbers are the sources of form and energy in the world. They are dynamic and active even among themselves … almost human … in their capacity for mutual influence.”

  It should not be surprising, then, that the first things Alice encounters in the Wonderland garden are numbers—or that they are behaving like quarrelling humans, “dynamic and active even among themselves.” These card-gardeners confirm Theon’s comment that “numbers have independent life and qualities that make them akin to living creatures with personalities.”

  In Wonderland, each of these numbers has a distinct personality: 7 is self-righteous and argumentative, 5 is sulky and accusatory, and 2 is quarrelsome and divisive. Here the playing cards behave like humans, while living creatures (flamingos and hedgehogs) behave like inanimate objects (croquet mallets and balls).

  In the Wonderland garden, Carroll’s choice of cards with the numbers 7, 5 and 2 has always been something of a mystery. The same has been true of the strange wording of the dispute 5 has with 7 over the trouble with “bringing the cook tulip-roots.”

  To resolve this mystery, we may, in a typical Lewis Carroll word twist, read “tulip-roots” as “the root of 2,” or √2. And indeed, the numbers 7, 5 and 2 could give us an answer to the tulip-root riddle because the ancient Greeks famously used the ratio of 7 : 5 as the simplest and most convenient approximation of the irrational √2. And so, with the numbers 7, 5, 2 we can create the equation 7 : 5 = √2.

  Furthermore, the reason for the dispute between these numbers is provided in the wording of 7’s indignant reaction to 5’s revelation about tulip-roots: “Well, of all the unjust things.” For Pythagoreans, √2 was the archetypal unjust thing, for two reasons. First, it is an irrational number that cannot be “justified”—that is, it cannot be expressed as a whole number or as a fraction. And second, its discovery allegedly threatened to wreck the entire Pythagorean philosophy of whole numbers, to the point that, according to legend, its discoverer was drowned in the hope of concealing this flaw in their system.

  However, once the secret was out, the ancient Greeks became especially fascinated with √2, just as they were with those other famous irrational keys to knowledge, Φ and π. All three produce infinite Euclidean algorithms, and were the focus of much study and wonder among the ancients—as well as our mathematician, Charles Dodgson.

  Pythagoras: Numbers came before anything else.

  First came ten soldiers carrying clubs; these were all shaped like the three gardeners, oblong and flat, with their hands and feet at the corners: next the ten courtiers; these were ornamented all over with diamonds, and walked two and two, as the soldiers did. After these came the royal children; there were ten of them, and the little dears came jumping merrily along hand in hand, in couples: they were all ornamented with hearts. Next came the guests, mostly Kings and Queens, and among them Alice recognised the White Rabbit: it was talking in a hurried nervous manner, smiling at everything that was said, and went by without noticing her. Then followed the Knave of Hearts, carrying the King’s crown on a crimson velvet cushion; and, last of all this grand procession, came THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS.

  PLATO’S REPUBLIC IN WONDERLAND Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland borrows extensively from the themes and ideas of Plato’s Republic. Initially, Alice’s underground hall in many ways is comparable to Plato’s famous allegory of the cave. In Francis Cornford’s translation of The Republic, Plato describes his allegorical cave and its inhabitants: “Imagine the condition of men living in a sort of cavernous chamber underground, with an entrance open to the light and a long passage all down to the cave. Here they have been since childhood.”

  This is the condition of most people, Plato argues: living in darkness and shadows cast by firelight in an underground chamber. Only those who are willing to question their state of existence can make their way out of this subterranean world of illusions. Only then will they discover the tunnel into the light of the garden of true knowledge.

  Alice’s underground hall lit with lamps is like Plato’s fire-lit cave—a subterranean world of illusions. And like Plato’s prisoner, Alice struggles to find her way out of the underground chamber through a tunnel into a bright garden. “How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains.”

  In Plato’s allegory, this garden is the ideal philosopher’s garden of archetypes, or (as Plato stated) Ideas or Forms. In the Wonderland Queen’s garden, Lewis Carroll parodies this garden of archetypes. It is an ideal abstract realm of number and form wherein numbered, oblong playing cards are animated and speak and behave like humans. For, as the logician and Carrollian scholar Duncan Black once wrote, Lewis Carroll’s “real life was lived in a world of inner meanings. Philosophic and logical principles were just as real for him as human beings and occupied his mind just as much.”

  Consequently, in Wonderland’s garden, the playing cards Alice fir
st encounters are spades who—logically enough—work as gardeners. It follows that the numbered club cards are soldiers, the numbered diamonds are wealthy courtiers and the numbered hearts are the royal children.

  The rank and order of these cards in the procession watched by Alice are similar to the rank and order of the hierarchy in Plato’s republic. The gardener spades are matched with Plato’s lowly agricultural workers; the Wonderland soldier clubs are comparable to his military auxiliaries; the courtier diamonds are akin to his wealthy merchant class; the Wonderland face cards of each suit resemble the republic’s oligarchs in each class; and finally, in Carroll’s trump suit of hearts, we have the royal family ruled by the King of Hearts who is the republic’s philosopher-king.

  Wonderland’s parodic King of Hearts is somewhat dim-witted and vague, but relatively speaking, he does appear to possess some of the virtues of the temperate and self-restraining philosopher-king. Certainly, his habit of constantly pardoning all those condemned by his tyrannical Queen suggests something of a forgiving and compassionate nature. It is worth noting the King of Hearts’ glib instruction to the White Rabbit to “Begin at the beginning.” Although sounding absurd in the mouth of the rather foolish King of Hearts, it was the way Plato’s philosopher-king ideally approached any dilemma. In fact, Aristophanes picked exactly the same phrase to mock Plato’s school of philosophers in his comedy The Clouds.

  Plato’s cave: Only those who question can find the exit.