Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded

by David Day

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.

  “Nor I,” said the March Hare.

  F.D. Maurice: Founder of the Apostles.

  Robert Fludd: High priest of Rosicrucian mysteries.

  TEA AND THEOSOPHY Oxford’s theosophical tea party began at the end of the sixteenth century and the dawn of the seventeenth. It was Oxford’s Rosicrucian golden age. The theosophical Mad Hatter was the polymath ROBERT FLUDD (1574–1637). A man with a hat so full of bees, he was satirized in his own time as “Trismegistian-Platonick-Rosy-crucian Doctor.” Fludd studied the Kabbalah and Paracelsian medicine. He was a noted astrologer, chemist, mathematician and cosmologist and received a doctorate of medicine at Christ Church.

  Fludd was the author of numerous publications, including a 1616 tract on the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, by which he became known as the “high priest of their mysteries.” Fludd’s encyclopedic texts were part of an unfinished magnum opus that was an attempt to encompass the whole of human knowledge in a single repository. Just as the Mad Hatter wished to be “on good terms” with Time, Fludd was very much concerned with aspects of chronology and cosmology: the measurement of time and the order of the cosmos.

  Fludd’s German colleague—and fellow Rosicrucian—Count MICHAEL MAIER (1568–1622) was the March Hare. Maier was a German physician and counsellor to the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II and had a great interest in alchemy and hermetic philosophy that he shared with his imperial patron. He was an expert Latin grammarian who was a master of dialectics, logic, rhetoric and syllogistic reasoning.

  Just as the March Hare appeared in the court of the King of Hearts, Maier visited the court of the English King James I, where he met Fludd within a circle of other British hermetic physicians. Maier was credited with introducing the Order of the Rosy Cross into Britain and with the initiation of Robert Fludd into the order.

  When the March Hare reappears in Through the Looking-Glass as one of the messengers, we are informed, “ ‘His name is Haigha.’ (He pronounced it so as to rhyme with ‘mayor.’)” Clearly it also rhymes with Maier. Furthermore, in Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno novels, we have a mysterious German professor named Mein Herr: a pun on both March Hare and Herr Maier. Like the March Hare, Mein Herr is some kind of learned lunatic who is linked to “the Man in the Moon.” And among Maier’s many works was one on lunar observations and another that investigated the causes of and treatments for insanity.

  Mein Hare: Michael Maier.

  Maier’s spectacular engraved illustrated books were held in the highest esteem, as was his commentary on Hermes Trismegistus. Maier’s Arcana arcanissima incorporates Hermetic interpretation of Greek and Egyptian myths into Rosicrucian literature. In his Latin verse he assumes the pseudonym Hermes Malavici, an anagram of Michael Maiervs. The English edition of Maier’s Themis Aurea: The Laws of the Fraternity of the Rosie Cross, was dedicated to our theosophical White Rabbit, Elias Ashmole.

  Like Lewis Carroll, Maier in his prose and poetry employed erudite word games with Latin anagrams, acrostics and fables with talking animals, and wrote poems in geometric shapes. Maier’s alchemical tracts also give us one possible explanation for Carroll’s diary notation for significant days or events that gave him great pleasure: “I mark this day with a white stone.” According to Maier, the “white stone” was the earthly counterpart of the lapis occultus, or philosopher’s stone, that was the object of every alchemist’s quest.

  The eldest of the participants in the Oxford theosophical tea party was the Dormouse: Sir FRANCIS BACON (1561–1626)—philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist and author. Carroll’s library included Bacon’s works in 10 volumes. Like the Dormouse, Bacon became a prosecution witness at more than one trial that ended with a command of “Off with his head!” Later, again like the Dormouse, Bacon was himself suppressed and only just escaped execution.

  Francis Bacon: M is for mouse.

  Another clue to the Dormouse’s identity is implied by his obsession with “everything that begins with an M.” In Bacon’s utopian novel New Atlantis (1627), he mentions that a book written by Solomon is located in New Atlantis. This is “The Book of M,” a Rosicrucian treasure reputed to contain all worldly knowledge. And as the Renaissance scholar Frances Yates explained in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment: “New Atlantis” was governed by the R.C. [Rosicrucian] Brotherhood, invisibly travelling as ‘merchants of light’ in the outside world from the invisible college, now called Salomon’s House.”

  TEA NOT WINE On the mythological level, the introduction of wine at the Mad Tea-Party equates it with the ancient Greco-Roman Bacchanalia, a festival held in honour of the god of wine and madness. Worshippers of the Greek gods Dionysus (or Roman Bacchus), Pan (or Roman Faunas) and Seilenos (or Roman Silenus) annually held a mad wine party. The Bacchanalia were held in celebration of a cult of wild and terrifying nymphs and satyrs who tore human and animal victims to pieces and devoured them.

  But in this underground world, the March Hare, Mad Hatter and Dormouse all prove to be entirely lacking in wildness. Instead of wine, they drink tea. Instead of raw human flesh, they eat thinly sliced bread and thinly spread butter. They are certainly capable of a considerable degree of eccentric rudeness, but this hardly rises to a terrifying bacchanalian frenzy.

  Dionysus: His mysteries were the most mysterious of all.

  Pan: A wild and crazy god.

  The Mad Hatter is Dionysus, the god of wine and madness. The Dionysian Mysteries were the most secret of all the mysteries and related to living souls’ ability to communicate with the souls of the dead. To the Romans, he was Bacchus and presided over the bacchanalian festival. He was known as “the Liberator,” bringing freedom from one’s normal self through an inspired madness.

  The March Hare is Pan, the goat-footed and goat-horned god of frenzy, from whom we get the word panic. This nature spirit closely associated with the worship of Dionysus was both a wise counsellor and a mad, irrational beast. Like the “mad” March hare of folklore and nature, Pan had a wild unpredictable nature associated with the frenzied spring mating rituals of animals.

  Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.”

  “If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Alice.

  “Of course you don’t!” the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. “I dare say you never even spoke to Time!”

  “Perhaps not,” Alice cautiously replied: “but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.”

  The Dormouse is Seilenos, god of drunkenness. He was the foster father of Dionysus. Like the Dormouse, Seilenos the satyr was snub-nosed, pot-bellied, animal-eared and famous for frequently falling asleep at the banquet table. Also like the Dormouse, he was often called upon—woken up, if necessary—to entertain guests with stories and songs.

  However, the Mad Tea-Party is essentially the domain of a fourth god: Dionysus’s grandfather Cronus (the Roman Saturn), the god of time. Before arriving at the tea party, Alice was primarily concerned with her identity as it was manifest in the physical dimensions of space—height, width, depth—and in maintaining these proportionately. Once at the table, though, she begins to deal with the problem (first voiced to the Caterpillar) of her identity changing with the passage of time: past, present, future.

  Seilenos: Often fell asleep during banquets.

  Old Father Time: He too is a guest at the tea party.

  “Ah! That accounts for it,” said the Hatter. “He won’t stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o’clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you’d only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!”

  (“I only wi
sh it was,” the March Hare said to itself in a whisper.)

  “That would be grand, certainly,” said Alice thoughtfully: “but then—I shouldn’t be hungry for it, you know.”

  “Not at first, perhaps,” said the Hatter: “but you could keep it to half-past one as long as you liked.”

  “Is that the way you manage?” Alice asked.

  Mad wine party: Bacchanalia, by Henryk Siemiradzki, 1890.

  THE RIDDLE OF HATTER’S HAT “In this Style: 10/6 ” is the label attached to the Wonderland Hatter’s Hat. Initially, it appears to be a price-tag that in English currency must be read: “ten shilling six pence” or “one-half guinea.” Is there any significance in that price? Is it a price tag at all?

  Let us begin with the wording of the tag on the hat. Instead of reading “In this Style: 10/6 ” as “In this Style: 10 shillings 6 pence,” we could easily read it as: “In this Style: 10 6 ” wherein 106 = 1,000,000. Of course, this could be interpreted as meaning that the Hatter has manufactured one million hats in this style. However, this is not likely and would simply introduce more pointless numbers.

  However, we are also told that Alice is 7 that day. Why would Carroll provide us with this number? Most obviously, 7 is the prime number used for determining the number of weeks in any given number of days. This makes a certain amount of sense as the Hatter’s watch seems to be concerned with calendar time, and if we accept 106 as both an ordinary decimal and as a number in a modular system.

  So, just for amusement, let us divide 106 or 1,000,000 by 7. The answer is 142857 weeks + 1 day. And then, like Alice, we must ask: “What does this signify?”

  Among mathematicians 142857 is a famous “mysterious number” that in his later years, Charles Dodgson used to impress school children. He would write the number down and ask them to multiply it by 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. The results were surprising: each of these multiples of 142857 would yield a product consisting of a cyclic permutation of the original six digits.

  142857 × 2 = 285714

  142857 × 3 = 428571

  142857 × 4 = 571428

  142857 × 5 = 714285

  142857 × 6 = 857142

  However, upon its multiplication by seven, we have a quite different result: 142857 × 7 = 999999…. This is because seven is a prime number whose reciprocal (1/7) has a periodic length of 6 as demonstrated in its cyclical decimal representations of the fraction.

  In fact, all fractions with a denominator 7 have a period length of 6:

  1/7 = .142857 2/7 = .285714 3/7 = .428571

  4/7 = .571428 5/7 = .714285 6/7 = .857142

  These kinds of cyclical numbers were known to Dodgson as a “circulating decimal.” In his squib “The Offer to the Clarendon Trust” (1868), Dodgson suggests that since laboratories were being built for the other sciences, mathematics ought to have their own labs. And among them, he absurdly suggests: “A large room, which might be darkened, and fitted with a magic lantern, for the purpose of exhibiting Circulating Decimals in the act of circulation.”

  So accepting 7 as the defining prime number whose length of decimal expansion is 6, let us now see what other mathematical tricks we may pull out of the Hatter’s Hat if we observe the Hatter as he is called up as a witness in the court of the King and Queen of Hearts. Once accused by the Queen of ‘murdering time,’ the Hatter “kept shifting from one foot to the other” nervously dancing back and forth—in periodic motion—like a metronome.

  The Hatter’s complaint is that he is stuck in time—perpetual Tea Time (at 6 o’clock). This is because the Hatter does not have any unit he can measure time with until Alice introduces her prime number of 7. However, the Hatter is still stuck in time at the trial because his hat’s value of 106 (1 million) is not exactly congruent with the prime number 7. The Hatter needs to deduct 1 to arrive at 999999—and this appears to occur when “in his confusion he bit a large piece out of his tea cup.”

  What does this signify? If we read “In this Style 10/6 ” as “In this Mode 106,” we arrive at a formula 106 ≅ 1 (mod 7) that can trigger exponential growth. This formula is a specific application of a theorem critical to number theory and modular mathematics. It is a famous theorem in the history of mathematics, known as Fermat’s Theorem: ap-1 ≅ 1 (mod p) ≅ 1 (mod p). To be specific, if we apply Fermat’s Theorem (not to be confused with Fermat’s Last Theorem) to a formula with 7 = prime, we would arrive at 107-1 ≅ 1 (mod 7) or more simply stated, the Hatter’s: 106 1 (mod 7).

  So, what happens next? “Just at this moment Alice felt a very curious sensation, which puzzled her a great deal until she made out what it was: she was beginning to grow larger again.” The Hatter’s action has triggered Alice’s “ridiculous” exponential growth.

  PIERRE DE FERMAT (1601-1665) was a French lawyer of Basque origin and a mathematician credited with the early development of modern calculus. He made major discoveries in number theory, probability theory and algebraic geometry.

  Also, the theorem’s importance in modular arithmetic is perhaps why Lewis Carroll saw fit to pay tribute to Fermat through a cryptic inscription on his Hatter’s Hat. In fact, if we take a hint from another of his political-mathematical squibs, “The Dynamics of a Parti-cle,” the chapter title itself can be viewed as the typical Carrollian “tea = t = time” pun extended to include modular arithmetic: “A Mad Tea Party” = “A Modular Time Parti-cle” = “a mod t particle” (mod = modular, t = time, particle = unit).

  Alice soon discovers that the tea party is primarily concerned with the measuring, managing and ordering of time. The Mad Hatter personifies time in the folk-tale form of Old Father Time: the iconic old bearded man with a scythe, derived from the myth of the Greek Cronus, the scythe-bearing god of time. Cronus is also the source of our image of the Grim Reaper, who comes to us all in time.

  The tea party is rife with riddles, the most famous of which is the Hatter’s: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” It goes unanswered, and scores of readers over the years have attempted to solve it. Martin Gardner in his Annotated Alice quotes several, among them: “Poe wrote on both,” “bills and tales are among their characteristics,” “both slope with a flap,” “both have inky quills,” “one is good for writing books and the other better for biting rooks” and “one has flapping fits and the other fitting flaps.”

  In 1896—two years before his death—Carroll provided some sort of answer: “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!” By the purposeful misspelling of never as nevar—raven spelled backwards—Carroll succeeds in making his nonsensical answer make some kind of sense, as well as having the added dimension of an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe. After all, if one puts the wrong end in front, the bird will be “nevar-more.”

  The Liddell sisters: Alice, Lorina and Edith.

  The Hatter shook his head mournfully. “Not I!” he replied. “We quarreled last March—just before he went mad, you know—” (pointing with his tea spoon at the March Hare,) “—it was at the great concert given by the Queen of Hearts, and I had to sing

  ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

  How I wonder what you’re at!’

  You know the song, perhaps?”

  “I’ve heard something like it,” said Alice.

  “It goes on, you know,” the Hatter continued, “in this way:—

  ‘Up above the world you fly,

  Like a tea-tray in the sky.

  Twinkle, twinkle—’ ”

  A few peripheral references and private jokes are woven into the tea party scene. The Mad Hatter’s song beginning “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!” is of course a parody of Jane Taylor’s poem “The Star” (1805). The bat is commonly believed to be Carroll’s mathematics tutor, friend and colleague BARTHOLOMEW “BAT” PRICE (1818–1898). Price published major works on differential and infinitesimal calculus, and his lectures—as Carroll acknowledged in his diaries—often flew above the heads of his students.

  The Dormouse�
�s story was also told as an inside joke about the Liddell sisters. It begins, “Once upon a time there were three little sisters … Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well.” Once again, Carroll uses the pun about the “three little [Liddell] sisters”; Elsie is Lorina Charlotte (initials L. C.), Lacie is Alice (anagram) and Tillie is Edith (actual pet name Matilda).

  The Burne-Jones window, Christ Church Cathedral.

  According to the Dormouse’s absurd story, the little sisters lived at the bottom of a treacle well and lived on treacle (molasses). In fact, treacle well was a medieval term for a well or spring blessed with healing powers. The Dormouse is alluding to a locally famous well at Binsley, near Oxford. This well was sacred to St. Margaret and plays a crucial role in the legend of St. Frideswide, the patron saint of Oxford. Christ Church’s cathedral was built on the site of her priory.

  The Liddell sisters would have witnessed the installation and dedication of Edward Burne-Jones’s St. Frideswide stained glass window in Christ Church Cathedral in 1859. And in later life, Alice carved a wooden panel, now in St. Frideswide’s, Ostney, portraying a scene from the saint’s life.

  A second allusion relates to these three sisters and the well from which they drew “everything that begins with an M, such as mousetraps, and the moon, and memory …” In the classical Greek underworld, we may also discover a well “that begins with an M”: Mnemosyne, the Well of Memory. As we saw earlier, Mnemosyne was also the mother of the Muses, and thus linked to the prologue poem’s same three little (Liddell) sisters who are Carroll’s muses.

  This way to Wonderland: Door to the Deanery Garden.

  After all the riddles and conundrums posed to her by a variety of Wonderland tutors since leaving the great hall, Alice, like an initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries, has acquired many life lessons. She has learned how to keep her temper, mind her own business and “at any rate” keep a proper sense of size and proportion. And despite her initial impression that the Mad Tea-Party was “the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!” she finds she has actually also learned how to “manage better this time”—or manage time. After returning to the great hall, she finds she is easily able to follow a logical sequence of steps that will finally allow her to use the golden key to pass through the curtained door and enter the rose garden at the heart of Wonderland. There she discovers a strangely familiar royal garden.