‘The background to the two Alice stories of Lewis Carroll explains much about how they ‘work’ and the inspiration they curiously provided for a much later generation of chaos magicians. Carroll was a hugely gifted logician and mathematician, but his bête noire was having to cope with the irrational. On the surface, Alice’s adventures are just the antidote, amusing stories, but they hide all kinds of twists and turns.
Carroll’s zoomorphism and anthropomorphism have a direct parallel with techniques used in Goetia: how we ‘see’ and experience the daemonic, for instance. Curiously one of his distant relatives, Samuel McGregor Liddell Mathers – one of the key members of the Golden Dawn (and related movements) led the development of ceremonial magic(k) and resurrected the Goetia as a working text. Another namesake, Peter J. Carroll promoted chaos magic, which – indirectly drawing inspiration from Alice – essentially functions by the same mechanism: nothing is true, and everything is permitted. Along the way, it might be interesting to discuss the notion of muses and of eroticism as a ‘motor’, hallucinogenic drug-taking, and altered states of consciousness.
By modern standards Carroll’s photography (especially the nude studies of Alice) would be banned: my own take is that he was probably entirely sexless, a characteristic he shared with S.M. Liddell Mathers, whose marriage to Mona (another gifted occultist) was entirely chaste. I’m not convinced that exclusive devotion to the virginal aspect of the Goddess in the context of magical working is a good thing. Another wrinkle is that Carroll’s ‘real-world’ work hinged on a four-dimensional ‘reality’, whereas now we know through quantum mechanics that Stephen Hawking’s worm-holes are much closer to Alice’s rabbit hole than we thought possible. The worm-holes/rabbit-holes have a parallel with the Qlippothic tunnels and alternative realities of the shells of the Sitra Ahra (described in Thomas Karlsson’s work). And, of course, one can view the ‘rabbit hole’ as a metaphor for the womb…’
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