Zodiacal Alice

 

[from Lewis Carroll, Symbolic Logic (1896)]

We know Carroll loved games, puns, diversions and cleverness of all kinds: the Alice books are shot through with these things, wordplay, equivalences, ludic strategems and patterns. And there has certainly been no shortage of critical and fannish interpretations of the books. So it's surprising to me that nobody has made the following suggestion: Alice in Wonderland is a zodiacal book, and Through the Looking-Glass is a gloss upon its zodiacal logic.

The zodiac consists of twelve stations or zones (Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces) that comprise eight animals—fish, ram, bull, scorpion, lion, crab, centaur and goat—and four other things: ‘water’, twins, the virgin and the scales of justice. The twelve chapters of the first Alice book are disposed between eight predominant animals and four other qualities (in what follows I notate the animals in lower case and the other qualities in capital letters):

I. Down the Rabbit-Hole [rabbit]
II. The Pool of Tears [WATER]
III. A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale [mouse]
IV. The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill [lizard]
V. Advice from a Caterpillar [caterpillar]
VI. Pig and Pepper [pig]
VII. A Mad Tea-Party [hare]
VIII. The Queen’s Croquet-Ground [flamingo]
IX. The Mock Turtle’s Story [fish]
X. The Lobster Quadrille [lobster]
XI. Who Stole the Tarts? [SCALES OF JUSTICE]
XII. Alice’s Evidence [VIRGO]

This doesn’t look, in itself, wholly zodiacal. Where, for instance, are the twins? The lion? Well, obviously, they are in Looking-Glass:

I. Looking-Glass House [?]
II. The Garden of Live Flowers [flowers]
III. Looking-Glass Insects [insects]
IV. Tweedledum And Tweedledee [TWINS]
V. Wool and Water [sheep/ram]
VI. Humpty Dumpty [shell]
VII. The Lion and the Unicorn [lion]
VIII. “It’s my own Invention” [man + horse = centaur]
IX. Queen Alice [?]
X. Shaking [?]
XI. Waking [?]
XII. Which Dreamed it? [?]

In other words, the true zodiacal Alice emerges when we superpose the latter design upon the former, thus:

I Down the Rabbit-Hole [Alice = VIRGO]
II. The Pool of Tears [WATER]
III. Looking-Glass Insects [goat and scorpion]
IV. Tweedledum And Tweedledee [TWINS]
V. Wool and Water [ram]
VI. Humpty Dumpty [bull]
VII. The Lion and the Unicorn [lion]
VIII. “It’s my own Invention” [centaur]
IX. The Mock Turtle’s Story [fish]
X. The Lobster Quadrille [crab (= lobster)]
XI. Who Stole the Tarts? [SCALES OF JUSTICE]
XII. Alice’s Evidence/Which Dreamed it? [Alice = VIRGO]

The doubling of signs in the third chapter, there, follows from the fact that (in Looking-Glass) this chapter leaps two squares on the chessboard instead of one, which is to say moves at double speed. It is the chapter containing both the actual goat (‘a Goat, that was sitting next to the gentleman in white, shut his eyes and said in a loud voice, “She ought to know her way to the ticket-office, even if she doesn’t know her alphabet!”’) whose beard Alice actually grasps in fright when the railway carriage ‘rises up’ suddenly—and then, in a new, unrelated episode, all the insects. A scorpion, as entomologists will tell you, is not actually an insect: it’s an arachnid of the order scorpiones. But the ancients did not make this distinction (that is, they considered it an insect): and the lack of actual scorpions in the landscapes of England—upon which Wonderland riffs—necessitates its replacement with the gnat and other insects of this episode. Humpty Dumpty, though bullish, is not actually a bull. But he is (with his mouth and therefore, we must suppose, alimentary canal) not a sphere or ovoid but a torus; a taurus; exactly the kind of pun in which the mathematically expert Carroll would delight. It is also relevant that Alice herself (born 4th May 1852) was herself a taurus.

The starsign ‘cancer’, though conventionally a crab today, was indifferently a crab or a lobster in medieval and ancient understanding (καρκίνος, whence the Latin cancer, comes from the pincers or claws of the beast. Of either beast.)

What is so appealing about this superposed Alice pattern is that it starts with ‘virgo’, Alice herself, and ends there again, in twelve chapters moving through the various animal and other signs in a celestial, wondrous (‘wonderland’) circle to return again home.


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Do I genuinely believe that Lewis Carroll sat down and plotted out a complex zodiacal patterning, to run across his two twelve-chapter volumes of Alice’s adventures? No, I don’t. It’s extremely unlikely anything like this was ever in Carroll’s mind. 

I lay this out here as an exercise in interpretation as such. In an earlier blogpost I did something similar with C S Lewis’s Narnia and Mithraism: that post being an oblique engagement with Ward's Planet Narnia book, and a way of thinking aloud, in a performative way, about what counts as ‘evidence’ in literary criticism. This is what strikes me: though the premise of this post is, in a sense, arbitrary—the coincidence of there being twelve zodiac signs and the fact that each Alice book has twelve chapters—and although there is no evidence that Carroll himself thought zodiacally about his creation, or anything else, as I worked-out the comparison I found myself strangely compelled by it, almost convinced. After all: Tweedledum and Tweedledee! The Twins! Gemini! The lion and the unicorn! Once you start looking, you find these things everywhere.

Even elements that, manifestly, don’t fit the schema—most obviously the lack of any bull in either story (an animal Carroll could very easily have included if he’d wanted to)—become nodes of significance. Alice’s own star-sign was taurus: perhaps that is why ‘taurus’ is represented not by an actual bull, but by an egg, that ovoid symbol of origins and birth (the egg from which Helen was hatched, to which all the mighty legends of Troy and Odysseus’s wanderings can be traced back). It’s nonsense, but by locating it, and writing it out, it starts to acquire strange power over you. 

This is a dangerous path, I’m well aware. It’s how people end up believing the measurements of the Great Pyramid at Giza encode the Hebrew Bible (or is it the other way around?) or that Shakespeare’s plays contain elaborate codes proving Baconian authorship: evidence, howsoever tenuous, is presented as evidence and absence of evidence is also presented as evidence. It locks itself around the mind, like the circle (cancer) made by the connected claws of the lobster.