"The Publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 2
The Publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
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On
the morning of August 2nd, 1865, two thousand freshly bound copies of a strange
little book arrived at a London warehouse—and were almost immediately thrown
away. The author had paid for the entire print run himself. The illustrator
took one look at the finished pages and pronounced them unfit to sell. Within
days, every single copy of the “first edition” of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was pulled
from circulation, and the book the world actually fell in love with wouldn't
reach a single shop shelf for another four months.
It's
a strange footnote for a story that would go on to never once fall out of
print—and it's not even the strangest thing hiding behind this particular
publication date. The mathematician who wrote it kept one foot planted firmly
in Victorian rationalism and the other, quite seriously, in the era's booming
investigation of ghosts, telepathy, and the unseen. Decades later, one of
history's most notorious ceremonial magicians would tell his own students that
they couldn't fully understand Alice at all unless they understood the Qabalah
first…
Down the Rabbit Hole...
The
story everyone knows starts on a golden afternoon in 1862, when Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson, a shy, stammering mathematics don at Oxford's Christ Church,
rowed three young sisters up the Thames and improvised a tale about a girl who
follows a white rabbit down a hole. Alice Liddell, the middle sister, begged
him to write it down. He did, eventually expanding his handwritten gift into a
full manuscript, adding a grinning cat, a manic tea party, and a homicidal
Queen of Hearts along the way, and publishing it under the pen name “Lewis
Carroll.”
He hired John Tenniel, Punch magazine's star political cartoonist, to illustrate it, and paid every printing cost himself. When the first 2,000 copies came off the press on August 2nd, 1865, Tenniel took one look and declared the reproduction of his own illustrations unacceptably poor. Dodgson, ever the perfectionist, agreed completely and pulled the entire run before it ever reached a bookstore. The rejected, unbound sheets were eventually sold off to an American publisher; the real public debut had to wait until a corrected edition arrived in time for Christmas that same year, carrying an 1866 date on its title page out of sheer printing-house convention. So the book “published” on August 2nd is technically a book that was, by its own author's judgment, unpublishable. What actually reached readers that winter was already, in the most literal sense, a second edition.
Dodgson
himself was, by every outward measure, a pillar of Victorian orthodoxy: an
ordained Anglican deacon, a lifelong bachelor devoted to logic puzzles and
photography, a man so precise about language that he kept meticulous diaries
recording nearly every letter he ever wrote or received. He was, on paper, the
last person anyone might expect to take séances and telepathy seriously.
And yet he did, for decades. Dodgson's interest in psychical research began quietly in the 1860s and deepened considerably in the 1880s, after he read Johann Zöllner's Transcendental Physics and the Society for Psychical Research's landmark study Phantasms of the Living. He became an enthusiastic charter member of the SPR itself, founded in 1882 by a coalition of scientists and clergy determined to investigate ghosts, clairvoyance, and telepathy with the same rigor Dodgson brought to his mathematics. In an era when serious minds were genuinely divided over whether “thought transference” was a real, measurable force, Dodgson came down firmly on the side that it might well be.
There's no
evidence he ever cast a circle or drew a pentagram, and his own faith remained
conventionally, sincerely Christian to the end of his life. But it does
complicate the tidy image of Alice's author as a simple, whimsical children's
writer with no interest in the era's stranger currents. The man who sent Alice
down a rabbit hole into a world where logic ran backward was, by his own hand,
also investigating whether the walls between this world and the next were quite
as solid as they appeared.
However,
in the appendix to Magick in Theory and Practice,
Aleister Crowley laid out an actual reading list for students of his magical
order, the A∴A∴, ranking books by their usefulness to the serious occult
aspirant. Sandwiched between The Arabian Nights and the works of Rabelais sit three
unlikely entries: Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark, each annotated
with the identical note, “Valuable to those who understand the Qabalah.”
Dodgson's SPR
membership and his psychical research reading are matters of settled
biographical record. Crowley's reading list entry is a matter of settled
bibliographical record too, verifiable in his own published Appendix. What
Alice's Qabalistic “meaning” actually is, and whether Dodgson intended any of
it, remains squarely a matter of interpretation, one Crowley himself left as
more of a wink than an argument.
None
of which makes the coincidence any less fascinating. A mathematician
investigating the boundary between rational thought and the unseen, writing a
story about a girl who falls through a hole in the world and finds every fixed
rule of size, identity, and logic dissolving around her, on a date whose own
“publication” turned out to be an illusion the moment it happened. Wonderland,
it turns out, started keeping its secrets before Alice ever took her first bite
of mushrooms...
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of Crowley's own curious footnote, we're recommending the book he'd have wanted you to read right alongside Alice herself.
777 and Other Qabalistic
Writings of Aleister Crowley
Edited
by Israel Regardie | Red Wheel-Weiser Books
If
Crowley is going to insist that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is “valuable
to those who understand the Qabalah,” the obvious next question is: understand
it from where, exactly? 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings is his own answer,
and it remains one of the strangest, most genuinely useful reference works to
come out of the twentieth-century occult revival. Originally compiled with the
Golden Dawn adept Allan Bennett and first published in The Equinox, the volume
collects three distinct texts: the famous 777 itself, a dense tabulated
correspondence system mapping the ten Sephiroth and twenty-two paths of the
Tree of Life against symbols, deities, colors, and Tarot trumps drawn from
Hermeticism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Norse myth, and half a dozen other traditions
at once; Gematria, Crowley and Bennett's practical guide to Hebrew
numerological analysis; and Sepher Sephiroth, a working Hebrew-English number
dictionary. Israel Regardie's editorial introduction, present in the modern
Weiser edition, does real work making the material approachable, situating
Crowley's system within the broader Golden Dawn correspondence tradition rather
than leaving readers to reverse-engineer the logic from the tables alone.
This
is not bedtime reading, and it was never meant to be; 777 functions less as a
book to be read cover to cover than as a working reference a practitioner
returns to for years, the same way a chemist keeps a periodic table close at
hand. Readers coming to it cold, without at least a working familiarity with
the Tree of Life's basic structure, will likely find the opening tables
baffling rather than illuminating, and Crowley's prose elsewhere in the volume
swings, characteristically, between genuine clarity and gleeful obscurity
within the same page. But approached with patience, and perhaps a copy of Alice
close at hand for comparison, it offers exactly what Crowley promised his
students: the actual grammar underneath the joke, the system by which a talking
caterpillar, a disappearing cat, and a garden that keeps rearranging itself
stop looking like nonsense and start looking like a very old kind of code.
Whether Lewis Carroll ever intended any of it is a question 777 makes no
attempt to answer. It simply hands you the cipher and lets you decide for
yourself whether Wonderland was ever really about a rabbit hole at all.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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