Alice Steps Through The Looking Glass and Encounters The Kybalion

Whimsy and Wisdom: Discovering the Hermetic Principles in Looking Glass Land

Photo by Ivan Lapyrin on Unsplash

Wandering around my favourite charity (thrift) shop a few months ago, I found a lovely hardback copy of Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (Lewis Carroll 1872). It wasn’t an old one by any means but published in the 1990s. I hadn’t read Alice in decades and I bought it with some idea that I might read it to my grandkids. I left it by my bed so I could dip into it when insomnia stalks.

And, it was one of those nights when sleep buggered off as soon as my head hit the pillow, that I sat up and reached for Alice. But I’d picked up two books. And when I saw what the other book was, I had an idea.

The Kybalion is a slim volume which summarises the ancient Hermetic Principles. It was ostensibly written by the anonymous authors, ‘The Three Initiates’ but is generally thought to be the work of one William Walker Atkinson, a prominent ‘New Thought’ author. It was published in 1908, some 36 years after Alice climbed onto the mantelpiece and disappeared, head over tip, into a parallel world.

So I began to read Through the Looking Glass with the seven principles of The Kybalion in my mind. As I read, I looked for clues that Lewis Carroll knew the Principles of Hermeticism when he wrote the book.

So with a wink to Mr Carroll and an apology to the followers of Hermeticism, I’m attempting to bind Alice’s journey through the land where nothing is as it seems, with the timeless and magical principles that govern the universe.

1. Alice and the Principle of Mentalism

The whole story of Alice’s trip around the chessboard world of Looking Glass land is the embodiment of the Principle of Mentalism. It could have been plucked from the very pages of a Hermetic riddle — although ‘Alice’ is so much more readable. As we know, by the end of the story (forgive the spoiler, dear reader), Alice had been dreaming all along. She might have said to Kitty as she realised upon waking that the kitten was the sly Red Queen herself, “Why, the whole thing was in my head!”

The entire Looking Glass world with its peculiar rules and even more peculiar rulers…