Witch Queen Alice: Equinox Psychopomps & Witchcraft Rabbits

Springtime, katabasis, and Alice in Wonderland

The vernal equinox falls each year between March 20^th and 21^st, heralding the beginning of spring. For millennia our ancestors have marked this turning of the seasons with ritual, festivals, and other practices. As spurious as the origins of some of these traditions might be, it’s certainly true that springtime has been marked by spiritual observance cross-culturally for thousands of years.

It was also spring when, on a balmy golden afternoon, little Alice fell down the rabbit hole and into Wonderland. Lewis Carroll set his original story on May 4^th, to coincide with his muse Alice Liddell’s birthday, which makes it not an equinox story but most certainly a springtime tale, evidenced by the recurring imagery of sunlight, flowers in bloom, and a host of animal companions—not least of which is Alice’s psychopompic friend, the White Rabbit.

John Tenniel’s 1865 illustration of the White Rabbit

One of the most enduring symbols of springtime is the rabbit. Exemplified by the modern capitalist cryptid the Easter Bunny, the family Leporidae have long been associated with spring. Contrary to popular belief, Christians did not “steal” the Easter Bunny from Pagans. Like most things, the history and evolution of the bunny is nuanced and convoluted.

We have 16^th Century Germans to thank for our long-eared egg-delivering friend, who began life not as a rabbit but as a hare. The legend of Der Osterhase was first recorded by German doctor Johannes Richier in 1682, who felt compelled to warn against the consumption of eggs allegedly laid by the magical lapin, lest children succumb to stomach ache. Later iterations of the myth (particularly once the hare crossed the Atlantic and assimilated into the Pennsylvanian Dutch community) include a moralistic dimension, where the hare (or rabbit) judges children’s behavior before gifting them with colored eggs.

But hares have been associated with springtime, fertility, and transformation long before chocolatiers started slapping rabbits on their wares. In folklore, the hare has been a potent and complex symbol since at least the Neolithic period (we have an 8000-year-old hare-shaped vessel recovered from the Euphrates Valley proving the significance of the animal to ancient peoples). Hares appear in Ancient Greece as a symbol of love and fertility often associated with the Goddess Aphrodite. The image of the three hares appears in artwork as early as the 6^th Century (on a cave wall in China), and has been associated with the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. In Medieval times the hare appears frequently in illuminated manuscripts, tapestries, and other texts, where its sometimes a stand-in for God-fearing Christians and sometimes a malevolent agent of Satan.

Hans Hoffman A Hare in the Forest (16th Century)

Hares are silent and uncanny. They feed at night, hide during the day, and can conceive while pregnant (which accounts for the fertility association). Their enduring association with the moon, as well as their physical adaptability, led to a connection with shapeshifting and otherworld navigation. The hare is a liminal being, a psychopomp ushering us into the underworld. This folkloric connective tissue gave rise to a connection between hares and witches, as seen in this account from 1663, published in 1920 by Lady Gregory in Visions and Beliefs of West Ireland, where a farmer observes a hare transforming back into accused Somerset witch Julian Cox:

“A huntsman swore that he went out with a pack of hounds to hunt a hare, and not far from Julian Cox’s house he at last started a hare: the dogs hunted her very close… till at last the huntsman perceiving the hare almost spent and making towards a great bush, he ran on the other side of the bush to take her up and preserve her from the dogs; but as soon as he laid hands on her it proved to be Julian Cox, who had her head grovelling on the ground and her globes (as he expressed it) upward. He knowing her, was so affrighted that his hair on his head stood on end; and yet he spake to her and ask’d her what brought her there; but she was so far out of breath that she could not make him any answer; his dogs also came up full cry to recover the game and smelled at her and so left off hunting any further. And the huntsman and his dogs went home presently sadly affrighted.”

(Source: Matthew Dennison, thefield.co.uk)

Ian Howard RSA, Isobel Gowdie Encounters a Demon

There’s also the witch trial testimony of Isobel Gowdie, who (two years prior to Julian Cox) gave a detailed confession of her witchcraft practice during her trial in Auldearn, Scotland. Historians and folklorists are conflicted about the veracity of Gowdie’s testimony, but part of her supposedly-voluntary account included a spoken charm to transform into a hare:

I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and sych and meickle care;
And I shall go in the Devil’s name,
Ay while I come home again.

Transformation into a hare allowed the witch not only to move swiftly and undetected, but also to pass through the tender membrane of reality and into the otherworld of spirits, entities, and faerie beings. This process, often known as hedge riding or hedge crossing, is a kind of shamanic journeying, a trance state similar to astral projection where the witch extends their consciousness beyond the realm of the mundane and “over the hedge” into the wilderness beyond.

Alice, of course, does not cross a hedge. Instead her journey is more explicitly katabasic, a journey into the underworld accomplished by following the lapin psychopomp into the earth itself. Nevertheless, she is shifting from one reality into another—not becoming the hare, but pursuing the rabbit.

Alice is not yet a witch. She cannot cross the hedge at will or penetrate through the veil into the unseen reality beyond her tidy garden. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland she must undergo the initiatory journey, tumbling into the unknown after boredom and curiosity cause her to follow the civilized, more domesticated figure of the rabbit (complete with waistcoat and pocket watch) into the realm that will reshape her life forever.

I’ve long felt that Carroll’s Alice books are katabasis myths. To me they are a softened, more whimsical Descent of Inanna – a bedtime story for would-be witches who know what it is to fall away from reason, out of the mundane and into a world whose logic and rules you cannot immediately understand. As a child I played my VHS tape of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland so many times the cassette broke and voraciously consumed every adaptation I could get my hands on, the good, the bad, and the ugly. When I slept, I dreamed of Wonderland, a dream landscape that recurs into adulthood and that I’ve come to connect with Elphame. I would lie on my back on my mother’s bed holding her antique ebony hand mirror, tilting it backward to see the room on the other side of the glass, the Looking Glass World that I knew I could access if only I knew the right words, the right incantation.

Around this same time, my father would tell me bedtime stories he made up himself. The stories were of a little girl—Amelia—just my same age and height, who crossed a magical hedge with her animal companion, a frog named Fortescue, into a series of strange and unusual worlds.

The initiation story was already in my blood, in my bones. I wouldn’t piece it all together or understand it for what it was til’ many, many years later.

Like my father, Lewis Carroll—more formally known as the Reverend Charles Dodgson—was a storyteller. His verbal telling of the stories that became Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass began on July 4^th 1862, not May 4^th, when the first story is set. It would not be correct to say that he conceived of them as initiatory tales – not spiritually, at least, though there are clearly themes of childhood, transformation, and growth, especially in Through the Looking Glass. Carroll was a Christian and a mathematician, though also a member of the Society for Psychical Research, so it would be fair to extrapolate some mystical meaning to his tales, whether fully intentional or not.

Many of Alice’s struggles and conflicts in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are satirical math logic puzzles, but this is also a beautiful metaphor for encountering the world of spirits (or Fae) and having to discern rules and order within a tangle of what seems to be chaos. A casual reader might see Alice not as an agent of story but a passive observer who spends most of the narrative confused, overwhelmed, and allowing Wonderland to call the shots. But this is the initiatory journey: we follow the rabbit, the psychopompic hare, and allow the visions, experiences, and oddities of the revealed otherworld to change us.

In Wonderland, Alice concludes the narrative by resisting her own beheading by the tyrannical Queen of Hearts and ends the dream-state, the visionary hedge-crossing, by collapsing the magical lens and dismissing the Queen’s soldiers as nothing but a pack of cards. She wakes to the real world and the adventure concludes. But the initiation has still taken place: she is not the same Alice who tumbled down the rabbit hole. In Through the Looking Glass the initiation is completed when Alice, now with greater agency, navigates the chess board to become herself a Queen.

Through the Looking Glass is an autumnal tale, set on a snowy night on November 4^th, exactly six months after the events of Wonderland. However when Alice crosses through the mirror and into the Looking Glass House, she enters a verdant spring-time garden – the Garden of Live Flowers. The seasonal imagery, the exact timing of the dates, and the changes in Alice’s personality and agency between the two books signal a biphasic initiation: curiosity and culmination, Child Alice and Witch Queen Alice, who has learned the logic of the dream-realm of Wonderland, undergone trials, and taken up her position as authority in that space.

There’s so much potent witchcraft symbolism in the Alice books – enough so that a series of posts on the subject might be worthwhile (I recently read the short story by Thomas Ligotti, Alice’s Last Adventure, a review of which you can read here, and which adds a darker aspect to the initiatory journey which is well worth considering and discussing). And of course there are other darker-aspected Alice adaptations and properties, such as the video game series by American McGee, which re-imagines Alice as catatonic patient in a psychiatric institution. Alice has continued to capture imaginations for over a hundred years for very good reason: something about the archetype is resonating on a deeper level. There is mystery and mysticism there, a hint of something deeper and more profound lurking beneath the surface of a children’s story of talking animals and treats that make you grow and shrink. In Ligotti’s story, the protagonist reflects on her father:

“I remember one occasion when Father was reading Through the Looking Glass to me for the umpteenth time. Suddenly the stopped, closed the book, and said to me, as if in deep confidence, that there was more in the Alice books than anyone knew. But that he knew, and someday would tell me.”

Someday perhaps we will all see it – the Wonderland beyond the hedgerow, the meaning in-between things and the witchcraft that exists within story, wrought in ink and incantation, in the words of long-dead witches and mathematician-mystics. There is a white rabbit waiting for all of us. So let us go into a hare. Let us cross the threshold. It is spring, after all.