The Mysticism of Lewis Carroll

The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll. Carroll is best known as the author of Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass, but he was also a brilliant mathematician and a greatly gifted formal logician. He became a mathematics lecturer and was expected, as a condition of his residency at Christ Church Oxford, to take holy orders. But he didn’t. He never took full orders. And the reason is that he became a mystic with a genius for documenting mystic symbolism in an accessible way. Carroll was shy, and cursed with an incurable stammer. But in the company of young children, he lost both his stammer and his shyness. Carroll confessed in 1858 that ‘they [the children] are three fourths my life’. And this is why he wrote what appeared to be children’s stories. As Carl Gustav Jung said “Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain vie