THE surreal landscape of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass has Alice wondering what the world is like on the other side of a mirror.
To her surprise, Alice is able to pass into a fantastic astral world and experience an alternate existence.
A puzzled Alice discovers a book with looking-glass poetry called “Jabberwocky,” which she can read only by holding it up to a mirror.
To Theosophical students, Carroll’s imaginative invention is an unambiguous reminder of “the astral light” of occultism, a universal storage drive where original images of all things are seen in reverse of their visible projections on our terrestrial plane.
In 1871, mediumship and table-tipping were all the rage, detailed in Mitch Horowitz’s recent book Occult America. Understandably, Carroll’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland was wildly popular at the time.
Clairvoyance and psychic powers have always fascinated the public. But then, as now, they were considered nonsensical by mainstream scientists.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” the White Queen confides to Alice.
Once of interest only to ghost-hunters, and the derided science of parapsychology, “The Big 5”: Precognition, Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Psychokinesis and Healing (known collectively as “psi”), are now being noticed by the rank-and-file psychological and neuroscience community.