Alice in the Castle of Cups
Tarot Lessons in Wonderland
Image by Pixabay“Every adventure requires a first step”.From the Cheshire Cat
When Alice tumbled after the White Rabbit and slipped through the rabbit hole, she didn’t just fall into a strange dreamland. She crossed a threshold into the realm of Cups — the Castle of Hearts, where feelings rule, time melts, and logic twists itself into knots.
Teacups, Tears, and Tarot: Alice in the Realm of Hearts
Entering any archetypal realm is a rite of passage, almost an initiation.
The Castle of Heart is not a calm palace of polite emotions. It is a place of deep transformation, death, and rebirth of ideas, concepts, and feelings. What you think you know about yourself dissolves there, the way Alice’s sense of size and shape kept changing with every sip and bite.
In this kingdom, Cups are not just cards. They are rivers, tears, teacups (symbols of the suit), and oceans of mood.
The Castle in the Kingdom of Hearts belongs to Water, the world of feelings. People who “live” in this suit judge life by the heart, not by cold logic.
Harmony, kindness, and deep connection matter more than facts and proofs. Their choices are guided by values, love, and emotional truth, even when those choices don’t make sense on paper. Wonderland shows this perfectly: nothing is very logical, but everything is emotionally charged.
When the realm of Hearts overflows, emotions run high. Romance glows in every corner; nostalgia hangs in the air like perfume; imagination stretches reality into impossible shapes; spiritual longing turns every path into a quest for meaning. There is a constant search for belonging, family, friendship, causes, faith, relationships, and even trends. The heart wants to feel part of something bigger, something that says, “You matter. You are loved.”
Yet, as Alice discovers, the shadow of this realm is just as powerful. Feelings can thicken into fog. Fantasy becomes a trap. One can cling to the past like Alice clinging to memories of “who she was,” or dream so hard about the future that real life quietly slips away. It’s easy to end up at a tea party that never moves forward, stuck in old stories and endless reruns of the same scene.
Aside from the royal court of Hearts, the Queen and King who embody the peak of emotional power, we can imagine the Minor Arcana busy in the background, tending the kingdom. The Pages might carry delicate messages of affection, the Knights ride on waves of passion and mood, the numbered Cups lay out everyday scenes of love, loss, hope, and healing. Together, they keep the business of the realm running: friendships, family dramas, romances that spark and fade, spiritual awakenings that rise and fall like tides.Image by Pixabay
But Wonderland adds another layer. Beyond the “expected” tarot figures, we meet stranger beings: the nervous White Rabbit, forever late; the Mad Hatter and his chaotic, timeless tea; the March Hare, twitchy and restless. These inhabitants are like living allegories of feelings and impulses when our intellectual mind is not in charge. Anxiety, excitement, mood swings, and sudden tears — all walking around in shoes and holding cups.
There is a reason the Hatter is mad, yes? He is our original archetype of the Fool. This time with Alice. He is her host in one of the way stations on this emotional journey.“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” said Alice.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the cat. “We’re all mad here.”
— Lewis Carroll
In the Castle of Hearts, the element of Water rules, and logic behaves like the Cheshire Cat: it appears and disappears at will, leaving only a grin in the air. Just as Alice wanders through a world where feelings often trump facts, the residents of this watery kingdom judge through the heart’s own logic.
The Cheshire Cat, with his vanishing body and shining smile, is the perfect guide here. He doesn’t give straight, linear answers. Instead, he mirrors back Alice’s own confusion, curiosity, and desire, inviting her to look within.
This realm is soaked in romantic idealism and vivid imagination. Love can feel like a pure, transcendent rapture. A simple tea party can become a symbol of time frozen by emotional wounds.Image by Pixabay
Off With Their Heads, On With Their Hearts:
The Queen of Hearts, shouting “Off with their heads!” at every tiny offense, is what happens when feelings grow too big and wild, when anger and fear explode without any container. That is the danger of an overflowing Cups kingdom: one can become lost in deceptive fantasies or emotional storms, trapped in a never-ending party of the past, or ruled by a queen whose heart is all feeling and no wisdom.
And yet, like all the Suit Castles, the realm and Castle of the Heart is not without transformation. In fact, it demands it.“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
This question echoes through the watery halls of the Castle of Hearts. Who am I when I am not my old stories? Who am I when my feelings keep changing? Along with Alice on her own journey of self-discovery, we come to one of the most important guides in this emotional landscape: the Caterpillar.
Sitting calmly on his mushroom, smoking and watching, the Caterpillar is an emblematic sage, a guru who offers few words but powerful challenges. In the language of the Hidden Arcana Tarot, he can be seen as the “Almuten Fulguris,” the elusive 24th Arcana. His presence is not an invention, but a restoration, an echo of teachings preserved in mystery schools, alchemy, and world myths. Here, in the Castle of Hearts, he stands as Guardian of Alice’s soul, a symbol of her deepest life purpose.
He is a guide who is undergoing his own transformation. A caterpillar is never just a caterpillar; it is a promise of a butterfly. His wisdom is not still and fixed. It is dynamic, growing from the inside out. And in the realm of Cups, there can be no shallow transformation. Any true change of heart must be deep, messy, and honest.
The Caterpillar, the Cup, and the Question: Who Are You?
The Caterpillar forces Alice to face this reality. When he asks, “Who are you?” she struggles to answer. She is too tall, too small, too emotional, too confused. This is not just about size; it is about identity. His question becomes the key that unlocks her awareness of how much she is changing.
This is a profound lesson in agency.
The Caterpillar does not fix things for her. He does not tell her who she is. Instead, he hands her a tool: the mushroom. One side makes her grow larger; the other makes her smaller. He gives her the knowledge and the instrument she needs to manage her own transformations. In tarot terms, he hands her a way to work with the Cups energy — how much feeling, how much sensitivity, how big or small she allows her emotional reactions to become.“I can’t go back to yesterday — because I was a different person then.”
— Lewis Carroll
Growing, Shrinking, Feeling: Alice and the Alchemy of Cups
Before this meeting, Alice had already tasted the wild extremes of the Castle of Hearts. After the White Rabbit had mistaken her for his housemaid and sent her to fetch his gloves, she ended up alone in his little house. There, she finds a bottle and, remembering what happened before, drinks from it with cautious hope. She shrinks to a tiny size and escapes the house, yet soon realizes she is still stuck, now lost in tall grass that seems like a forest.
Next, she discovers a cake on the ground marked with the tempting words “EAT ME.” Desperate to regain a useful size, she eats the entire thing. The spell works too well. She shoots up, growing so gigantic that her head hits the ceiling, her arms and legs trapped at odd angles. One arm bursts out of a window; a foot presses against a door. She is now a prisoner of her own growth, painfully aware of how out of proportion everything has become.
Overwhelmed, she bursts into tears.
Her enormous sobbing creates a pool of tears that rises around her feet, a literal flood of emotion. When the Rabbit returns and sees this towering girl inside his house, he panics. With his neighbors’ help, he attacks the “monster” by throwing pebbles at her. But in true Wonderland fashion, the pebbles transform into little cakes.
Seeing one more chance, Alice eats a cake and begins to shrink again. At first, she feels relieved, but soon fear spikes: she is shrinking too much. The pool of tears she made when she was a giant now threatens to drown her. What was once ankle-deep becomes, at her new size, a vast ocean of her own sorrow and confusion.
This is the perfect image for the shadow of Cups: we can be overwhelmed and nearly swallowed by the emotions we ourselves created.
In this light, the Caterpillar’s lesson becomes even clearer. By asking “Who are you?” and explaining how the mushroom works, he guides Alice from helpless reaction to purposeful action. He shows her that she can learn to adjust, to grow or shrink as needed, rather than being constantly at the mercy of her feelings and circumstances.
In tarot language, he teaches her how to work with the Castle of Hearts instead of drowning in it.Image Pixabay by DigitalRoo
The Castle of Hearts, then, is not just a dreamy place of romance and poetry. It is a training ground for emotional intelligence. People who live strongly in the realm of Cups seek harmony, kindness, and deep connection. They long for meaning and belonging in family, faith, and relationships. At their best, they love bravely and feel deeply. At their worst, they lose themselves in fantasies, emotional confusion, and old pain. The trick is not to shut the door on feeling, but to learn, like Alice, how to navigate it.
The Suit of Cups in a reading often shows where our hearts are leading us — our hopes, wounds, and secret wishes. When Cups dominate, it can mean we are in our own Wonderland, ruled by moods, dreams, and spiritual questions. The story of Alice reminds us that this is not a bad thing. It is a necessary passage. But we must meet our Caterpillars, our inner guides, and accept their hard questions. We must learn to hold both the joy of the tea party and the terror of the Queen of Hearts without losing ourselves.
Alice’s journey through Wonderland mirrors our own walk through the Castle of Hearts.
It can be confusing, emotional, and often absurd. But it is also rich with insight. Each strange character, each pool of tears, each sudden change of size is a card in the Suit of Cups, inviting us to understand our feelings more deeply. The realm of Cups does not erase reality; it changes how we see it. And in that shifting light, we may finally discover the true shape of our own heart.
It is, as Alice learns, a beautiful and bewildering journey to discover who we truly are.
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Alice in the Castle of Cups was originally published in HiddenArcanaTarot on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
13.11.2025 21:56 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
