"Off With Their Heads!?" Alice's Encounter with the Red Queen on her Heroine’s Journey

Alice is, in many ways, the embodiment of a Victorian paradox: a child who is supposed to be “seen and not heard,” and yet she is both. She speaks with clarity and wit. She contradicts authority. She argues with mad tea-drinkers, challenges riddles, and boldly questions her environment. But she also suffers the bewilderment of those caught between childhood obedience and the first sparks of individuation.

Her world is a satire of adult logic: rules without reason, etiquette without empathy, and authority without compassion. Lewis Carroll, himself a logician, uses nonsense to reveal the hidden madness of so-called reason. In Wonderland, logic turns back on itself, exposing the brittle absurdities of adult norms.

This is the anxiety of growing up. One minute, you’re too big for your britches. Next, you’re too small to count. The famous “eat me” and “drink me” conundrum, where Alice swells or shrinks depending on what she consumes, is not simply fantastical. It is a metaphor for emotional expansion and contraction, for the adolescent push-and-pull between dependence and autonomy, the fear of taking up too much space, or vanishing altogether.

And then, there is the Red Queen: Alice's shadow teacher in the underworld of her own psyche. She is no simple villain but a force of rigid order, an enforcer of appearances and absolute rules. "Off with their heads!" becomes her mantra of control, decapitation as the symbolic severing of independent thought, the removal of all that questions her authority. But the Red Queen is more than an external tyrant; she is the internalized voice Alice must meet in her descent: the part that fears chaos, craves certainty, and lashes out when confronted with ambiguity. She rules from fear disguised as power, panic dressed as command. To face the Red Queen is to confront one's own calcified rules: the perfectionism, the self-doubt, the inner dictator that hisses, "You mustn't make a scene. You mustn't speak your truth. You mustn't grow too big or shrink too small."

In Neo-Classical Homeopathy, we recognize this archetype: the remedy state where rigidity protects a fragile core, where control masks terror of the unknown. The Red Queen is not to be vanquished but integrated; her origins understood, her sharp tongue disarmed through presence and compassion, this is the essence of the Heroine's Journey.

There's a curious echo of the Red Queen in another fictional enforcer of false order: Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter. In both, power hides behind politeness, cruelty behind decorum. The forced niceties, the clipped "Um," the insistence on propriety: these are linguistic veils for violence.

When Alice stammers, hesitates, or says "Um," it is the language of uncertainty trying to find its voice in a world that punishes not-knowing. This is the homeopathic state of suppression: when the vital force cannot speak directly, it stutters, it fragments, it loses coherence. The psyche knows what it needs to say, but the internal Red Queen forbids it. Silence becomes not peace but pathology, a constriction of the visshudha (throat) chakra, a swallowing of words that then lodge as lumps, as thyroid dysfunction, as the body's protest against enforced muteness.

The question becomes: How do we speak from our center in a world that punishes authenticity? How do we grow and shrink (without apology) to match the needs of the moment rather than the demands of the tyrant within? This is the individuation process. This is the core of longitudinal neo-classical homeopathic healing. To reclaim the voice means descending into the place where it was first silenced, meeting the Red Queen on her own territory, and discovering that her power dissolves when met with truth. The remedy for Umbridge-consciousness, for Red Queen rigidity, is not more control but courageous flexibility: the willingness to be uncertain, to speak imperfectly, to allow the "um" to become not hesitation but the sacred pause before authentic utterance. In our retreat, we explore how the Red Queen lives within us, how her rules have protected us, and how (finally) we can thank her for her service and gently set down her crown.

Homeopathy & the Heroine’s Transformation

In the fluid terrain of healing, homeopathy mirrors Alice’s journey. The remedy, when truly well-chosen, does not merely palliate symptoms; it meets the totality of the moment: the sensation, the story, the threshold. It speaks to the psyche’s gesture toward change. In this way, homeopathy becomes a subtle alchemy, guiding the heroine toward the integration of her lost or disowned parts.

Alice’s repeated question: “Who am I now?” is not rhetorical. It is the central inquiry of the individuation process. Each encounter in Wonderland invites her to shed assumptions, to challenge inherited norms, to see through the masks of identity, and to allow Alice to become distinct. Likewise, each remedy, rightly chosen, calls forth a deeper becoming. Not by suppressing the shadow, but by making space for it.

The Red Queen, with her authoritarian certainty and violent threats, represents the fragmented will to control what cannot be controlled: change, chaos, emotion. In the heroine’s journey, she is not a nemesis to be defeated but a shadow teacher to be understood. Integration begins not when we conquer the Red Queen, but when we recognize her within our own inner tyrant who demands perfection, who fears contradiction, who would rather silence the heart than risk the unknown.

Homeopathy, in this context, becomes a numinous threshold medicine, a guide for the psyche standing at the edge of the rabbit hole, uncertain whether to jump. Just as Alice must leave behind the safety of her sister's lap and the predictable world above ground, individuation requires us to release old dependencies and step into the uncertainty of becoming. Remedies like Lac maternum hold the archetype of mother's milk, the original nourishment, and support the delicate transition from "I am fed" to "I feed myself", from dependency to self-trust. Pulsatilla, the windflower that bends with every breeze, speaks to those who, like Alice at the beginning of her journey, look constantly to others for direction: "Should I drink this? Should I eat that? Which way should I go?" Pulsatilla helps the soul find its own inner compass, to make choices not from fear of abandonment but from an emerging sense of self. These remedies don't force growth; they accompany it, offering the homeopathic equivalent of Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth of transformation.

Other remedies address the particular madness of the descent itself. Aurum metallicum, the remedy made from gold, speaks to Alice's encounter with the Queen's croquet ground, that place where perfection is demanded, where one wrong move means "Off with your head!" Aurum metallicum integrates the crushing weight of perfectionism with the soul's longing to be simply, messily, authentically human. It is the remedy for those who have climbed so high they've forgotten how to touch the ground. Anacardium orientale and Stramonium bring coherence to the fragmented psyche when, like Alice eating and drinking unknown substances, we lose our sense of wholeness, growing too large, shrinking too small, no longer recognizing our own reflection. Anacardium orientale speaks to the internal split, the feeling of two selves at war.

"Am I good or am I cruel? Do I belong or am I cast out?"

While Stramonium addresses the terror of complete disorientation, the nightmare logic of Wonderland, it stops being whimsical and becomes genuinely frightening. These remedies don't erase the confusion; they help us hold it without shattering, to remain present even when nothing makes sense, to trust that coherence will return, not by forcing it, but by surrendering to the spiral of the journey itself.

To face the Red Queen without losing one’s head is no small task. It requires inner spaciousness. It requires a medicine that can match the psyche’s complexity and honor its mythic dimensions. Homeopathy, when practiced with nuance, offers just such a path.

Alice teaches us that transformation does not come from victory. It comes from staying present in the mystery. From daring to ask, “Who am I now?” and listening for the answer, not from the outside, but from within. From befriending our own wild logic. From meeting the Red Queen within and offering her not submission or rebellion, but understanding.

Join Us Down the Rabbit Hole

At our retreat, our students will descend into Wonderland not to escape life, but to delve into it. We’ll explore Alice’s shape-shifting journey as a mirror of our own: facing fearsome queens, confronting nonsensical rules, and learning to navigate the landscape of becoming with courage, wit, and wonder.

Growing up isn't linear. It's a spiral. Spiral learning means we encounter the same themes again and again: attachment, autonomy, trust, identity, but each pass through deepens our understanding. What looked like regression is often integration; what feels like going backward is actually circling around to heal what we missed the first time. The spiral honors both progress and return. And sometimes, the magic is in knowing how to grow and shrink, to meet life's complexity when needed and return to essential simplicity when called, without losing who you are.

We will offer two core programs, Simpli-PHI and Intensi-PHI, plus specialized offerings and trainings through The Healing Flame (Prometheus stole fire from the gods; we offer it to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear).

Step through the looking-glass: Join Simpli-PHI, our foundational course beginning January 2025. Homeopathic practitioners and committed students can explore Intensi-PHI and Healing Flame offerings. The journey begins within.

© 2025 Je Norbu (Jason-Aeric) Huenecke, CCH, RSHom (NA)