In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice leaves her world behind by falling down a rabbit hole for a very, very long time, before landing gently by a table set with a glass bottle and a key to a tiny door. Alice picks up the key, stoops to open the lock, and marvels when the door swings open onto a beautiful garden. Once she obeys the bottle on the table labeled, “Drink Me,” she shrinks down small enough to fit through the door. Only, when she does, she realizes too late that she has forgotten to take the key, which is now too high for her to reach.
An inhabitant of Victorian England, Lewis Carroll was an Oxford graduate, a mathematician, and Anglican deacon—his mind ordered reality according to the empire’s rules of civilization. Duly, his young protagonist is a sensible, well-bred young lady who finds herself completely at odds with the world she encounters down the rabbit hole. In older tales of magic quests, the young men and women who embarked on them could rely on their instincts to see them through, but Alice wanders lost through Wonderland, confused by nearly everyone she meets. Traditional fairy lore offered explicit instructions on how mortals might receive otherworldly hospitality, but when Alice stumbles across the Hatter’s tea party, she immediately offends her hosts, and is equally offended in turn. And when she finally makes her way into the garden, she finds that it is nothing like the paradise she had imagined, but a place full of fear, ruled by a capricious, raging monarch with a fondness for decapitation. Carroll wrote Alice’s adventures at the height of Queen Victoria’s rule, as Britain conquered the world and imposed industrial capitalism upon its conquests, showing that in even the most fantastical tales, magic had stopped making sense.
New Orleans is a city that only makes sense to people who believe in magic. You are not required to admit to this, even to yourself, but you must follow its principles to derive any satisfaction from living here. Otherwise, there would be no logic to committing to a place that appears to outside eyes as irredeemably dysfunctional. Those who find themselves baffled by strange occurrences and brushes with the otherworldly tend to relocate. Those who stay can generally hang. But like inhabitants of Victorian England, the natural rhythms of this place have also been conquered by the stern metronome of industrial production. It’s only during Carnival that wild time completely supersedes it, and while the city is governed by its ancient laws, magic is once again undeniable.
This is true across the city’s many subcultures. You can go anywhere in New Orleans—a swanky boutique on Magazine, a Mid-City bro bar, or a hip kid downtown coffee shop—use the words “Mardi Gras magic” in context, and expect to be understood. Though Mardi Gras looks completely different neighborhood by neighborhood, all seasoned revelers know this to be a time of high emotion, complex plots, and extremely meaningful coincidences that would make for a totally pointless story outside of Carnival. But in the thick of the season, Mardi Gras magic is all there is. You set out in search of something you need for your costume and the next thing you know, you’re Odysseus, getting waylaid by enchantresses and navigating the stormy seas of Mardi Gras traffic. Someone you’ve been feuding with catches sight of you from a parade float, offers you a handmade throw with a beatific smile, and you know all is forgiven. The seeds of story planted at Epiphany come into full bloom on Mardi Gras Day, when everything is laden with cosmic grandeur. The lords of St. Charles Avenue toss trinkets to the peasants, African gods stride along Claiborne Avenue, and there’s glitter mingling with the ashes of the dead in the waters of the Mississippi.
In the grand tradition of Dionysian ecstasies, intoxication plays an important role in Carnivalesque rites. But that’s not to say that all 21st century intoxicants serve the magic of the season equally. Among them are agents of industrial time, who have infiltrated this notorious bastion of subversive joy to tempt you with their Faustian bargains. They will sell you extreme sensation as a substitute for true magic, and your tired body and overstimulated nerves will pay the price. A season of trying to find your way into the garden with potions to make you endlessly taller and smaller can leave you hollowed out by the end of it, physically and spiritually exhausted, poorly equipped to re-enter the ever-more brutal rhythms of industrial capitalism.
Charting a course through the many variables involved with staying sane and maximizing the magic—ducking and weaving with the shadow of Dark Mardi Gras all the while—is one hell of a quest. When the journey is at its stickiest, it is best to turn to the Mardi Gras sages: those New Orleanians with decades of Carnivals under their belts, be it a pearl-clad Uptown lady parked on the parade route, cocktail in hand, or a wizard in a walking parade, beard glinting silver in the morning sun. They’ve achieved their state of mastery by remembering that all poison is in the dose, that timing really is everything, and by embracing the poet W. B. Yeats’ injunction to “seize whatever prey the heart longs for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.” —Holly Devon
illustration by Laura Frizzell
February 2026 Double Truck cover by Romey Petite
