# 10 · The Rabbit ← [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 9 The Cat (Gabriel)|9 · The Cat]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary|The Bestiary]] · 10 of 10 · the strip ends in ∞, back to the top: [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 1 The Swan (Enoch)|1 · The Swan]] ↺ > **One-line reading.** The Rabbit stands at the foot of the ladder, the Kingdom: a stern little armed figure at the gate where everything above becomes a life someone has to live, and where the climb begins again.  *A pen drawing of a long-eared rabbit with a big, stern face (heavy brows, outlined eyes, a small triangular nose) and a plus-shaped cross on its forehead, on a stick-figure body. One hand holds an acorn, with an arrow and the words "Acorn grenade"; the other ends in a small forked hand. An arrow marked "Feet" points at one foot, and below the figure sits a circle with a cross inside it. The caption reads "Lemon the Rabbit (at the Gate of the World)".* > [!infobox] Station 10 · Malkuth, the Kingdom > > - **Caption:** *Lemon the Rabbit (at the Gate of the World)* > - **Seat and planet:** Malkuth · the Earth (the Kingdom, the world) > - **Scale note and colour:** low F · citrine, olive, russet and black, the four-part Kingdom band (the board's ascending scale) > - **Body address:** the feet (body station 1) · *feet of a rabbit* > - **Room and code:** [room 76](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/76), *The Gate Of The World* · `D637` > - **Board lines:** descending, *I woke up in my shadow* · ascending, *Last night I dreamt I was standing at the Gate of the World* > - **Crowley's line at this station:** *The world*, from Aleister Crowley's *The Book of Lies* (1913), copied onto the handwritten emanation page > - **Neighbours:** above, [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 9 The Cat (Gabriel)|9 · The Cat]] · below, none: the animal strip ends in an infinity sign (∞) ## What the drawing shows A long-eared rabbit with a big round head and a stern face: heavy brows angled down, outlined eyes, a small triangular nose. A plus-shaped cross sits on its forehead. The body is a stick figure. One hand holds an acorn, and an arrow names it an *Acorn grenade*; the other arm ends in a small forked hand. An arrow labelled *Feet* points at one foot, and under the figure sits a separate circle with a plus inside it, the shape of the Earth sign ⊕. The caption reads *Lemon the Rabbit* and, below it, *(at the Gate of the World)*. ## What the station does The tenth station is Malkuth, the Kingdom: the world at the foot of the Tree, and in the body count the feet. The drawing marks all three. The caption puts the Rabbit at the Gate of the World, the Earth sign sits beneath it, and an arrow points out the feet. The handwritten emanation page gives the station two words, *The world*. The board's scale gives the rung low F and a four-part band of citrine, olive, russet and black. And [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - The Equations|the Equations]] start here: *Rabbit = Man*. The room's key is an address. *D637* is a cell on the "I'm 33" board, and that cell holds a question: how to create and steer a soul. The key to this drawing is, literally, the address of a question about making and steering a soul. The two board lines refuse an easy opposition between sleeping and waking. Coming down, the ladder's last line is *I woke up in my shadow*: arriving in the world is waking, but waking inside a shadow. Going up, the first line dreams, of standing at the Gate of the World, the same gate as Lemon's caption. The board states that a speaker changes into something at only two rungs, *became* (the child who became a warrior, going up at Mars) and *woke* (here, coming down), and of all ten animals only those two carry weapons and pet names: Cinnamon's dagger, Lemon's grenade. A sweet name on an armed body, twice, where a self turns into something else. The acorn grenade has a song. *[[Good Time (1-08)]]* compares youth not to a fountain but to a hidden hand grenade, and its singer is a rabbit, unsure what is being sought; in the public dream story behind the song, Roy is a rabbit and Lucius a second rabbit in clown makeup. In the lyrics and artifacts this guide has catalogued, *grenade* occurs only there and on this drawing. The drawing was in the maze by 13 August 2022, and the song came out on 29 September 2023, so the hidden explosive was in the pictures more than a year before a song said it. That dates the image, not the writing of the line, and the song has four credited writers. The acorn joins two futures in one small object: a seed that could grow into a tree, and a charge that could break whatever holds it. *[[Happy Face]]*'s ticking timebomb and *[[Soul Is A Star]]*'s girl who was a gun read as the same family of hidden explosives. The board keeps other rabbits too. A hand-drawn breeding tree, numbered 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 down the margin, is captioned *Rabbits in the key of 'F'*, and it has its own room, [[Hall of Mirrors/Artifacts - Gallery 4 (113-149)#120 · FIBONACCI RABBITS|Fibonacci Rabbits]]. Fibonacci introduced that sequence through a puzzle about breeding rabbits, and F is also the note of the ladder's first rung, the Rabbit's. Read that way, the rabbit is generation in the Kingdom. *[[Sir Rabbit]]* starts and ends at this station. Rabbit leaves a garden full of sound, climbs by way of the Cat, the Fox, the Dove and the Spider, and then, after one great leap through the Mourning Sun, a flash of lightning (spelled *lighting* on the page) puts him back where he began. The room holding that last page is named *Sir Rabbit & The Lightning Flash*. In the Tree tradition the Lightning Flash is the path of creation from the crown down to the Kingdom. Read with that, the traveller who climbed from Moon to Sun comes home by the descending route, and the poem joins the ladder's two directions in one story. The garden is the same; the Rabbit is not. The poem's own rabbit is not Lemon, though. The rabbit on the poem's page is a found object, a Roman enamelled brooch (100 to 300 CE) in the Metropolitan Museum, while Lemon is a drawing on the ladder. They share the Kingdom's seat; whether they are one figure is left open.  *The room Rabbit=Man, opened by the phrase "Standing at the gate of the world": a monochrome studio photograph of a rabbit in profile against black, one ear up. Its name is the key to the next door, Cat=Moon.*  *Room 51, Roy Story "Sir Rabbit" (code Q763): the whole poem typed in four blocks around a photograph of a green-bronze Roman rabbit brooch, the last block still selected in an editing frame. Q763 is also the board cell that holds the animal column's rabbit photograph.* Finally, the station sits apart. On the *Tree thinking* drawing a line labelled *Abyss Out* separates 10 from 9 and sets the tenth station on its own platform, and the emanation page's only arrow points down from 9 to 10. Below the Rabbit, the animal strip ends not in a blank but in an infinity sign. The last station is not an ending. ## Where it connects - **[[Sir Rabbit]]**: the poem's seeker shares this seat, and his journey ends by coming home. - **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - The Equations|The Equations]]**: *Rabbit = Man* is the first door, and the chain climbs from here to the Sun. - **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 5 The Horse (Cinnamon)|The Horse]]**: the other pet name and the other weapon, at the other stated change. - **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 1 The Swan (Enoch)|The Swan]]**: the crown to this foot; the strip's ∞ sends the reader back up. - **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - Peter XIV and KiRi-Kama|Peter XIV and KiRi-Kama]]**: the second bestiary sheet, where the ladder's stations become a people and a place. ## In the tradition The Rabbit is the one animal on the ladder that no compared tradition seats at its station. Crowley's *777* has no rabbit or hare anywhere in its animal column and gives Malkuth the Sphinx; Agrippa does know the hare, but lists it among Saturn's and Mercury's creatures, not at the Kingdom. The method that places the owl and the whale (taking an animal from a path and seating it where the path comes down from) cannot reach this seat, because every path touching Malkuth ends there. At the one station the inherited tables could not fill, the work sets the animal it uses elsewhere for its seeker (and Agrippa's hare, filed partly under Mercury, Lucius's planet, echoes the dream's second rabbit). The plus on the forehead and the circled cross below read naturally as the cross and the Earth sign, though nothing on the sheet names them. And W. G. Gray, whose terms label the *Tree thinking* drawing, calls the gap between the Moon-seat and the Kingdom the Inferior Abyss: the sleep-state, the barrier between outer and inner awareness. The Rabbit's two lines sit on exactly that border, one waking and one dreaming. That is a resonance with a book the work demonstrably uses, not a stated intention. ## Open questions - Why *Lemon*? It may simply be a coat colour; no real rabbit of that name has turned up. - Are Lemon, the poem's Sir Rabbit and the photographed rabbit of *Rabbit=Man* one figure? They share the seat, and the work does not say. - What does the cross on the forehead mean? No source explains it. --- ← [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 9 The Cat (Gabriel)|9 · The Cat]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary|All the animals]] · back to [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 1 The Swan (Enoch)|1 · The Swan]] ↺ · the second bestiary: [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - Peter XIV and KiRi-Kama|Peter XIV and KiRi-Kama]]