# 2 · The Owl [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary|The Bestiary]] · 2 of 10 · next: [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 3 The Whale (God the Mother)|3 · The Whale]] → > **One-line reading.** The Owl is where the ladder first imagines an order: wheels within wheels, a whole world pictured before anything in it moves. Its station is also where the word is first spoken and one becomes two.  *A pencil drawing of an owl facing straight out: a heart-shaped face, two large black eyes, a short hooked beak, speckles down the breast, wings folded at its sides, and no perch or ground drawn. Three stars sit over the head, the middle one larger and higher, with three small dots among them in a point-up triangle. Three spirals float in the empty air around the bird, none touching it, and a note at upper right, "wheels of whirling forces", sends an arrow to one of them. The caption reads "RAtziel the Beech OwL", with capitals for the R and A that open the name and for the last letter of "Owl".* > [!infobox] Station 2 · Chokmah, Wisdom > > - **Caption:** *RAtziel the Beech Owl* > - **Seat and planet:** Chokmah · no planet (the tradition gives this seat the zodiac) > - **Scale note and colour:** A♯ · grey (the board's ascending scale) > - **Body address:** the head (body stage 9, "left side of head") · *pituitary gland of an owl*, which opens [room 53](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/53), *Grey in A#* > - **Room and code:** [room 108](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/108), titled *A#* · `GREY` > - **Board lines:** descending, *a wheel inside a wheel imagined* · ascending, *the whole world imagined* > - **Crowley's line at this station:** *I speak the word*, from Aleister Crowley's *The Book of Lies* (1913), where it reads "I utter The Word", as copied at 2 on Roy's handwritten emanation page > - **Neighbours:** above, [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 1 The Swan (Enoch)|1 · The Swan]] · below, [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 3 The Whale (God the Mother)|3 · The Whale]] ## What the drawing shows The Owl stands still and faces out. Everything that moves is outside it: three spirals hang in the empty air around the body, and the only words on the sheet besides the caption name them, *wheels of whirling forces*. The bird holds nothing. Over its head sit the three stars and the three small dots. The caption joins an archangel's name to a species: *RAtziel the Beech Owl*. The name opens with a capital RA, as the Spider's caption does (*RAPhael*). On the board's animal column, the Owl's own cell holds a photograph of a barn owl with its head tilted steeply. ## What the station does **An order imagined.** Both of the Owl's board lines turn on the same word. Coming down: *a wheel inside a wheel imagined*. Going up: *the whole world imagined*. The drawing labels its spirals *wheels of whirling forces*. So the wheels are named twice at this station, once by their shape, one inside another, and once by their force. The Owl does nothing inside a world; its station is where a world becomes thinkable. A strong reading: **the Owl is imagination at the scale of an order, the power to picture a whole arrangement before anything in it moves.** On the way up, the line turns from imagining wheels to recognizing that the whole world was imagined, and seeing that something was imagined hands back some responsibility for how it is arranged. That separates the Owl from two other animals the word *mind* usually covers. The Fox, captioned a scientist, works inside a world and makes distinctions. The Cat stands on a Moon that the [[Sir Rabbit]] poem calls a machine, with wheels turning inside it. Imagining an order, examining it and keeping it running are three different jobs, and the ladder gives them three different bodies. That is a reading this guide finds useful, not a scheme the work spells out. **The word spoken.** The emanation page's line at 2 is *I speak the word*: Crowley wrote *utter*, and the page says *speak*. On the board, the Owl's grey rows carry the stanza of [[Another Way II Heaven]] in which the singer speaks the words that make One into Two, is turned in reverse, sees a self and becomes You. The station where the word is spoken is also where unity first becomes a pair. The next line down the page, at the Whale, is *I hear the word*: the order is spoken before it is heard. **A note and a colour.** On the board's ascending scale this station's note is A♯ and its colour is grey. The Owl's portrait room is titled *A#* and opened by the key *Grey*: the note and the colour of its own row. The body phrase, *pituitary gland of an owl*, opens a second room whose title joins the two, *Grey in A#*.  *"Grey in A#", the room opened by "pituitary gland of an owl". A photograph of a mounted barn owl, wings spread wide and talons forward, in a display with dry grass, leaves and a painted backdrop. A small placard reads "BARN OWL".* The two owls read as mirror images. The drawn owl is still, and the motion around it is alive; the mounted owl is caught mid-flight, and its motion is the preserved, lifeless part. The phrase then goes one step further. Typed into another door, *Grey in A#* is itself a key: it opens a room called [*Original Master*](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/0xd47582489cfe6dec4b6cb5999e67c561f58f3873d47b891427915325ddb13510), a black-and-white photograph of a white dove or pigeon perched on the rim of a metal vessel. So the Owl's body phrase leads, in two steps, to a dove. The chain is on record; what it means is open. One station, then, addressed at once as a note, a colour, an animal, an angel and a part of the body. The body part adds a proportion worth noticing: a small gland inside the head, set against *the whole world*. Within the work it would appear that an imagined world need not take up much visible space to organize a life. ## Where it connects - **[[Symbols/The Wheel|The Wheel]]**: this guide's page on wheels, including Ezekiel's wheel in the middle of a wheel, the image the Owl's descending line recalls. - **[[Another Way II Heaven]]**: its division stanza, One become Two, is laid out on the Owl's rows of the board. - **[[Imagine A World]]**: the song asks the listener to picture a whole world in the mind and decide what is in it. The Owl's ascending line, *the whole world imagined*, reads like its summary. It is a comparison, not a documented link, and the song is co-written with Matt Pauling. - **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 9 The Cat (Gabriel)|9 · The Cat]]**: the poem's wheels turn inside the Cat's Moon machine. The Owl imagines wheels near the top of the ladder; the Cat's machine keeps them turning near the bottom. - **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 3 The Whale (God the Mother)|3 · The Whale]]**: the next station, which hears the word the Owl speaks. - **[[Influences/Alice Bailey|Alice Bailey]]**: the Theosophical writer whose complete works appear in the Upload's list of ingredients, and part of the lineage in which the brow centre is tied to the pituitary (see below). ## In the tradition These are the nearest analogues, not claims about where the drawing came from. - **Ratziel and the Wheels.** In the Golden Dawn scheme Ratziel is the archangel of Chokmah, Wisdom, and in legend the angel of a book of secrets. Crowley's *777* lists Ratziel at Chokmah with the angelic order of the Auphanim, "Wheels", the wheels of Ezekiel's vision. No printed source has yet been found for the drawing's exact words, *whirling forces*. - **An owl taken from a path.** *777* does not seat an owl at Chokmah itself. It puts the owl on path 15, as "the bird of Minerva", and that path runs down from Chokmah to Tiphareth; the ladder seats the owl at the path's upper end. Minerva is the goddess of wisdom, and Wisdom is Chokmah's title. Agrippa, by contrast, files owls among Saturn's birds. - **The pituitary.** *777* places Ajna, the brow centre, at Chokmah, and the Theosophical tradition ties Ajna to the pituitary. In that vocabulary a pituitary gland is the seat of inner vision, which is why the body phrase suits an imagining station. - **No planet.** Chokmah has no planet of its own; in the Golden Dawn scheme it takes the sphere of the zodiac. ## Open questions - **Why *Beech*?** In English etymology *beech* has long been tied to *book*, and Agrippa lists the beech among Jupiter's trees. Neither is more than a question. - **What do the stars and dots count?** Three stars, and three dots in a point-up triangle. A marked bird elsewhere in the Hall carries three dots on its chest; whether it is the same small triangle has not been checked. - **Why *RA*?** Both archangel captions of this kind open with a capital RA (*RAtziel*, *RAPhael*). Whether that marks anything is open. - **Which owl is the station's?** The drawn owl is filed with the Hall's *unseen* things and the mounted owl in its *darkness* realm, and a third, hand-made owl figurine turns up in a separate short video. Species alone does not make any of them this station's figure. --- ← [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 1 The Swan (Enoch)|1 · The Swan]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary|All the animals]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 3 The Whale (God the Mother)|3 · The Whale]] →