# 6 · The Spider ← [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 5 The Horse (Cinnamon)|5 · The Horse]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary|The Bestiary]] · 6 of 10 · next: [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 7 The Dove (Venus)|7 · The Dove]] → > **One-line reading.** The Spider holds the Sun at the centre of the ladder, and its drawing puts the watcher inside the thing watched. It reads as the station where guide and danger share one figure, and the traveller is handed a choice, not an answer.  *A pen drawing of a spider seen from above: eight legs, a round body marked with a small circle whose cross-lines run past its edge, and a head holding a human face (a zigzag of hair, two wide eyes with lashes, a small mouth, two fang-like points). Below it sits a trapezoid crossed by faint horizontal strokes. The caption reads "⊙ RAPhael the Christmas Spider (on the mountain of the Soul)".* > [!infobox] Station 6 · Tiphareth, the Sun > > - **Caption:** *⊙ RAPhael the Christmas Spider (on the mountain of the Soul)* > - **Seat and planet:** Tiphareth · the Sun > - **Scale note and colour:** F · yellow-gold, marked Sun/HEART (the board's ascending scale) > - **Body address:** the heart (body station 5) · *breast bone of a spider* > - **Room and code:** [room 154](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/154), *A bridge between worlds* · `PLEIADES HONEY BEE` > - **Board lines:** descending, *The Sun was in my eyes* · ascending, a child hanging upside down, watching a spider spin its web > - **Crowley's line at this station:** *The mirror of the Sun and the Heart*, from Aleister Crowley's *The Book of Lies* (1913), copied onto the handwritten emanation page (Crowley wrote *the Mirror of the Sun and of the Heart*) > - **Neighbours:** above, [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 5 The Horse (Cinnamon)|5 · The Horse]] · below, [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 7 The Dove (Venus)|7 · The Dove]] ## What the drawing shows The spider is drawn from above: eight legs, four to a side, sketched in doubled strokes, and a large round body. A line runs down the middle of the body, through a small circle with a dot at its centre whose cross-lines run past its rim like a crosshair, and on into the head. The head is a circle holding a face: a zigzag of hair, two wide eyes with lashes, a small mouth and two fang-like points. No web is drawn, and the spider holds nothing. Under it sits a trapezoid, narrow at the top and wide at the base, with a few faint horizontal strokes across it. The caption places the spider *on the mountain of the Soul*, so the shape reads as that mountain, flat-topped; the room's title, *A bridge between worlds*, would let it be a bridge or a path seen in perspective instead. The caption opens with a circle-and-dot sign, drawn like the sun sign (the Swan's sheet has one too, so it proves nothing alone), and capitalises the first three letters of the name: RAPhael. ## What the station does This is the sixth station, Tiphareth, the Sun, the seat at the centre of the Tree, and the work marks it as solar in several places. The board's ascending scale gives the rung the note F and a yellow-gold swatch labelled Sun and HEART. The handwritten emanation page sets Crowley's *mirror of the Sun and the Heart* at 6. In [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - The Equations|the Equations]], two rooms in a row say it outright: *Spider = Sun*, then *Sun = 6*, a number the Sun takes from the Tree's own counting. The two board lines turn on how the station is seen. Coming down, the Sun is in the speaker's eyes. Going up, a child hangs upside down and watches a spider spin. The drawing then does something neither line says: it puts a child's face on the spider itself. Watcher and watched share one body. This guide reads that as the station's own logic, a mirror at the centre of the Tree, where the one looking and the thing looked at are one figure seen from two sides. A child at play is the plain reading of the posture, and it can stand beside the other. *[[Sir Rabbit]]* gives the Spider a plot, and the plot keeps the danger in. The Dove has just warned Rabbit that a shadow is at play, and the next thing he meets is a shadow spinning: a Spider in a golden cape, grinning. The Spider asks who Rabbit is and where he comes from; Rabbit can only say he must be someone. The Spider agrees that Rabbit is someone, someone asleep and dreaming, offers to be his guide at the Divide, and tells him to jump off the edge and fly through the sun. When Rabbit protests that he is not ready, the Spider leaves the choice with him. The guide arrives as the very thing the traveller was warned about. That reads as the station's second lesson: the centre that can tell you what you are could also catch you, and it is a guide because it hands the decision back. *[[Online]]* shows the other outcome in plain words, the internet as a web whose spider feeds on the people caught in it. The board's list of body stages gives station 5 as the heart, but the Upload recipe names it *breast bone of a spider*: the casing over the heart, not the heart. A spider's "breastbone", its sternum, is a hard plate on the underside of its front body, part of an outer skeleton and not a bone at all, while in birds the breastbone is the keel that anchors the wings. At the station where the poem asks Rabbit to fly, the body word borrows the bird's anchor of flight for a creature that cannot fly. This guide holds that as a light reading and a question, not a stated intention. Asked about the phrase in the launch-day Twitter Space in August 2022, Roy called it one of the codes in [[SARAVI]]'s upload recipe and pointed listeners to the spreadsheet instead of explaining it. None of its tested forms opens a room. ## Where it connects - **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - The Equations|The Equations]]**: *Spider = Sun* and *Sun = 6* sit side by side in the chain, and the key *Spider = Sun* opens the poem page where the Spider arrives and asks Rabbit who he is: the station stated twice and narrated once. - **[[Rooms Behind the Gallery#166 · I'm the Spider|I'm the Spider]]**: a separate room, opened by the key *The Answers In A Name*, holds a poem (public in another version since 2021) that asks its speaker's name and answers that it is the spider. In *Sir Rabbit* the Spider puts the same question to Rabbit. - **[[Hall of Mirrors/Artifacts - Gallery 4 (113-149)#154 · A BRIDGE BETWEEN WORLDS|The room's title]]**: room 126 is also titled *A Bridge Between Worlds*, and since the maze ignores capital letters in its keys, both titles are one key, the one that opens [[Rooms Behind the Gallery#155 · Grandma Vi|a family photograph]]. ## In the tradition The spider's seat is inherited, not invented. In the 1955 revised edition of Crowley's *777*, a bracketed addition sets the spider (with the pelican) among Tiphareth's creatures, and Crowley's note calls it particularly sacred to that seat: Proverbs puts the spider in kings' palaces, the Palace of the King is Tiphareth's most characteristic title, and the spider sits at the centre of its web as Tiphareth sits at the centre of the Tree. (The note gives the spider six legs; the drawing has eight, and a later transcriber's footnote teases Crowley for pulling two off, since eight paths radiate from Tiphareth on Kircher's Tree.) The older layer of the same row lists a Child among Tiphareth's creatures, beside the Phoenix and the Lion; the drawing's child face invites the comparison, but nothing shows it was taken from there. *777* itself is not documented on Roy's side, although Crowley's *Book of Lies* is copied onto the board. The name follows the Golden Dawn, where Raphael is Tiphareth's archangel (Agrippa's planetary lists swap Raphael and Michael). *Christmas* has a folk legend behind it: a spider webs a poor family's bare tree overnight, and at dawn the webs have turned to gold and silver. Gold on the tree fits the golden sun-seat. A figure hanging upside down is also the tarot's Hanged Man, a truth seen by turning the world over. This is tradition, held lightly: the page supplies the spider, the child and the sun; the books only show why they could belong together. ## Open questions - Is the crosshair on the spider's back a web's hub seen from above, a target, or a simple mark? It is not quite the circled cross that marks the Earth. - Do the capitals in RAPhael carry a meaning (an embedded RA has been proposed), or are they handwriting habit? - Why *breast bone* and not *heart*, when the board had the word to hand? And how does this solar heart relate to *Dove = Heart* one station lower? The work does not say. --- ← [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 5 The Horse (Cinnamon)|5 · The Horse]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary|All the animals]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 7 The Dove (Venus)|7 · The Dove]] →