# 9 · The Cat ← [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 8 The Fox (Michael)|8 · The Fox]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary|The Bestiary]] · 9 of 10 · next: [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 10 The Rabbit (Lemon)|10 · The Rabbit]] → > **One-line reading.** The Cat stands on the Moon at the ninth station and holds the Moon's machinery in its hand. It reads as the station of the patterns that keep a life running, memory and rhythm and repetition, brought out where they can be seen.  *A pencil sketch of a cat with a very large face (pointed ears, big dark eyes, a shaded nose, whiskers) under a dark crescent moon, horns up. Its small stick body raises one arm holding two toothed wheels, with an arrow from the word "gears"; an arrow from the word "Sandals" points at its long, pointed feet. It stands at one end of a long, shallow curve. The caption reads "Gabriel the Willow CAT (standing on the Moon)".* > [!infobox] Station 9 · Yesod, the Moon > > - **Caption:** *Gabriel the Willow CAT (standing on the Moon)* > - **Seat and planet:** Yesod · the Moon > - **Scale note and colour:** C · violet (the board's ascending scale) > - **Body address:** the stomach (body station 2, with the lungs and sexual organs) · *Stomach of a cat + 9 lives* > - **Room and code:** [*Gabriel The Cat*](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/0xe0c8f894133abd1ec0383346e5ca54ae9fb1f6834bebbd140e1f8aa554af7c1f), an unnumbered room · `STOMACH OF A CAT + 9 LIVES` > - **Board lines:** descending, *The Moon Machine was keeping time* · ascending, *The Moon was a machine, eclipsed* > - **Crowley's line at this station:** *stability*, from Aleister Crowley's *The Book of Lies* (1913), copied onto the handwritten emanation page (Crowley wrote *Stability: begetting*) > - **Neighbours:** above, [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 8 The Fox (Michael)|8 · The Fox]] · below, [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 10 The Rabbit (Lemon)|10 · The Rabbit]] ## What the drawing shows The sketch fills only the left part of the sheet. The cat is mostly face: two pointed ears, big eyes with heavily shaded pupils, a shaded triangular nose, whiskers fanning from both cheeks. Over the head sits a solid dark crescent, horns up. A small stick body hangs from the chin; one arm points down, and the other is raised holding two toothed wheels, drawn overlapping, with an arrow running to them from the word *gears*. The legs end in long pointed shoes with a strap line, and a second arrow runs from the word *Sandals*. The feet stand at the left end of a long, shallow arc that curves away across the page, which reads as a horizon seen from on top, the ground the caption names. Read that way, the Moon appears twice, as the crescent overhead and as the ground underfoot. Those four pieces of writing (*gears*, *Sandals* and the two caption lines) are all the sheet carries. The maze names the room simply *Gabriel The Cat*; the willow lives only in the drawn caption. This portrait should not be confused with a different drawn cat recorded elsewhere in the project, a figure split into black and white halves with an eye in its hand. ## What the station does The ninth station is Yesod, the Moon, and the drawing says so overhead and underfoot. Its name is the Moon's archangel in the Golden Dawn scheme. [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - The Equations|The Equations]] put it flat: *Cat = Moon*. The board's scale gives the rung the note C and the colour violet, and on the board's animal column the cat's picture (a ginger kitten looking up at a thin crescent in a lavender sky) sits on a violet row. The room's code reads as the station's number written into the body: the stomach, plus nine lives, at station 9. *[[Sir Rabbit]]* begins at this station. The moon is violet in the sky when a very strange Cat comes bounding by and offers Rabbit a ride to the moon for lunch. As the Earth shrinks to a dot below them, the Cat tells Rabbit that he has been here before and has forgotten. When they arrive, the Violet Moon turns out to be a machine, with whirling gears and funny ears that keep it clean; the wheels inside are turning, and they stay for lunch. A machine moon with ears reads as the Cat's own shape given to the Moon, *Cat = Moon* drawn into the story. Put poem and drawing side by side and they make one move. In the poem the machinery is hidden inside the Moon. In the drawing the Cat stands on the Moon and holds the wheels out, labelled with their name. What was concealed becomes an object in the hand. That is the station's work in this guide's reading: the Moon-seat is the machinery that carries experience along (memory, habit, rhythm, the patterns that keep a life continuous), and the Cat is the one who can show it to you. Its lesson to Rabbit is exactly that: you have been here before, and you forgot. The two board lines take the machine in opposite directions. Coming down, the Moon Machine is keeping time: the mechanism works, and a world runs on it. Going up, the Moon is a machine, eclipsed, which reads as the apparatus going dark so that something larger can show around it. So the station holds both a necessary function, the continuity that lets a self remember, and a possible trap, the repetition that keeps a self circling. The word copied from Crowley for this station, *stability*, is Yesod's plain sense: the foundation. The machine moon was in the project's public vocabulary before the maze opened. In October 2021 an Instagram caption for a shirt called *The Gate Of Attention* described a gate that takes you from the consciousness of the earth plane to the dreamlike realm of the moon, pointed to the shirt's symbol of the Gate of Malkuth, and promised that once the gate opens you begin to see the *machinery of the universe* in violet light. That matches the Golden Dawn's named vision for this seat, and it was public about ten months before the Hall of Mirrors opened. (The shirt's design is credited to a collaborator, and the account's captions are not always in Roy's voice, so this is the project's public vocabulary rather than a signed statement.) Below the Cat, the ladder has its second seam. On the *Tree thinking* drawing the line between 9 and 10 is labelled *Abyss Out*, and the tenth station sits on a separate platform; on the handwritten emanation page, the only arrow runs down from 9 to 10. The Cat is the last station before the drop into the world, where [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 10 The Rabbit (Lemon)|the Rabbit]] waits. ## Where it connects - **[[Symbols/The Moon|The Moon]]**: the poem's machine moon, reflection turned into apparatus, charm first and mechanism second. - **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - The Equations|The Equations]]**: the room named *Rabbit = Man* passes its name on as the key to *Cat = Moon*, whose page is the poem's opening: the Cat is the first guide Rabbit meets. - **[[Sir Rabbit]]**: the Cat carries Rabbit to a place he has visited and forgotten, so memory is the first lesson of the journey. - **[[Rooms Behind the Gallery#161 · Gabriel the Cat|Gabriel the Cat, the room]]**: this guide's entry on the room, where the held-out wheels are read as a concealed mechanism brought into the open. - **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 10 The Rabbit (Lemon)|The Rabbit]]**: the station across the second seam; stomach at body station 2, feet at 1. ## In the tradition The cat is a lunar animal in Agrippa's chapter on the Moon, because cats' eyes grow larger and smaller with the Moon's course (Agrippa also lists the cat among Saturn's creatures). Gabriel is Yesod's archangel in the Golden Dawn. The drawing's two labels are the seat's own equipment: Crowley's *777* gives Yesod the Perfumes and Sandals as its magical weapons, and Dion Fortune's *Mystical Qabalah* gathers Gabriel, the Moon, the perfumes and sandals, and this seat's spiritual experience, the Vision of the Machinery of the Universe, in one chapter, with violet among its colours. The caption and labels line up with a cluster found in both books; whether either was the source is open, and neither is quoted on the page. (The sandals do not need Sandalphon to explain them; that angel belongs to the seat below.) Two details do not fit the tables so neatly. The compared tables give the willow to Malkuth, the Kingdom, not to Yesod, so *Willow Cat* is not simply borrowed from them. And *nine lives* is folk lore, not Qabalah; its fit with station 9 belongs to the work. ## Open questions - Is the arc under the Cat's feet the Moon's surface, or a plain horizon line? - Why *Willow*, a plant the compared tables give to the Kingdom one seat below? - Do the two wheels mesh, as gears would, or only overlap? The drawing is too small to say. --- ← [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 8 The Fox (Michael)|8 · The Fox]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary|All the animals]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 10 The Rabbit (Lemon)|10 · The Rabbit]] →