# The Bestiary > **▶ Ten animals, one ladder.** Scattered through the [[Hall of Mirrors]] is a menagerie of hand-drawn creatures. Read together they line up into a single structure: one animal on each rung of the Tree of Life, each creature standing for a planet, each a part of one cosmic body. The same ten animals then appear a *second* time, written not as pictures but as plain identities. This guide calls them **the two series**: **the Portraits** (below) and **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - The Equations|the Equations]]** (their own page). Each animal now has its own page, and so do the ladder's two strangers: **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - The Vulture|the unnumbered Vulture]]**, which sits in the gap between the third and fourth animals, and the second bestiary sheet, **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - Peter XIV and KiRi-Kama|Peter XIV and KiRi-Kama]]**. --- ## What it is The animals are not decoration and not a zoo. They are a **map of consciousness drawn as creatures**. The frame is the **Tree of Life**, the ten-rung diagram at the centre of Hermetic and Kabbalistic thought (see [[Kabbalah - The Tree of Life]]): ten "seats," called *sephirot*, descend from the Crown at the top to the Kingdom at the bottom, and most of the seats carry a traditional planet. The Bestiary sets **one animal on each seat**, so the ten creatures, read from the top down, are a ladder you can climb: swan, owl, whale, dolphin, horse, spider, dove, fox, cat, rabbit. Two things are happening in every figure at once. Each animal **is a planet** (the dolphin is Jupiter, the horse is Mars, the dove is Venus), and each animal **is a body part** (its unlock code is a coordinate like *cranium of a swan*, *left hip of a dove*, *teeth of a whale*). Assemble them and you get one being, drawn joint by joint: a single cosmic anatomy that is also the ladder of the soul. ## What the positions and the planets mean On the Tree, the seat sets the meaning. The Crown (Kether) is the source; the Kingdom (Malkuth) is the manifest world at our feet; the Sun-seat at the centre (Tiphareth) is the heart. Each seat also has a planet, and the animal is that planet's traditional creature. Most of the planet placements are **loose correspondences**, held lightly. **Two are not.** In the project's **basic symbol map**, the fixed points are these: - **Roy is the Venus pole**: the dove, the heart. Venus's seat is Netzach, and the dove is drawn there. - **[[Sir Lucius|Lucius]] is the Mercury pole**: the intellect, the mind. Mercury's seat is Hod, and the fox, "the scientist," is drawn there. So the ladder quietly seats Roy's bird and Lucius's fox at their own planets. Everything else in the planet column is a pointer, but those two are stated plainly by the work itself. ## Where the animals come from The bestiary is **mostly inherited, not invented**, and knowing that is the key to reading it honestly. Nine of the ten creatures are **standard attributions of the Hermetic and Golden Dawn tradition**, the planet-and-animal tables in Crowley's *777* and Agrippa's *Three Books of Occult Philosophy*: - **Seven sit on their planet's own animal.** *777* seats the **swan** at the Crown and the **spider** at the Sun; Agrippa makes the **dolphin** Jovial (Jupiter), the **horse** Martial (Mars), the **fox** Mercurial (Mercury) and the **cat** Lunary (the Moon); the **dove** is "sacred to Venus." - **Two are "path animals."** The **owl** and the **whale** are not listed at their own seats in the tables. Each is pulled from a connecting path and seated where that path descends from: the owl from a path leaving Wisdom, the whale from a path leaving Understanding, listed there with "all beasts of transport." (The whale even labels itself *"Great Sea,"* the classical title of its seat.) - **One has no traditional seat: the rabbit.** The old tables do know the hare (Agrippa files it under Saturn and under Mercury), but no tradition compared here seats a rabbit or hare at the Kingdom, and Crowley's *777* has neither. The Kingdom is also the one seat the borrowing method structurally cannot reach. Within the work the rabbit reads as a self-portrait, the searching rabbit at the foot of the ladder (see [[Sir Rabbit]] and [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 10 The Rabbit (Lemon)|the Rabbit's page]]). So the authored move is **not** the choice of animals. It is the **regularisation**: taking a tradition that scatters creatures messily across paths and combing it into a clean, climbable **one-animal-per-seat ladder**, then encoding each one twice (as planet and as body part) and giving it a name. A note on sourcing, kept honest: *777* is the closest match, and it is Crowley's. Another Crowley book is demonstrably in the work: the handwritten emanation page that runs beside the ladder is copied, selectively, from the first chapter of Crowley's *The Book of Lies* (see **The ladder's text**, below). That makes *777* a more plausible route than it once looked, but it still isn't documented. The two Qabalah books that *are* evidenced inside the work, Dion Fortune's *Mystical Qabalah* and W.G. Gray's *Ladder of Lights*, carry no animal table at all. These are widely circulating attributions available from almost anywhere, so this guide names the **tradition** as the source and leaves the exact route open. ## The ladder's text   *Left: the handwritten emanation page, one line per station from "0. Nothing is" to "10. The world", with a ruled line marked "Abyss (knowledge is relation)" between 3 and 4. Right: "Tree thinking", ten bands stacked into a pyramid, with "Abyss In" between 3 and 4 and "Abyss Out" between 9 and 10.* Two hand-drawn pages give the ladder its words and its seams, and both borrow from books. **The emanation page** gives every station a line: *I AM* at 1, *I speak the word* at 2, *I hear the word* at 3, then a ruled line marked **Abyss**, then *Father + Mother concealed in generation* at 4, down through *the mirror of the Sun and the Heart* at 6 and *stability* at 9 to *The world* at 10. The words come from the opening chapter of Aleister Crowley's *The Book of Lies* (1913), copied selectively by hand. Roy numbered the lines 0 to 10, dropped every "GOD" and the headings, wrote *speak* where Crowley wrote *utter*, and kept only one line of Crowley's Abyss passage: *knowledge is relation*. The wording is Crowley's; the selection and the ladder they are set on are the work's own. Each animal's page shows the line at its station. **The Tree-thinking pyramid** takes its title and its two labels, *Abyss In* and *Abyss Out*, from W. G. Gray's *The Ladder of Lights*. Its *Abyss In* falls at the same place as the emanation page's Abyss line, between 3 and 4. That is also where the animal column puts a vulture with no number (see **The unnumbered vulture**, below). ## The names, counted carefully The ten names fall into **three registers**, and the arithmetic is 1 + 7 + 2: - **One human being** raised out of humanity: **Enoch**, the swan, the man scripture says "walked with God, and was not," whom later mystical tradition turns into the archangel Metatron. The ladder does not begin with a god. It begins with someone who was here, and left. - **Seven angel, planet, or divine names**, each landing on its correct seat: **Ratziel** (owl), **God the Mother** (whale), **Jupiter** (dolphin), **Raphael** (spider), **Venus** (dove), **Michael** (fox), **Gabriel** (cat). - **Two ordinary pet names**: **Cinnamon** the horse and **Lemon** the rabbit. Those two pet names are the finding. They land on the ladder's **two clearest transformations**, the two rungs where the speaker is stated to change: *"the child became a warrior"* at Mars, and *"I woke up in my shadow"* at the Kingdom. And of all ten figures, Cinnamon and Lemon are the **only two drawn holding a weapon**, a dagger and an "acorn grenade." A sweet, domestic name on an armed body, twice, at exactly the two seats where a self turns into something else. --- ## Series 1 — The Portraits The ten drawings, in ladder order from the Crown down to the Kingdom. Each card is tinted with its seat's colour on the Tree of Life (white Crown, grey and black at the top, down through the planetary colours to the four-part Kingdom). Click a name to open that animal's page; the key column links the room in the maze, which will want a wallet connected. Click a picture to see it full size. <div class="legend"><b>Read the ladder top to bottom</b><span>1 · Crown → 10 · Kingdom</span><span>each card carries its seat's traditional colour</span><span>code = the room's unlock key</span></div> | Animal | Image | Planet | Key | Reading | Connects | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 1 The Swan (Enoch)\|1 · Swan: Enoch]]**<span class="t-drawings artchip"><span class="rung rung-10"></span>Kether · the Crown</span> | [](https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x03713ef7ffbd93989ca4e46975668d5ca48250385158624dfea7fa321ae799be..png) | *(no planet)* | `CRANIUM OF A SWAN` · [room 80](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/80) | The crown of the ladder, and the only rung named for a human being. The swan is the classical soul-bird; its cranium is the launchpad for the ascending soul, with a point in a circle above the head. | [[Kabbalah - The Tree of Life]] · [[Concepts/The Pattern]] | | **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 2 The Owl (RAtziel)\|2 · Owl: Ratziel]]**<span class="t-drawings artchip"><span class="rung rung-9"></span>Chokmah · Wisdom</span> | [](https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x6666c117460bf11e8591a4e4ad66cef72d3fa646bc55d443d72368a3171a00d2..png) | *(no planet)* | `GREY` · [room 108](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/108) | Wisdom's bird. Ratziel is the archangel of secrets at the second seat; his angelic order is the Auphanim, "the Wheels" (the drawing's *"wheels of whirling forces"*), and his scale-colour is grey, which is the room's key. | [[Kabbalah - The Tree of Life]] · [[Hall of Mirrors]] | | **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 3 The Whale (God the Mother)\|3 · Whale: God the Mother]]**<span class="t-drawings artchip"><span class="rung rung-8"></span>Binah · Understanding</span> | [](https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x918baee33033b370951514ca5c356575d0dde2520797978da425fc537e590932..png) | ♄ Saturn | `TEETH OF A WHALE` · [room 78](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/78) | The Supernal Mother, drawn as a whale breaching over ringed Saturn and a labelled *"Great Sea,"* captioned *"God the Mother."* Those are Binah's exact classical correspondences: Saturn, the womb, the great deep. | [[Mary]] · [[Kabbalah - The Tree of Life]] | | **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 4 The Dolphin (Jupiter)\|4 · Dolphin: Jupiter]]**<span class="t-drawings artchip"><span class="rung rung-7"></span>Chesed · Mercy</span> | [](https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x86154a585c03e88a49b4f8a91b5119b60356f5aee3203585979a1c26d6cad56e..png) | ♃ Jupiter | `LADDER` · [room 7](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/7) | Jupiter, mercy and the expansive sky-father, as the dolphin that crosses the waters, captioned *"Jupiter the Blue Dolphin"* (blue is Chesed's own scale-colour). A triangle-and-cross floats above it and its key, `LADDER`, files it on the ladder of ascent. | [[Kabbalah - The Tree of Life]] · [[Concepts/Jacob and Esau]] | | **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 5 The Horse (Cinnamon)\|5 · Horse: Cinnamon]]**<span class="t-drawings artchip"><span class="rung rung-6"></span>Geburah · Severity</span> | [](https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x906809c415dae59822a6d11f9bfedd9e421e1ae8ad6dcd6a34e42b13f0891b9d..png) | ♂ Mars | `RIGHT SHOULDER OF A HORSE` · [room 81](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/81) | Mars, drawn as a warhorse with a Mars glyph and a dagger, captioned *"Cinnamon the Horse (who lives on Mars)."* The room's title names the project's "Trojan Horse" method: a positive, mantra-like chorus carried on darker-sounding music, aimed at the subconscious. | [[Happy Face]] · [[Superhuman]] · [[Concepts/The Upload]] | | **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 6 The Spider (RAPhael)\|6 · Spider: Raphael]]**<span class="t-drawings artchip"><span class="rung rung-5"></span>Tiphareth · the Sun</span> | [](https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xb77eb3b1feda1f3504409f96c18b5e41eb816ada555589fa0d559cc57b0ee66a..png) | ☉ Sun | `PLEIADES HONEY BEE` · [room 154](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/154) | The Sun, the heart-seat at the centre of the Tree. Tradition calls the spider *"particularly sacred to Tiphareth,"* sitting at the centre of its web as the Sun sits at the centre. Captioned the *"Christmas Spider (on the mountain of the Soul),"* with a child's face on its body. | [[Concepts/The Pattern]] · [[SARAVI]] | | **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 7 The Dove (Venus)\|7 · Dove: Venus]]**<span class="t-drawings artchip"><span class="rung rung-4"></span>Netzach · Victory</span> | [](https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xaf2fbf7256dd50ea670c4d937856f8e953277ed3bc6ae03db5d539bb09f47041..png) | ♀ Venus | `LEFT HIP OF A DOVE` · [room 79](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/79) | Venus, love and art, drawn as a dove with a rose at the chest and a lamp in her hand (the lamp is Netzach's own tool). In the basic symbol map, Venus is **[[Roy]]'s** pole: the dove, the heart. Room 79, which this key opens, displays a small haloed bird sketch; this portrait is stored under the same key. | [[Roy]] · [[Symbols/The Dove]] · [[Mary]] | | **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 8 The Fox (Michael)\|8 · Fox: Michael]]**<span class="t-drawings artchip"><span class="rung rung-3"></span>Hod · Splendour</span> | [](https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xe4b1702d9298fee62dfeccc57d322a463ad55ca201256d01f62b45b2e1c21c10..png) | ☿ Mercury | `8` · [room 34](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/34) | Mercury, the quicksilver intellect, as a fox holding the Mercury glyph, captioned *"Michael the Fox (who is a scientist)."* Its key is simply `8`, Hod's number. In the basic symbol map, Mercury is **[[Sir Lucius\|Lucius]]'s** pole: the mind. | [[Sir Lucius]] · [[Concepts/Heart and Mind]] | | **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 9 The Cat (Gabriel)\|9 · Cat: Gabriel]]**<span class="t-drawings artchip"><span class="rung rung-2"></span>Yesod · Foundation</span> | [](https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xe0c8f894133abd1ec0383346e5ca54ae9fb1f6834bebbd140e1f8aa554af7c1f..png) | ☽ Moon | `STOMACH OF A CAT + 9 LIVES` · [the room](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/0xe0c8f894133abd1ec0383346e5ca54ae9fb1f6834bebbd140e1f8aa554af7c1f) | The Moon at the ninth seat: a cat with a crescent moon above its head, captioned *"Gabriel the Willow Cat (standing on the Moon),"* Gabriel being the Moon's archangel. Its feet are labelled *"sandals,"* the Moon-seat's footwear in the Qabalah, and the key writes the seat's number into the body, nine lives at seat nine. | [[Symbols/The Moon]] · [[Kabbalah - The Tree of Life]] | | **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 10 The Rabbit (Lemon)\|10 · Rabbit: Lemon]]**<span class="t-drawings artchip"><span class="rung rung-1"></span>Malkuth · the Kingdom</span> | [](https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x105696945071ed4aab05c06fe11d4825af2d0d3f2680ec6c52547263c1b50957..png) | ⊕ Earth | `THE GATE OF THE WORLD` · [room 76](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/rooms/76) | The Kingdom, the world at the foot of the Tree, and the one animal no traditional table seats at its station. A long-eared rabbit with a cross on its forehead, an *"acorn grenade"* in hand and its feet labelled, captioned *"Lemon the Rabbit (at the Gate of the World)."* | [[Sir Rabbit]] · [[Symbols/The Rabbit]] | *Fuller readings of the drawn creatures live in [[Hall of Mirrors/Artifacts - Drawings and Sketches#The planetary bestiary|Drawings & Sketches → The planetary bestiary]], and each animal's room is catalogued in the [[Artifacts|Artifacts galleries]].* --- ## The two shelves: pictures hidden, meanings seeded The maze files its rooms on named "shelves," and the two series are shelved apart in a way that reads like a statement. **All ten portraits above are filed on one shelf, *Unseen Things / Concealed Generations*** — the hidden shelf. **The second series, [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - The Equations|the Equations]], is filed on another, *Seeds of Infinity / Childhood*.** The concealed shelf's name has a source of its own. The line the emanation page sets at station 4 is *Father + Mother concealed in generation*, Crowley's words with his "GOD" removed, and the portraits' shelf is *Concealed Generations*. Read plainly: **the pictures are concealed; the knowledge of what they mean is planted as a seed.** The same ten creatures live on both shelves, once as images you have to find and once as meanings you can grow into. That second series turns this ladder from a map into something you can actually walk, and it has its own page. **→ [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - The Equations|Series 2 — The Equations]]** ## The unnumbered vulture  *The board's animal column: small photographs from a swan down to a rabbit, a first-person line for each numbered animal, and one white-crowned, pink-faced vulture, unnumbered, pressed against the dolphin.* On the board's animal column there is an **eleventh creature**, set between the whale (3) and the dolphin (4): a **vulture, never given a number**, with no caption and no portrait in either series. It is the only animal with a place and no number. Its gap is marked three times. The emanation page puts the Abyss line there, *knowledge is relation*. The Tree-thinking drawing puts *Abyss In* there. The column puts the vulture there. In the Tree of Life tradition that interval is **Da'at**, "knowledge", the hidden station in the Abyss between the three highest seats and the seven below. The work never writes the word, so this is this guide's strong reading, not a label on the page. The row's other ladder reads *The Rainbow Bridge*, a code that opens a room called *The Empty Room*: a colourless rainbow over an empty door, between pillars lettered J and B, with a split-faced figure looking both ways. And one page of the Complete Upload Recipe gives the bird an organ, *throat of a vulture*, the place where a heard word becomes a voice. The bird's name is still open. Crowley's *777* offers two candidates: **Asi** (Isis), whom it places "in Daath" at the neck, and **Maut** (Mut), "the Mother Vulture", whom it places one step higher at Understanding, the whale's seat. This guide leans toward Asi for the name, because every caption on the ladder takes its name from its station, while Maut explains why the creature is a vulture. That lean is held as a question, not a verdict. The full case, the throat, and what the gap does are on the vulture's own page. **→ [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - The Vulture|The unnumbered Vulture]]** ## The second bestiary: Peter XIV and KiRi-Kama  *The second bestiary sheet: Peter XIV, "leader of Zakanlian Kat Clan"; KiRi-Kama, "the Phox, teacher and barber"; the pillars Jachim and Boas; a stair of seven steps; "one Becomes 2"; and Rainflower, "seed of life, Jaguarships", falling toward a small city.* A second sheet takes the ladder somewhere new. Where the first bestiary gives each station an animal, this page gives the animals a world. There is a cat-eared leader with a regnal number, a beaked teacher who is also a barber, the two temple pillars, a stair, a gate, and a seed falling toward a town. Its facing page is a planetary map, so the two pages read as a cosmos and a view from inside it. **→ [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - Peter XIV and KiRi-Kama|Peter XIV and KiRi-Kama]]** --- ## Read next - **The ten animals:** [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 1 The Swan (Enoch)|1 · Swan]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 2 The Owl (RAtziel)|2 · Owl]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 3 The Whale (God the Mother)|3 · Whale]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - The Vulture|the unnumbered Vulture]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 4 The Dolphin (Jupiter)|4 · Dolphin]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 5 The Horse (Cinnamon)|5 · Horse]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 6 The Spider (RAPhael)|6 · Spider]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 7 The Dove (Venus)|7 · Dove]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 8 The Fox (Michael)|8 · Fox]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 9 The Cat (Gabriel)|9 · Cat]] · [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 10 The Rabbit (Lemon)|10 · Rabbit]] - **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - The Equations|The Bestiary: The Equations]]**: the second series, the same creatures as identities, wired into a walkable chain. - **[[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - Peter XIV and KiRi-Kama|Peter XIV and KiRi-Kama]]**: the second bestiary sheet, a world with a clan, a teacher and a town. - [[Kabbalah - The Tree of Life]]: the ten-seat frame the whole bestiary hangs on. - [[Concepts/The Abyss|The Abyss]]: the gap the vulture sits in. - [[Hall of Mirrors/The I'm 33 Board|The "I'm 33" Board]]: Roy's working cosmology sheet, where the animal column and its two poems live. - [[Concepts/The Pattern]]: the single cosmology these creatures are body parts of. - [[Roy]] · [[Sir Lucius]]: the Venus and Mercury poles the ladder seats at their planets.