Lion

The lion occupies one of the most richly stratified positions in the depth-psychological corpus, functioning simultaneously as an instinctual force, an alchemical substance, an archetypal symbol of the Self, and a figure of solar-heroic power. Jung’s alchemical writings treat the lion — especially in its green and red forms — as a manifestation of Mercurius, the arcane substance, and as an emblem of passionate emotionality that must be assimilated rather than suppressed: to ‘drink the lion’s blood’ is to ingest one’s own affects through the penetrating insight of consciousness. In Mysterium Coniunctionis the paired lions — winged and wingless, corresponding to white and red sulphur — prefigure the royal coniunctio, making the lion a threshold figure between raw instinct and the integrated Self. The Tarot literature (Nichols, Pollack, Banzhaf) elaborates this further through the Strength card, where the woman who tames the lion enacts the feminine ego’s capacity to hold the instinctual without annihilation. Hillman complicates the purely heroic reading by insisting that the lion’s roar is itself generative — the desert lion who awakens stillborn cubs images the heart’s capacity for self-renewal. Across all these registers, a central tension persists: is the lion something to be overcome, assimilated, or fundamentally honoured as an irreducible power of the psyche?

In the library 21 passages

Because of his fiery nature, the lion is the ‘affective animal’ par excellence. The drinking of the blood, the essence of the lion, is therefore like assimilating one’s own affects.

Jung defines the lion as the archetypal embodiment of uncontrolled affect, and proposes that the alchemical act of drinking the lion’s blood symbolises the psychological integration of one’s own passionate emotionality through insight.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955thesis

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The two lions are prefigurations of the royal pair, hence they wear crowns. Evidently at this stage there is still a good deal of bickering between them, and this is precisely what the fiery lion is intended to express — the passionate emotionality that precedes the recognition of unconscious contents.

Jung interprets the dual alchemical lions as the unresolved tension of opposites that must precede coniunctio, identifying their quarrel with the affective dynamism of the unconscious prior to conscious integration.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955thesis

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One of the manifestations of Mercurius in the alchemical process of transformation is the lion, now green and now red. Khunrath calls this transformation ‘luring the lion out of Saturn’s mountain cave.’ From ancient times the lion was associated with Saturn.

Jung establishes the lion as a shifting manifestation of Mercurius within the alchemical opus, linked to Saturn and constituting a transformative stage through which the prima materia passes toward purification.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis

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The lions, a royal couple, are in themselves a symbol of totality. In medieval symbolism, the ‘philosopher’s stone’ (a pre-eminent symbol of man’s wholeness) is represented as a pair of lions or as a human couple riding on lions.

Jung reads the paired lions as a symbol of the Self and the philosopher’s stone, locating them at the intersection of instinct and wholeness within the individuation process.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Man and His Symbols, 1964thesis

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Leo, with his sunburst mane, often symbolizes the heavenly sun and the illumination of the god-head. The Hindus place the lion higher than man in the hierarchy of being, for the lion is a symbol of reincarnation.

Nichols surveys cross-cultural lion symbolism — solar divinity, wisdom, reincarnation, and the religious instinct — to argue that the Tarot lion embodies the innate human yearning toward reunion with a transpersonal source.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980thesis

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It is the particular sort of beast which is most relevant here, for this is a lion and not a ram, a bull, a dragon or sea-monster, or a hostile brother. Sekhmet, as we have seen, typifies the aggressive, fiery nature of the lion.

Greene distinguishes the lion from other mythological beasts to isolate its specific archetypal quality — aggressive, solar, fiery — as exemplified in the myth of Herakles and the Nemean lion, representing the ego’s struggle with its instinctual roots.

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis

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If the lion is hungry, perhaps the lady will feed him, for she knows that if she does not give the beast appropriate food, he will swallow her up, body and soul. Psychologically this could mean that the hero’s eros side, his capacity for relatedness, would be obliterated.

Nichols argues that the Tarot Strength card enacts the necessity of nourishing rather than suppressing the instinctual lion-force, on pain of being consumed by unbounded affects of power and rage.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980thesis

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According to Physiology (the traditional lore of animal psychology), the lion’s cubs are stillborn. They must be awakened into life by a roar. That is why the lion has such a roar: to awaken the young lions asleep, as they sleep in our hearts.

Hillman reframes the lion not as a force to be tamed but as the heart’s own generative power, whose roar in the desert awakens the dormant life of feeling against the anesthesia of modernity.

Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992thesis

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To drink the green lion’s blood, then, would mean to assimilate… Emotionality in the sense of uncontrollable affects is essentially bestial, for which reason people in this state can be approached only with the circumspection proper to the jungle, or else with the methods of the animal-trainer.

Edinger expands Jung’s reading to clinical practice, warning that bestial lion-affects in analysands require special tact, while affirming that the goal is assimilation of the green lion’s blood — i.e., integration of raw instinctual energy.

Edinger, Edward F., The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995supporting

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According to most alchemical texts, the green lion is the ore from which philosophical mercury is extracted and is also known as terra (earth), the unclean body, or Latona.

Abraham documents the alchemical green lion as prima materia and source of philosophical mercury, establishing the lion’s foundational role as the raw, unrefined substance from which transformation proceeds.

Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting

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She is not a goddess, pictured immobile on a throne; she is a human being, dressed in the fashion of the period. Yet she is obviously no ordinary woman, for she is taming a lion.

Nichols identifies the Strength card’s central drama — a mortal woman taming a lion — as the anima’s mediation between heroic ego-consciousness and the archetypal instinctual forces of the unconscious.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting

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In the Mithraic religion we meet with a strange god, Aion, also called Chronos or deus leontocephalus because he is conventionally represented as a lion-headed human figure. He stands in a rigid attitude, wrapped in the coils of a serpent whose head juts forward over the head of the lion.

Jung traces the lion’s cosmic valence through the Mithraic deus leontocephalus, Aion, linking the lion-headed god of time to serpentine eternity and the archetype of totality underlying temporal existence.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting

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The onslaught of instinct then becomes an experience of divinity, provided that man does not succumb to it and follow it blindly, but defends his humanity against the animal nature of the divine power. The Messiah is ‘the Lion of the tribe of Judah.’

Jung aligns the lion with the divine-instinctual encounter, arguing that the heroic struggle against the lion’s onslaught is simultaneously a confrontation with numinous power, as crystallised in the Messianic epithet ‘Lion of Judah.’

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting

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Lions are monocolored, a tawny yellow that symbolism ties to the sun, to gold, and to all the heroic virtues of undeceiving singlemindedness. Tigers are striped with contraries: orange and black, white and black. As different as day and night.

Hillman contrasts the lion’s solar, single-minded symbolism with the tiger’s shamanic ambiguity, arguing that the lion’s cultural role as the test-beast of solar heroes — David, Herakles, Samson — defines a particular type of heroic consciousness.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

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The mother is perceived to belong to the tribes of lions, the wolves, and male elephants; the father, to the more devious, cunning, and less confrontational world of tigers, foxes, panthers, and tuskless elephants.

Hillman reports children’s dream-imagery in which the mother is associated with the lion’s direct, confrontational power, contrasting it with the father’s more devious feline equivalents, illuminating gendered dimensions of the lion archetype.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

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Even with the aid of such a lady magician, the lion can never be wholly domesticated, for he belongs to the realm of Artemis (Diana), goddess of the animals, who is herself a wild creature, untamed and unpredictable.

Nichols insists on the irreducible wildness of the lion, aligning it with Artemis and cautioning that the taming enacted by the Strength card is always provisional, never a full domestication of archetypal instinct.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting

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Left, a witch doctor from the Cameroons wearing a lion mask. He isn’t pretending to be a lion; he is convinced that he is a lion. Like the Congolese and his bird mask, he shares a ‘psychic identity’ with the animal — an identity that exists in the realm of myth and symbolism.

Jung illustrates participation mystique through the witch doctor’s lion mask, arguing that pre-modern consciousness preserved a psychic identity with the animal that modern rationalism has suppressed but not extinguished.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Man and His Symbols, 1964supporting

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I saw Alexander the Great go hunting to kill a lion without weapons. Hephaestion wanted to stop him. Finally they agreed that Alexander should deal with the lion, but that Hephaestion ought to carry a club.

Jung analyses Cardanus’s dream of Alexander hunting the lion as a dramatisation of heroic encounter with an archetypal adversary, in which the differentiation of ego-figures signals a crisis of individual development and authority.

Jung, C.G., Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, 2014supporting

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talking about the zoology of the lion and being attacked by a lion. When it happens, it leaves a tremendous, lasting impression, which can get people completely derailed and changed.

Jung distinguishes between intellectual discussion of the lion symbol and the lived experience of being overwhelmed by it, using this contrast to illustrate the transformative shock of genuine archetypal encounter.

Jung, C.G., Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, 2014aside

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One of the manifestations of Mercurius in the alchemical process of transformation is the lion, now green and now red. Khunrath calls this transformation ‘luring the lion out of Saturn’s mountain cave.’

This early Collected Works passage reiterates the Saturn-Mercurius-lion nexus, confirming that Jung’s identification of the lion with the alchemical Mercurius was a consistent position across his oeuvre.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907aside

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