Lioness

The lioness enters the depth-psychology corpus as a figure of dense symbolic multiplicity, operating simultaneously as emblem of instinctual matriarchal power, alchemical principle, and individuating archetype. Jung’s treatment in ‘Mysterium Coniunctionis’ is foundational: the lioness appears as white sulphur in furious battle with the wingless lion (red sulphur), a prefiguration of the royal coniunctio whose passionate conflict signals the emotionality that precedes the recognition of unconscious contents. In ‘Man and His Symbols,’ the lion-lioness pair constitutes a royal symbol of totality, and their transformation into king and queen marks the passage from instinctual compulsion to conscious individuation. Liz Greene situates the lioness within the lunar-Artemisian register — as the hunting, matriarchal face of the Moon that surfaces when solar consciousness relaxes its hold. McGilchrist appropriates the lioness philosophically as a model of intrinsic purposiveness, asking what it means ‘to be a lioness’ as a way of probing being itself rather than extrinsic utility. Neumann’s work on the Terrible Mother connects the lioness to Egyptian Sekhmet and the composite devourer Ta-urt. Across these registers, the term concentrates questions about feminine sovereignty, instinctual aggression, opus contra naturam, and the conditions under which raw power becomes differentiated selfhood.

In the library 10 passages

appears in dual form as lion and lioness, or he is said to be Mercurius duplex. The two lions are sometimes identified with the red and white sulphur. The illustrations show a furious battle between the wingless lion (red sulphur) and the winged lioness (white sulphur).

Jung identifies the alchemical lioness as white sulphur in polar opposition to the wingless lion, their furious battle encoding the passionate emotionality that must precede the coniunctio of unconscious opposites.

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

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The lioness and her son, which then appear on the scene, personify the mysterious urge toward individuation, indicated by their work at shaping the round stones. The lions, a royal couple, are in themselves a symbol of totality.

Jung reads the lion-lioness pair as a symbol of psychic totality and the urge toward individuation, with their eventual transformation into a royal couple marking the ascent from instinctual passion to conscious selfhood.

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

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Perhaps the purpose of a lioness is to express whatever good a lioness is capable of expressing. Perhaps the purpose of a lioness is to express an aspect of what the verb to be can signify.

McGilchrist uses the lioness as a philosophical test case for intrinsic purposiveness, arguing that her existence exemplifies the unfolding of being itself rather than any extrinsic or utilitarian function.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Perhaps the purpose of a lioness is to express whatever good a lioness is capable of expressing. Perhaps the purpose of a lioness is to express an aspect of what the verb to be can signify.

A parallel text to the preceding entry; McGilchrist’s argument situates the lioness within a cosmological framework in which intrinsic purpose, guided by attractors, supersedes instrumental reason.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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The lioness is a matriarch, and her mates are essentially toy-boys, although they would eat you rather than admit it. This face of the Moon is often what emerges when we get drunk, or lose control of solar consciousness.

Greene associates the lioness with the predatory-matriarchal face of the Moon-Artemis complex, the instinctual savagery that erupts when ego-solar control is suspended.

Greene, Liz; Sasportas, Howard, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992thesis

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Ta-urt, too, is a combination of hippopotamus, crocodile, and lioness; only here the marks of the lion-goddess Sekhmet are more strongly emphasized. Thus the devourer of the dead is the Terrible Mother of death and the underworld.

Neumann aligns the lioness with Egyptian Sekhmet and the composite devouring figure Ta-urt, locating the archetype within the Terrible Mother’s underworld aspect of annihilation and judgment.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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the goddess consort of Ptah is the great and terrible lion-goddess Sekhmet, whose name means the ‘Powerful One.’ Her Indian counterpart is called the ‘power’ (śakti) of Śiva, and, as we have seen, she is insatiable in her thirst for the ambrosia of blood.

Campbell identifies the lion-goddess Sekhmet as a cross-cultural figure of terrifying feminine power whose insatiable blood-thirst links Egyptian and Indian goddess traditions.

Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962supporting

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holy Artemis laments the unhappy beast, ‘for well she loves the tender cubs of ravening lions and well the suckling of every beast of the wood.’ She must once have taken particular joy in lions.

Otto documents Artemis’s intimacy with lions as their divine nurse and huntress, establishing the goddess’s paradoxical bond of care and destruction that the lioness embodies within Greek religion.

Otto, Walter F., The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, 1929supporting

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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’s symbolic register from other mythic beasts, linking it to the aggressive solar-fire quality embodied in Sekhmet and the ego’s confrontation with its instinctual nature.

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting

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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 situates the Tarot lion within Artemis’s sovereignty over the wild, insisting that the lion’s — and by extension the lioness’s — essential nature resists complete domestication by consciousness.

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

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