Lions

The dream dictionaries answer before you have finished asking: the lion is your inner strength, your personal power, the courage you have not yet claimed. Sometimes they reverse it into a threat — an aggressor, a domineering boss, the rage you keep caged. Either way the beast is flattened into a single trait and handed back to you as flattery or warning. But the lion in the dream is never just an emblem. There is the lion that hunts you and the lion that walks beside you; the one crouched over a kill and the one stretched in the sun; the lion in a cage, the lion at the city gate, the lion you must somehow choke in the dark. The tradition does not read the lion as a synonym for strength. It reads it as a particular animal with a particular hunger, and the only useful questions are what this lion is doing, and whether you are its quarry, its keeper, or its kin.

The Greeks did not see the lion as a feeling at all. They saw a force. Bruno Snell insists we take Homer literally: “When Homer has someone go against his enemies ‘like a lion,’ we must take him at his word. The warrior and the lion are activated by one and the same force” — the menos, the forward impulse — so that “a man who walks ‘like a lion’ betrays an actual kinship with the beast” (Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, 1953). The animal is not decoration laid over the man; it is the same drive showing through him. Gregory Nagy finds this kinship at its most terrible in Achilles, whom Apollo himself describes as “a lion that yields to its great biê and overweening thûmos, and goes after the sheep of men, in order to get a dais“ — a feast (Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, 1979). Standing over the dying Hektor, Achilles confesses the lion fully: “I wish that somehow my menos and thumos impelled me to slice you up and eat your meat raw.” The lion-dream, in this register, is the dream of one’s own appetite for the kill.

Emily Vermeule shows how old and how patterned that image of predation is. The Greek imagination returns again and again to “the motif of the meat-eating killer leaping at a victim off guard and unable to defend himself,” and on the battlefield of Troy “the duel between enemy heroes is handled in precisely the same formal patterns as the animal fight” (Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry, 1979). So the dreamer must ask which side of the scene this is. Are you the predator at the throat, or the grass-eater who, in the old grammar, “seldom escapes”? The lion-dream stages a conflict of species, and it matters whether you wake as the hunter or the hunted.

There is a third position, and it is the most disquieting: the lion as something raised inside the walls that cannot be sent away. Angela Hobbs recovers the line from Aristophanes that haunted the Athenians debating Alcibiades — “it is best by far to rear no lion within your city’s walls; but, if one is raised to adulthood, you must humour its ways” (Hobbs, Plato and the Hero, 2000). The lion here is the magnificent, ungovernable nature one has nourished and now cannot evict; you do not kill it, you learn to flatter it. A dream of a lion loose in the house may be exactly this — the thûmos you raised and must now live beside.

Depth psychology inherits the beast and sets it to work. Liz Greene reads the Nemean lion, the one Heracles must strangle bare-handed in a cave, as “the battle between the developing ego and its instinctual roots, which must be tamed before the individual can become truly individual” — and she notes that it matters this is “a lion and not a ram, a bull, a dragon,” because the lion is “hot-blooded and fiery” (Greene, The Astrology of Fate, 1984). The hero does not destroy the lion so much as wear it; he flays it and carries the hide ever after. Jung sharpens the point in the alchemical key, where the lion is a stage in the transformation of Mercurius — “the warm-blooded form of the devouring, predatory monster who first appears as the dragon,” and “precisely what the fiery lion is intended to express” is “the passionate emotionality that precedes the recognition of unconscious contents” (Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1955). The lion comes just before insight, carrying the heat that the cold-blooded dragon could not.

This is why the alchemists drew the lion devouring the sun. Edward Edinger reads that image as “the descent of consciousness into the animal realm where it must endure the fiery energies of instinct,” placing the lion between the wolf of raw desire and the king of clear consciousness as “the egocentric power drive” (Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, 1985). The lion is not the bottom and not the top; it is the proud, sunlit, devouring middle that must itself be cooked. And James Hillman, refusing the easy heroics of slaying it, describes the alchemical operation as a kind of surgery on the lion’s reach: “One well-known method cuts off the green lion’s paws, depriving it of its reach into the world. Yet it stays alive as a succus vitae in the heart, for green is the color of the heart and of the vitality of the heart” (Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992). The lion is not killed. It is brought to the heart and kept there, alive, declawed of its grasping but not of its life.

What the lion is finally working toward, the dream sometimes shows directly. Jung records a sequence in which a dreamer meets a lioness and her son, “a royal couple,” who together form “a symbol of totality”; when “lion and lioness have turned into a king and queen, the urge to individuate has reached the level of conscious realization” (Jung, Man and His Symbols, 1964). The animal does not vanish into the human. It is recognized, crowned, taken up.

So the question is not whether you are secretly strong. It is what this lion wants of you — whether it has come to hunt you, to be hunted, to be housed and humored, to be flayed and worn, or to be brought close enough to the heart that its heat stops devouring and starts to warm. The dream is not telling you that you are a lion. It is asking whether you can stand to live beside one.