Meaning of the green lion devouring the sun

Few images in the alchemical corpus carry more concentrated symbolic weight than the green lion opening its jaws around the solar disc. The emblem appears first in a sixteenth-century manuscript of the Rosarium philosophorum and was printed with it in 1550 — a lion consuming the sun, blood issuing from its mouth — and it recurs across the tradition as one of the central icons of the nigredo, the first and most dangerous phase of the opus alchymicum.

The green lion is the prima materia in its most active, devouring form: raw mercurial ore, unripe and fertile, carrying within it the dissolving power that can reduce all metals to their first matter. Abraham (1998) notes that the lion's greenness signals precisely this immaturity — "unripe fruit is green" — and that the vital essence extracted from it is "that force or virtue which makes all things fertile, green and growing, as they are in nature." The lion is not yet gold; it is the seed-force that can become gold, but only by first destroying what already exists.

The sun it devours is Sol, the fixed, coagulated gold — the already-formed, the already-named, the ruling principle of the current state. Jung identifies the lion as "the king in his theriomorphic form" (cited in Edinger 1995), the animal version of royalty: the same sovereign energy that organizes consciousness, but encountered in its wild, pre-civilized aspect. When the green lion swallows the sun, the organized principle is dissolved back into the mercurial chaos from which it came.

The green lion swallows the sun, with the blood of the lion issuing from its mouth. Here the sun symbolizes the alchemists' raw stuff, 'gold', which is devoured and dissolved in order to obtain the 'sperm' of gold, the living seed from which pure gold may be grown.

The dissolution is simultaneously a coniunctio in embryo. The Hunting of the Greene Lyon makes the lion a priest who facilitates the chemical wedding of sun and moon: "The Lyon ys the Preist, the Sun and Moone the wed." The mercurial blood released in the devouring becomes the nourishing drink for the philosophical child — the new, incorruptible substance that the union of Sol and Luna will eventually produce. Destruction and generation are not sequential here; they are the same event seen from two angles.

Psychologically, Jung reads the image as the release of the archaic, inflation-prone energy that an archetypal experience sets loose. In the 1936–41 dream seminars he describes what happens when the personality is "lifted up by such an archetypal experience": "this wild beast that wants to devour everything will be set free. All and everything should serve him, the king" (Jung 2014). The lion that must be overcome — and must be overcome unarmed, without the mediation of intellect — is the ego's own leonine identification with the numinous. The hero proves himself only by facing the lion directly, because "this lion — that's me."

Hillman presses the image further into the psychology of desire. The lion's sulfuric nature — its himma, its burning attachment — is what makes it both conflagrate and coagulate simultaneously:

What I burn with attaches me to it; I am anointed by the fat of my own desire, captive to my own enthusiasm, and thus in exile from my heart at the very moment I seem most to own it.

The green lion devouring the sun is, in this register, the moment when desire swallows its own object — when the soul loses itself in the very thing it most wants. The alchemical remedy is not suppression but sublimation: raising the sulfuric heat to white intensity until "what one desires no longer matters, even as it matters most" (Hillman 1992). The lion's paws are cut off, depriving it of its reach into the world, yet its succus vitae — its living sap — remains in the heart, because "green is the color of the heart and of the vitality of the heart."

Bosnak (2007) locates the green lion's force in the viriditas, the greening animation of nature itself — the copper-oxide tarnish that is simultaneously corruption and the seed of transformation. The work begins in affliction, in the corrosion of innocence, because only what has the power to corrode can be refined into a transforming potency. The lion's devouring of the sun is not catastrophe but the necessary portal: the old solar gold must be eclipsed before the new, philosophical gold — the aurum nostrum — can be grown from its seed.

  • nigredo — the initial blackening stage of the alchemical opus and its psychological parallels
  • prima materia — the raw, undifferentiated substance from which the philosopher's stone is made
  • James Hillman — portrait and bibliography of the archetypal psychologist who developed alchemical psychology's account of sulfur and desire
  • Edward Edinger — portrait of the Jungian analyst whose Anatomy of the Psyche and Mysterium Lectures remain the most systematic psychological readings of alchemical imagery

Sources Cited

  • Abraham, Lyndy, 1998, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery
  • Jung, C.G., 2014, Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern
  • Jung, C.G., 1944, Psychology and Alchemy
  • Jung, C.G., 1954, Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy
  • Hillman, James, 1989, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman
  • Hillman, James, 1992, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World
  • Edinger, Edward F., 1995, The Mysterium Lectures
  • Bosnak, Robert, 2007, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel