From: msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: literary lions
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1992 01:50:40 GMT


                 Lion Hunt
                           Friday, the 13th of November, 1992

When she set me on to it, I wasn't thinking of lions as primal.
Symbols of power, yes, but regal and refined.

In fact, the very first thing I thought of was Jefferson. A copy
of Houdon's famous bronze bust adorns the largest bookshelf in our
living room. And flanking Jefferson are two Chinese lions we brought
back with us from Taiwan. They are made of carved stone, I think, with
a musty red-lacquer finish, and the heft of good bookends. They sit,
lion on the right, lioness on the left, with heads full of stylized
curls for manes, body bedecked with jewelry, and mouths slightly parted
in ferociously grinned sharls.  Under the right front paw of the
male rests an orb, symbolic I am told of dominion over earth. Under the
left front paw of the female lies a cub on his back, his mother's
paw blanketing his belly, symbolic of dominion over home.
Volumes of Freud and Marx and William James sit behind on the
left, others of Shelley, Pope, and Coleridge lie behind on the right.
An unintentional yin and yang of symmetry, with a candydish full of
Jelly Bellies on the right to make it less fearful.

More civilized lions could not be imagined.

Unless it were perhaps the lions, tres elegantes, in the six 
tapestries, ``The Lady and the Unicorn'', which now hang
in the Musee de Cluny. Rilke descibes them in _Malte
Laurids Brigge_. Each tapestry presents a tableau with a lady in
the center, the first five allegorizing the senses, and the sixth
``the summation of woman's excellence''. They were commissioned
by Jean de Chabannes-Vandennes about the year 1510 in honor
of his fiancee, Claude le Viste. A lion rampant in dexter support
(which means here ``on the left'') flanks the central scene. And a
unicorn is on the right. Of course, this particular pair has graced
the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom since James I came to
the throne in 1603. And Chapter VII of _Through the Looking Glass_ since
1871. I suppose the Mother Goose rhyme came someplace in between.

But she spoke otherwise...of sex and violence and bestial power,
and of the goddess.

``As if when Men quitting the State of Nature entered into
 Society, they agreed that all of them but one, should be under
 the restraint of Laws, but that he should still retain all the
 Liberty of the State of Nature, increased with Power, and made
 licentious by Impunity. This is to think that Men are so foolish
 that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by
 Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be
 devoured by Lions.''
         [Locke, _Two Treatises of Government_, II.93.26-32]

I wondered how far back lions as symbols of kings might go.
I came across the lion-column of Ashoka (c. 250 B.C.) in Durant,
but, even better than that, I've walked through the lion gate
at Mycenae myself. Back to 1350 B.C., it would seem. Before
Agamemnon walked through it, at any rate. And before he did,
Cassandra said:

  ``Ah! that unleashed female beast to kill a man.
 What monster shall I call her? What abomination?
    An `amphisbaena'---each end a sting?
 A scylla lurking: rock-witch ruin of sailors?
           A hell-born hag,
 Breathing fire and slaughter on those most dear?
      The effrontery of that cry of hers!
      Like a battle rout of triumph
 Supposedly for joy at his return.

 And whether you believe or not---what matter now?
           It comes what comes.''
                  [Aeschylus, _Agamemnon_, Paul Roche trans.]

And the seasickness (of others) on my shoes in the morning caique
from Mykonos. To see the stone lions of Delos, and what Christians
have left of the phalloi. There used to be maybe nine lions, white
marble from Naxos in the 7th Century. Sejant, much like their Chinese
cousins, except sleeker now from the elemental erosion. There are
only five left, but another is at the Arsenal in Venice. With the
lions of St. Mark.

I like St. Jerome better, though. Recycled Androcles, of course,
but still there's the book and the lion rests tame at his feet.

And yet two of my favorite lions were warriors---Coeur de Lion
and Gustavus Adolphus, Lion of the North.

Fiona doesn't seem to be immune from dichotomy.

But, I confess I am confused by an even more elemental dichotomy---is
the lion male or female? Nature and the goddess and chthonian forces
are female certainly. But all these men who *are* lions, what does
that mean?

``Judah, thee shall thy brethren praise:
  Thy hand shall be on the neck of thine enemies;
  Thy father's sons shall bow down before thee.
  Judah is a lion's whelp;
  From the prey, my son, thou art gone up:
  He stooped down, he couched as a lion,
  And as a lioness; who shall rouse him up?
  The sceptre shall not depart from Judah,
  Nor the ruler's staff from between his feet,
  Until Shiloh come;
  And unto him shall the obedience of the peoples be.''
                   [Genesis, XLIX. 8-10, RSV]

In the first canto of the Inferno (as Barb has already mentioned) a
lion blocks Dante's ascent out of the dark wood [lines 44-48]:

    ma non si che paura non mi desse
    la vista che m'apparve d'un leone.
                 [but it (hope) was not enough to drive fear away
                  the sight when to me appeared a lion]
 
    Questi parea che contra me venisse
    con la test' alta e con rabbiosa fame,
    si che parea che l'aere ne tremesse.
                 [This seemed that it against me would come
                  with its head high and with ravenous hunger
                  and it seemed as if the air would tremble about it]
	
But, we know this lion is one of an alliterative three---lonza,
leone, lupa. Leopard, lion, she-wolf. Sometimes allegorized
to lust, pride, and avarice.

They come from the Bible:

   ``Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them,
     and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard
     shall watch over their cities: every one that goeth out thence
     shall be torn in pieces: because their transgressions are many,
     and their backslidings are increased.''
             [Jeremiah, V.6, KJV]

And therein will be found also a promise that these selfsame
three will be tamed:

   ``The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard
     shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young
     lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.''
             [Isaiah, XI.6]

Unless tamed or hunted down, these lions block the way of men,
    Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
    [In the middle of the road of our life],
and, male or female, lions are obstacle both to
man/aner and to man/anthropos.

Perhaps the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, but the Assyrians
in the 8th Century B.C. carved masterful, and mastered, lions into stone.
At Carchemish, Calah, Khorsabad, and Babylon, but mostly today
in the British Museum. Especially look at the wounded and dying
lioness from Sennacherib's Palace at Ninevah (it's in Durant I).
There are arrows in her, and I couldn't help thinking of St. Anthony,
and yet again of La Paglia.

Robert Graves cites a tradition linking the Nemean lion
(the First of the Twelve Labours) to Selene, the moon goddess,
she either giving birth to it or fashioning it out of sea-foam
(Aphrodite?), and to take a terrible vengeance on her own
under-attentive worshippers. This lion, whose pelt is destined
to become Herakles' cloak and symbol of his strength, is proof
against all weapons---arrows, spears, swords, all machines---so
that Herakles has in the end to strangle it with his bare hands.

Graves also notes the lion mixed in to griffins, chimaeras,
and sphinxes, tieing these hybrid monsters to the solar year
and their parts to zodiacal symbols of the seasons. Killing the
lion, or the beast, the hero comes thereby to rule and to hold
kingship over the sacred year.

To be hunted even so down to the lion hunt of Alexander the Great
depicted in the mosaics at Pella. Or echoes of ``Bully!'' from a
still later age.

Sphinxes, now there is the female, no doubt about it. The beast
as eternal riddle for man to solve. And he does solve it and
slay the beast. Or does he?

In Aristotle, humorless Aristotle, the regal metaphor comes 
into a discussion of the lion's behaviour and character:

    ``For even the lion, although it is very dangerous
      while feeding, if it is not hungry and has fed is
      very gentle. In character it is not shy nor suspicious
      of anything, and towards those reared with it and familiar
      it is very playful and affectionate. When it is being hunted,
      even if it is in view it never runs away nor takes cover,
      but if it is compelled to withdraw because of the number of
      hunters it retreats at a walk, step by step, and turning
      its head at short intervals; nevertheless if it reaches
      thick cover it runs away fast until it has come into full
      view, it runs extended and does not leap. The running gait
      is continuously extended like a hound's; when it is
      pursuing, however, it hurls itself on the prey when it is
      near. And what is said of it is true, both that its chief
      fear is of fire (as in Homer's verses: ``and burning torches
      from which he turns in fear even when he is charging
      furiously'') and that it watches for the man who is shooting and
      then rushes upon that one. And if one shoots without hurting
      it, then if it can catch him by springing on him it does not
      injure him nor wound him with its claws, but after shaking
      and frightening him it lets him go again. They approach the
      towns and injure humans mostly after they have grown
      old, being unable to hunt because of their age and because
      their teeth have suffered. They live many years, and the lion
      that was captured lame had many of its teeth broken, which
      some used as evidence that they have many years of life, arguing
      that it could not have developed this condition except over a long
      period. There are two kinds of lions; of these the one with
      the more rounded body and curlier hair is more cowardly, while
      the longer one with good hair is braver. Sometimes they run
      away stretching the tail straight out like hounds. A lion
      has been seen before now about to attack a pig,
      and running away when it saw it bristling in defence. Against
      blows to the flanks it is weak, but it can take many over
      the rest of its body and its head is strong. Whatever it has
      bitten or wounded with its claws, the wounds run with ichors
      which are deep yellow and cannot be washed out of the
      bandages and sponges. The treatment is the same as for wounds
      caused by dogbite.'' [Historia Animalium, VIII, xliv, trans.
                            by D.M. Balme]

    ``Now here are the sorts of ways in which animals differ from
      each other in regard to disposition. Some...; others are free
      and brave and high-born, such as the lion;...''
                           [H.A. I.i]
 
Or, how about the lion's mating procedure:

    ``Lions copulate rearwards, and are opisthuretic, as has been
      already stated. They do not copulate and bear at every
      season, but once a year. Parturition is in the spring, and
      the lioness bears usually two cubs, at the most six, though
      sometimes only one. The story which is told about the lioness
      losing her uterus in parturition is nonsense, and was made
      up to account for the scarcity of lions by someone who was
      at a loss to explain it otherwise. It is a fact that the
      lion is a scarce animal, and is not found in many places---
      in the whole of Europe it occurs only in the tract of country
      between the rivers Acheloos and Nessus. The lioness' cubs are
      so small when born they can barely walk. Lions in Syria
      bear five times: five the first time, then one fewer each
      succeeding time; after that they bear no more, but continue
      without offspring. The lioness has no mane; only the lion
      has one. The lion sheds only the four so-called canine teeth,
      two from the upper jaw and two from the lower; this happens
      at the age of six months.''
                       [H.A. VI.xxxi]

[I asked Martha about this rearward copulation (of lions
that is), and she told me that she was doubtful. Dogs do do
this---he mounts her, pumps, at which the base of the penis
inflates, locking them together. This is apparently called
``The Tie'' and he twists around back until they are standing
back-to-back and there they remain as much as half an hour. But
domestic cats, at least, work nothing like this. So I'm curious now
if Aristotle has got reproduction wrong. I find it curious
also that Aristotle does say that all female animals are
retromingent, and then he claims this for lions, too.]

I wonder about lions as a symbol of primality, and I wonder if this
symbology doesn't lose much of its potency by the fact that Herakles
eventually won. Much like a new layer of sadness gets added to
_Moby Dick_ now that whales species are endangered.

Lions once ranged far. Europe in the Pleistocene (Campbell shows
a lion painted at Les Trois Freres, c.12,000 B.C.), and throughout
the Middle East and parts of Greece up into classical times. Hence,
the lion fables (imponderable: should ``the lion's share'' mean all,
or only the biggest part?---depends on which Aesop fable you're alluding
to) and lion myths throughout the classical and pre-classical world.

[I was curious to find in an old Britannica (1) that lions now (1971)
range not only in sub-Saharan Africa, but in Kwathiawar in Gujarat
state in northwestern India, (2) that lions have a ``claw''--a horny
scale or spur--at the tip of the last tail vertebra, and (3) that lions
can interbreed with tigers in captivity. Joseph Campbell calls the lion
a sun creature, and likens its roar, which announces the beginning of its
hunt to the herds of its prey, to dawn's scattering of the stars. Poetic,
no doubt, but I suspect his usual free association, since the Britannica
says the lion hunts at night, and that the roar comes at
sunset. ``In addition to the roar,'' it says, ``the lion
utters many other sounds: coughs, grunts, growls and deep purring
noises.'']

Lion hunts killed them, sure, but probably more the domestication
and husbandry of livestock, the loss of the lions' hunting ground to
human encroachment and advancing civilization.

It's kind of sad, I agree, Fiona, to have them pinned like
butterflies into our art collections and civilized symbologies. For the
quest, be it for lions or dragons or giants, is nothing without
the hunted. But I wish for them nevertheless because I want to hunt
them, not admire them.

Perhaps because of this artistic pinning, because of the stylizations,
tigers seem more primal than lions to me. Blake's tyger, tyger
of course, but this whole topic got me thinking instead of Borges:

            El otro tigre

                 And the craft that createth a resemblance
                  (Morris, _Sigurd the Volsung_, 1876)

     Pienso en un tigre. La penumbra exalta
        [I am thinking on a tiger. The shadow exalts]
     La vasta Biblioteca laboriosa
        [the vast Library laborious]
     Y parece alejar los anaqueles;
        [and pushes back the shelves;]
     Fuerte, inocente, ensangrentado y nuevo,
        [powerful, innocent, bloody and new,]
     El ira por su selva y su ma~ana
        [it moves through its forest and its morning]
     Y marcara su rastro en la limosa
        [and marks its track on the muddy]
     Margen de un rio cuyo nombre ignora
        [margin of a river whose name it doesn't know]
     (En su mundo no hay nombres ni pasado
        [(in its world it has neither names nor past]
     Ni porvenir, solo un instante cierto)
        [nor to come, only a certain instant)]
     Y salvara las barbaras distancias
        [and leaps the barbarous distances]
     Y husmeara en el trenzado laberinto
        [and will scent in the plaited labyrinth]
     De los olores el olor del alba
        [of all scents the scent of dawn]
     Y el olor deleitable del venado.
        [and the delectable scent of deer.]
     Entre las rayas de bambu descifro
        [Between the stripes of bamboo I decipher]
     Sus rayas y presiento la osatura
        [its stripes and sense the bones]
     Bajo la piel esplendida que vibra.
        [beneath its splendid skin that vibrate.]
     En vano se interponen los convexos
        [In vain interpose the convex]
     Mares y los desiertos del planeta;
        [seas and the deserts of the planet;]
     Desde esta casa de un remoto puerto
        [From this house of a far-off port]
     De America del Sur, te sigo y sue~o,
        [of South America, I seek you and dream you,]
     Oh tigre de las margenes del Ganges.
        [O tiger of the banks of the Ganges.]
     Cunde la tarde en mi alma y reflexiono
        [Grows the afternoon in my soul and I reflect]
     Que el tigre vocativo de mi verso
        [that the tiger I invoke in my verse]
     Es un tigre de simbolos y sombras,
        [is a tiger of symbols and shades,]
     Una serie de tropos literarios
        [a series of literary tropes]
     Y de memorias de la enciclopedia
        [and of memories from the encyclopaedia]
     Y no el tigre fatal, la aciaga joya
        [and not the fatal tiger, the fateful jewel]
     Que, bajo el sol o la diversa luna,
        [that, under the sun or the diverse moon,]
     Va compliendo en Sumatra o en Bengala
        [goes on fulfilling in Sumatra or in Bengal]
     Su rutina de amor, de ocio y de muerte.
        [its round of love, of idleness and of death.]
     Al tigre de los simbolos he opuesto
        [To the tiger of symbols I have opposed]
     El verdadero, el de caliente sangre,
        [the real one, the one with warm blood,]
     El que diezma la tribu de los bufalos
        [the one that decimates the tribe of the buffaloes]
     Y hoy, 3 de agosto del 59,
        [and today, the 3rd of August of '59,]
     Alarga en la pradera una pausada
        [stretches on the grass a deliberate]
     Sombra, pero ya el hecho de nombrarlo
        [shadow, but already the fact of naming it]
     Y de conjeturar su circunstancia
        [and conjecturing its circumstance]
     Lo hace ficcion del arte y no criatura
        [makes it a fiction of art and no creature]
     Viviente de las que andan por la tierra.
        [living of they that walk the earth.]

     Un tercer tigre buscaremos. Este
        [A third tiger we will seek. This one]
     Sera como los otros una forma
        [will be like the others a shape]
     De mi sue~o, un sistema de palabras
        [of my dream, a system of words]
     Humanas y no el tigre vertebrado
        [human-made and not the tiger vertebrate]
     Que, mas alla de los mitologias,
        [which, farther than all mythologies]
     Pisa la tierra. Bien lo se, pero algo
        [paces the earth. Well I know it, but something]
     Me impone esta aventura indefinida
        [lays on me this adventure indefinite]
     Insensata y antigua, y persevero
        [senseless and ancient, and I persevere]
     En buscar por el tiempo de la tarde
        [in seeking through the afternoon]
     El otro tigre, el que no esta en el verso.
        [the other tiger, the one which isn't in verse.]
                    [from _el hacedor_, pp. 103-105, English
                     crib from the translation by Harold Morland in
                     _Dreamtigers_, pp. 70-71]
                     
When it comes right down to it, I prefer identification of self
(and of writer) with lion-tamer, even lion-killer, than lion.

If only to be being contrariwise.

                   Mike Morris
          (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)

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