Here is the King; the first of these four kings whom the Lord made appear to the dazzled eyes of Ezekiel on the banks of the Chobar, (*1) and whom Saint John recognized in his dazzling vision of Patmos, while they sang before the throne of the dominating Lamb, waving their wings of fire: the Lion, terrible king of wild beasts, the Bull, king of victims, the Eagle, king of the air, and Man, king of the world.
But this Lion of the prophets of Israel, sovereign as he was, was nevertheless only a servant, and that is why, in concert with the Man, the Eagle and the Bull, he acclaimed, in trances of love and adoration, the One who occupied the throne, by turns Lamb and Lion, whom John saw ascend the divine seat to open the Book sealed seven times (*2).
I. THE LION IN THE SYMBOLISM OF PRE-CHRISTIAN CULTS
Around this religion of Israel over which hovered the formidable voices of the prophets and the reflections of their troubling visions, many centuries before John rested his forehead on the Heart of the Messiah and the Spirit descended into him, the paganisms of Europe, Africa and Asia had adopted the image of the Lion to represent, as they imagined them, the various attributes of the Divinity.
Among the Egyptians, the goddess Sekhet nobly wore a lion's head (*3) (Fig. 1); among the Ammonites the sun was worshipped under the name of Camos, the Lion-sun, and the royal animal, as we shall see later, had a divine character in Syria. For thousands of years, Tibet has worshipped the Ka-gro-Mha, goddesses with lioness heads, like the Sekhet of Egypt, divinely beautiful, who dance naked on the corpses of vanquished men and animals. (*4)
Among the Greeks, four lions with reins would gallop away in an impressive manner, or pull majestically at a walking pace the chariot of Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, the “Good Goddess”, an illusory image, but an image nonetheless, of the divine goodness which gives man all the goods that the earth produces.
In Persia, the lion was one of the sacred animals of the cult of Mithra. The festivals of this god were called "Leontic", and, often, on the sculptures which show us Mithra sacrificing the Bull, the lion and the serpent are lying under the sacrificed animal. The initiates of the Fourth Order, in the Mithraic mysteries, were called "lions" and "lion-nesses", and Mithra himself, "the Invincible Sun", seems to have been sometimes personified by a leontocephalic god, that is to say one who wore a lion's head on a human body. Even today, the heraldic Lion of the Persian State, brandishing a sword, carries the resplendent sun on its back. (Fig. II).
In ancient Assyria, the god of warrior courage was represented by a tiare-bearing leocentaur with four lion's paws and two human arms. (Fig. III). And in our country, is not Bartholdi's "Lion of Bel-fort" one of the most powerful glorifications of military courage?
It was probably this same symbolism as much as the Mithraic cult, very much in favour in the Roman legions of the East, which caused a large number of them to adopt the image of the lion as a military badge: the 4th legion, Flavia; the 7th, Claudia; the 9th, Augusta; the 13th, Gemina; the 16th, Flavia; the 21st, Gemina, bore the lion as a distinctive mark.
Moreover, the lion lends its claws to the sphinx and its body to the griffin, giving to these myths, at the same time as a part of its nature, a part also of the qualities which were attached to it, royalty, power, vigilance, courage and justice.
Royalty and power; and this was probably why, on their coins, Alexander the Great, and after him Maximilian-Hercules, Probus, Gallienus and other sovereigns wore helmets made of the skin of the lion's head. (Fig. IV).
Strength and courage; which explains, in addition to the Mithraic influence, its adoption as a badge by the legions of Rome.
Justice; for the Ancients said that the lion only attacks its prey if it is driven by an imperative need for food, and that, even in this case, it never throws itself on the opponent who has fallen to the ground before the fight. It was also said that the lion knew how to show gratitude for a benefit received, to the point that humans could receive from it useful lessons of just gratitude.
The Middle Ages did not break the links that had previously linked the lion to the idea of justice. From Italy to the Loire, ecclesiastical jurisdictions often sat in the forecourts of churches, between stone lions that framed the portal, and judgments were thus rendered there, according to the well-known expression, inter leones et coram populo, between the lions and before the assembled people. One can still see one of these forecourts of justice, with its lions that time has mutilated, on the great portal of the church of Sainte-Radegonde in Poitiers 1. Lions still appear on the thresholds of several ancient churches in Rome, at Saint-Laurent-hors-les-Murs, at the Douze-Apôtres, at Saint-Laurent-in-Lucina, at Saint-Saba 2.
The concept that links the lion to the virtue of justice was based, in Christian Symbolism, on the description given in the Bible of Solomon's throne of justice, made of ivory and gold, and which rested on six steps guarded by twelve magnificent lions 3.
Let us say, however, that in spite of all the ancient fictions which made the lion a pedestal of sufficient relief, its fortune, in the symbolism of Christ, was less brilliant than that, for example, of the fish, the lamb, the pelican, the ibis, the eagle. Let us add that ancient numismatics, a faithful reflection of the paganisms of the time, also shows it less often on the coins of sovereigns and cities, than the stag, the bull, the horse, the ram, the fish, the eagle and the bird which also became, later, emblems of Jesus Christ in sacred art and literature. (Fig. V.)
Footnotes:
*1. EZEKIEL, Prophetic. I, 10.
*2. See St. JOHN, Apocalypse. V, 8 and VI, 5, 6.
*3. Cf. DE SAULEY, Reports of the Academy of Inscriptions. December 1864.
*4. Cf. MARQUET-RIVIÈRE, In the shadow of the Tibetan Monasteries. Attinger ed., p. 158.