The Gorgon is the power of evil in heaven, conquered by Athena, and thenceforward becoming her ægis, when she is herself the inflictor of evil. Her helmet is then the helmet of Orcus.
But the Lion is the power of death on earth, conquered by Heracles, and becoming thenceforward both his helmet and ægis. All ordinary architectural lion sculpture is derived from the Heraclean.
Then the Christian Lions are, first, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah—Christ Himself as Captain and Judge: "He shall rule the nations with a rod of iron," (the opposite power of His adversary, is rarely intended in sculpture unless in association with the serpent—"inculcabis supra leonem et aspidem"); secondly, the Lion of St. Mark, the power of the Gospel going out to conquest; thirdly, the Lion of St. Jerome, the wrath of the brute creation changed into love by the kindness of man; and, fourthly, the Lion of the Zodiac, which is the Lion of Egypt and of the Lombardic pillar-supports in Italy; these four, if you remember, with the Nemean Greek one, five altogether, will give you, broadly, interpretation of nearly all Lion symbolism in great art. How they degenerate into the British door knocker, I leave you to determine for yourselves, with such assistances as I may be able to suggest to you in my next lecture; but, as the grotesqueness of human history plans it, there is actually a connection between that last degradation of the Leonine symbol, and its first and noblest significance.
You see there are letters round this golden Lion of Alfred's spelling-book, which his princess friend was likely enough to spell for him. They are two Latin hexameters:—
Hic Leo, surgendo, portas confregit Averni
Qui nunquam dormit, nusquam dormitat, in ævum.
(This Lion, rising, burst the gates of Death:
This, who sleeps not, nor shall sleep, for ever.)
Now here is the Christian change of the Heraclean conquest of Death into Christ's Resurrection. Samson's bearing away the gates of Gaza is another like symbol, and to the mind of Alfred, taught, whether by the Pope Leo for his schoolmaster, or by the great-granddaughter of Charlemagne for his schoolmistress, it represented, as it did to all the intelligence of Christendom, Christ in His own first and last, Alpha and Omega, description of Himself,—