Two lions fight on open ground among ruins and trees. One has great feathered wings and holds the other by the head. The second has none. Both have long tails that end in a tuft. This is the sixteenth emblem of Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens, and its motto reads: this lion has no feathers; the other has what he lacks. The book was printed in 1617 at Oppenheim. It has fifty emblems, and each one joins an engraving, a Latin verse, a prose discourse and a fugue for three voices. The engravings are attributed to the workshop of Matthäus Merian. Maier, a physician at the court of Emperor Rudolf II, designed the book to be seen, read and sung. The Motto The Latin line gives a clear contrast. One lion is plain. The other carries feathers, which in this picture means wings. What one lacks, the other has. Nothing in the line says the two are enemies. They are two halves of a single idea, shown at the moment they grapple. The Lion in Alchemy The lion was a favorite beast of alchemi...

Very few animals have been drawn, carved and written about as much as the lion. It watches from city gates and royal thrones, from coats of arms and church doors, from the stone steps of a thousand libraries. People who had never seen a living lion still knew what it meant: strength, courage and the right to rule. The alchemists took this ancient meaning and added a twist of their own, because in their books the lion appears twice, once green and once red, and the first one eats the sun. King of Beasts The lion's place at the head of the animal kingdom is very old. In Mesopotamia, the kings of Assyria had themselves carved hunting lions in huge stone reliefs, such as those from the palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in the seventh century BCE, to show that the ruler could master the fiercest of creatures. The goddess Ishtar was shown standing on a lion. In Egypt the lioness-goddess Sekhmet embodied the burning power of the sun, and the Great Sphinx combines a lion's body w...