signsThe lion

Egypt put the lion in the birth room. The two gods most frequently invoked in Egyptian household apotropaic ritual were Taweret and Bes, and Bes is described in that account as the lion-deity, developed from the earlier dwarf god Aha, 'fighter'. James Romano, Egyptologist and former Curator of Egyptian Art at the Brooklyn Museum, holds that in its earliest inception Bes was a representation of a lion rearing up on its hind legs. Taweret takes the form of a female hippopotamus with the tail of a Nile crocodile and the paws of a lioness, features that parallel other ferocious protective deities, in her case Sekhmet the lioness goddess; her predatory form is what lets her ward evil away from the innocent.

Mesopotamia gave the face to the thing being warded off. Lamashtu has "the head of a lion, the teeth of a donkey, naked breasts, a hairy body, hands stained (with blood?), long fingers and fingernails, and the feet of Anzû", and her amulets vary: a canine or leonine face, talons, wings. An obsidian amulet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art gives her a lion-griffin-like head, raised clawed hands and the feet of a bird of prey. The lion is also overhead — the astral-medical text LBAT 1597 reads, "If (the moon is) in the region of Leo, lamaštu, labašu, and ahhazu-demons, the seized-by-lamaštu(-disease), seized by lamaštu day-and-night(-disease), the god is a lion related to a belligerent god, Ištar, and Hand of the Ghost-disease, (in the region of) Venus and Leo."

This is one of the few families in the atlas where transmission is argued from excavated objects rather than from resemblance. Some scholars hold that Bes is a counterpart of the Mesopotamian Pazuzu: both are protector demons of the home, both have lion parts, wings, a long phallus and similar facial features, both sit similarly on protective amulets, and both are associated with protecting pregnant women and mothers. The contact is physical. A possible Pazuzu figure has been found in Egypt and Bes amulets at sites in Iran, and in a seventh-century-BCE fort at Nimrud five Pazuzu heads were found near a Bes amulet. The derivation, though, stays open: one theory connects both names to the king name Bazi, and the cited account states that neither Pazuzu's name has been shown to come from Bazi nor Bes's name proved to be foreign.

Late antiquity mixed the head into a composite. E. A. Wallis Budge, describing the figure that carries the name Abraxas on magical gems, wrote that "as a Pantheus, i.e. All-God, he appears on the amulets with the head of a cock (Phœbus) or of a lion (Ra or Mithras), the body of a man, and his legs are serpents which terminate in scorpions, types of the Agathodaimon." On other gems Abraxas stands upon a lion borne by a crocodile, and departed spirits ride the back of a crocodile or a lion on the journey to judgment. Budge's gloss names the borrowing outright: the lion head is read as Ra or Mithras, which is a syncretism rather than a coincidence.

The last dated appearance here is an instruction rather than an object. The Pseudo-Aristotelian Sirr al-Asrar, in the Arabic Hermetica perhaps dating to the ninth century CE, gives a kings' talisman that keeps harm away: under certain astrological marks, a ruby-red stone is carved on a Thursday with a winged, crowned man riding a lion with a flag, six hairless men bowing beneath his hands, and the stone is then burned in an extended ritual.

No source read here documents a living lion amulet, so this record closes in the ninth century CE rather than at the present day. That is a gap in the sources, not a statement that the sign died; it is marked so a later pass can fill it.