News from the Orphanage

"An adult is just a child's way of making playmates."

– Flagon d' Canter, 1888

Before King Richard, the Lion was the personal familiar of a goddess. That is to say, they were in a metaphoric relationship. One might call her a were-kitty. Of course, the three-headed goddess herself was in a similar metaphoric relation with women in general, which is also to say an abstraction of any particular person to the generality of mothering or nurturing. So poetically, lion refers to that aspect of maidenhood (before it was usurped by the menfolk and their patriarchal institutions) as opposed to nymph or crone, just like Venus rising, ripe (but unseen) at mid-day and setting are three aspects of the star coming out of the eastern sea, traversing the sky and returning to the western depths each evening, hence the common eulogy "...and unto dusk it shall return".

The nymph is merely a prepubescent sea or forest creature like a child or lamb (often feminized in literature), so when we hear that universally misinterpreted prophecy, "the lion will lay down with the lamb", we should not impulsively think of an impossible utopia without predation and then laugh it off like a bad case of crabs. This is nonsense as even vestal vegans must exercise a certain predatory muscle hunting down young cabbages and broccoli. Remember that it is the lioness who is the par excellent huntress, the queen of the forest, and chief nurturer of her young who happen to thrive on mutton, so named because it rhymes with glutton – a condition which may cause a swelling in the belly apt to produce fat cats. I myself have seen a grandmotherly mountain lion lie down with five lambs, and she seemed very happy and they felt no pain whatsoever, and like a naive ass with impulse-control issues, shot her for kidnapping. A grandpa once said, "you can never trust a horse but you can always trust a mule – it will kick you every time".

The grand christian mistake may have been the function of non-overlapping magesteria, a particular confusion of modern thinking which imposes categorical membership like it's dispensing prison terms. What was meant by the proverb was in all probability this: "Do not confuse your children with your daily bread!". There was a time when the idea of a meal ticket never even came up (much less state or parental "ownership" of their progeny) and hopefully, at least the very young will live to see such sociable relations again.