The Lion in the Well

On the Master of Animals, the ego’s reflection, and the difference awareness makes

Across nearly every ancient civilization, the same image appears: a figure stands with arms outstretched, holding two lions in perfect symmetry — not killing them, not fleeing them, simply holding them. Scholars call it the Master of Animals. It shows up on Sumerian seals, in the hands of Gilgamesh, in the imagery of Artemis, in the earliest goddess figures of Anatolia. The details change. The structure never does: a still center, and two mirrored forces held in balance around it.

Rumi never painted this figure. Sufi art doesn’t work in images. But he told the same truth in a different shape — a story from the Masnavi, in the first book, the one devoted entirely to the nafs.

A lion has been terrorizing a valley of animals, striking from ambush, until the exhausted creatures strike a bargain: stop hunting us in secret, and we’ll deliver you one of our own each day. He agrees. The lot falls, in time, to a hare — small, and the last of the animals anyone would expect to outwit a lion.

The hare arrives late. Starving and furious, the lion demands why. The hare tells him a story: another lion ambushed him on the road and stole his companion. Hearing that a rival has trespassed on his territory, the lion’s hunger turns to rage, and he orders the hare to lead him to the intruder at once.

The hare leads him to a well. They look down together. The water throws back an image — a lion, with a plump hare pressed to his side. The lion sees it and reads it as other: his rival, holding the stolen prey. He lunges in to destroy him, and drowns.

That is the whole mechanism of the ego, in one image. It is not evil. It is not foreign. It is power and identity that has not yet recognized itself. The ego looks at its own fear, its own hunger, its own reflection — and reads it as something outside to be fought, chased, or destroyed, rather than something within to be known. That’s me, looking back — and instead it becomes there is my enemy. The lion had the truth an arm’s length away, shining right up at him, and what he did with it was attack.

The hare wins by keeping the lion blind to his own reflection — using the lion’s unconsciousness as the weapon that ends him. It is a clever ending, and Rumi lets the other animals celebrate it. But the hare himself stops them before the celebration goes too far: the lion, he says, was only the outer enemy. There is a fiercer one, living inside each of them, and no trick drowns that one. That is the battle the rest of the book turns to.

This is where the older image answers the story. The figure with arms outstretched, holding two lions rather than plunging toward either one, is the alternative ending — the one where recognition comes before the water closes over him, not after. Same reflection. Same mirrored force on either side. But one path ends in drowning, and the other in mastery — and the only variable between them is whether the seeing happens with awareness or without it.

Consciousness, then, is not a weapon added on top of strength. It is what turns a lunge into a recognition. The nafs is never actually standing across from you, separate, waiting to be conquered. It is your own reflection in the water. The only real question is whether you meet it that way — or run at it as if it were someone else.

Love, harmony, and beauty.
Be happy forever.
Omar.