The Lion in the waves

I've wanted to write about the sea for some time now, not just as a narrative piece for this blog, but as a larger cathartic piece to exercise the ghosts of anxiety. I find there is something of a grander resonance when myth and contemporary life find a matching syncretic pattern, this to me is true serendipity. For me, at least, I find this in the motto of my Grandfather's home province of Zeeland, in the South of Holland. Zeeland, of course, translates as "Sea land," that land that has been precariously taken from the sea (or perhaps looking at it climatically, it vould be land the sea has willfully given up), and it is land precariously threatens to become the sea again.

The motto of Zeeland is "Luctor Et Emergo," in Dutch this translates to "Ik worstel en kom boven," and in English, "I struggle and I emerge." The crest of Zeeland:














The evocation of this image is one of the classical lion icon fighting like hell to stay above the water. An interesting representation of what is otherwise cast as a very powerful animal in practically every other crest it appears on in Western European iconography. Waves above, waves below and all around, even the crown that surrounds the lion is surrounded by waves. There is another representation of the logo that evokes an even greater sense of struggle, and this was from an early 20th century stamp:






















This second image considers not just the waves the lion is fighting against, but also the tangled mess of everything that threatens to pull it down. I am uncertain of the lion's representation in this context, but I know that in other Occidental myths it appears as the sun God. Without attempting to assign this designation to a lion that might just be a dutch fish monger, I think there could be some resonance with the mythic Occidental sun god as lion and the lion in this image. This is based solely on my wondering, but I often imagine (and we'll leave it at that... imagination) that the lion here is the sun, and it is fullfilling it's daily duty by looking to the west (it faces left) and is swallowed by the sea (which it would appear to do if you saw it from the banks of the North Sea on Walcheren or from Breskens). But, as the motto boldly declares "I EMERGE!" meaning it rises again in the morning, like the precariously positioned land itself, from the eastward flow that moves west.

So, is this some cleverly hidden gem of dutch traditional knowledge, encoding a lowland cosmology into a crest? If it is, I think there is a timeless quality to the story it speaks to Zeelanders, stating that we struggle to pull earth from the water so it can face the sun and we can live. It also speaks to the great anxiety faced by anyone living by a sea that threatens to swallow whole everything. To this I see characters like Beowulf, the northern cousin to some lost Dutch equivalent, after all, the epic does speak of wars against the Frisians. Beowulf possess that enigmatic quality of heros that are able to go into the sea, that place where no mortal dare. He is able to not only go into the sea, he is also quite able to wrestle with its beings, which he does so quite effectively, coming back to tell the tale over and over again, repeating the sacred repetition of myth. Beowulf, however, being written (and that is the key) at some point (was it 12th century?) suddenly becomes a story about how those undersea beings and the beings the woods lack the timeless presence of the sun, the sea, the earth. Suddenly, this cloak is given to the one celestial God and away from what would have been the timeless biological, terrestrial, aquatic, and celestial truth.

Could the lion in the waves be a remembrance of those timeless qualities, placed on a crest before they too were slain by a single and uniform cosmology? Who knows, all we have is our imagination to wonder.