Animals

The Leopard

The panther

The spotted beast that bars the way, and cannot change its spots.

The plate: “Symbols of the Four Great Monarchies,” a plate “engraved expressly for ‘Bible Readings’” and copyrighted 1888, in Bible Readings for the Home Circle (Battle Creek, Mich.: Review and Herald Publishing Co., 1891), p. 26, photographed from the founder’s copy: the third beast, “like a leopard, which had upon the back of it four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads” (Daniel 7:6). Source.

The Leopard: what does it mean in analytical psychology?

Jung wrote that the impulse is readily represented in dreams as an animal, and that “dreams swarm with such theriomorphic representations of the libido”: the leopard is one of the swiftest and most beautiful of them, a desire that is all grace and spots and will not stand aside.

So Dante met it first of the three beasts at the foot of the hill, where the ascent began: “a panther light and swift exceedingly, which with a spotted skin was covered o’er,” and it “did impede so much my way” that he turned back many times. Its spots are the old image of a nature that does not change: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” asks Jeremiah.

The Leopard: where does it appear in myth and tradition?

Daniel’s third beast, “like a leopard, which had upon the back of it four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads”; the beast of the Apocalypse, “like unto a leopard,” with the feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion; Dante’s panther in the dark wood.

Where to Read

  • Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious (1916, tr. Hinkle), part II, ch. 4
  • Dante, Inferno I (tr. Longfellow)
  • Daniel 7:6; Revelation 13:2; Jeremiah 13:23 (King James Version)

Jung’s writings are cited by the volume of the Collected Works (CW), Bollingen Series / Princeton, 1953–79.

Related Symbols

Also among Animals

“Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it all when you are analysing a dream.”
C. G. Jung’s counsel, as one of his students recalled it

Club members can point at a technical term in this entry, such as a constituent, an action, or a word of Jung’s, to read its definition from the source. The Club.

Cite This Entry

“The Leopard.” In Symbols of the Psyche, the Symbolarium. The Thinking Press, 2026. https://thethinkingpress.org/symbolarium/psyche/leopard.

Nearby in the alphabet: The Lamp: A small light carried into the dark. Lead: The heaviest and darkest metal, where the work begins. Lightning: Sudden illumination, and sudden change.