Lion Paw Shell

A lion's paw shell, four and a half to six inches across. Deep ribs with knuckled bumps along them, which is where the name comes from. It sits flat and holds its shape, which makes it a good offering dish, ring dish, salt dish or crystal tray.

It is a scallop, a bivalve, and the fan is the whole point of the shape. The scallop is the shell in the Western symbolic vocabulary: the pilgrim's badge for Santiago de Compostela, carried on the hat and marked along the Camino, where the grooves converging on one hinge get read as many roads arriving at the same place. Botticelli put Venus on one. They turn up on baptismal fonts across Europe. Worth being accurate about it, though: the Camino shell is Pecten maximus off Galicia, and the lion's paw is Nodipecten subnodosus from the Mexican Pacific. Same family, same shape, opposite side of the world.

The animal is stranger than the symbol. A scallop carries up to two hundred eyes along the edge of its mantle, and they do not work like ours. Each one focuses light off a curved mirror at the back of the eye rather than through a lens, the same principle as a reflecting telescope; the lens it does have barely bends light at all. Scallops also swim, clapping the two halves of the shell to jet away from a starfish.

So if you want a shell for water symbolism, an abalone gives you the color. This one gives you the fan, and it sits flat, which the abalone does not.

Good to Know

4.5 to 6 inches. Natural shell, so size, shape and color vary. Not a burn bowl; it is shallow and it will scorch. Use it for offerings, salt, water, crystals or jewelry.

Try It With

A Shiva lingam or a handful of tumbled stones to sit in it. The New Zealand paua if you actually wanted something to burn in. More in altar items.