It is a bit disconcerting to read Tarzan of the Apes  in the original pulp version and find Sabor the tiger instead of Sabor the lioness in so many passages.  Even more startling is the fact that Sabor the tiger is a male, so he went through a gender change as well when ERB made the corrections for his book edition.

Atamian traces the name, Sabor, to one of ERB’s modes of thinking -- the rule of alteration where a word is left substantially intact with its original core of meaning.

“Why Sabor and not some other name?  Every school child knows about the saber-toothed tiger, because of its saber-like teeth.  But the saber (or sabre) is also a cavalry sword used by soldiers in the din and fury of the battlefield.  To say Saber the Tiger (or Lioness) may create a perceptual dissonance since the tiger or lioness is a stealthy, quiet, stalking, slinking beast symbolizing the opposite of battlefield din and clamor.  So  ERB changes the “e” to “o” and makes it Sabor (Atamian, 62).

It is likely that ERB’s name for a male lion, a Numa, was derived from the Roman King, Numa Pompilius, whom Burroughs would remember from reading Livy’s History of Early Rome.  Livy tells us that  “Numa Pompilius had a great reputation at this time for justice and piety.”  He was the first king to rule Rome after the legendary founding by Romulus.  His reign lasted from 715-672 B.C.

Numa was the law-giver of Rome.  His first act was to divide the year into twelve lunar months, and he appointed virgin priestesses for the service of Vesta.  Livy sees Romulus and Numa as the important founders of Roman power -- Romulus by war and Numa by peace.  “When Numa died, Rome by the twin disciplines of peace and war was as eminent for self-mastery as for military power (Livy, 35).

Burroughs wrote only two stories in his Tarzan series without the appearance of a lion in at least one scene.  Tarzan at the Earth’s Core features the saber-tooth tigers of Pellucidar and there are only tigers in Tarzan and "The Foreign Legion", which is quite understandable since the story takes place in Sumatra.
 

The lion was such a strong beast-villain for ERB that he created another version of his own to inhabit Mars -- the Barsoomian lion, which he called a banth.  It is particularly fierce lion, briefly described by Brady as “hairless except for a large, bristly mane around its thick neck.  It has a long, muscular body and ten legs.  Its mouth reaches back behind its ears, which are very small, and it has three rows of needle-like teeth, much as does a calot.  It has huge, protruding green eyes and its body is a tawny yellow color.”
 

The banth is not introduced until the second book in the Mars Series, The Gods of Mars.  John Carter and Tars Tarkas fight off a host of banths in “The Chamber of Mystery” where they meet Thuvia, who has the uncanny ability to tame these fierce creatures by the sound of her voice.  Banths appear in the next four novels, Warlord, Thuvia, Chessmen, and Master Mind, but they are absent from the rest, except for a mention as being on exhibit in the zoo at Amhor in Synthetic Men.  Kormal is a huge Barsoomian banth that has come to be worshipped as a god by the nearly extinct race of Lothar in Thuvia, Maid of Mars.
 

Perhaps at least a note in passing should be made of the Cat Men of Ladan in The Swords of Mars. They have a strange purring, mewing kind of language which they use among themselves, and although a ferocious race, the Masenas can be friendly and frequently quite playful in a cat-like manner.

The little six-legged domestic animals called, Soraks, are Barsoomian cats.

It seems that Burroughs cannot create a new world without creating new lions to go with it.  It is rather curious that he tends to place stripes upon his imaginary lions, perhaps playing with the “mistake” in Tarzan of the Apes.
 

The Tharban on Venus (Amtor) is a ferocious lion-like man-eating creature.  It is much larger than the African lion and has a red coat striped lengthwise with white stripes.  The hair of their coats is like stiff bristle, and the belly has a bluish tinge.  The Tharban has enormous jaws, fangs and talons.  It has a horse-like mane, and ‘a most abominable disposition and an insatiable appetite’ (Day, 77).

“Ta-Ho” in Pellucidarian is the huge cave lion of the Inner World.  They are generally found in a wild state, but they have been domesticated by a single tribe of Gilaks. (Day, 79).  There is also the Tarag, the huge saber-tooth tiger and the Saber-Tooth Men in Pellucidar who feed on human flesh. (Day, 114).

The Lion of Poloda is one of the many ferocious carnivorous man-eating beasts that inhabit the Mountains of Loras in Unis on the planet of Poloda.  The “lions” are larger than the lions of Earth but rather similar in appearance except that they are striped like a Zebra. (Day, 79).

Oo is the gigantic saber-toothed tiger of the stone age found in The Eternal Lover.  It is as large as a full-grown bull with vivid black stripes on a bright yellow background.  His canine fangs measure eighteen inches. (Day, 97).  The Panther of Caspak is of such size and ferocity it may be mistaken for the prehistoric saber-tooth tiger. (Day, 102.)  Zor is the prehistoric cave lion of the Niocene Age.  It is rather like the African lion, but three times the size and ferocity of that modern beast. (Day, 146).

According to Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols ,” the lion corresponds principally to gold or the ‘subterranean sun,’ and to the sun itself, and hence it is found as a symbol of sun-gods such as Mithras.” (Cirlot, 180)  Tarzan is quite logically connected to the lion in this sense with his companion, Jad-bal-ja, the golden lion, his own status as a “demigod,” and with his journey to Pellucidar, which ERB tells us was “heaven” to him.

“For Jung, the lion, in its wild-state is broadly speaking an index of latent passions; it may also take the for of a sign indicating the danger of being devoured by the unconscious . . . The wild lioness is a symbol of the Magna Mater (the Great Mother, who in antiquity was the symbol of the furnace, or womb, and the universal queen or anima mundi, the world’s soul.) (Cirlot, 180-181).  Both the male and female lion play an important part in Tarzan’s life, as may be seen in my “Soul of the Lion” first published in ERBapa in 1995.

There is no doubt that ERB’s Sabor as a male tiger in the first version of Tarzan of the Apes makes a symbolic reading of the lioness this book problematical, but it certainly does not remove the validity of such a reading since lions are extremely important in this book and the rest of the series.

It seems likely that Kipling’s Shere Kahn, the tiger, was ERB’s inspiration for his Sabor.  Even Atamian is willing to give Kipling this much:  “ (Burroughs) was generally influenced, or more correctly, inspired, by Kipling, but not specifically in Tarzan’s creation  (Atamian, 30).

The lion played its role in Greek and Roman mythology, which was as much an influence on Burroughs as Kipling.  The first of the twelve labors of Hercules (or “Heracles” as Graves correctly spells it since it means “Glory of Hera”) was to kill and flay the Nemean or Cleonaean lion, an enormous beast with a pelt proof against iron, bronze, and stone.  After trying to slay the beast with arrows, his sword, and his club, he finally choked it to death. (Graves, 103-104).   Of course, this reminds the ERB fan of Tarzan’s battle with Sabor at the window of his cabin in chapter 15 of Apes  where he kills Sabor (the tiger) with his bare hands, employing a “full Nelson” and breaking his/her neck.   Burroughs tells us that “Clayton saw a thing done which not even the eternal heavens had ever seen before,” but he certainly knew about Heracles and Samson (who repeated the feat in the Hebrew version of this tale).  Since Burroughs knew of these previous stories, he was not pointing out the exclusiveness of Tarzan’s feat, but calling upon the eternal heavens to observe how his character now joins in that immortal band.

Heracles skinned the lion, using its own claws for the otherwise impossible task, and wore the invulnerable pelt as armor, and the head as a helmet. (Graves, 105).  Tarzan’s pelt of Sabor dried out and became as stiff as a board before he could use it, which demonstrates the fact that he had chosen the wrong symbolic dress.  Tarzan was to be garbed most of the time in a leopard skin, although he did wear a lion pelt upon occasions.

In story # 8 Jungle Tales of Tarzan, the Ape-man is nearly killed by the members of his tribe when he appears dressed in a lion pelt.  Later in story #11 “Jungle Joke” Tarzan plays the lion skin trick again, but this time on the cannibals to a good effect when he pulls a switch and frees a real lion into the village.  The natives come to believe that Tarzan is able to change himself from a lion to a man, and back again into a lion, which of course is one of the main Tarzanic themes -- a man divided between two natures.  (Burroughs, JT, 292).

Mowgli too desires the pelt of the tiger, but not to wear as did Tarzan.  When Shere Khan’s striped hide was taken by Mowgli, it was spread out on Council Rock and he sang and danced upon it, “leaping up and down on the rattling skin, and beating time with his heels till he had no more breath left” (Kipling, 90).  Thus, he performed a ritual celebrating the death of the tiger, one might say, a private Dum-Dum, to mark the defeat of his enemy.

Bonamy Dobree points out in his introduction to the Easton Press edition of The Jungle Book  that “Mowgli was acutely aware of being torn between two races, both of which had cast him out -- a bitter realization he expressed in his “Song” which comes after the story, “Tiger! Tiger!”  The last three lines go as follows:

“I am two Mowglis, but the hide of Shere Kahn is under my feet. All the jungle knows that I have killed Shere Kahn.  Look -- look well, O Wolves! Ahae!  My heart is heavy with the things that I do not understand.”  (Kipling, xv).

When Mowgli brings the pelt to his Mother Wolf to show her his victory she says, “I told him on that day, when he crammed his head and shoulders into this cave, hunting for thy life, Little Frog -- I told him that the hunter would be the hunted.  It is well done” (Kipling 89).

This episode refers to the first Mowgli story, “Mowgli’s Brothers” where Shere Kahn came to claim his prey (Mowgli) who has just escaped him.   The tiger pushed his great square head and shoulders into the cave entrance where Mowgli had found shelter with the wolves.

It seems possible that there might have been a distant memory of Kipling’s story at work in chapter 15 of Apes called “The Forest God” when Tarzan drew Sabor the tiger out of the window of his cabin when he was trying to kill Jane and her maid.  Kipling’s picture of a tiger sticking his head into a cave to look at the child is a forceful one, and one twice repeated in Kipling’s accounts.  In ERB’s story, the double mention of head and shoulders is the telling point.  Tarzan pulls Sabor back out of the window ‘until the great shoulders came clear.”  Jane is surprised, and in the moonlight beyond she saw “the heads and shoulders” of two men.

This scene may or may not be an artistic transposition of something ERB read many years past.  The sources for images that come to a writer can not often be found, but this one of the tiger poking his head and shoulders into a tiny opening seems to ring true to me given the forcefulness of the image.