Everything about Bull Mythology totally explained
The worship of the
Sacred Bull was widespread in the ancient world. It is perhaps most familiar to the Western world in the
Biblical episode wherein an idol of the
Golden Calf is made by
Aaron and worshipped by the Hebrews in the wilderness of Sinai (
Exodus). Young bulls were set as frontier markers at
Tel Dan and at
Bethel the frontiers of the
Kingdom of Israel. In other cultures,
Marduk is the "bull of
Utu" and the Hindu God
Shiva's steed is
Nandi, the Bull.
Nandi the bull can be traced back to
Indus Valley Civilization, where
dairy farming was the most important occupations. The bull Nandi is Shiva's primary vehicle and is the principal gana(follower)of Shiva.
Aurochs are depicted in many Paleolithic European cave paintings such as those found at
Lascaux and Livernon in France. Their life force may have been thought to have magical qualities, for early carvings of the aurochs have also been found. The impressive and dangerous aurochs survived into the
Iron Age in Anatolia and the Near East and was worshiped throughout that area as a sacred animal. The
Sumerian
Epic of Gilgamesh depicts the killing of the
Bull of Heaven,
Gugalana, husband of
Ereshkigal, as an act of defiance of the gods.
From the earliest times, the bull was lunar in
Mesopotamia (its horns representing the crescent moon), though we can't recreate a specific context for the bull skulls with horns (
bucrania) preserved in an 8th millennium BCE sanctuary at
Çatalhöyük in eastern Anatolia. The sacred bull of the
Hattians, whose elaborate standards were found at
Alaca Höyük alongside those of the
sacred stag, survived in the
Hurrian and
Hittite mythologies as Seri and Hurri ('Day' and 'Night') — the bulls who carried the weather god
Teshub on their backs or in his chariot, and who grazed on the ruins of cities. In
Cyprus, bull masks made from real skulls were worn in rites. Bull-masked terracotta figurines and Neolithic bull-horned stone altars have been found in Cyprus.
In Egypt, the bull was worshiped as
Apis, the embodiment of
Ptah and later of
Osiris. A long series of ritually perfect bulls were identified by the god's priests, housed in the temple for their lifetime, then embalmed and encased in a giant
sarcophagus. A long sequence of monolithic stone sarcophagi were housed in the
Serapeum, and were rediscovered by
Auguste Mariette at
Saqqara in
1851. The bull was also worshipped as
Mnewer, the embodiment of
Atum-Ra, in
Heliopolis.
Ka in Egyptian is both a religious concept of life-force/power and the word for bull.
Walter Burkert summarized modern revision of a too-facile and blurred identification of a god that was identical to his sacrificial victim, which had created suggestive analogies with the Christian Eucharist for an earlier generation of mythographers:
» The concept of the theriomorphic god and especially of the bull god, however, may all too easily efface the very important distinctions between a god named, described, represented, and worshipped in animal form, a real animal worshipped as a god, animal symbols and animal maskes used in the cult, and finally the consecrated animal destined for sacrifice. Animal worship of the kind found in the Egyptian Apis cult is unknown in Greece. ("Greek Religion," 1985).
When the heroes of the new
Indo-European culture arrived in the Aegean basin, they faced off with the ancient Sacred Bull on many occasions, and always overcame it, in the form of the myths that have survived. For the Greeks, the bull was strongly linked to
the Bull of Crete:
Theseus of Athens had to capture the ancient sacred bull of
Marathon (the
"Marathonian bull") before he faced the Bull-man, the
Minotaur (Greek for
"Bull of Minos"), whom the Greeks imagined as a man with the head of a bull at the center of the
labyrinth. Earlier
Minoan frescos and
ceramics depict
bull-leaping rituals in which participants of both sexes vaulted over bulls by grasping their horns. Yet Walter Burkert's constant warning is,
"It is hazardous to project Greek tradition directly into the Bronze age"; only one Minoan image of a bull-headed man has been found, a tiny
seal currently held in the Archaeological Museum of
Chania.
In the
Olympian cult,
Hera's
epithet Bo-opis is usually translated "ox-eyed" Hera, but the term could just as well apply if the goddess had the head of a cow, and thus the epithet reveals the presence of an earlier, though not necessarily more primitive, iconic view. Classical Greeks never otherwise referred to Hera simply as the cow, though her priestess
Io was so literally a heifer that she was stung by a gadfly, and it was in the form of a heifer that Zeus coupled with her. Zeus took over the earlier roles, and, in the form of a bull that came forth from the sea, abducted the high-born Phoenician
Europa and brought her, significantly, to Crete.
Dionysus was another god of resurrection who was strongly linked to the bull. In a cult hymn from
Olympia, at a festival for Hera,
Dionysus is also invited to come as a bull,
"with bull-foot raging." "Quite frequently he's portrayed with bull horns, and in Kyzikos he's a tauromorphic image," Walter Burkert relates, and refers also to an archaic myth in which
Dionysus is slaughtered as a bull calf and impiously eaten by the
Titans.
In the Classical period of Greece, the bull and other animals identified with deities were separated as their
agalma, a kind of heraldic show-piece that concretely signified their numinous presence.
Alexander the Great's famous horse was named
Bucephalus (
"ox-head"), linking the self-proclaimed god-king with the mythical power of the bull.
The bull is one of the animals associated with the late Hellenistic and Roman
syncretic cult of
Mithras, in which the killing of the astral bull, the
tauroctony, was as central in the cult as the
Crucifixion was to
contemporary Christians. The
tauroctony was represented in every
Mithraeum (compare the very similar
Enkidu tauroctony seal). An often-disputed suggestion connects remnants of
Mithraic ritual to the survival or rise of
bullfighting in Iberia and southern France, where the legend of Saint
Saturninus (or Sernin) of Toulouse and his protegé in Pamplona,
Saint Fermin, at least, are inseparably linked to bull-sacrifices by the vivid manner of their martryrdoms, set by Christian
hagiography in the 3rd century CE, which was also the century in which Mithraism was most widely practiced.
Irish Gaelic myth features the tales of the epic hero
Cuchulainn, which were collected in the 7th century CE "
Book of the Dun Cow."
In some
Christian religions,
Nativity scenes are assembled at
Christmas time. Most of them show a bull or an
ox near baby
Jesus, lying in a manger. Traditional songs of Christmas often tell of the bull and the donkey warming the infant with their breath.
The sacred bull survives in the constellation
Taurus.
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