The worship of the
Sacred Bull throughout the
ancient world is most familiar to the Western world in the
biblical episode of the idol of the
Golden Calf made by Aaron and worshipped by the
Hebrews in the wilderness of Sinai (
Exodus).
Marduk is the
"bull of
Utu".
Shiva's
steed is
Nandi, the Bull. The sacred bull
survives in the constellation
Taurus. The
bull
is the subject of various other cultural and
religious incarnations, as well as modern mentions
in
new age cultures.
Paleolithic findings
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 earliest
survivals of a bull cult are at neolithic
Çatalhöyük.
Mesopotamia
The
Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh depicts the killing by
Gilgamesh and
Enkidu
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).
Eastern Anatolia
We cannot
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 grazed
on the ruins of cities.
Minoan civilization
The Bull
was a central theme in the Minoan
Civilization, with bull heads and bull horns used as symbols in
the Knossos
palace. Minoan
frescos and
ceramics depict the
bull-leaping ritual in which participants of
both sexes vaulted over bulls by grasping their horns. See also
"
Minotaur and The Bull of Crete"
(
below) for a
later incarnation to the Minoan Bull.
Indus Valley Civilization
Nandi the bull can be traced back to
Indus Valley Civilization
, where
dairy farming was the most
important occupation . The bull Nandi is Shiva's primary vehicle
and is the principal
gana (follower) of Shiva.
Cyprus
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.
Egypt
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.
Levant
The
Canaanite (and later Carthaginian
) deity Moloch was often
depicted as a bull, and became a bull demon in Abrahamic traditions.
Judeo-Christian traditions
Old Testament
The Bull is familiar in
Judeo-Christian cultures from 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.
Christianity
In some
Christian traditions,
Nativity scenes are assembled at
Christmas time. Many show a bull or an
ox near the baby
Jesus, lying in a
manger. Traditional songs of Christmas often tell of the bull and
the donkey warming the infant with their breath.
Greek world
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.
Minotaur and The Bull of Crete
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
.
Twelve Olympians
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
is portrayed with bull horns, and in Kyzikos
he has 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
Titan.
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.
Late Hellenistic and Roman Era
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.
Celtic Polytheism
A prominent
zoomorphic deity type is the
divine bull.
Tarvos
Trigaranus ("bull with three cranes") is pictured on reliefs
from the cathedral at Trier
, Germany
, and at Notre-Dame
de Paris
. In
Irish literature, the
Donn Cuailnge ("Brown Bull of Cooley") plays a
central role in the epic
Táin Bó Cuailnge ("The
Cattle-Raid of Cooley").
Pliny the Elder, writing in the
first century AD, describes a religious ceremony in
Gaul in which white-clad
druids
climbed a sacred
oak, cut down the
mistletoe growing on it, sacrificed two
white bull and used the mistletoe to
cure infertility:
Irish mythology features the tales of the epic hero
Cuchulainn, which were collected in the 7th
century CE "
Book of the Dun
Cow."
Interpretations of Bull Worshipping
Eucharist analogies
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).
Astrology connections
The bull is the symbol representing the constellation
Taurus.
Notes
See also
References
- Burkert, Walter, Greek
Religion, 1985
- Campbell, Joseph Occidental
Mythology "2.The Consort of the Bull", 1964.
- Hawkes, Jacquetta; Woolley, Leonard: Prehistory and the
Beginnings of Civilization, v. 1 (NY, Harper & Row,
1963)
- Vieyra, Maurice: Hittite Art, 2300-750 B.C. (London,
A. Tiranti, 1955)
- Jeremy B. Rutter, The Three Phases of the Taurobolium,
Phoenix (1968).
External links
includes one example of the bull
standards.
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