The Sacred Bull

Summary

The sacred bull is the bull people make the image of a power they do not hold: the power of an angry sky, the strength of the eldest father, the life of a god in a living body, or the first animal from whose death grain and cattle come. Again and again the bull is sent as a punishment, or worshipped alive, or killed so that life comes out of its death.

Its oldest complete story is the Sumerian Bull of Heaven. Gilgamesh refuses Inana, and she asks her father An for the Bull of Heaven to kill Gilgamesh. An says: it will muddy the waters and leave its dung over the land; its pasture is on the horizon and it grazes only where the sun rises; I will not give it to you. She threatens to shout until her voice reaches heaven and earth, and he is afraid and gives her its leash. The bull comes down to Uruk, and Gilgamesh says: we will throw your corpse into the streets and your intestines into the square, share out your meat in baskets to the widows' sons of my city, and make flasks of your horns to pour fine oil to Inana. He and Enkidu kill it. In the Babylonian version, in the sixth tablet of the epic, Ishtar threatens that if her father does not give her the bull she will break the gates of the netherworld and let the dead come up to eat the living. He says: if I give it to you there will be seven years of empty husks for Uruk; have you gathered grain for the people? She says she has. The bull comes down and snorts, and a pit opens into which a hundred young men fall, then two hundred, then Enkidu falls in up to his waist, leaps out and seizes the bull by its horns, and Gilgamesh thrusts his sword between the nape and the horns; they offer its heart to Shamash. Ishtar climbs onto the wall and curses, and Enkidu tears off the bull's haunch and flings it in her face.

The picture recurs among the peoples. At Ugarit the eldest of the gods is called "Bull El"; in Egypt Apis lives as a living bull at Memphis and is buried like a king; in Crete Poseidon sends King Minos a bull from the sea, which the king keeps back instead of sacrificing it, and from the bull and the king's wife is born the Minotaur whom Theseus kills. In Iran Ahriman kills the first ox, and grain and plants grow from its limbs; in the Roman sanctuaries of Mithras the god stabs the bull and its tail becomes an ear of wheat. In India Daksha gives Shiva a bull, which becomes his mount and his banner; and in the North the cow Auðhumla nurses the first giant, Ymir. Library 3.1.3–4; Bundahishn 4 and 10; Encyclopaedia Iranica, "Mithraism"; Mahābhārata 13.77; Gylfaginning 6.

The idea these stories turn on is that the bull is the strength of the land and its crops in a single body, a strength that is given and taken. The Bull of Heaven grazes on the horizon, and when it comes down to earth it brings seven years of dearth and opens pits under people's feet; the ploughing bull of Egypt is worshipped alive and mourned dead; the first ox of Iran dies and grain grows from its limbs. Kings deal with the bull as they deal with the god: Minos keeps back Poseidon's bull and is punished, Gilgamesh kills An's bull and his friend dies, Cambyses stabs Apis and goes mad in Herodotus's telling. The bull belongs to the god, and whoever takes from it what is not his pays the price.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Thawr, bull, is one word in the Semitic tongues, and the project's table of sound changes says it is Latin taurus and Greek ταῦρος, with th become t. Ugaritic writes it ṯr in El's title; the Akkadian dictionary gives šūru as bull and šūr šamāʾī as the Bull of Heaven; and the Greek essay says the Minotaur is "the bull of Minos". In Lane, thawr is the bull; al-thawr is a sign of the zodiac, Taurus; thawr is the lord or chief of a people; and muthīra is a cow that tills the ground, from thāra, to rise up, be roused. The word holds the three things the stories turn on: the star in the sky, the lord among his people, and the beast that stirs the soil.

Linguistic Root

Th and t

Ugaritic writes the bull ṯr, and Ugaritic ṯ is Arabic th; the project's Canaanite essay says that El in Ugaritic is "father of the gods and father of mankind" and "Bull El", the symbol of first strength. Th becomes sh in Hebrew and t in Aramaic, as the Juthoor table gives it, and in Akkadian it is šūru with š. The project's table of sound changes says the Semitic thawr is Latin taurus, with th become t, and grades the match "very probable". The Greek essay reads Μινώταυρος as two words, Minos and the bull, and says thawr is a genuinely Semitic word; the Theseus page sets out the reading.

Thāra and athāra

Lane's root th-w-r joins the bull and rousing: dust thāra, rose; a man thāra, his anger was roused; and muthīra is a cow that tills the ground. In the Qur'an Moses describes the cow the Children of Israel are told to slaughter as "not trained to plough the earth nor to water the tillage". So the bull in this root is the one that stirs up the soil with the plough and the one that rages and frightens, and these are the two faces of the Bull of Heaven: it opens the earth with its snort so that people fall in, and brings seven years without grain.

The heavenly bull and the constellation

The Akkadian dictionary gives alû as the Bull of Heaven in Babylonian literature and as the name of the constellation Taurus, written in Sumerian signs MUL.GU4.AN.NA, "star of the Bull of Heaven". In Lane al-thawr is a sign of the zodiac. So the Bull of Heaven in the Babylonian story is the constellation itself, and its coming down to earth is the descent of a star. In the Sumerian version An says the bull grazes only on the horizon where the sun rises.

Gāw and jāmūs

Lane says jāmūs, the buffalo, is a kind of cattle and an arabicized word from Persian gāw-mīsh. The Persian gāw is Avestan gāuš, which gives the name of "the soul of the cow", gəuš uruuan, Pahlavi Gōšurun. So Arabic keeps in jāmūs the Iranian word for the cow.

Nandi

Monier-Williams gives Sanskrit nandin as rejoicing, gladdening, the name of an attendant of Śiva in the Mahābhārata, and the name of Śiva's bull. The project's Hindu essay reads the name from n-d-y: nadī, the assembly of a people, so that Nandi is the bull standing before Shiva's temple where people gather; or nādā, to call, the caller at the god's door.

Attestations by Culture

Mesopotamia: the Bull of Heaven

In the Babylonian version the craftsmen marvel at the thickness of the bull's horns, each of thirty minas of lapis lazuli; Gilgamesh gives the oil they hold, six vats, to his god Lugalbanda and hangs them in his bedroom. Ishtar gathers the women of her temple to mourn over the bull's haunch. Then Enkidu dreams that the gods have decreed his death for killing Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. The bull that brought dearth is killed, and Enkidu pays the price.

Ugarit: Bull El

In the Ugaritic tablets El is called "Bull El, his father" when his children address him; he is the elder who strikes no blow himself and from whom permission and blessing are sought, as the El page tells. Here the bull is the strength and authority of the eldest father, not an animal to be sacrificed.

Egypt: Apis and Mnevis

Apis lives at Memphis, is known by his markings, mourned when he dies and his successor sought, and Plutarch calls him the image of the soul of Osiris. At Heliopolis there was another bull, Mnevis, worshipped in the temple of the sun, and Diodorus says the Egyptians consecrated both bulls to Osiris because they helped men in sowing and ploughing.

Crete and Greece: the bull from the sea

The Library says that Minos promised Poseidon to sacrifice whatever came out of the sea, and when a beautiful bull came out he sent it to his herds and sacrificed another; Poseidon in anger made the bull savage and made the king's wife Pasiphae desire it, and Daedalus made her a wooden cow, and she bore the Minotaur. In the seventh labour of Heracles he catches the bull in Crete, brings it to Eurystheus and lets it go, and it roams through Sparta and Arcadia until it reaches Marathon; some say it was the bull that carried Europa for Zeus. Library 2.5.7, 3.1.3–4.

Iran and Rome: the first ox and Mithras's stroke

In Yasna 29 the soul of the ox wails to the gods: for whom did you fashion me? who created me? violence and rapine have oppressed me, and I have no other herdsman than you. The Bundahishn tells that when the primeval ox died its soul, Gōšurun, came out and cried to Ohrmazd with the voice of a thousand men: to whom have you left the guardianship of the creatures, now that ruin has broken into the earth, the plants are withered and the water troubled? She went round the stations of the stars, the moon and the sun until she was shown the guardian spirit of Zarathustra, and agreed to be created again in the cattle. From the ox's limbs grew fifty-five kinds of grain and twelve kinds of medicinal plants, and its seed was purified in the moon and gave rise to a bull and a cow. Roger Beck in the Encyclopaedia Iranica says that the Roman Mithras stabs the bull at the mouth of a cave and its tail turns into an ear of wheat, a dog and a snake leap at the blood and a scorpion seizes the bull's genitals, and that the scene may be a Roman translation of Ahriman's killing of the first ox, or of Saoshyant's sacrifice of a bull at the end of time to make the drink of immortality from its fat, while the Pahlavi texts are centuries later than the bull-slaying monuments.

India: Shiva's bull

The Mahābhārata tells that Daksha, lord of creatures, drank the nectar and belched, and from his mouth came the cow Surabhi, who bore golden-coloured cows; when they gave milk the froth spread, and some fell from the calves' mouths on the head of Shiva as he sat on the earth. In anger he looked on the cows with his third eye and seemed to burn them. Daksha gave him a bull with some cows; he was pleased, made the bull his mount and its figure the device on the banner of his chariot, and so was called "the bull-bannered", and the gods made him lord of animals.

The North: the cow that nurses and licks

Gylfaginning says that when the rime dripped, a cow called Auðhumla came of it; four rivers of milk ran from her teats and fed Ymir. She licked the salty rime-stones, and on the first day a man's hair came out of the stone, on the second his head, on the third the whole man, named Búri, grandfather of Odin. The first cow of the North is not killed: she nurses the giant and brings the gods' grandfather out of the stone; her story is told on the Auðhumla page.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

What the bull stands for in each story. In Mesopotamia the Bull of Heaven is a star that comes down in anger and brings dearth; at Ugarit it is the title of the eldest father; in Egypt a body the god dwells in; in Crete a gift from the sea that a king keeps back and is punished for; in Iran the first animal, whose death yields grain and cattle; with Mithras the victim from whose death the wheat comes; in India the god's mount and banner; in the North the cow that nurses the first creation. The Iranian first ox comes close to the cosmic body, since plants come from its limbs as the world comes from Ymir's body, and Apis comes close to the dying and rising god.

Again and again the price of the bull is a death: Enkidu dies after the Bull of Heaven; Theseus kills the Minotaur and his father Aegeus dies when he sees the black sail; Cambyses stabs Apis and, Herodotus says, goes mad. And again and again the bull has a colour and a mark: Apis is black with a white spot, the cow in the Qur'an has "no blemish on her", Minos's bull is a beautiful one from the sea, and Surabhi's cows are the colour of gold.

The bull among all these peoples belongs to the agricultural calendar: the Bull of Heaven brings seven years without grain, Apis and Mnevis helped with sowing, the tail of Mithras's bull is an ear of wheat, and the Iranian ox yields fifty-five kinds of grain. And in Egypt the parts of the ferry of the dead are made from the hide of Mnevis, as told under the river of the dead.

In the Babylonian Akitu the priest sets a white bull at sunset before a pit holding reeds, honey, cream and oil, the king kindles the fire, and the two say: "O divine Bull, brilliant light that lights up the darkness": the Akitu.

At Armant south of Thebes lived the Buchis bull, black-headed and white-bodied, "the living image of Montu", the war god; it wore Montu's two plumes with a sun disc between its horns, and the bulls were buried in sandstone sarcophagi in the Bucheum, their mothers in a cemetery beside it: Montu.

Symbolic Reading

The project's Greek essay reads the name Minotaur as "the bull of Minos" and Minos from manna in the sense of decreeing and ruling, so the Minotaur is "the ruler's bull". The table of sound changes sets the Semitic thawr beside Latin taurus and Norse Þórr under the Möller-Bomhard law, which traces some likenesses between Semitic and Indo-European to a common origin, and the trade-routes essay warns that this hypothesis is not universally accepted, though some of the likenesses are hard to explain as chance. The Hindu essay calls Nandi and Apis "the same idea exactly" and names with them the sacred calf of Anu in Babylon. The stories themselves make the bull the beast of the plough, so reading the word together with the crops agrees with what Diodorus says of the bulls of Egypt and what the Bundahishn says of the first ox.