The Power of the Bull

Michael Rice

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317725831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Everyone has heard of the Minotaur in the labyrinth on Crete and many know that the Greek gods would adopt the guise of a bull to seduce mortal women. But what lies behind these legends?
The Power of the Bull discusses mankind's enduring obsession with bulls. The bull is an almost universal symbol throughout Indo-European cultures. Bull cults proliferated in the Middle East and in many parts of North Africa, and one cult, Mithraism, was the greatest rival to Christianity in the Roman Empire. The Cults are divergent yet have certain core elements in common.
Michael Rice argues that the ancient bulls were the supreme sacrificial animal. An examination of evidence from earliest prehistory onwards reveals the bull to be a symbol of political authority, sexual potency, economic wealth and vast subterranean powers. In some areas representations of the bull have varied little from earliest times, in others it has changed vastly over centuries. This volume provides a well-illustrated and accessible analysis of the exceptionally rich artistic inheritance associated with the bull.

PART I

THE ORIGINS OF THE BULL-CULT

CHAPTER ONE

THE BULL-CULT IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

The sub-species of large primates to which humans belong, self-defined as homo sapiens sapiens, is a very new entry in the catalogue of the planet’s fauna. We are, with little doubt, the most significant new species to have evolved since the end of the Pleiocene, some two million years ago. We are also, without any doubt at all, the most perniciously destructive species yet to be let loose on the world.

The history of homo sapiens is brief but very dense. Emerging, somewhat obscurely, from a line of primate ancestors we evolved through a sequence of more and more adapted apes until, bipedal, opposed-thumbed, binocular-visioned, we stood poised to take possession of the planet. About 100,000 years ago (rather longer than had quite recently been supposed) we added the second sapiens to our classification and became modern man.

Behind us lay great tracts of time, deep into the early stone age, the Lower Palaeolithic, where our humanoid ancestors lurked. As modern man we became dominant over the other species, not merely scavengers as our more remote ancestors were. But, whilst our precise line might be in some doubt, the consequence of a great void in the record of our pithecine ancestry, our descent from the same line which produced the great apes could not be disputed. From these distant anthropoid apes we inherited our eventual humanity, whether we liked them or not.

Today such statements do not pass unquestioned. There has in recent years been a realization that fully modern man probably evolved in southwestern Asia before the last Ice Age and migrated westwards, over a very protracted period. There has similarly been an increased recognition of the part played by the peoples of the Epi-Palaeolithic, the time intervening between the end of the Upper Palaeolithic, c. 10,000 BC and the early Neolithic when rudimentary agriculture and the first attempts at the control of animals can be detected in the ancient Near East. Greater understanding of the effects on human societies of climate changes over this period, which in all probability would have been imperceptible to those who lived through them, has been added to the sum of our knowledge of our immediate past.

The origins of sophisticated architecture have been pushed back, at sites like Jericho, Cayönü, Muraybet, to very nearly 10,000 years ago¹ and, a little later, at Catal Hüyük. This last-named site has transformed our view of man’s cultural development and, in particular, our understanding of his psychological imperatives at what must have been a time of especial stress and uncertainty.²

If we reach back beyond this point, beyond the beginnings of agriculture and the domestication of animal species into the Upper Palaeolithic itself, we can see, in the interiors of the great caves of south-western France and north-eastern Spain (and in other locations too, some of them very far distant from south-western Europe) the first evidences of two extraordinary characteristics of our species. These are modern man’s ability to represent the creatures around him, through the media of engraving, sculpture and painting, and the deep sense of dependence which man has on forces beyond himself, with which he seeks to identify or which he believes that he needs to placate.

The societies in and around the Mediterranean and in the Near East which were ancestral to the great urban, literate, royal and temple-rich states are the direct forerunners of the world in which we live today. Most of our concerns, apprehensions and anxieties, as well as the roots of our creative engagement with the world about us, are to be found in the societies which arose in this relatively contained part of the world in the millennia which followed the last Ice Age. The essential characteristics of these societies, and of all those which have followed them, are virtually the same, held in common. All observers and analysts of ancient societies are intrigued, and often perplexed, by the evident similarity which one ancient culture may seem to have with another, no matter how distant in time or isolated in location. In the view of this present work, the most convincing explanation for such similarities, other than that of similar challenges or opportunities experienced by different peoples at different times producing similar responses (the solar cults of Egypt and those of South America, for example, expressing themselves in the form of pyramids) is that of the working of the collective unconscious. This concept, first developed by C.G. Jung, defines a common heritage in the unconscious of all members of our species, manifesting itself in the form of archetypes which are thus the common property of us all. This idea is one which has especial relevance to this study and, in the immediate context of the apparent similarities between one culture and another, the same psychological mechanism is clearly at work. In recent years there has come an increasing realization that, judged as an animal species, humans, of all regions and times, share the same neuro-physiological structures and produce the same neuropsychological responses to stress, especially in heightened states of awareness.³ This realization is of great importance.

There is another, more mundane agent which often is present in bringing the achievements or innovations of one people to another. There is no doubt that trade, which started very early in our history, is one of the more potent agents of cultural change. We have tended to overlook the quite remarkable distances which men were prepared to travel in early antiquity in search of raw materials or the prospects of exchange with distant peoples. Whilst the affairs of travelling merchants may seem less exalted than the preoccupations of kings or the promotion of systems of belief by a temple priesthood, their influences are likely to be at least as enduring. This study, which concerns itself particularly with the origin of complex societies, acknowledges the role played by early traders in disseminating culture and belief systems, especially those which were related to the domestication of animals.

But ideas were transmitted not only as a result of the quest for raw materials or the disposal of surplus products which fuelled ancient trade. Ideas were carried not only by traders, who indeed probably had other things to think about as they negotiated with their agents or customers, but by peoples migrating, for any one of many reasons, from one area to another. In the early days of the cultivation of crops, for example, this must have happened countless times as a community, unaware of the importance of letting fields lie fallow or of not over-grazing, found their chosen land suddenly inhospitable. Moving to a new area they carried with them artefacts, animals and ideas which were new to the people among whom, or on the periphery of whom, they settled.

The remoter periods of our species’ history reveal one particular aspect of the diffusion of ideas and their implanting across a wide area of the ancient world. This is the curious pursuit of the divine which is so specific a concern of our race of hominids. In all the lands with which this study is concerned and in many of those which are peripheral to them, one particular manifestation of what is taken to be the divine seems to dominate the rest, in its drama, in the variety of images which it inspires and in the extent of time and distance over which it is sustained.

This is the cult of the bull.

Of course, there are many other enduring cults detectable over the long span of time, judged in terms of human history at least, with which we are concerned. The moon is a constant object of veneration, mysterious and, sometimes in a literal sense, occult; the sun, too, though rather less frequently than might be thought, for it is a curiously late object of universal reverence. Divinity is immanent in streams, mountains, the storm and in many animal forms. None of such manifestations, however, seems to me to have the persistence nor the power of the bull in grasping and holding the imagination of men. From late Upper Palaeolithic times to the end of antiquity the bull is always honoured as a divine creature, as the manifestation of a god or as the witness of a god’s presence. For more than 15,000 years therefore this creature has seized the god-making imagination of men throughout the great band of territory which sweeps from the Atlantic to the borders of India, and south into Africa, in which most of the worthwhile advances of our species, as well as many of its more resounding disasters, were realized. It is the purpose of this book to try to chart the extent of this preoccupation with bulls and, however tentatively, to explore some of the possible reasons which make the bull so potent, yet so ambiguous an object of veneration; ambiguous, for as often as the bull is honoured, he is destroyed.

In the process of this pursuit of the bull through the remoter reaches of antiquity some episodes will be encountered which at first sight may seem familiar but on closer examination will be seen to have elements which are strange or unexpected. Thus, traces of bull-games, so well-known an image of second millennium Crete, will be found in seventh and sixth millennium Anatolia, in third millennium Egypt and in the Arabian Gulf hundreds of years before they appear in Crete. The personification of youthful gods in bulls, and the dreadful forms of killing which they undergo, prefigures the archetype of the dying god in a particularly powerful manifestation. Beneath all of the various individual cults which appear, in desert as often as in rich steppe-land, there echoes a deeper resonance which has its fulfilment in the particular form of the cult of the bull which almost obliterated Christianity in its early years.

There will be some revelation of the power of the bull in art, where, once again, its image has been a dominant element, ranging from the mighty bulls of the Upper Palaeolithic caves to the tiny representations, no less magical, of the bull on Near-Eastern seals. There is also a compelling subplot, of the mysterious union of bull and man;⁴ even the Minotaur, one of the archetypes of the monster whose nature is as melancholy as it is threatening, has an antiquity which reaches far back into our kind’s more distant past. Bulls and men, especially masked men, have long been companions; men have sought for, even perhaps recognized, a community with the bull.

The bull leads his followers into some very dark caverns; literally so, since the bull is a chthonic creature and is, however mysteriously, associated with the forces which are found under the earth. The bull is identified with earthquake, with the roar of volcanoes and land-slip, and with flood. The gods who assume its form are as often the gods of the underworld.

But the bull also leads on to the stars, in what is surely his most arcane epiphany. The bull is a celestial creature as much as he is terrestrial; his presence amongst the stars has for a very long time been an element in magic and forecasting the future. Such influences as these which man has sought to invoke from the heavens and in much more down-to-earth concerns, like those of mariners seeking their way homeward or travellers in an apparently featureless desert to whom the stars are friendly companions and, sometimes, the agents of survival, are powerful and enduring.

The appearance of the bull amongst the stars, where he occupies, in mythological terms, a form of leadership, is one of the most intriguing of all his manifestations. Throughout antiquity, especially in the period when plant and animal domestication become increasingly the dominant pattern of human existence in the Near East, the bull is identified with a particular group of constellations; this identification can be traced at least to the third millennium BC, probably to much earlier still, and continues to this day.

There is, on the face of it, no reason why a group of stars, which individually have no real relationship whatsoever with each other, the nearest of which lies some 130 light years away from earth, should be described by many cultures and over thousands of years as ‘the Bull’. The stars do not look like a bull, nor have they ever looked like a bull, yet among the constellations, Taurus, to use its most common name, is perhaps the most familiar of the 12 great clusterings of stars which go to make up the zodiac.⁵

No subject is more calculated to make an archaeologist blanch with dismay than the mention of that bastard sister of astronomy, astrology. Yet this is a department of the bull’s domain; as such the eerie blend of astronomical reality and astrological fantasy (if that is what such influences are) must be confronted.

From very early times the bull has been associated with rebirth, including the most tremendous of all regenerations, the Spring. The constellation of the bull marked the vernal equinox for a little over 2,000 years from the end of the fifth millennium BC to the beginning of the second. The appearance of the bull on the horizon at dawn is further examined in Chapter 2 and, in the context of Egypt where it is particularly important, in Chapter 10.

We accord our ancestors neither courtesy nor justice when we assume that only in our age was careful observation of natural phenomena practised, and what we might call scientific deductions made from such observations. The careful alignment of the Pyramids, and the northern European standing stone monuments such as Stonehenge and Carnac, is a powerful witness to the quality of the observation-based science of late or immediately post-Neolithic peoples, the second of the two examples quoted deriving certainly from an otherwise decidedly Neolithic stage of social and technological development.⁶

Nothing in recent years has changed the conventional view of the ancient world more than two quite unconnected but contemporary developments. The first, chronologically speaking, was the uncovering of an important third and second millennium culture in the Arabian Gulf; this and the altogether unexpected but related evidence from the Arabian peninsula itself will change considerably the understanding of the development of societies in south-west Asia and, especially, of the role of trade in stimulating social development and in transmitting ideas from one people to another. The Gulf and Arabian cultures are also, perhaps surprisingly, important repositories of the bull-cult.

The other revelation which has transformed the thinking of historians about what was happening in the millennia before Sumer and Egypt began their sumptuous careers, was the excavation of part of the site at Catal Hüyük, in southern Anatolia (see Chapter 7). The importance of Anatolia had always been recognized, especially by classicists, who knew of the influence which peoples from Anatolia had exerted from time to time on the cultures of early Greece. But none had foreseen the exceptionally rich and complex society which was found at Catal Hüyük⁷ in what, to all intents and purposes, was a seventh millennium city, antedating by several thousa...