Archetypes: The Bull
For an agricultural society, life is a cycle of deaths and rebirths. In the spring, the farmer places the seeds of his crops into the soil. Time moves forward. Storms roll over the fields and define the space between heaven and earth. Sun rays break periodically, matching the breaking of soil by the sprouting of plants. Throughout the summer and fall, these plants birth flowers and fruit - life sustaining nutrients. As the year’s warmth begins to wane, plants are cut from their roots. Harvested, they act as seeds for the following year, and sustenance for us. When the winter comes, and life fades into the cold, the long nights and short days, we bunker down and rely on crops we cut from the earth. This cycle, planting and harvesting, living and dying, extend beyond agriculture into our lives and myths. When discussing the bull, its surrounding stories and rituals, we will see it firmly planted in this cycle. The bull is a sacrificial offering, symbol of fertility, and adversary to spiritual growth.
In The Origins and History of Consciousness by Eric Neumann, star student of Carl Jung, discussion of the bull is abound. However, we must recognize that all symbols of this kind, embedded in our unconscious, are contextually dependent. It does not matter that a bull and a bud are materially different, they often play the same role in the story of our lives. They belong to the same category (or metaphor-world) as each other. They are eddies in the same stream. This means that, like an actor in a play, their role is understood in relation to the other characters. For this reason, we must begin with the Great Mother Archetype.
The Great Mother is well represented across mythology. She is Hera, Kali, Europa, Demeter, Persephone, Isis, and Astarte, among others. For our discussion, we will simplify her as terra materna, or mother earth. Earth is a mother for plain reasons. She gives birth to our crops, fruits, and, as nature, us. We are the children of the good mother earth. For this reason, she is a provider, the many breasted goddess, fertile and abundant. Today, the unconscious plays the same way; men who are hungry or poor, are more likely to be attracted to large breasts. The starving unconscious is attracted to abundance.
“blood is dew and rain for the earth”
However, the Great Mother is cruel as well. As Semitic Anath, she is the sister and helper of Baal. While she plays a key role in Baal’s resurrection story, she is also a ferocious harpe overcome with bloodlust. From Neumann:
“After she had slaughtered the race of men, ‘the blood was so deep that she waded in it up to her knees, nay, up to her neck. Under her feet were human heads; above her, human hands flew like locusts; in her sensuous delight she decorated herself with suspended heads and attached hands to her girdle.’ Her joy at the butchery is described in ever more sadistic language: “her liver swelled with laughter, her heart was full of joy, the liver of Anath was full of exultation’” (p.74).
This enjoyment of death was, for our ancient ancestors, plain to see in the slaughterhouse of nature. Lion males will kill the children of their competitors. Their mother, having lost her progeny, will go into estrus at the sight; she is turned on by the butchering of her kids. But agricultural societies needn’t look so far for evidence of nature’s bloodlust. Every season crops are “slain” to feed us. They die, return to mother nature’s body, and are later born again. Nature kills, and births in an endless cycle. The grim reaper still carries a scythe.
For the ancients, “blood is dew and rain for the earth” (p 74). This brings us to the category to which the bull belongs: The Son-Lover. Earth gives birth to a plant, whose seed impregnates his mother. In the spring, he will be born again. Plants often appear in mythology in this category. “The principal symbol of Osiris is the ‘djed pillar,’ a tree fetish, itself sufficiently remarkable in treeless Egypt; and in Byblos, too, a tree, wrapped in linen and anointed, was worshiped as the ‘wood of Isis’” (Neumann, p. 70). We still call a male erection “wood.” Melicertes’s body is left under a pine tree, which, in many ancient cultures, Roman to Druidic, were erected on the winter solstice. Later Christ would be nailed to a tree, and pines would be erected as Christmas trees, ostensibly in his honor.
For the ancients, death was a prerequisite for birth that extended beyond the harvest. In Greek myth, Agave, queen of the maenads, in worship of Dionysus, is worked into an ecstatic ritual bloodlust known as sparagmos. Therein, “the body of the god, or a human or animal substitute, is torn to pieces, which are eaten or scattered like seed” (Paglia, p. 95). Agave’s son Pentheus is lured by Dionysus into the woods where the ritual is taking place. Thinking he will witness the orgiastic rites of the women, he is torn limb from limb by his own mother. She then places his head on a spike, and parades around with his corpse.
Sparagmos is our connection to the bull. Firstly, Dionysus is frequently called by Homer, “Bullgod” (p. 15). A bull, for the rich, or a human far earlier in history, was considered a stand-in for Dionysus himself who was to be sacrificed to the Great Mother. Thus, the bull becomes a representative of the Son-Lover, killed to make the grass grow. In Jewish culture, circumcision plays the same role as the bull, a stand in for a greater sacrifice, either human or phallus. Neumann goes on,
Cretan fertility cult is the bull, the male instrument of fertility [or phallus] and also its victim. He is the chief protagonist in the hunts and festival games; his is the blood of the offerings; his head and horns are, besides the double ax, or labrys (the sacred sacrificial implement), a typical symbol in Creten Shrines. This bull symbolizes the youthful god, son-lover of the Great Mother… (p. 76).
Where some Amazonian cultures believed that infants were the accumulation of semen, leading to women copulating with many men in order to provide the fetus with materials for construction, Greeks saw blood as more central. Seeing that a woman ceases her period when pregnant, ancients inferred that life demanded a storage of blood. In this case, the blood provided was given by the bull, though often human sacrifices were offered, as in the case of Caananite Baal, represented as a winged bull, where children were rumored to be burned in his honor.
The bull is the lover of the mother goddess for several reasons. In general, sex is a symbol of creative union. For example, Egyptian Atum, masturbates the world into existence; read: has sex with himself, impregnates himself, and gives birth to the universe. Thus, the planting of a seed is the unification of the seed with the earth, “impregnating” her. Cave paintings were the insemination of yonic caves, a form of sympathetic magic in the hopes of birthing valuable animals from earth’s womb. The bull often plays a similar sexual role. Zeus copulates with Europa in the form of a bull. Queen Pasiphaë has sex with a bull, famously giving birth to the Minotaur. Today, the extramarital male partner in a cuckolding dynamic is called a “bull.”
In short, the bull is that which is given that the future may bear fruit. How it relates to the hero is an interesting and more psychological matter. The Great Mother is not just a representative of external nature, but one’s own nature as well. She is the unconscious drives and impulses that may overwhelm the ego. She is the domain of the dark, the night, the underworld or underground, the cave, the belly, and anything hidden. She is yin, and anything that absorbs as opposed to penetrates. Thus, as a matter of psychological maturation, the ego, the “I” I recognize, must confront one's own impulses in order to grow. To be trapped in a state of impulsivity, childlike squalor and revelry, is to engage in “incest” with the “mother.” This is to say that it is a union of the ego with one’s animal desires. As such, one is “castrated,” rendered impotent, losing their mode of force necessary for the creation of the world.
Throughout mythology, the bull slays or is slain by the hero. The failed hero is one who is overcome by their animal nature. Their personality is dismembered, reduced to the constant shifting between impulses and the personalities they entail; one becomes many. After all, Plutarch called Dionysus, “the many.” Examples abound, Actaeon, witnessing Artemis nude, nature in the raw, is turned into a deer and torn apart by his own hunting dogs. How many men have been turned into animals by beautiful women? Adonis, the archetypal male beauty, is penetrated and killed by a boar, a symbolic brother to the bull. Conversely, maturation is the hero’s slaying of the Great Mother and her minions, be that the Sphinx, in the case of Oedipus, or the Minotaur, who lurks in an underground labyrinth - domain of the Great Mother - by Theseus. The charge of the individual is to overcome your instincts, be it fear, pain, lust, or what June McDaniels and others have called the “wargasm,” on the path to a higher self. The sexualized bull, the hulking need to reproduce, must be given up, sacrificed, in order to grow. Today, this remains ritualized in Spain, either in the bull fights, where the hero conquers the bull, or the Festival of San Fermín, where one flees the representative of the Great Mother. This is the path of spiritual progression: Confrontation and conquering of one’s animal nature, symbolized by the archetypal bull.
“Myth is not the same as fiction.”
To close off our discussion and provide a contemporary example of this dynamic, we’ll look to the book and film Dune. The clarity with which the Great Mother is depicted in Dune is unmatched in any film I have seen to date. This is likely because Frank Herbert, the author of the original novel, had read Jung’s works. To understand this section, I recommend the reader watch the film, because (1) there will be spoilers, and (2) it will better inform the reader on these patterns.
In the film, Paul Atreides represents the hero/ego. He is simultaneously one who conquers the external world, and confronts the internal world, depending on the level of interpretation. For all intents and purposes, Paul is you in the story. He belongs to a family who traces their lineage to Spain, and carries the head of a bull with them. Throughout the beginning of the story, we see a small statue of a man fighting a bull, and learn that Paul’s grandfather died is such a match. Their family’s association with the bull immediately sets them up to be sacrificed. They are simultaneously hulking and powerful animals, and doomed to the currents of nature.
Who then does the slaying? At first glance the Harkonen, a rival family often at war with the Atreides, does the deed; especially since they set up the family, and launched an attack that led to their deaths. However, this plan is orchestrated and sanctioned by the shadowy Bene Gesserit. This collection of women, the most powerful of which are aged matriarchs, play the role of the Great Mother. Spectacularly, they are veiled, operate in the shadows, wear black - and direct the course of their species through selective breeding - the task of mother nature (and women) for millions of years. Nothing in the Dune universe matches the power of the Bene Gesserit. In effect, they are the mysterious natural director of humanity, determining its destiny - the sisters of fate. And it is them that kills the bull.
In a few short scenes, we quickly see the bull, particularly represented by Paul’s father Leto, rise to power, take over a planet, crash, and die, like Icarus trying to escape the atmosphere. Only Paul, the son, remains, forced to resurrect his family’s tradition and ascend to new heights.
The pattern of the bull is an immortal one, spanning back thousands of years to the very beginning of agriculture and animal domestication. It has embedded itself in our psyche and symbols, emerging time and again in our films, language, and sexual titles. Myth is not the same thing as fiction. It names grand patterns of human being, and thrusts them against each other over the course of civilizations. In the current moment, one may look to themself, and society, and ask where the pattern is applicable. Answers such as “I am” and “us” may quickly, frighteningly, follow.
Read more of Joe Jackowski’s work at theparodies.substack.com
Continue reading about Archetypes with this article on the Ouroboros.
Thumbnail Photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash
References:
McDaniel, J. (2018). Lost Ecstasy: Its decline and transformation in religion. Pelgrave MacMillan.
Neumann, E. (2014). The Origins and History of Consciousness. (Originally published in 1949). Princeton Classics.
Paglia, C. (1991). Sexual Personae: Art and decadence from Nerfertiti to Emily Dickinson. Vintage Books.
Ryan, C., & Jetha, C. (2010). Sex at Dawn. Harper Perennial. p. 90-91.
Swami, V., & Tovée, M. J. (2013). Resource security impacts men’s female breast size preferences. PLoS ONE, 8(3). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0057623