On My Mind
By Joseph Dispenza, Sept 22, 2006

Romance of the bulls

Bulls do not win bull fights. People do. 

—Norman Ralph Augustine

Daedalus, the famous Athenian master craftsman exiled on the island of Crete, received a summons one day. Pasiphaë, the queen of Crete, had an unusual (to say the least) request. She had fallen madly in love with a white bull and could not rest until she mated with it.

King Minos, Pasiphaë’s husband, had once boasted at a banquet that the gods would give him anything he asked for. To prove it, he prayed to Poseidon, god of the sea, to send him a gift. Moments later an amazing, enormous white bull emerged from the waves and made its way on shore and to the palace. 

At that point, Minos should have done the right thing—sacrificed the bull back to Poseidon. He did not. He decided to keep it as a showpiece in a meadow near the palace. For his indiscretion, the god punished Minos by having Pasiphaë fall passionately, helplessly, hopelessly in love with the bull.

To quell the fire in her head, her heart and elsewhere, Daedalus fashioned a wooden cow with a hollow belly. Pasiphaë crawled into it and the craftsman rolled it out to the meadow, then hurried away. The great white bull approached the artificial cow, and Pasiphaë’s overpowering love was at last consummated.

That might have been the end of the story, but, alas, it was just the beginning. Nine months later, Pasiphaë delivered a boy-child that was healthy and normal, save in one ghastly aspect: the child’s head was the head of a bull. Enraged by the scandal of this Minotaur (bull of Minos), the king called Daedalus in, dressed him down, and, as punishment for his complicity with the queen, commanded him to construct a pen for the creature from which it could never escape.

The resulting structure was the magnificent and horrific Labyrinth, a maze of walls and halls and intersections, dead-ends and false exits from which anyone who had entered would lose their way and die trying to get out. Every nine years, Minos arranged to have the Minotaur fed live humans; seven youths and seven maidens were forced into the Labyrinth, never to be seen again.

Much later, the hero Theseus, disguised as one of these sacrificial youths, penetrated to the heart of the Labyrinth, found the Minotaur, killed it, and found his way out to the light of day. But that is another story.

We seem to have a love–hate relationship with bulls. The huge, muscular animal impresses us with its weight, its power, its energy and untamed force. How often have you become practically paralyzed at the sight of a bull? Seeing a bull seems to excite us and fill us with conflicting emotions, all of them strongly felt—fear, passion, anger, desire, rage, courage, terror. 

Through the ages we have both sanctified and demonized bulls. Bull worship abounded in the ancient world, especially among the Sumerians, Egyptians and Greeks. In the Bible, the “golden calf” made by Aaron and worshipped by the ancient Hebrews in the wilderness of Sinai was an example of bull veneration. The early Christian symbol for St. Luke, one of the authors of the New Testament, is the bull. 

But we have made the bull evil, as well. The Mithraic cult, which had its origins in Persia (Iran), was practiced in ancient Rome. Mithras, the god of light, waged eternal battle with darkness in the form of a bull. The Devil in Christian lore is a hooved being with horns like those of a bull. 

A bull’s wild sexuality awakens something in us, much as it must have in Queen Pasiphaë. A bull is the very embodiment of virility, sensuality, the power to impregnate. In astrology, Taurus, the sign of the bull, is ruled by Venus, goddess of love, passion and beauty.

We have been fighting bulls more or less face-to-face for many centuries. The bullfights of today are, of course, the ritualistic remnants of contests held in arenas everywhere in the ancient world: weaponless gladiators wrestled with them, ravenous tigers were set upon them, Christians were thrown to them. What survived from these circuses was the drama of a single human pitted against a single bull, civilized being against brute being, light against darkness—our higher self against our lower self.

Perhaps in the face of the bull, snorting and mindless, bent on destruction, intent on forcing sex, we see our own face and are both excited and appalled. Upon the head of the bull we place our own uncontrolled animal selves, projecting onto the hulking animal our insane rage that is seeing red, tasting blood, enjoying torture, craving murder.

This may be why we continue to chase down, taunt and otherwise confront bulls. They represent the part of ourselves that needs to be faced and battled—and ultimately killed. But ceremony of a sacramental quality is required in the dance between human and bull, and respect: the bull is, after all, the mirror image of ourselves. 

In Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway writes, “Every bull fight is a tragedy … because the bull dies in the end.” But a part of us dies as well, making this sacred encounter, no matter how many times it is enacted, momentous, mythical. 

We like to think of ourselves as “a little less than the angels,” but it may be truer to say that we are raised up on the bovine shoulders of our brutish species past, from which high place, but for the grace of God, we might fall at any minute.



Joseph Dispenza is a spiritual counselor in private practice and the award-winning author of a dozen books, including the newly released God On Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion. He is a cofounder of LifePath Retreats in San Miguel de Allende. He can be reached at Joseph@LifePathRetreats.com