Bull‐Worship
The worship of the Bull and the Ram was addressed to one and the same power, that of generative creation, under two aspects— the celestial or cosmic, and the terrestrial or human. The ram‐headed gods all belong to the latter aspect, the bull—to the former. Osiris to whom the Bull was sacred, was never regarded as a phallic deity ; neither was Siva with his Bull Nandi, in spite of the lingham. As Nandi is of a pure milk‐ white colour, so was Apis. Both were the emblems of the generative, or of evolutionary power in the Universal Kosmos. Those who regard the solar gods and the bulls as of a phallic character, or connect the Sun with it, are mistaken, it is only the lunar gods and the rams, and lambs, which are priapic, and it little becomes a religion which, however unconsciously, has still adopted for its worship a god pre‐eminently lunar, and accentuated its choice by the selection of the lamb, whose sire is the ram, a glyph as pre‐eminently phallic, for its most sacred symbol—to vilify the older religions for using the same symbolism. The worship of the bull, Apis, Hapi Ankh, or the living Osiris, ceased over 3,000 years ago the worship of the ram and lamb continues to this day. Mariette Bey discovered the Serapeum, the Necropolis of the Apis‐ bulls, near Memphis, an imposing subterranean crypt 2,000 feet long and twenty feet wide, containing the mummies of thirty sacred bulls. If 1,000 years hence, a Roman Catholic Cathedral with the Easter lamb in it, were discovered under the ashes of Vesuvius or Etna, would future generations be justified in inferring therefrom that Christians were “lamb” and “dove” worshippers ? Yet the two symbols would give them as much right in the one case as in the other. Moreover, not all of the sacred “Bulls” were phallic, i.e., males; there were hermaphrodite and sexless “bulls”. The black bull Mnevis, the son of Ptah, was sacred to the God Ra at Heliopolis; the Pacis of Hermonthis—to Amoun Horus, &c., &c., and Apis himself was a hermaphodite and not a male animal, which shows his cosmic character. As well call the Taurus of the Zodiac and all Nature phallic. (TG).
DATA
To show: ; sortable: Bull‐Worship
Lifetime:
Shortly: The worship of the Bull and the Ram was addressed to one and the same power, that of generative crea...