Observations placeholder
Cirlot on bulls and cows
Identifier
004822
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
A Dictionary of Symbols – J E Cirlot
The cow is associated with the earth and with the moon. A great many lunar goddesses wear the horns of a cow on their head. When linked with the primigenial goddess Neith, the cow is a mother-symbol, representing the primal principle of humidity and endowed with certain androgynous – or gynandrous, rather – characteristics.
In Egypt it was linked with the idea of vital heat. Vac, the feminine aspect of Brahma, is known as the 'melodious cow' and as the 'cow of abundance', the first description stemming from the idea of the world's creation out of sound, while the second – as hardly needs be said – comes from the function of nourishing the world with its milk, the fine dust of the Milky Way.
In this we can also see the idea of heaven as a fecundating bull, with its sex inverted; in Hindu belief, the bull and the cow represent the active and the passive aspects of the generating forces of the universe