Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum

Bullriders, cowmen and girls, and animal husbandry

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Front-Ranger:
Is the cow the oldest domesticated animal? I'm not sure, but I do know that cows and bulls have been the companions of humankind since before recorded history. I was just reading the article "Homer in India" and came across this passage:

"One [Rajasthani epic poem] told the tale of the deeds, feuds, life, death, and avenging of Pabuji, a semi-divine warrior and incarnate god who died protecting a goddess's cattle against demonic rustlers. The other--fiour times its size, much more ambitious, and with similarities to both the Iliad and "Once Upon a Time in the West"--was the tale of a humble cattle herder named Sawai Bhoj, of the Bagravat clan; he eloped with an incarnate goddess....and so sparked a monumental caste war."

The story of cows and bulls is the stuff of Westerns but it is also in the East and everywhere; it is an archtypical myth of the time before patriarchal societies came to power when the source of milk, whether bovine or human, was worshipped.

moremojo:
Lee, my favorite Egyptian deity is Hathor, the cow-eared goddess of love, music, and joy. She was sometimes represented as a cow, as in a beautiful New Kingdom papyrus scroll showing her as a lustrous white cow emerging from the side of a mountain.

Hathor had her dark capacity as well, when, upon overindulging in beer, she transformed into Sekhmet, the terrifiying lion-headed goddess of war, who lusted for the taste of shed blood. This seems to anticipate the ideas and imagery seen in the the Hindu mother goddess, who is known in her benign form as Parvati, refined consort of the god Shiva, who likewise can manifest in fearful mien as Kali, the wrathful, destructive dark deity who nonetheless bestows her mysterious blessings upon her adherents. Kalidasa, perhaps the greatest of Sanskrit poets, was a devotee of Kali, as was Ramakrishna, the compassionate Bengali mystic who witnessed the Divine Mother as an effulgent ocean of light.

Front-Ranger:
That's very interesting, Scott. It has often seemed to me that Brokeback Mountain itself, with its intermingled creative and destructive energies, is like the goddess Kali.

Jeff Wrangler:

--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on November 28, 2006, 06:30:26 pm ---Is the cow the oldest domesticated animal?
--- End quote ---

I think that might actually be the dog, but I could be wrong.

Front-Ranger:
Okay, Jeff, while you're checking on that (believe me, I have a dog, and the term "domesticated" doesn't really apply to him, he's just two degrees of separation from a wolf!) I would like to relate the story of Europa. She was a fair Phoenician princess who caught the eye of Zeus and, in order to seduce her, he transformed himself into a bull. When she mounted him, he raced off to Crete with her, where she gave birth to three of his sons, one of them King Minos. The young king received a white bull from Poseidon which he was to sacrifice to the gods but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Enraged, Poseidon cast a spell over Minos's wife so that she developed a consuming passion for the bull. The palace engineer, Daedalus, built a cow costume for her and, concealed in it, she was able to consummate her lust. But a monster was born, half man, half bull. This Minotaur was sent to live in in the labyrinth along with his mother. This is the thinly concealed story of the primodial battle between the paternalistic and maternalistic cultures/religions for domination over the ancient world.

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