Author Topic: Bullriders, cowmen and girls, and animal husbandry  (Read 17820 times)

Offline Front-Ranger

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 30,288
  • Brokeback got us good.
Bullriders, cowmen and girls, and animal husbandry
« on: November 28, 2006, 06:30:26 pm »
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.
"chewing gum and duct tape"

moremojo

  • Guest
Re: Bullriders, cowmen and girls, and animal husbandry
« Reply #1 on: November 28, 2006, 06:53:51 pm »
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.

Offline Front-Ranger

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 30,288
  • Brokeback got us good.
Re: Bullriders, cowmen and girls, and animal husbandry
« Reply #2 on: November 29, 2006, 02:32:35 pm »
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.

"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline Jeff Wrangler

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,165
  • "He somebody you cowboy'd with?"
Re: Bullriders, cowmen and girls, and animal husbandry
« Reply #3 on: November 29, 2006, 02:37:12 pm »
Is the cow the oldest domesticated animal?

I think that might actually be the dog, but I could be wrong.
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline Front-Ranger

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 30,288
  • Brokeback got us good.
Re: Bullriders, cowmen and girls, and animal husbandry
« Reply #4 on: December 03, 2006, 01:41:24 pm »
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.
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline 2robots4u

  • Sr. Ranch Hand
  • ***
  • Posts: 132
Re: Bullriders, cowmen and girls, and animal husbandry
« Reply #5 on: December 03, 2006, 03:49:14 pm »
I agree with Jeff that it is the dog.  Front-Ranger, keep in mnid that the dog IS just 2 degrees separated from a wolf, so your pet is normal :) My neighbor has 3 full-grown Dobbies and when I go over, I just wait to see which one is going to attack...buy they are really kind animals, and they seem to like me, but I still keep up my guard. You know the story...once a wolf, always a wolf....Doug

Offline Front-Ranger

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 30,288
  • Brokeback got us good.
Re: Bullriders, cowmen and girls, and animal husbandry
« Reply #6 on: December 03, 2006, 05:10:21 pm »
Okay, 2rob, but I am going to hold you and Jeff to substantiating your claim about the dog...I wanna see some proof!

And now, I am jumping ahead of myself here, but since people have short attention spans, I want to explain why I think these ancient myths have relevance to Brokeback Mountain and to today. I'll start by quoting from the book The Once and Future Goddess:

Quote
Maleness is viewed as being entirely different from femaleness, excluding all that resembles his mother or her womb. The hero’s odyssey takes him away from all that, to “out there” where the sky’s the limit.
For 2,500 years, since the time of Aristotle, men have been talking about separation and difference and isolation as the human condition.

Males do not simply discard the aspects of themselves that they shared with their  mothers before their enforced separation, but later on after separation, those parts must be disclaimed and repressed, fought against and if need be distorted until they are unrecognized. It’s as if the best way for a boy child to keep from seeing those female things in himself, all unacceptable parts of himself, is to start actively demeaning them in others, attach disgusting labels to those aspects.

Elinor W. Gadon, quoting Wilshire and Wilshire, unpublished papers

Now I ask you to think back to the dozy embrace, and think about Ennis's words in that scene....
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline Penthesilea

  • Town Administration
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 14,745
Re: Bullriders, cowmen and girls, and animal husbandry
« Reply #7 on: December 03, 2006, 05:32:21 pm »
Okay, 2rob, but I am going to hold you and Jeff to substantiating your claim about the dog...I wanna see some proof!

From wikpedia:

The first animal to be domesticated appears to have been the dog, in the Upper Paleolithic era; this preceded the domestication of other species by several millennia. In the Neolithic a number of important species (such as the goat, sheep, pig and cow) were domesticated, as part of the spread of farming which characterises this period. The goat, sheep and pig in particular were domesticated independently in the Levant and Asia.

Here's the complete article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication

I've been loving dogs for my whole life. I've read many, many (really a huge amount) of specialized books about them. Believe me, dogs were the first domesticated animals (and not only "appear to have been" like the English wikipedia says).

The German wikipedia clearly says that dogs were indeed the first domesticated animals.

Additionally, I found the following information there:

Genetic calculation show that the wolf and the dog have genetically seperated about 125 000 years ago. The earliest proof is a mold (imprint?) of a dog's paw, which is ca. 23 000 years old.

Proof enough or should I go and search for more English sources?  :)

Offline Front-Ranger

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 30,288
  • Brokeback got us good.
Re: Bullriders, cowmen and girls, and animal husbandry
« Reply #8 on: December 03, 2006, 07:29:02 pm »
Okay, okay, fine. Shall we split this topic into one devoted to dogs and the other to cows et al?? Cause I could say plenty about dogs by themselves, 'specially sheepdogs.
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline Front-Ranger

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 30,288
  • Brokeback got us good.
Re: Bullriders, cowmen and girls, and animal husbandry
« Reply #9 on: December 05, 2006, 01:16:25 pm »
Here is a fresco of ancient bullriders on the Greek island of Crete:

"chewing gum and duct tape"