He was searched for, examined with meticulous care, and recognised as a divine exponent by certain signs. Herodotus describes it as black, with a white square on the forehead, a mark like an eagle on the back and a lump like a beetle under the tongue. According to Pliny it had a white mark shaped like a crescent on the right side. Other authorities make the mark on the forehead a triangle. "As the birth of Apis filled all Egypt with joy and festivities, so his death threw the whole country into mourning." In the Zodiac Aries, the Celestial Ram, is the one who breaks the icy clutch of winter and opens the way to renewed life, and Taurus (the Bull) and the Sun plow the blue meadows of the heavens. The bull like the sun is the great fecundator of nature, and together they symbolise the eternal productive pair. Thus the Bull of Heaven found its counterpart on earth in the Ox. Apis is the Ox into which the soul of Osiris enters, "because the animal has been of service in the cultivation of the ground." The connection is a very obvious one. Osiris as a water god pours the Nile over the land, and the bull god provided the strength which enabled the Egyptians to plow it up.
The bull god Apis, the Sacred Bull of the Assyrians and the bull Nandi of the Hindus are looked upon as identical types. Some of the numerous sculptures represent Mithras kneeling on the back of a bull and plunging a knife in its flank. In others he has thrown the bull on the ground and with one knee on its croup plunges a knife into its heart. A dog, serpent, scorpion figure, also two youths, one with an inverted torch and the other holding aloft a burning torch. The symbolism remains a mystery. Unless, as Frazer surmises, Mithras who was a sun-god, a corn-god, a twice-born god sacrifices the "ox who appears as a representative of the corn-spirit. .." The sacrificing of a bull formed a leading feature in the mysteries of Mithraism, and he suggests that the bull may be "conceived in one at least of its aspects, as an incarnation of the corn-spirit."1
As Mithras was the springtime sun and the Bull of the Zodiac presides over the spring, and as the ancients looked upon blood as the primary vehicle of life, it is not unjustifiable to suppose that the bull sacrificed by the sun-god was to release the waters (or blood) of life so that all nature might be revived. "From the sacrifice of the bull of Mithra the entire creation springs." 2
Lajard finds that the two principal attributes of Venus in the Orient and Occident are the Lion, symbol of the sun, heat, light, the active generative power, and the Bull, symbol of the humid power, the passive power. When the goddess is attended by both ,animals he interprets it as typifying the hermaphroditism of Venus. 3
1 Fraser's The Golden Bough, abridged edition, p. 468.
2. Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious, Note, p. 497.
3 Recherchessur le Cul~ ~ Venus, Felix Lajard.
