Solar bull

Sumerian lapis lazuli amulet of a bull, early dynastic iii period, 2650-2350 b.c. the reclining bull with bearded human head, curved horns...Sold by Christies...

Who's this guy?

Well, Utu / Shamash, the sun god...

Every spring, the sun god Utu / Shamash climbs the holy mountain (Abzu) to free Enki / Ea, the god of sweet water from his icy prison...I talked about this in my post "Shamash young and old"...

This freeing of Enki is an euphemism for snowmelt, in the mountains north and East of Mesopotamia, which are the source of Tigris and Euphrates. Snowmelt contributes more than 70% to the annual water flow of these great rivers. And this water flow peaks at the beginning of summer, Apr/May in Taurus...

Tigris annual flow chart:

Euphrates annual flow chart:

Which is why Shamash is depicted as a golden bull with long flowing "lapis lazuli" (water) beard...

Or as a lapis bull with human head...

"Enki placed in charge of the whole of heaven and earth the hero, the youth Utu (Shamash), the bull standing triumphantly, audaciously, majestically...the great herald in the east of holy An...with a lapis-lazuli beard, rising from the horizon..." 

Do you want to know why there is a winged lion chewing on the butt of Utu / Shamash? I talked about this in my post "Butt chewing"...

Anyway, we can see that in Mesopotamia bull with a human face and beard was a solar symbol...

What is amazing is that few thousand years earlier in the Balkans we find this guy...

Oh hello there, gorgeous 🙂 A Neolithic bull with human face and beard from Bulgaria...Karanovo Culture, 5th mill. BC...

Another neolithic depiction of a bull man from Bulgaria...Tell Rousse, 5th mill. BC...

This version of the bull man seem to have been popular across Neolithic Central Europe...

This 7,000-year-old ceramic horned face pot shard, was discovered in Poland. The object was found during the excavation of the Early Neolithic site in Biskupice, southeast of Krakow... 

Now we don't know if this bull man was also a solar bull, like the Mesopotamian one...

But we know that until recently bull was seen as a solar animal in the Balkans...

In Serbia and Bulgaria there are legends about monstrous bulls who lived in lakes and to whom local people sacrificed young girls...Anyone reminded of any famous legends? 

And around one lake in Serbia, there are two versions of the same legend, one talking about a bull living in the lake, and one talking about a dragon living the lake...I talked about this in my post "Water bull"...

Sooo???

Now we know that dragon of a fire breathing variety, is a symbol of the summer, and particularly the end of summer, Jul/Aug, the hottest and (usually) driest part of the year, the time of droughts...Dragon was used as symbol for dry hot part of the year in Eurasia since Neolithic until today...I talked about this in many of my posts, for instance "Dragon who stole rain", "Seven headed dragon", "Winged superhuman hero", "Is that you Gilgamesh"...

Summer which starts in Taurus, Bull...Hence the equating of bull and dragon in this Serbian legend...Which would make bull a solar animal too...

In my post Re'em, about the origin of a unicorn, I mention this Serbian riddle:

Q: "I slaughtered a bull behind one hill and the blood spurted from behind another" 

A: Sun, setting in the west and rising in the east

Another example of the deep link between bull and sun in Serbian culture...

I talked about the killing of the bull of summer, which was once performed in the Balkans as a sacrifice to Perun, the thunder god, on the fist day of autumn, in my post "Alidjun"...On the first Sunday (!) in August, local people also organise bull fights...Interestingly, this is also when in the past Auroch bulls used to start their mating fights...I talked about this in my post "Ram and Bull"...

How old are these Balkan legends and rituals? 

Kassandra

Scene from the trojan war: Cassandra clings to the Xoanon, the wooden cult image of Athene, while Ajax the Lesser is about to drag her away in front of her father Priam (standing on the left) and rape her. Roman fresco from the atrium of the Casa del Menandro, Pompeii.

Cassandra was a Trojan priestess of Apollo. According to the legend, Apollo fell in love with her, and sought to win her by giving Cassandra the gift of prophecy...

Some sources say that she promised Apollo her favors, some say that she promised nothing. Regardless, after receiving the gift, she refused the god, which as you can imagine pissed him off...A lot...

The enraged Apollo could not revoke a divine power, so he added to it the curse that though she would see the future, nobody would believe her prophecies...

Her cursed gift from Apollo became an endless pain and frustration to her. She was seen as a liar and a madwoman by her family and by the Trojan people...

Cassandra foresaw the destruction of Troy, she warned the Trojans about the Greeks hiding inside the Trojan Horse, Agamemnon's death, her own demise at the hands of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, her mother Hecuba's fate...Everything...However, her warnings were all disregarded...

So far, a classic Greek tragedy...But here is the interesting bit (for me):

In some versions of the myth, it wasn't Apollo who gave her the prophetic powers directly. She was asleep in the Apollo's temple, where the snakes licked (or whispered in) her ears so that she could hear the future...

You know snakes, the only true solar animals, working on behalf of the sun god and following him everywhere. They are in our world when the sun is in it too (day, and hot, dry part of the year), and in the underworld when the sun is there too (night, and wet, cold part of the year) 

I talked about this in my posts "Enemy of the sun", "The chthonic animal", "Bactrian snakes and dragons", "Dragon who stole rain"... 

And this is even better. In some versions of the myth, Apollo curses her by spitting into her mouth...

Well well well...

This is really interesting. Why? Because this is the third case of "spitting into someone's mouth" was used to either transmit sacred knowledge, ability to see (know) things others don't, or to revoke this knowledge or to mess it up...And that snakes are somehow involved...

The other two examples of this story can be found in my post "Glaucos"...

Oh, and wasn't Delphi, the most famous prophetic centre of the old world, originally the place where a giant snake (symbol of sun's heat) / dragon (symbol of extreme sun's heat) lived, until it was killed and replaced by....Sun god Apollo...

It is believed that snakes are linked to prophecy because they can travel between our world and the underworld, the world of the dead...And it is the dead that posses the knowledge of the future...But as I already said, snakes follow sun to the underworld...Hence Apollo and the snake at the centre of Delphi...