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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in bull

Posted by on in Paths Blogs

In Part 3, I talk about the story of the Wall Street Bull and its blocking and unblocking. How did I see a news story that was no longer there when I looked again? Perhaps the universe supplied it so I would be inspired to honor the Bull. 

The story of the Wall Street Bull and its blocking by an opposing statue goes like this, according search engine research. The Bull was sculpted after an 80s era stock market crash, to encourage the economy to recover. It was always intended as a symbol of prosperity, and specifically of recovery after a period of less prosperity. 

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Honor the Bull part 1

Recently a news story crossed my social media feed saying New York just removed a blockage against the prosperity of the nation and the world. The economy has been bad since the blockage appeared, but hopefully the bull will charge ahead now and everything will be better for everyone.

When I searched for the story later I could not find any recent news confirming this. The story turned out to be a little more complicated, but more on that later. First, let’s talk about the Bull and Bear symbols.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Ariadne's Tribe Pantheon: Zagreus

This is one in a series of posts about finding our deities in Minoan art. Find the full list of blog posts in this series here

Today we're looking for the bull-god Zagreus in Minoan art. We consider him to be an aspect of our god Tauros Asterion. So obviously, we're going to look for images of bulls. But what kinds of images? When we go looking for Tauros Asterion in Minoan art, we seek out naturalistic/realistic images of bulls. When we're in search of the Minotaur (another aspect of Tauros Asterion), we look for shape-shifting depictions of half-man, half-bull creatures. So how do we know when we've found Zagreus?

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Ariadne's Tribe Family of Deities: Tauros Asterion

This is one in a series about our pantheon. Find the other posts here.

Today, we're focusing on Tauros Asterion. He's one of three gods who are sons of our mother goddesses. As you might guess from his name, he has both earthly and cosmic aspects. In Ariadne's Tribe, we consider the Minotaur and Zagreus to be two of his faces. But for now we're focusing specifically on Tauros Asterion, whom we consider to be the son of our Earth Mother goddess Rhea as well as having a connection with our cosmic mother goddess Ourania.

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Are You Washed in the Blood of the Bull?  A Mithraic Anthem

Hey, every little pagan gayboy harbors a Mithraic fantasy or two, and I was no different from the rest.

As gods go, Mithras is as cute as they get, not to mention that he gets to ascend to heaven and handfast the Sun, who's not only cute, but hangs out butt-naked all the time. What's not to like? In the end, they even share a couch. (Go ahead, check out the vignettes if you don't believe me.) Plus, it's an all-male cult. That's pretty hot.

I wrote these lyrics back in the 80s as a send-up of the classic American hymn Are You Washed in the Blood (of the Lamb)? They do not faithfully portray actual Mithraic practice. The taurobolium (blood baptism) characterized the cultus of the Magna Mater, not that of Mithras. (No sane person would ever try to bring a live bull into the intimately close confines of your average Mithraeum, much less sacrifice one there.) Likewise, surviving iconography makes it quite clear that Mithras ≠ Sun.

So what follows is best regarded as a lark, not a serious addition to contemporary pagan hymnody.

Still, I like to think that it successfully captures something of the fraternal joy that must have characterized ancient (and, no doubt, modern) Mithraism. Does anybody seriously believe that, after the wine had gone around once or twice, the Brothers did not sing a good, rousing anthem or two together?

 

Do you shine for the Sun,

and does he shine for you?

 

 

Are You Washed in the Blood of the Bull?

A Mithraic Anthem

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  • Jamie
    Jamie says #
    Ave Mithras Sol Invictus! Hey, they're still trying to figure out stuff about Mithraism. Thanks for sharing.

Posted by on in Paths Blogs
A Dilemma of Horns: Minoan Bulls and Cows

If it looks like a cow but it has horns, it must be a bull, right?

Wrong.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Moon, Stars, and Questions: Who is Asterion?

It’s always tricky, reconstructing ancient religious practices. We may or may not have reliable sources of information and from a distance of centuries, it’s hard to tell what really happened way back then. It’s especially tricky when the only written records we have were recorded by people who weren’t exactly friendly to our chosen culture, as I discussed in a recent guest post on a friend’s blog. This is the case with the ancient Minoans. Most of the mythology we know about from ancient Crete comes down to us from the Hellenic Greeks, who lived a thousand years after the collapse of Minoan civilization and whose Big Man culture held radically different values from the Minoans.

One Minoan deity whose identity we’ve been grappling with lately is known by the Greek epithet Asterion, which means ‘the starry one.’ The few references we have to this deity come from Pausanias, a Greek traveler and geographer who lived in the second century of this era; Pseudo-Apollodorus, the pen name of a Greek or Roman author who lived in the first or second century BCE; and Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian who lived in the first century BCE.

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  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I like Asterion as the sky-bull/constellation Taurus. Have you tried seeking personal communication with Asterion yet? I know so
  • Laura Perry
    Laura Perry says #
    No, I haven't, mainly because I only recently came up with this correlation. I've been grappling with the identity of Asterion for

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