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Facing the Bull...

Why the myth of 

Theseus and the Minotaur has survived.

Bull related rituals such as the 'Course au Coeur' in the Carmague where a mob of men try to snatch a ribbon off a bull's brow and the Hamar of Ethiopia and their 'jumping the bull' are remnants of a ritual that have been with us for almost longer than we can remember.

Some 11,999,995,000 years after singularity the people of Minos, an island empire located in the Mediterranean Sea, organize themselves into a cohesive, wealthy and efficient society. Their preoccupations transcend the immediate concerns of survival and bring the search for the meaning of human existence to new levels of awareness.   

Among those preoccupations is a ritual which confirms and illustrates their ascendancy over the animals. Facing the Bull is performed in an arena, in front of spectators.  Naked young men stand before the fierce, immensely muscular beast with its enormous testicles and gleaming horns.  They do not seek to kill it, but to conquer their fear of it. 

They run straight for its head, grip one horn in each hand, somersaulting through the rack of horns, across the bull's back, skillfully returning to their feet behind the beast.   

One day the great God of the sea, Poisedon, presents the king of Minos with a gift, a great white bull for a very special sacrifice.  Such is the King's admiration of the beast that he cannot bring himself to sacrifice it and puts an inferior beast under the knife instead.

Suffering mighty offense, Poseidon lures the great white bull into coupling with the King's unhappy wife, who obsessed by her lust for the beast lays up in a fragrant meadow inside the hollow cavity of stretched cowhide with her rear open and her sex exposed.  The great bull ambles into the meadow, thinks she is a cow and shags her with much enthusiasm.

Empowered by his rapacious conquest, the great white bull left meadow and trampled through the land terrifying people and destroying crops and vines until Hercules on his seventh labour, captured it, put it on a boat and carried it away. He handed the bull over to the hero Theseus who dragged it through the streets of Athens up to the Acropolis and sacrificed it.

The issue of the bull's coupling with the unhappy wife of King Minos was the Minotaur, a bizarre monster with the enormous body of a man and the head of a bull.

The Minotaur is confined to the labyrinth beneath the city of Knossos where every ninth year seven youths and seven maidens are sent below to appease the monster.

One year, Theseus, takes the place of one of the youths.  Aided by Ariadne who gives him a magic ball of twine that leads him through the labyrinth to the sleeping beast and a back again, Theseus murders the Minotaur. 

Understanding and overcoming our deeply instinctive fascination with, and fear of, animals is key to understanding The Magic Helix.

It is extraordinary that humans can triumph in contests of will and intelligence when pitted against the cunning, athleticism and brute force of the wild ancestors of our domesticated animals.

People start hunting as scavengers. They followed and stalk herds of creatures waiting for the weak to die.  They begin to kill those in trouble.  The more successful this strategy is, the more it leads to aggressive attacks on healthier animals until it becomes true hunting.  

The dog joins the human at the kill, just as the hyneas and the vultures join the lion.  The dog progresses in the role of partner in sniffing the animal out and bringing it down.  A relationship is formed. Bonds are strengthened. 

Among the earliest human prey are the Auroch, a bovine monster that tramples through European forests. To hunt them successfully, the people had to understand them.  The more they understand them, the more they learn to manage their behavior and the more control they exert over the animals' lives until hunting is replaced by the husbandry of domesticated animals. 

A domesticated animal is selectively bred in captivity and thereby modified from its wild ancestors for use by humans who control the animals' selection of mate and food supply.  In spite of a number of exceptional instances where unique animals are domesticated by specific cultures in specific geographies, in reality there are only five widely distributed, domesticated animals:- cow, sheep, goat, pig and horse. 

Large animals like cows and horses are an especially important component in the development of mankind.  They provide meat, milk, fertilizer, transport (both domestic and military), engines for plowing and milling, wool and germs.  The germs kill previously unexposed people and immunized those exposed over a long period.

 

 

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