Cattle
Cattle denote pastoral wealth, fertility, and sacred dependence; solar bulls embody virility and kingship, lunar cows nurture, and folklore grants herds familial sympathy and magic.
Our paraphrase of what the sources say it carries.
At a glance
- Type
- Concept
- Borne by
- 2 figures (1 is this, 1 carries it)
- Traditions
- Amazigh (Berber) folklore (1)Greek mythology (1)
Figures that bear it
A model judged each figure against its own description, one term at a time. Is: the figure is, or is partly, this thing. Bears: it carries the thing or is marked by it. What a figure does is filed under motifs and powers. Open "why" for the sentence the judgement rests on.
- Itherther is Amazigh (Berber) folklore
why
He belongs to a creation-myth register in which the first beings to exist are cattle rather than gods or humans, a pattern that recurs, in various forms, across pastoralist societies in Africa where herds sit close to the root of cosmology as well as of livelihood.
- Geryon bears Greek mythology
why
In Greek mythology, Geryon is the triple-bodied giant son of Chrysaor and Callirrhoe whose prized red cattle Heracles seizes after killing the giant and his monstrous guardians.