Cow and Bull Worship.
But the most famous of these animal totems or fetishes is the cow or bull. According to the school of comparative mythology the bull which bore away Europe from Kadmos is the same from which the dawn flies in the Vedic hymn. He, according to this theory, is “the bull Indra, which, like the sun, traverses the heaven, bearing the dawn from east to west. But the Cretan bull, like his fellow in the Gnossian labyrinth, who devours the tribute children from the city of the Dawn goddess, is a dark and malignant monster, akin to the throttling snake who represents the powers of night and darkness.”73 This may be so, but the identification of primitive religion, in all its varied phases, with the sun or other physical phenomena is open to the obvious objection that it limits the ideas of the early Aryans to the weather and their dairies, and antedates the regard for the cow to a period when the animal was held in much less reverence than it is at present.