Ox

The ox as a symbol is cattle as the basis of settled agriculture, and once that is said the pattern of the traditions becomes obvious. A society whose ploughing, transport, milk, hide and manure come from one animal will treat that animal as close to sacred whether or not it says so.

Egypt. The Apis bull of Memphis was a living animal, selected by specific markings, kept in the temple precinct, consulted as an oracle, and on its death mummified and interred in the Serapeum at Saqqara, a subterranean complex of enormous granite sarcophagi. The bull was regarded as a manifestation of Ptah and later associated with Osiris. Hathor, one of the great goddesses, is cow-headed or cow-horned.

Mesopotamia and the Levant. The bull is the standard image of divine strength. The lamassu, the human-headed winged bull, guards Assyrian palace gates. The bull is the animal of the storm gods, of Adad and of Baal, and the golden calf of Exodus 32 makes sense as an attempt to depict a god in the ordinary regional manner rather than as an arbitrary lapse.

India. Nandi is Shiva's bull and his gatekeeper, and a recumbent Nandi faces the shrine in every substantial Shiva temple, positioned so that the worshipper looks between his horns. The status of cattle in Hindu practice is genuinely complex and its history is contested, Vedic texts describe cattle sacrifice, and the emergence of strong protection norms is a later development connected with ahimsa, with Jain and Buddhist influence, and in the modern period with politics.

Greece and Rome. The bull is the principal large sacrificial animal, and the taurobolium of the cult of Cybele and the bull-slaying of Mithras are central rites.

The ox is one of the four living creatures of Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4, and in the Western standard descending from Victorinus of Pettau through Jerome it is assigned to Luke, on the reasoning that his gospel opens with Zechariah offering incense in the temple and therefore with sacrifice. Other patristic writers assigned the four differently, Irenaeus and Augustine each give a different arrangement, so the familiar scheme is a fourth-century preference that prevailed rather than an original allocation. The winged ox of Luke in manuscript illumination and church sculpture follows from that choice.

Zen. The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures are a sequence of images with verses, in the received form attributed to the twelfth-century Chinese Chan master Kuoan Shiyuan, depicting the stages of practice. The seeker searches for the ox, finds its tracks, glimpses it, catches it, tames it, rides it home, forgets the ox, forgets both ox and self, returns to the source, and finally enters the marketplace with open hands. The ox stands for the mind, or for one's own nature, something never actually absent, which is the point of the later panels. Earlier versions of the sequence had fewer pictures and ended at the empty circle; the addition of the final return to the world is a substantive doctrinal statement about what enlightenment is for.

China. The ox is the second animal of the zodiac, having carried the rat to the finish and been beaten by it at the line, and it is associated with patience, reliability and unglamorous strength. Spring ploughing ceremonies involving a clay or living ox were performed by Chinese and later Vietnamese and Thai monarchs, tying the ruler's legitimacy to the agricultural year.