The Divine Cow

Ymir,Auðumbla, Búri Nicolai Abildgaard (1790)

The goddess known as Hathor to the Egyptians is the Divine Cow. Her belly is Heaven and her four legs stand on each corner of the world. For the Norse, Audumbla was the Divine Cow who fed Ymir and licked Buri from a block of ice. The Egyptians and the Norse were thousands of years apart and thousands of miles apart but shared the concept of a divine cow. It seems like these mythical beings share a common origin, or stem from a common concept.

Some authors associate Hathor with the Milky Way, while others imagine the Egyptians thought she was the sky itself (the House of Horus), or clouds (sky cows), thus her milk was life giving rain.

The Egyptian Hathor has multiple forms and animal associations as do the other gods in the Egyptian pantheon. In the Egyptian stories, such as the "Contendings of Horus and Set", for example, each of the gods readily transforms into different animal forms such as hippos or birds. It takes a significant exercise of imagination to try to adopt this mode of thinking to really grasp the significance of the Egyptian's (or Norse) animal godforms.

Our relationship with animals, except domestic pets, and with nature in general can be extremely attenuated, and for many people it's non-existent. It is possible to live within a completely man-made landscape, and indeed to only interact through the world via an electronic medium like TV or a computer or a phone.

Deforestation in the US

Our current way of life keeps most people far removed from nature. In the United States and most of the western world, the landscape has been tamed and turned into a version of the Eurasian Steppe grassland--our ancient ancestral home. Animals and plants have been slaughtered to make the land hospitable to livestock and crops and families who are unfamiliar with the wilderness. Furthermore, commercial, corporate, retail society sets the rhythms, boundaries,

Eurasian Steppe

and interactions of day-to-day life. The world has been remade for man and commerce.

This is not a new phenomenon. Our ancient ancestors domesticated cattle sometime in the distant past. As new archaeological discoveries are made, the date moves back. Some researchers discovered evidence for cattle domestication in northeastern China as early as 10,000 years ago. It's noteworthy that this date is many thousand years later than the fusion of wolf packs and human tribes. [See articles on the co-evolution of dogs and people.] Cows are the domesticated descendants of wild (now extinct) Aurochs. Clearly, there's no divine cow myth without cows.

Researchers have speculated on a Proto-Indo European religion, which includes an Audumbla-like divine cow in it's canonical myths, but establishing dates or the origins of these stories is probably not practical. Depictions of Hathor date to the Fourth Dynasty in Egypt (2613 to 2494 BC), "only" 4,500 years ago so we're forced to wildly speculate.

Maybe the divine cow myth originates with those cows who first decided to live with people. It's not difficult to imagine processions of newly minted cows arriving in far flung settlements across the world. In ancient times, the arrival of a new handful of cattle to your village would have been as exciting as electricity was to people in 20th century America. They would have been celebrated, and glorious. They solve numerous problems (while creating numerous other ones). Cattle are a miraculous self-contained, self propelled, self-propagating industry that provides milk, cheese, meat, and leather.

We are completely removed, today, from the divinity of the cow and from what our relationship with her represents. When humans domesticated cattle and horses, they also domesticated themselves. Hopefully by meditating on these myths we can enliven what was lost.