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New Light on the Bull-Leap :
Mystery Ekphrasis of the Andromeda Myth,
in Novels of the Second Sophistic
The Knossos Bull Leaper Fresco
Bull Leaper Videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFfuH5qGT3Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1L-8xLI_5c&feature=related
The Bull Leaper Fresco from Knossos, in Bronze Age Crete, hangs like a massive question mark over the History of Art. With vibrant colours and elegant curves, it speaks of dashing bravery, of skill, agility, and peak physical fitness. There is power and grace in the huge charging bull, and the viewer can almost hear the clatter of hooves on the stones of the courtyard, sense the rumbling like thunder as its great bulk erupts into motion, and feel the suspense of the crowd as the leaper readies himself for the feat.
But as archaeological work has turned up more examples of this same image, the sense of mystery has deepened. We find the leaper for example on a Cretan cylinder seal, a fabulous bronze statuette, a gold cup, a golden seal-ring, and an ivory figurine. We also find similar images abroad, in fresco fragments from Mycenaean Tyrins and Pylos, and more recently from Avaris in Southern Egypt. It has become quite clear that we are dealing here not simply with one artist’s decision to depict a scene from everyday Minoan life, but with a motif, an artistic tradition, a standard image, in other words an image which must have some story behind it.
So beyond the questions of why and at what occasions the leap was performed, and what function it fulfilled, whether ritual or entertainment, or somewhere between the two, there is also the question of why it was a favourite scene for artistic depiction. We can see that it is beautiful, combining thrill and grace, but why did the artists stick to the formula of this artistic configuration?
Around the great hearths of the courts of the palaces of the Old Aegean culture, bards struck up on their harps, and stories were sung. The period would later be remembered by the Greeks as the Age of Heroes. Surely the leaps - whether danced through by the Cretan acrobats or traced out by the painters - surely they played through an act which had been performed by some hero or demigod during an epic adventure or quest. In other words the image of the Bull-Leap can hardly have existed in a cultural vacuum lacking an equivalent expression in myth.
The fact that this is an act of bravery has lead some scholars to suggest that what is shown may be an initiation, a coming of age test for adolescent males. As speculations go, this seems sensible. Then a sudden flash of light is thrown on bull-leaper art by an intriguing theory which suggests the bull is the Taurus constellation and the leaper is Perseus, the constellation that hangs over the shoulder of the Taurus. And intriguingly the shape of Perseus does match that of the Knossos bull leaper remarkably well. We shall see that far from being incompatible with the theory of the bull-leap as initiation, the Perseus leaper theory finds confirmation in a source that also confirms the initiatory nature.
 
The Perseus Constellation
As Perseus crosses the southern sky over the course of the night he rises up in a trajectory towards culmination, where he rapidly flips over and then sinks down into the West, just as if he is vaulting. Although I didn’t know it when I began to write on this subject, this theory that the bull-leaper is Perseus was first suggested by the archaeologist Professor Sandy McGillivray of the British School of Athens in Labyrinths and Bull-Leapers in Archaeology, November-December 2000, 53-5. Part of the attraction of this beautiful and elevating theory is that it immediately connects the feat with a well known hero, and one who Greek myth places in the Minoan/Mycenaean Age, for Perseus it was who, in those stories, founded Mycenae. How old is the Perseus constellation, and is there anything in surviving mythology to link him with a bull leap?
The theory that the Bull Leaper is Perseus is compelling, but does it have to remain just another half-baked sticking point for scholars to differ over, another controversy to add to the list? If we could find a conclusive link from Antiquity between the Bull Leap and Perseus, we could dispel the lack of certainty. Such a link does indeed exist, one that I found by accident while reading an ancient novel for its own sake. My eyes widened and a sense of something multidimensional possessed me as a realised that here at last was a sign, a token, a proof for an answer to one of the greatest questions of European Archaeology and Art History.
In the ancient novel Ethiopian Story by Heliodorus, a Perseus-identified figure performs a bull-leap during a god-willed abortion of the sacrifice of his Andromeda-identified lover. To clarify, the heroine, Chariclea, is repeatedly and explicitly identified in the book with Andromeda. And like Andromeda in the Perseus myth, she is to be sacrificed at the hands of her own parents. As with Andromeda, these parents are the king and queen of Ethiopia. Here in Heliodorus’ brilliant novel, however, there is a twist. These parents do not know that she is their daughter until the last minute. The recognition comes just in the nick of time, and the extraordinary nature of the events surrounding this convinces the priests of the king that the god in question does not wished to be sacrificed to in this harmful fashion. So the priests declare that from then on human sacrifice shall be ceased. One of the key incidents happening here to make these events sufficiently extraordinary is the bull leap performed by the lover of this heroine. And if the heroine is identified with Andromeda, her consort by simple logic is identified with the lover of Andromeda, namely Perseus. Therefore, Perseus is shown here performing the bull leap. As I put two and two together and realised that the words on the page of this novel in front of me were echoing exactly the theory put forward by Professor McGillivray, it felt like a kind of historic moment; that theory really is a genuine addition to our knowledge of the history of art. Yet I was fully aware that this raised further questions, because while the Bull Leaper fresco comes from way back in the Bronze Age of Minoan Crete, the novel comes from Late Antiquity. Didn’t bull-leaper art die out way before even Homer sung his poems?
Before we look at this in more detail, we will benefit from fitting this novel into its cultural period, namely the Second Sophistic. This period, occurring as the brilliant final flourishing of the classical pagan culture of Antiquity, prior to its emergence in altered form in the Renaissance, saw the composition of a number of Greek and Roman novels, most of which contain some sort of ekphrasis, so that for example a painting is frequently met in the plot, which is described beautifully and which shows scenes from a myth, a myth which then influences the course of the plot. This way the novel would not just depict events of the fleeting mundane world, but would also have a light, beautiful resonance with timeless universal Forms, those of the old stories and, through this, the unchanging star-patterns onto which the ancients imprinted their myths.
So for example in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon the action brings us to a temple on the coast of Egypt where there is a painting of the moment in the Andromeda myth where the heroine is chained to the rock as an offering to the sea-monster who will shortly be dealt with by Perseus as he swoops down on Pegasus. This painted scene exists in the stars, where we see the constellations of Perseus, Andromeda, Cetus (the whale/sea-monster) and Pegasus all in close proximity. Following the appearance of this painting in the plot, the heroine of the novel narrowly escapes being a sacrifice at the hands of bandits, and so the painting has turned out to be prophetic, and this is always the case with paintings encountered in the novels of the Second Sophistic.
The same identification of the heroine with this same figure of Andromeda is present in Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story, as I’ve said. We are explicitly told that Chariclea looks just like a painting of Andromeda that hangs in the Ethiopian palace of her parents, the king and queen, and we are told that, as an Ethiopian princess, Chariclea also has Andromeda as one of her ancestors. Again, the plot follows the myth as Andromeda’s parents offered her as a sacrifice, from which she was saved in the nick of time.
A key sequence in this series of events runs like this. Gifts are being brought to the Ethiopian king. Chariclea’s identity has now been recognized, but the sacrifice of her and her lover Theagenes has not yet been finally aborted. A giraffe is brought forward as one of the gifts for the king. One of the sacred bulls, alarmed by the appearance of this strange creature, breaks free, and rampages through the crowd. With the king, queen and their daughter looking on, Theagenes makes use of the confusion to break free himself, but he does not take the opportunity to escape, but instead seeks a way to bring the bull back under control. He first jumps onto the back of a white horse, and then from this jumps onto the neck of the bull, putting his hands between the horns. He then manages to lower himself over the front of the charging animal and to place his feet on its legs to hamper its running. In this way he tires the animal and it eventually rolls onto its back. He has “thrown” the bull, the extraordinary but possible act of wrestling a bull to the ground single handedly.
When we look at the map of the constellations we see Perseus, Andromeda and Pegasus, all adjacent, and right above them we see, looking on (as in the novel) the two parents of Andromeda, in the constellations of Cassiopeia and Cepheus. This means that there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Heliodorus intended here to show a scene representing the Perseus constellation as an acrobat leaping over Taurus. How amazing then that the bull leaper fresco from almost two thousand years earlier shows a leaper whose form again matches that of Perseus over Taurus! This fresco lay in fragments under Cretan soil at the time Heliodorus was writing his book. So while we can be certain that Heliodorus intended to show this star-map scene, there is still a big mystery here.
Before we suggest a theory to bridge those missing centuries, we may also note as we look at modern maps of the constellations that the giraffe constellation is part of this same constellation group, it being placed in the sky just to the left of Cassiopeia and Perseus. So this scene in the book features no less than seven adjacent constellation figures: the giraffe, the bull, Theagenes as Perseus leaping over the bull, Chariclea and her parents as Andromeda and her parents looking on, and the white horse as Pegasus. Truly then, there can be no doubt that this is the image from which the plot derived its inspiration by means of a simple but veiled ekphrasis. But the giraffe, too, is a particularly mysterious walk on part here, for the simple reason that, as far as historians are aware, this constellation wasn’t placed into the sky until the Renaissance!
Petrus Plancius is credited with the first depiction of Camelopardalis, the Camel-Leopard (“Giraffe”), on a star chart produced in 1612. Plancius was a founder member of the Dutch East India Company, for which he produced the primary nautical charts, based on information he was able to glean from the Portuguese. These were put into use for a first Dutch voyage in 1595, returning 1597. Information gleaned on this and subsequent voyages was used to improve the maps. These Dutch voyages also mapped the stars of the Southern Sky, and from this information brought back to Holland Plancius created new constellations. But he also added some constellations to the well-known Northern Sky, including the Camel-Leopard
Had he conjured this up from nowhere? The first Dutch expedition established contacts at Banten in Java, near to what would soon become the Dutch colony of Batavia. From about seventy years earlier Java had been dominated by Muslims. Could it have been from contacts here that the idea for Camelopardalis was derived? Islamic celestial globes showing the constellations were crafted as early as the eleventh century, and a fine example produced in the 17th century in Islamic Mughal India is in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution. The Arabic attribution of star-names includes several named after camels, and most intriguingly, while Plancius’ Camelopardalis is located between two high northern constellations, Draco and Cassiopeia, we also learn that:
“[Various animals including dromedaries] can be seen in other constellation images from pre-Islamic Arabia... Camels that had recently foaled were seen in the head of Draco, while some saw a camel formed of some of the stars in Cassiopeia while the brightest star of that group was called the camel's hump.” (SMITHSONIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY, NUMBER 46).
We may also note that the author of Ethiopian Story may well have been in touch with this pre-Islamic Arabian world, being a Phoenician living in Emesa in the Third Century AD. Interestingly, the Greeks apparently thought of this region of the sky as a desert, and so any mythology concerned with the area would appropriately include the camel as the animal used to convey people across deserts.
Whether or not Plancius got the idea for Camelopardalis from the information brought by the Dutch East-India Company, it must surely be considered as interesting that early Arabian traditions associated the same part of the sky with a camel. Before a firmer hypothesis could be put forward, it would be necessary do some more research into this possibility that Plancius derived the idea from an existing constellation. Besides, a camel is only part of a camel-leopard. There is no indication from Heliodorus’ novel of where in the sky, if anywhere, he placed the giraffe constellation. So for now the giraffe manages to glide off across the plains out of reach, its mystery continuing to elude me.
Since we have not got very far with the camel-leopard mystery postdating Heliodorus, let us return to the one which predates him, and that gulf of centuries between Late Antiquity and the Minoans. What is going on here? I have a suggestion. In Antiquity there were agents through which traditions were passed on for long periods of time in secrecy. These agents were the Mysteries. At Eleusis for example the initiates involved themselves every September for over a thousand years with the disappearance of the Maiden, just at the time of year when the Virgo constellation disappeared for a few days from the sky due to her being behind the Sun. Neither in the evening nor the morning, nor in the middle of night could she be found. Then a few dews on her bright star, Spica, was seen rising above the horizon shortly before the Sun, the return of the Maiden from the Underworld. Furthermore, there were other Mysteries that involved the capture or overcoming of a bull. Book 8 (19,2) of Pausanias’ Guide to Greece tells us of Arcadians living near Lousoi who had a sanctuary of Dionysos, and how in a Winter festival at this sanctuary they would oil their bodies and go out and capture a bull ("whichever one the god [Dionysos] puts into their heads") and then bring it back alive to the sanctuary, for sacrifice. Bodies were oiled by athletes before their athletic activities. Robert Graves sites Strabo as a reference when he tells us in his Greek Myths that the same procedure was carried out in the Dionysian Mysteries in Lydia. Something similar seems to have been part of the Mithraic Mysteries of the Romans, with Mithras apparently being shown overcoming the bull and bringing it back to his cave (Plato, Prehistorian, Settagast) and there are records of Thessalian horse-men actually performing bull-throwing in the Coliseum of Rome. (Theagenes, consort of the latter-day Andromeda Chariclea, was from Thessaly). Although the bull capture of Mithras is the closest parallel in the ancient mysteries to the feat performed in the novel, the Mithraic Mysteries are those which scholars would probably be least likely to credit with such antiquity as would take us back to Knossos. The Taurobolion rite, in which a bull was overcome, was also incorporated into the Mysteries of Samothrace.
Archaeology dates buildings on the Eleusis site back to the Mycenaean Age, and scholars generally agree that the rites themselves have origins in those times, yet the secrets of the initiation were maintained. So the same could be true of the Mysteries that featured a bull capture. Capture of a bull by means of a net is depicted on Minoan artefacts, and we also know from the art that bull sacrifice was important there.
I have a good reason for suspecting that the Mysteries of Dionysos might be the agent by which this star-lore was passed on in secret from the Bronze Age all the way up to the time of the novels of Late Antiquity. The fact is, several scholars have already, for various reasons, concluded that it is likely that these novels encoded elements of the Dionysian Mysteries.
For example, Reinhold Merkelbach, developing the ideas of historian of religion Karl Kerenyi, wrote an essay in German entitled Roman und Mysterium in which he argued that these ancient novels were based on the beliefs and rites of Mystery cults. To quote Margeret Anne Doody in The True Story of the Novel, "Merkelbach believes that certain stock character types represent personages represented during actual mystery ceremonies. The bandit-herdsmen (boukoloi) would have served as abductors and captors, moving the initiands about." He may have been thinking along the lines of the temple-builder figures that killed Hiram Abif in Masonic tradition. The symbolic killing and raising is acted out by initiates playing these roles in the Masonic initiation.
Merkelbach's suggestion that the boukoloi of these novels represent roles played in the Mystery initiations is based on sound reasoning, for we know that the Dionysian initiatory societies did include figures carrying the names of standard and 'holy' boukoloi, as well as a chief boukolos. A Cowherd as a singer of hymns and a giver of sacrifices is known from the Orphic hymnbook. To all this we may add our knowledge that a lost Athenian Old Comedy play named after these Boukoloi was written by Kratinus, and that they formed the chorus, and also, interestingly, that this play opened with a dithyrhamb, a song sung at the sacrifice of the animal and celebrating the god's birth.
In Ethiopian Story the protagonist pair are kidnapped by the bandit-herdsmen in the Nile delta; the same motif is present in the similar Leucippe and Clitophon, again with these bandit-herdsman in the Nile Delta; also in Daphnis and Chloe in the kidnap by pirates following the model in the Dionysos story; in The Golden Ass too where brigands keep Lucias and the girl Charité in a cave; Chalirhoe is taken away from Siracuse by pirates in Chariton’s novel, and in The Ephesian Tale the heroine is captured by pirates and the hero by, once again, herdsman of the Nile Delta. Such capture certainly functions as a base device for inserting suspense into the plot, drawing the reader into the story out of a desire to see a resolution to the dilemma, wanting goodness and innocence to prevail, and piracy was a genuine enough danger in those times for merchants making use of the seaways. But the commonalities between the novels are sometimes so close as to raise a suspicion that there is something else going on beneath the surface of these plots. Why, for example, did they have to be herdsmen from the Nile Delta? The name used for the bandit-herdsman of the Nile Delta marshes that captured Leucippe and Clitophon in Achilles Tatius' novel named after them, and those that feature in Heliodorus' Ethiopian Story, is indeed boukoloi, "Cowherds".
Since The Golden Ass in its last sections actually includes the initiation of the protagonist into the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris, suspicions that there may have been undercurrents of a similar nature in the other novels are worth entertaining. And it is when we look to the Egyptian Mysteries that the light dawns regarding the pirate herdsman of the Nile in the novels. We know that passion plays based on the Osiris story and including a mock boat battle took place in Egypt, for the Roman Julius Firmicus Maternus tells us as much in his 4th century De Errore Profanorum. We also know that such traditions were by then very ancient for a stele in Abydos dating from the 12th Dynasty, raised by I-Kher-Nefert (thought to have been a priest of Osiris) around 2000 years BC, details the events of a festival of Osiris, in which, much like the Greek Easter ceremonies, a night-time vigil was followed by the god’s rebirth. In this festival, the representation of Osiris had been taken and laid in the tomb on the second day, and the method of bearing it there was a carrying in a boat. This boat was defended from the followers of Seth in a mock battle. Mythically, of course, this battle was thought of as having occurred in the Nile, and old Egyptian tomb art shows battles occurring between boatmen in the marshes. Were these Followers of Seth, then, the prototypes for the Nile Delta pirates in the novels? There is no doubt that the Greeks themselves closely identified their Dionysos with Egyptian Osiris, and Dionysos himself, in his myth, overcame capture by pirates.
This suspicion solidifies when we consider the motif of coronation. In the Golden Ass, Lucias, after his initiation into the Mysteries of Isis, is crowned at dawn, signifying that he is now fully initiated as a priest of these mysteries. Equally, we know from the ancient Abydos stele that the statue of the resurrected Osiris of the Osiris Passion Play was likewise crowned at dawn. Thirdly, after Chariclea has been saved from sacrifice and her consort, Theagenes, has performed the bull leap, the two become priestess and priest, and are crowned. This crowning is no small motif in the novel, but in fact is the fulfilment of a prophecy given by the oracle of Delphi much earlier in the story. As far as I can see this is strongly supportive of the idea that the bull leap was performed as part of an initiation.
This is where it begins to seem likely that such Mysteries were indeed the agent for transference of the bull leaper star lore down across the centuries until the very end of the pagan period when finally Heliodorus left a clue for posterity in his brilliant novel.
At their deepest level initiations were always concerned with becoming Eternal. Platonic similes, firmly rooted in the Mysteries, were all about ascension into the realm of the immortals; Initiates of the mysteries of Mithras had ascended beyond the vagaries of the sub-Zodiac world; those of Eleusis had attained access the paradise of the Afterlife, the Elysian Fields; Egyptian tomb-cults were founded on resonance with unchanging ka forms, and initiates and brides of Dionysos rode in his joyful train into the Realm of Eternity. The realization that the Bull Leaper is Perseus shows that this feat was not simply a coming of age test of bravery: it was an initiation in the full mystical sense. So we read in the very ancient Pyramid Texts: “May you ferry over by means of the Great Bull… The Bull of the Sky has bent down his horn that he may pass over thereby.”
“Ferrying over” in Egypt, especially in this funerary context, was about crossing the great river, the Nile, which had its starry counterpart in the Milky Way. The horns of Taurus straddle the Milky Way, and crossing over this river, as in cultures such as Greece, Ancient Persia and Ancient India, and especially in the context of the Pyramid Texts, meant entering the Afterlife, the “Place of Eternity”, expressed wonderfully by the fixity, from generation to generation, of the constellations of the sky.
My own bull-leaper paintings can be seen here.
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