How Many Bulls Must Be Sacrificed Before the Myth Dies?

It begins with Zeus. He does not seduce Europa as a man. He becomes a bull — white, gentle, magnetic — and she climbs onto his back because something in the animal bypasses her reason. Exiting, at least for me. The god compresses himself into pure force, and a continent takes its name from the abduction.

Paestum Red-Figure Chalice Krater Signed by Assteas. Museum of Sannio, Benevento, Italy.

Set aside the colonial reading, irrelevant in this case. Set aside the postcolonial one, even more so. This is about the beast. The bull is the thing.

Before we go further, a question of origin.

Europa was not European. She was Phoenician — daughter of Agenor, king of Sidon, from the coast of what we now call Lebanon (before Hezbollah). She came from the East, from the world the Greeks called the Orient. Zeus crossed that boundary to take her. The continent that bears her name was named after someone who did not belong to it. Did anything that belonged to it have a name?

The West begins with an Eastern woman, carried across the sea on the back of a god in animal form. That is not a founding myth of purity. It is a myth of appropriation at the very root. The bull did not stay on his side of the sea.

There is another myth that claims to be the matrix of Western civilization: Exodus. A people chosen, oppressed, freed, given law. A myth of vertical relationship — God above, man below, covenant between. It produces guilt, obligation, memory, and a very particular relationship to suffering as meaning. Half of Western moral architecture runs through it.

But Exodus is chapter one. Europa is a preface.

Exodus presupposes a people already formed, already named, already in relationship with a god who knows their name. The liberation is meaningful because there is already something there to liberate. It is a myth of becoming.

Europa is prior to all of that. There is no people yet, no covenant, no moral framework. There is only the god, the animal, the girl, and the sea crossing. What comes after — the continent, the civilization, the whole apparatus of what we call the West — is the consequence of an act that asked no one's permission and followed no law, because the law did not yet exist.

If Exodus is the myth of what we owe, Europa is the myth of what we are made of.

Exodus gives Western civilization its conscience. Europa gives it its conception. And a conception is not a moral event. You do not choose your origin. You inherit it. What Europa passes down is not law or liberation but something more ungovernable: the memory, encoded at the foundation, of beauty and force arriving together, indistinguishable from each other.

In the Greek imagination the bull is potency, virility, fertility. Pure macho toxicity, and the divine reduced to muscle and horn — and that is a different conversation. — appetite that cannot be reasoned with. It is the divine reduced to muscle and horn. When force of that kind meets human order, something has to give.

The simpletons arrive with one concept: cruelty. The torture of the bull. And there the conversation ends, before it has started.

But the killing is not random. It is choreographed, ceremonial, almost liturgical. The bull dies the same death in the same space, night after night, six to a corrida, a corrida to a city, across the season, across the country.

The matador answers brute force with grace — economy of motion, geometry, a near-feminine (near-Europa) surrender to form. The bull becomes less of a victim than a partner in the figure being drawn. Beauty pitted against power, and death as the shape they make together.

The corrida does not stage cruelty. It restages the original scene. The one on the beach in Sidon, before history had a name for what was happening.

The repetition does not exhaust the bull. It regenerates him.

Each matador, each arena, each Feria restarts the ritual. The bull dies; the Bull does not.

Which brings us to the question that has never quite been asked — not in the centuries of argument about tradition and modernity, not in the manifestos of abolitionists or the elegies of Lorca and Hemingway:

How many bulls must be sacrificed before the myth dies? And beneath that question, two others that are harder to look at directly.

Titian, Rape of Europa, ca. 1560-1562, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, USA.

Do we want the myth to die? Because the myth is not decorative. It is structural. Europa is not a story the West tells about itself. It is the story underneath every story the West tells about itself. To kill the myth is not to reform a tradition. It is to pull the load-bearing wall.

And if the wall comes down — who is left standing? Not other civilizations in any triumphant sense. The barbarians. But barbarians in the original Greek meaning: those outside the story, those for whom the bull was never sacred and the arena never a temple, those for whom Europa was always just a girl on a beach who should have known better.

No answer here. Only my question, which is the better thing to keep.

The Phoenicians — Europa's people — were among the first to land on the coast of what is now Valencia and the Costa Blanca. They came from the same shores Zeus crossed to take her. They brought their language, their trade, their gods, and whatever it is that travels in blood and has no name.

Centuries later, that same coast became one of the great heartlands of the corrida. The circuit, it turns out, closes in Valencia. The arena is not a Spanish institution built on Roman foundations, on Greek mythology, or of Phoenician origin. It is all of those things at once, layered in the same ground, under the same light.

The question of how many bulls must die before the myth dies may not be answerable in language. It may only be answerable there, in Valencia — standing on the Phoenician shore, in the city where the origin and the ritual share the same earth, watching the matador draw his figure in the air, and the bull complete it.

How that answer feels is something each person must decide for themselves. But they should know, before they decide, what it is they are being asked to let go of.