How Many Bulls Must Be Sacrificed Before the Myth Dies?

A Meditation on Europa, Bullfighting, and the Persistence of Myth

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. At least for me, that is the enduring fascination of the story. 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 subject.

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. 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 it have a name of its own?

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 abduction 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. The divine reduced to muscle and horn, appetite that cannot be reasoned with. When force of that kind meets human order, something has to give.

Many critics arrive with a single concept: cruelty. And there the conversation ends before it has begun.

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 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.

Bous a la Mar—Bulls to the Sea!

I recently learned of a peculiar celebration that takes place each July in Dénia, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it.

Unlike the corrida, there is no matador, no cape, no sword, no horse, no banderilleros, and no blood. There is only the bull and what resembles a theatrical amphitheater open to the sea. The action unfolds on a narrow stage at water’s edge, where young men attempt to entice the animal toward the Mediterranean. The object of the game is not to wound the bull, nor even to dominate it, but to trick it into jumping into the water. If the animal refuses and manages to remain on the stage, it is eventually led back to the corral and the crowd celebrates its escape. If it leaps, the crowd celebrates as well, and a rescue team guides it safely back to shore. The festival is called Bous a la Mar—Bulls to the Sea—and it has been celebrated in Dénia for generations.

The existence of such a spectacle stirred an unexpected thought. Thousands of years ago, according to the myth, another bull entered these same waters. He came from the eastern Mediterranean, from Phoenicia, from the shores of what is now Lebanon. In the story, the bull carried Europa westward across the sea and gave a continent its name.

I do not believe that the festival in Dénia is a direct survival of that myth. I cannot prove such a connection, and I remain skeptical of those eager to discover hidden antiquity behind every local custom. Yet the image is difficult to ignore. A bull entering the Mediterranean. Young people gathered around the event. The sea itself transformed into part of the drama. The resemblance is not historical but symbolic.

This is where I find myself wondering what Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell might have made of such a scene. Jung might have argued that certain images possess a life independent of history. Archetypes emerge, disappear, and return because they inhabit structures buried deep within the human imagination. The participants need not know the myth; the image itself survives. Campbell, approaching the question from another direction, might have suggested that myths endure because they continue to perform a function. They help societies understand themselves, transforming experience into narrative and narrative into ritual.

Whether either man would have recognized an echo of Europa in Bous a la Mar is impossible to know. Yet the question itself seems worth asking. Why does the bull continue to command attention after thousands of years? Why does the encounter between the bull and the sea still possess the power to gather a crowd? Why does this particular image—a bull entering Mediterranean waters—continue to reappear?

The modern debate surrounding bullfighting has become largely a moral one. For some, the bull is a victim. For others, it is a cultural symbol. For still others, the controversy represents a broader struggle between modernity and tradition. These are important questions. Yet beneath them may lie something older: the possibility that certain symbolic structures survive long after their original meaning has been forgotten.

The bullfight may disappear. Festivals may disappear. Rituals may disappear. But perhaps images endure. Perhaps myths survive not because they are taught or remembered, but because they continue to be enacted in forms no one fully recognizes. Disguised as games, celebrations, and customs, they pass quietly from one generation to the next.

Perhaps that is why the bull remains. Perhaps that is why it continues to fascinate us. And perhaps that is why, thousands of years after Europa crossed the Mediterranean on the back of a bull, crowds still gather along the Spanish coast to watch another bull enter the sea.

I do not know. The uncertainty is what interests me most. The modern world excels at answering questions. It is less comfortable living with mysteries.

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 merely a Spanish institution. It rests on Roman foundations, Greek mythology, Phoenician memory, and centuries of accumulated ritual. It is all of those things at once, layered in the same ground beneath 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.

What if the myth is not dying?

What if it is still being performed?

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