A Bull Cult is noted by Plato as one of the characteristics of the culture of Atlantis. Unfortunately it does little to identify the location of Atlantis since the bull featured prominently in the cultures of so many ancient peoples and continues today, principally
Seti and son with bull
in the bullfights of Spain, Portugal, and Mexico. At the 2005 Atlantis Conference, Professor Stavros Papamarinopoulos delivered a paper outlining the Bronze Age bull rituals in Egypt and the Aegean and their parallels in Iberia. In the Temple of Seti at Abydos there is a well-known wall carving depicting Seti I and his son Ramses II roping a bull and further along the wall sacrificing it.
Felice Vinci draws attention to the fact that both Plato and Homer (Iliad 20.403-404 & Odyssey 13.181) refer to the sacrifice of bulls to Poseidon.
Robert Ishoy had pointed out bull carvings in Sardinia. The Minoan bull jumpers on Crete are widely known. The Egyptians had a cult of Apis the Bull, a fact mentioned by R. McQuillen in support of his Egyptian Atlantis theory. When the Israelites rebelled they worshipped a golden calf or more correctly a young bull. In Iranian mythology Mithra kills a sacred bull. Carvings of bulls’ heads decorated the home of ancient Anatolia in modern Turkey. There are bull carvings to be seen at Tarxien in Malta. The ancient Celts also included bulls in their ceremonies. The Assyrians had a bull-god as their guardian. The oldest church in Toulouse is dedicated to St. Taur, a possible reference to an earlier bull cult. Further afield, in India, there is a bull taming sport, jallikattu, which is practiced annually in the villages of Tamil Nadu.
Peter James in a short appendix to his book, The Sunken Kingdom[047] supports a Lydian origin for the Atlantis tale argued that Plato’s text makes no reference to the bull-leaping game depicted in Minoan art. However, quoted the studies of the British anthropologist Jane Harrison who discovered[600] that a coin from Troy’s Roman period depicted a bull being sacrificed in exactly the same manner as Plato’s description, namely, suspended from a pillar. James also provides other instances of possible Atlantean style bull worship in the same region which also contains his proposed location for Atlantis, ancient Sipylus
In conclusion therefore, it must be obvious from the above that Plato’s reference to bull rituals is no guide to finding an exclusive location and so probably has limited value in any quest for Atlantis.
