Until the early Bronze Age, most ancient religions were centered on mother goddesses. In other words, it was a matriarchal society.
If we look at one of the perceptions that changed most profoundly from then until modern times, it could be said to be the shift in symbolism regarding the sun and the moon.
In modern times, the tendency to view men as the sun and women as the moon is predominant. Even in Eastern yin-yang philosophy, men are described as yang energy and women as yin energy.
But surprisingly, in ancient matriarchal societies that worshipped mother goddesses, this was exactly the opposite.
In that era, women were the sun. Female fertility was directly connected to the sacredness of the mother goddess. Menstrual blood from the womb evoked fire in the minds of ancient people, and fire led to the sun, and since the sun was life and creation, it was vigorous yang energy.
On the other hand, the moon was an entity swallowed by the sun. The mother goddess was a sun goddess, and just as she conceived and gave birth to a child, just as she embraced male genitalia and released it, she swallowed the moon and spat it out.
Sacrificial offerings were always male. Female animals were not used as sacrifices. This was because females did not come back to life after dying.
Women were regarded as beings who led death to resurrection and transformed it, and dying, being swallowed, and being spat out again was solely the domain of men.
Then later, when society became patriarchal, this structure was overturned.
The sun became the domain of men, and women came to symbolize the moon. From some point on, forced logic began to be applied: attaching women's menstruation to the cycles of the moon, claiming women are yin energy and men are yang energy, and so on.
Let me say again: the mother goddess symbolized productivity and abundance, and that was precisely yang energy and vital essence, the sun and the heavens.
Conversely, men were beings who appeared and disappeared, coming and going from time to time.
In matriarchal society, that is what men were.
On nights when faces could not even be seen, they were beings who moved from place to place among women's quarters, serving only as sexual partners.
In the appendix of the previous volume, we emphasized how important a role fire played in ancient society. Was not Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, a deity of tremendous power? All rituals had to be performed before fire, and the hearth within the home was the most sacred and important existence.
Thus, the deities symbolizing fire were all goddesses. If fire is female, how does the sun, which possesses the attribute of fire, become male... There is nothing to say about that logical leap. (When writing appendices, one ends up having nothing to say on every topic.)
Looking at the terracottas of ancient Greek culture, one can see many depictions of bull worship or bull festivals.
The most representative examples are the frescoes of the Palace of Knossos in Crete, where paintings of bull-hunting or bull-leaping remain. It is also called the Bull of Minos.
Who is Minos? He is the king who took the famous Queen Pasiphaë as his wife. And who is Queen Pasiphaë? She is the daughter of Helios who fell in love with a bull, coupled with it, and gave birth to the monster called the Minotaur.
Were only humans obsessed with cattle? Absolutely not. The gods were even more so.
Zeus habitually ravished heifers and arbitrarily transformed perfectly normal human women into cows; he loved cattle that much. Poseidon expressed his affection by presenting white cows to humans he favored.
It could be called a bull culture by male gods, for male gods, and of male gods. In contrast, wild boars only occasionally appeared as minor roles, such as when some goddess shot and killed a young man she adored with an arrow.
(Since ancient times, the offering of the earth was the pig, and the offering of the heavens was the bull. There is a claim that this was determined by the direction each animal's horns pointed.)
One need only remember this: beneath the throne in the Palace of Knossos where King Minos sat, a moon was carved.
As if to support this, Frazer's *The Golden Bough* also states: long ago, in the early era of kingship, men voluntarily offered themselves as sacrifices, and the young king, as the Moon, was the most valuable and important offering to be devoted to the sun god.
The King of Crete offered substitutes in his place. He held festivals and had warriors disguised as the sun god carry out bull hunts. Just as the sun had swallowed and killed the moon once every month.