Overview: The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. In I Am Taurus, author Stephen Palmer traces the story of the bull in the sky, starting from that point 19,000 years ago - a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.

Verdict: Each of the eleven sections here in I Am Taurus is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Spain and elsewhere.

This is not just a history of the bull but also an attempt to see ourselves through the eyes of the bull, illustrating our pre-literate use of myth, how the advent of writing and the urban revolution changed our view of ourselves, and how even the most modern of rituals - bullfighting in Spain - is a variation on the ancient sacrifice of the sacred bull.

For thousands of years, the symbol of the bull has been surrounded with a mythical aura that spans not only eons of history, enduring to the present day, but also the vast range of cultures that have emerged in the Mediterranean world.

The legends and cults woven around the bull and the integral part that this wondrous, almost divine, animal played in people’s lives is the subject of I am Taurus, which is in and unto itself a gloriously dutiful exploration of the role of these animals in prehistoric culture and such.

Painted or engraved bulls on the walls of paleolithic caverns suggest that from prehistoric times, the bull was associated with cosmic energy and the forces of life and death. In Anatolia, the bull was worshiped as the son of the mother-goddess, and its horns, which supported the world, were seen as the pillars of the universe. This concept was probably the origin of horns as a mark of divinity.

In Mesopotamia, for instance, gods occasionally had bulls’ ears and, with almost no exception, wore a diadem with bulls’ horns. Another example, included in the exhibition, is the Hellenistic head of Zeus-Amon, a new Egyptian deity that emerged with the cultural fusion that followed Egypt’s conquest by Alexander the Great. The bulls’ horns that sprout from the head is again an attribute of divinity. The Roman deity Jupiter was portrayed, like other celestial gods of Syria and Palestine, with one or two bulls.

But, I digress, for as you can tell, the bull is an entity that I have followed along with for almost all my life, but here in the book, author Stephen Palmer traces connections between different times and places around the Mediterranean, all informed by the presence of a bull-like constellation.

About the Author - Stephen Palmer is the author of twenty genre novels, ranging from eco-SF through dark fantasy to steampunk. His short stories have been widely published, and he is the author of the book Tangerine Dream In The 1970s. He lives and works in Shropshire, UK.

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