The Zodiac --- The Constellation of Taurus the Bull

As long as 30,000 years ago, Paleolithic Man knew the constellation of Taurus The Bull, a large and starry asterism that is the second constellation of the Zodiac. Taurus's horns and face are distinct in the asterism, the body of the bull less so. 

The Taurus painting at Lascaux. Note the Pleiades over the aurochs' back, and the Hyades on its face, with Aldebaran clearly emphasized. The four stars to the left may be Orion's Belt and the Orion Nebula.

The Bull's Eye. The giant red star Aldebaran.

 

Accurate images of Taurus adorn the walls of the Lascaux Caves in northern France, highlighting its most prominent features, including Aldebaran the great red star that makes up the bull's eye (Number 10 in the Nautical Almanac), and the star clusters of the Pleiades and the Hyades. Taurus is immediately adjacent to Orion The Hunter who has his club raised to defend himself against the charging bull, a probably not unlikely scenario for the cave-dwelling folk of those times.

"The Seven Sisters." Using his telescope, it was Galileo Galilei who discovered that there were many more than seven stars in the cluster of the Pleiades. They were considered the patrons of ancient sailors.

The Hyades are the closer, brighter stars in the photo. They make up the center of Taurus' face, and they presaged the Spring rains.

All those thousands of years ago the Spring Equinox was in Taurus, not in Aries. Taurus was thus just as important to Stone Age mankind as Aries later became to Bronze Age humans. The Sumerians called Taurus Mul Apin, "The Bull of Heaven." All cultures consider Taurus a bovine creature, though the species varies locally, indicating a single very, very early origin for this asterism. The ancient Hebrews considered Taurus the first sign of their Zodiac, and Taurus is represented by the letter "Aleph" meaning "Champion." 

 

Very early on in the human experience the Cult of the Bull was central to the spiritual life of the human race. Bull cults lasted well into historic times. The ancient people of Egypt and Mesopotamia, India, and northern Europe (the Celts) worshiped the Bull. These complex rituals often included the mating of a king or queen (or a substitute) with a bull. The Sumerians saw the constellations of Centaurus and Sagittarius as "Bison-Men" and believed they were descended from these creatures. The Hebrews rejected the Bull Cult in the traumatic Biblical tale of the Golden Calf, and many other subsequent times in the later books of the Tanach. The sport of bullfighting is a timeless holdover from certain remote sacrificial practices. The sacredness of kine to orthodox Hindus in a remnant of these beliefs. The Buddha's birthday, Vesak, corresponds with the First Point of Taurus.

It is a certainty that Taurus did not originally represent the bulls we think of today but the aurochs, one of the giant mammals of the Pleistocene, and one that became extinct almost in our own time. The last known aurochs died on a nobleman's game preserve in Poland in 1627. The "bison" painted on cave walls is now recognized as the aurochs. The Greek word "taurus" is closely related to "(t)aurochs" as is the word "ox." The aurochs was far larger than any bovine living today. Julius Caesar in "The Gallic Wars" described the aurochs as nearly as large as an elephant (even if he was referring to the Indian elephant, the aurochs was still a huge ungulate). While men working together could bring down an aurochs (the word is the same singular of plural) in quite the same way that the Native American Sioux hunted buffalo, a human alone against an aurochs stood no chance, as trampling or goring with the creature's wicked horns would invariably be fatal. Aurochs were considered placid animals unless in rut or stampeded or attacked when bulls in particular became crazed. There's little wonder that this gigantic creature would be deified by early man. 

A modern depiction of cavemen fighting an aurochs. Although aurochs existed until the 17th Century few artists seemed to have painted them in more recent times.

Humans domesticated the aurochs by mating smaller captive aurochs with yet smaller and more controllable bovines. This gave rise to the cattle we know today. The natural range of the aurochs included most of the Old World, but as human beings occupied the earth's various environments aurochs did not stand a chance. There is something fascinating about aurochs however, and there are plans to revivify the species using DNA culled from aurochs bones. The first, rather insane, plan to recreate the aurochs came out of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Heinrich Himmler wanted to retrobreed aurochs so that eugenically superior Nazi "supermen" could bull-wrestle. No, I am not making this up. 

Taurus is the only constellation crossed by the galactic equator, celestial equator, and the ecliptic.Taurus is the home not only of Aldebaran but of the Pleiades star cluster, a group of gravitationally-related stars 444 light years from Earth. The Pleiades are also called "The Seven Sisters" in all ancient cultures. Like the recognition of Taurus as a bull, this designation of the Pleiades probably dates back tens of thousands of years. The rising of the Pleiades traditionally marked the onset of the seafaring season in ancient times. Likewise, the visually nearby Hyades (150 light years from Earth) are a dense cluster of stars, also considered sisters in antiquity, whose appearance in the sky heralded "April Showers." The annual Taurid meteor shower is also a Taurus-related astronomical event. 

The Taurid meteor shower in a time lapse photograph. Visible around Halloween, the Celts considered them the spirits of the departed returning to the world for Samhain. The Catholic Church decreed them to be "The tears of St. Lawrence."

Although the Sun is in the Zodiacal sign of Taurus from April 20th to May 20th, the Sun transits the constellation itself from May 14 to June 19, a full 37 days.