He Who Turns the Heavens
HARAPPA TO ROME · 3000 BCE - 400 CE
"The bull is not merely an animal—it is the material principle itself"
Three-quarters of all Harappan animal figurines depict cattle, especially the humped zebu bull. This wasn't mere pastoral interest—the bull represented the M+ axis: material abundance, physical manifestation, the wealth that sustains civilization.
The "unicorn" seal—appearing on over 60% of all seals—shows a bull in profile, its two horns overlapping into one. This is not a mythical creature but a geometric reduction: duality collapsing into unity. Two horns → One image = [1 = -1].
Earth's axis wobbles like a spinning top, completing one full cycle every ~26,000 years. This causes the constellation behind the rising sun at the spring equinox to slowly shift—the "precession of the equinoxes."
During the Age of Taurus (4300-2150 BCE), the sun rose in the constellation Taurus at the spring equinox. This is exactly when the Harappan civilization flourished (3300-1300 BCE). The bull wasn't just important to them—the entire cosmos was aligned with the bull.
Bull-worshiping cultures dominated: Egypt (Apis, Mnevis), Crete (the Minotaur, bull-leaping), Mesopotamia (the Bull of Heaven), and the Indus Valley. This was no coincidence—they were reading the sky.
Centuries later, in the Roman cult of Mithras (1st-4th century CE), the central sacred image was the tauroctony: Mithras slaying a bull. Every mithraeum (underground temple) contained this scene at its focal point.
Scholar David Ulansey demonstrated that the tauroctony is a star map. The bull is Taurus. The other figures—dog, snake, raven, scorpion, lion, cup—are the constellations that lay on the celestial equator during the Age of Taurus.
Mithras doesn't look at the bull as he kills it—his eyes turn upward toward Sol, the Sun. The act is not violence but cosmic transformation. The blood becomes wheat and grapes. Death generates life.
The "killing" represents the end of the Age of Taurus—Mithras has the power to rotate the entire cosmic sphere, moving the equinox point from Taurus to Aries. He is the force behind precession itself.
The numbers of precession encode the same geometric principles found in Harappan metrology. 360 (degrees in a circle), 72 (years per degree), 2,160 (years per age)—these are not arbitrary but emerge from the deep structure of cosmic rotation.
The Harappans may not have known the exact precession period, but they knew the bull ruled their sky. The Mithraists knew the bull had been "slain"—the Age of Taurus ended. Both encoded this cosmic truth in their sacred imagery.
From Harappa to Rome, across 3,000 years, the bull carried the same secret: it is not merely an animal but a cosmic marker. The bull's position in the sky marks the great ages. To "kill" the bull is to turn the wheel of precession.
Mithras rotates the cosmos.
The bull marks the rotation.
Geometry speaks through time.