COW
Exploring the sacred, the subjugated, and the symbolic.
COW
Exploring the sacred, the subjugated, and the symbolic.
In the amber glow of dawn, a farmer once knelt beside a cow, hands calloused but tender, murmuring gratitude to the divine for the milk that flowed like liquid silver. The act was a prayer: a ritual bridging human, animal, and "God." To ancient Hindus, the cow was Kamadhenu—a wish-fulfilling "mother of all beings," her body a map of deities, her milk a sacrament. Egyptians saw her as Hathor, goddess of sky and nourishment; Celts linked her to fertility and earth’s abundance. She was not just livestock but a living altar, a symbol of creation’s reciprocity. Industrialization reframed her as a problem to solve: How to extract more, faster, cheaper. Machines replaced hands; steel pipes siphoned milk without human touch, while algorithms optimize her pregnancies, her feed, her slaughter. The sacred circle—human caring for cow, cow sustaining human—collapsed into a linear equation. Efficiency became the new liturgy, and in its hum, something silent grew: the void where reverence once lived. This is not a protest against milk or the cow. This is a grievance about the existential fracture of modernity—the substitution of transcendence with transaction. When we unshackled ourselves from myth, did we also sever the thread that tied us to the numinous? Technology promised dominion over nature, but was that not already a God-given right? The cow, once a bridge to the eternal, is now "standing-reserve" in a dairy plant. Her body, quantified and logged, becomes data. Yet in this data, there is no answer to where God stands—how He feels. The machines are removed from divinity; is that why we get sick? Cows weren’t meant to be farmed en masse—the intimacy was meant to remain intact. Space between God and the cow only grows as mechanization continues. God makes us sick as a warning—sick cows infect us. The world fights back, a self-correcting mechanism written into the very structure of existence. Disease does not emerge from soil alone but from the desecration of natural law. Feedlots are theological errors. When we violate the sacred, creation responds in kind. This is not punishment but revelation. And yet, divinity is still tenacious. In India, activists still rally to protect stray cows, invoking ancient vows. In small farms, a revival of rotational grazing whispers of partnership, not exploitation. These glimmers of hope—a refusal to let mechanization consume the sacred—suggest that the cow remains a mirror of our moral order. Perhaps the question is not whether we have moved away from God, but what God we have chosen to serve. What beast, besides the ones that physically roam, do we now feed? Does the devil crave efficiency? Does he celebrate the punishment of divinity? To feel the pain of cattle, beneath concrete and code, is to see the stubborn, lowing truth: to care for a creature—to see the holiness in its breath—is to touch the hem of something infinite. The cow is the crossroad of an ever-inflicting paradox: Can we wield technology without severing the soul? If societal collapse comes, it is not an end but a return—to milk our own cows, to kneel once more in the dirt, to remember the ritual. The machines will rust. The cow will remain. God will only win.
The bull embodies duality—fragile and patient like a bunny, yet explosive and aggressive when provoked. It symbolizes raw power, fertility, and the tension between human mastery and nature's force.
Once used to track wandering cattle, cowbells symbolize both freedom and control. In the modern world, they echo the surveillance of cellphones and cameras, tethering us to larger systems.
Herd mentality reflects the strength of numbers but also raises questions about individuality. Are we truly ourselves when we belong to a group?
Cows represent nurturing and creation, while bulls symbolize aggression and destruction. Together, they reflect the balance of forces in nature and society.