Buchis bꜣ-ḫꜣ

Egypt kept bulls the way other cultures keep relics.

Not statues of bulls. Actual bulls, alive, in stalls, fed and groomed and watched by priests — and when one died the country went into mourning and the search began for the calf with the right markings. Apis at Memphis is the famous one. Mnevis at Heliopolis is the second.

The third lived at Hermonthis, south of Thebes, and he is the strangest of the three by a wide margin.

Three impossible facts about one animal

The Greeks and Romans who wrote him down could not stop describing him, and every detail they give is wrong in an interesting direction.

He was black.

His hair grew backwards — the sources say it turned "a contrary way from that of all other animals," which is a real and observable feature of some cattle and must have been the first thing anyone checked when looking for a successor.

And he changed colour every hour of the day.

That last one is not a thing a bull does. But hold the three together and they stop being a list of oddities and become a single idea, because of what the sources say he was for: he was an image of the sun shining on the other side of the world.

The sun, seen from underneath

Here is the thought, and it is a good one.

The sun goes down. For twelve hours it is somewhere — under the earth, in the underworld, moving through the hours of the night. Egyptian religion has an enormous amount to say about that journey, and none of it is visible. You can read about it, you can have it painted on your tomb wall, but you cannot go and look.

Unless you go to Hermonthis, where there is a bull who is doing it.

He is black, because the sun at night is not shining on you. His hair runs the wrong way, because he belongs to the world that runs the other way. And he changes colour hour by hour because the sun down there is passing through hours, and the hours are not the same as each other.

The bull is a clock, and it is running on the far side of the sky.

Both horizons at once

His titles keep the same logic and push it further. He is called the living soul of Ra. He is called the bull of the Mountain of the Sunrise. And he is called the lion of the Mountain of the Sunset.

Sunrise and sunset, east and west, the two ends of the journey — and he changes species between them. Bull in the east. Lion in the west.

Between his horns he wore a sun-disk with plumes rising from it and a cobra, and across his hindquarters a vulture with its wings spread. Which is to say: he was dressed. Somebody put those on him, or painted them, or the priests recognised the markings as such. An animal was walking around Upper Egypt wearing the whole cosmology on its back.

What we do not have

I want to be straight about the evidence here, because it is thinner than the description makes it sound.

Almost everything above reaches us through Strabo, Macrobius and Aelian — Greek and Roman writers describing Egyptian practice, some of them centuries after the fact, at least one of them working from hearsay. The colour-changing in particular has the shape of a tourist's story.

The Egyptian name behind the Greek is Bakha, and the titles read like translations of a real inscription. But the inscription is not quoted. The stelae from the bulls' burial ground at Armant would settle a great deal, and they are not among the books read here.

Named for a mountain

One last thing, because it took two attempts to get right.

Bakhau is the Mountain of the Sunrise — a place, not a god. There was a period where the working notes for this reference had the bull's name and the mountain's name confused, and the confusion was thrown out as an invention.

Then the sentence turned up: the bull is styled the bull of the Mountain of the Sunrise. So the two names were never the same word, and they were always connected. He is not the mountain. He is the animal that comes over it.