Nurturing, life giving, grounding presence, caring, nourishing, motherly love, her milk flows – a generous, ever sustaining power. The cow has been a symbol of creation and stability, of abundance and prosperity, of love and motherhood. Cow goddesses nourished the hearts of ancient cultures, fertilizing the inner landscape of traditions, mothering the minds of people from India to Egypt all throughout Europe and the Middle East.
The cow was a powerful symbol of fertility and generosity in human cultures as ancient as 120,000 years old. Engraved cow bones as old as that tell us the story of our ancestors’ sacred relationship to cattle.
The cow roots us into our creative spirit not only as a symbol of creation. A wild cow engraved into a stone as old as 38,000 years, grounds us into the recognition that making art is part of our human nature. The motherly, nurturing symbolism of cow goddesses has been with us for a very long time; flowing in our blood, carving pathways of milk in our minds, reaching into the creative caves at the core of our existence.
India and the Sacred Cow
Nowhere in the world are cows as holy and important as they are in India. Reverence for the holy cow mother is felt throughout the subcontinent. Hindus cherish the cow as a living, breathing symbol of maternal love, of fertile resourcefulness, of bounty, and of mother earth herself.
The cow is associated with the earth goddess, Bhoomi, whose maternal love is extended throughout the land of India, sustaining and nourishing all beings. She is grounding. She is a stabilizing force. She holds you, supports you, and invites you to drink from her nourishing milk, her life giving generosity, her nutrient rich sustenance.
Lakshmi is the goddess of beauty and bounty. She is embodied as prosperity and abundance, as the flowing milk of the cow, as the fertility of the land. She is often accompanied by cows, sitting on a Lotus flower, gold coins pouring out of her hands. She is the liquidity of life’s creative, regenerative, inventive, adaptable power.
Gopis – the cowgirls, cow herding, gorgeous milkmaids of Indian lore – invite us into the beautiful pastures, into the scent of flowers after monsoon rains, into the liquidity of milk and sensuality, into the moisture in the air, into the dance of wild erotic play with their beloved, Krsna. With the Gopis, the cow is the power of eros, of pleasure, of attraction, and lust.
Among other cow goddesses, Gauri, who is a form of Parvati – goddess of fertility, abundance, motherhood, and love – is interwoven with the cow. Parvati is mostly seen as a mother and a wife, and her story reminds us that the erotic is part of the archetype. She paves the path of ecstasy. She is a yoga goddess, a deity of deep meditation, a queen of inner work and transformation. Her Sadhana (Sanskrit for spiritual practice) is iconic.
The cow archetype invites us into yoga as a life giving, nourishing, paradoxical path; it sustains and transforms us, stabilizing while revolutionizing who we are. She calls us into a process that grounds us in peace and heats us up, enlivens us and calms us. Yoga churns and stirs us, cleanses and regenerates, enriches and recreates us through deep inquiry, commitment, and willingness to keep showing up and doing the work.
The Milky Ocean and the Mother of All cows
What came first – the milk or the cow?
In an old Hindu story, the gods and the demons come together to churn the ocean of milk – the primordial vastness of cosmic possibility. They want to get their hands on the nectar of immortality (Amrta, in Sanskrit), and in order to do that, they have to come together
Lots of things rise from this primordial, milky ocean. One of the first things, of course, is the Halahala, which is a poison that threatens to suffocate the whole universe. I mean, if you churn the ocean of consciousness, if you start to do some deep inner work, if you bring your light and your shadow together to stir things up in order to excavate the nectar of immortality – of course the poison will rise to the surface first.
The great mother cow is the womb of existence, and she doesn’t exclude the demons or the poison, the shadow or the pain, the ghosts or the skeletons. She is the sustaining energy of the world, the milk of creation, the nourishment of our soulfulness and our somatic, soil centered reality. She is the care that life carries in its core. And it holds in it the whole of us. Poet and piranha, rhythmic and dissonant, poison and medicine.
The divine physician of the gods, Dhanvantari, who invents Ayurveda, comes out of this very source that births the most toxic substance, and holds in its depth the nectar of immortality. The great goddess of beauty and wealth, Lakshmi, comes out of the same milky ocean. The ability to make meaning and beauty, to bring value and healing, to generate well being is stirred in the same cosmic soup that spits toxicity and threatens to destroy all that exists in the world.
And this milky ocean, this milky way, this primordial liquid that churns you into existence with all that you are – poison and medicine, beauty and healing, wild horses and white elephants, precious jewels and even the moon itself – gives birth to the wish fulfilling cow, Kamadhenu.
Kamadhenu is the mythic Hindu mother of all cows, the holy cow of all that is sacred, the sacred mother of all that is. Because that which gives birth to all that exists, and nourishes and sustains its creation, knows also how to be born out its own life sustaining milk.
So what came first – the cow or the milk? She wants you to stay in the question.
The mother of creation, creation as a mother, shows us that life is cyclical, that nature is spiralic, that existence is circular, that the cosmos is a cow.
Ancient Egyptian Cow Goddesses
Ancient Egyptians looked at the sky and saw it; a motherly cow arched over their heads as the vault of the heavens. The milky way stretched across her belly. She was the cosmic mother, giving life and breath to the stars, protecting the protectors of children and women, birthing the light, scattering sparkles over the night.
Nut: Sky, Stars, and Cosmic Birth
Nut was the ancient Egyptian cow mother sky goddess, who birthed the sun god, Ra, every morning, swallowing him back up every night. She was the mother of many mythic narratives. She was the mother of Isis and Osiris, Nepthys and Seth. She was the mother of the great sky and of all the celestial bodies that danced across it.
Sometimes she was envisioned as a woman stretching her body over the earth, with feet rooting into soil, and hands reaching into the underworld to hold the souls of the dead. With Nut, the cyclical nature of life was revealed, the art of cosmic reality expressed itself as death and rebirth unfurled across her cow or woman’s belly.
Her children wove the mythic magic of dissolution and resurrection, of dismemberment and recoalcing, of drying, arid land and a flooding river re-fertilizing the earth, of love and grief, of ferocity and vulnerability, of animosity and deep care, of life’s endlessness becoming and unbecoming.
Nut’s role as a nourishing cow mother was shared with other cow goddesses; a community of nurturing guides and care givers.
Hathor: Love, Fertility, and the Sacred Cow
Hathor is one of the most beloved goddesses of Ancient Egypt; healing and restorative and nourishing. She‘s the power of creativity and of creation. She’s womanhood, motherhood, female sexuality, associated with beauty and love and all nurturing qualities. She is the goddess women called on during conception, pregnancy, labor, and childbirth. As a cow goddess, she was nursing the kings, and protective of the monarchy.
Between her cow horns she wears the sun disc, telling us of her relationship to the sun god, Ra. Sometimes she’s his daughter, and sometimes she’s his mother, and similar to Nut, she swallows him each night, and births him every morning. Other times, Hathor is seen as Ra’s consort. She’s the Eye of Ra and she accompanies him on his journey across the sky.
She’s the sky womb, giving home to the great falcon, Horus, who is sometimes her son, and other times her consort. Hathor is both a solar sky goddess and a water sky goddess. She’s nighttime. And she’s the milky way.
Sometimes she’s called “The Necklace.” She is the necklace of the universe – adorned and adorning – the vibrant adornment of the body of space. She provides life force. She’s the circularity and cyclicality of life; a multiplicity and diversity of beads on the string of creation. She’s a garland of vibrant powers, of the energies of the universe; a garland of flowers, vines, stars, and plants, of feelings and thoughts and the magic of the senses, of ideas and dreams and visions of creation.
She’s an underworld goddess, feeding the dead, caring for their souls, and the mother of all living beings, reminding us that life and death are not a dichotomy, they are the woven reality of the fabric of the cosmos.
Hathor was a goddess of music and happiness, alcohol, festivals, goddess of pleasure, of fertility, and of parties. She was a womb goddess. One of her names was “the mistress of vagina.” She was the mother who births the universe and nourishes all life, and that identity was not separate from that of the Erotic Feminine.
The Greeks associate Hathor with Aphrodite; their goddess of love, fertility, and sexuality.
Cow Goddesses in Greek Mythology
Like many ancient cultures, the Greeks had a deep relationship with cows. The cow grazed her way from the Fertile Crescent into Europe, and carved their milky way into the creative heart of many civilizations there. The bull gods and cow goddesses of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Levant, and Cannan took the shape of other bovine deities in Celtic and Germanic traditions. Female figurines with cow features, expressing the mother cow, were spread all over Neolithic Europe.
The Greek sun god, Helios, had a sacred cattle. Cows were among other animals in this magical herd of immortal beings. The sacred cattle of Helios are often confused with the sacred cows of Apollo, who are stolen by his little brother, Hermes, only hours after his birth.
The cow is sacred to Goddess Hera who in Ancient Greece’s patriarchal culture turned from the nourishing earth mother into a jealous wife. Queen of the gods, goddess of mothers, childbirth, and family life, was described as a cow-eyed goddess.
The Story of Io
In a famous story, Zeus, the king of the gods, known for his lust, infidelity, and his inability to keep his genitals in his pants, desires a woman named Io. Sometimes she is said to be a mortal woman, and sometimes she’s a Naiad; a river nymph. In her origin, Io was a moon Mother Goddess, a triple goddess, and one of the ancient cow goddesses of the area.
Io was the daughter of Inachus, who was the first king or Argos, and also a water god, and she was an exceptionally beautiful woman, who like many other exceptionally beautiful women, attracted the attention of Zeus, who seduced her and took her as a lover.
To try to hide his infidelity, Zeus covers the land of Argos with thick fog. Hera, who Hellenistic myths present as the archetype of a jealous wife, is intrigued by this thick cloud that so obviously hides something from her cow eyes. She knows what’s up. This is not her first rodeo. She descends from Mount Olympus to try to catch her husband in his act.
Zeus can feel her approaching, and in an act of desperation he turns his lover into a cow. Hera’s experience and strong senses tell her exactly what’s going on, and she asks Zeus to give her the beautiful cow as a gift. To prevent her husband from ever reconnecting with Io again, she employs a hundred eyed giant to watch over the cow, but Zeus sends Hermes to distract the giant, and frees Io, still in the form of a cow, to roam. After a long tale of difficulties and struggles, Io makes her way to Egypt, where she gives birth to the child of Zeus.
In some versions of the story, Io was a priestess of Hera, which makes sense, because before Io and Hera were turned against each other by the patriarchy, Io was the cow expression of the goddess.
Holy Cow Goddesses: Weaving, Fertility, Nourishment, and Power
Giving birth on the banks of the Nile, weaves the story of Io with the story of Isis. Hera, Hathor, Isis, and Io are a tapestry of interconnected, interwoven threads and stories. They remind us of the way that stories and ideas fertilize each other, telling us that cultures have always been influenced and nourished by one another.
There’s a sacred thread that weaves us together. We’re mythically woven. Ideas of one person fertilize the vision of another. Concepts of one culture nourish the structures of another. The power of life weaves reality through the process of one thing metabolizing another, things birthing each other. Creation is a commingling complexity of contrasts and collaborations.
The archetype of the cow grazes at the core of who we are, nourishing the creativity of our identity as humans, supporting us with her earthy, grounding energy, carving a milky way through our collective imagination and somatic existence.
The Shadow and Medicine of the Cow Archetype Today
The power of the cow is the power of love, and love can make you blind. We need to learn how to discern. The cow reflects to us that we too are a herd, and warns us, in her good natured way, of herd mentality.
In a world that tries to separate us and turn us against one another, trying to push us into boxes, and a dominant culture that feeds binary thinking, starving our visions of nuance, we can easily project our herd mentality on the cow. We follow the algorithm and graze on whatever we hear in the cho chamber on our screens.
And in a world seeded and flowering with hatred, the cow can be brought back in as the loving, fertile creature that nurtures and nourishes us, watches over mothers and children, and reweaves the erotic feminine as an empowering breath of life.
Explore cow goddesses and dive into embodied Archetypal Alchemy in this video – a mythopoetic transmission and a yoga practice to bring this deep inner work into a somatic space:
If you love cow goddesses, you will also enjoy this essay.
To invoke and embody the divine feminine as an erotic, enchanting, and empowered in her sensuality, the Beltane Somatic Ceremony will support you in this creative, embodied journey. Find out more here
If you are a lover of the mythic and the magical, subscribe to my Substack here. You’ll get Muse Medicine flowing your way every Monday.
Sending you love through the Milky Ways of the cosmos,
Hagar