The Cults of the Bull and of A Feminine Divinity in Spanish Levantine Art

The most important animals represented in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic religions are without doubt the bull and the deer, present already in the earliest impressed cardial ceramics. They appear also in the Spanish ‘macroschematic’ and Levantine arts. The bull appears isolated in the earliest paintings, but is later accompanied by other bulls or by a woman, when the sacred meaning becomes clearer. At some stage the bull is inexplicably replaced by the deer. These complex scenes must have a religious significance, connected with a fertility goddess, as well as a socio-economic one.