The Seba library treats Bison in 8 passages, across 3 authors (including Campbell, Joseph, Hillman, James, Onians, R B).
The sacred object of the rite is to be a bull’s head and buffalo robe. All those who dance the bulls are to wear a bull’s he
Campbell presents the bison (buffalo) as the sacral centre of a restorative ritual in which the killed animal is revived through dance, establishing the reciprocal covenant between hunters and the herd.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis
the initiation rite of a Plains Indian tribe where the Jung brave drives his stake through his bison hide, pinning him onto one spot on the earth, letting the stampeding herd crush him
Hillman invokes the bison-hide staking rite as an archetypal image of radical earthly rootedness and the courage required to hold one’s ground against overwhelming instinctual force.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
mammoth; and then the bison. It has been suggested that the daily task and serious concern of dealing death, spilling blood, in order to live, created a situation of anxiety that had to be resolved
Campbell identifies the bison as a central object of the hunter’s existential anxiety and the mythological systems devised to manage the guilt and reciprocity involved in the kill.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis
Outside the stone chest were arranged the head of a bison, four skulls and jawbones of horses, together with horns of deer and reindeer. To protect her or supply her needs
Onians documents the ritual placement of a bison head in a Solutrean burial, arguing the animal’s spiritual force was believed to accompany and protect the dead.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
Among the horses, bison, reindeer, mammoths, etc., ‘here and there human people with animal heads are engraved on the walls’.
Onians situates the bison within the iconographic programme of paleolithic cave art, where human-animal hybrids suggest shamanic identification with the bison and related species.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
the cave, as literal fact, evoked, in the way of a sign stimulus, the latent energies of that other cave, the unfathomed human heart, and what poured forth was the first creation of
Campbell reads the Franco-Cantabrian cave sanctuaries — where bison imagery is central — as the mythogenetic zone in which inner psychic depths and outer sacred space first merged.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
From the Dordogne to the Mississippi the mammoth hunt was at its peak. We no longer find images of the goddess in the West European sites
Campbell traces the Solutrean shift in paleolithic religious imagery away from goddess figurines toward the hunting cultures in which bison and mammoth dominate the sacred iconography.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959aside
In the great cave of Lascaux, in the Dordogne, in what is called the rotunda, another great chamber, there is a frieze of animals.
Campbell points to the Lascaux frieze — which includes bison — as evidence of a shamanic religious consciousness in which animal images encode the mystery of transcendence.
, Transformations of Myth Through Time, 1990aside