Calves

the sacred herd, such as is known to have supplied the temple dairy farm with ‘the holy milk of Nin-khursag’ at Lagash, is returning from pasture, to be met by the young calves who spring from their byre exactly as Homer describes

Neumann deploys the image of calves reuniting with cows as mythological evidence for the sacred fertility symbolism of the cow-goddess and the Great Mother archetype, grounding the motif in ancient Mesopotamian temple religion.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis

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it has this image of the calves. When the thighs move, the calves follow, for moving or stopping depends on the thighs and not on the calves.

Wang Bi’s commentary uses calves as a structural metaphor for dependent, non-autonomous action, establishing that the Second Yin’s movement is wholly governed by the Third Yang above it, as calves are governed by the thighs.

Wang Bi, Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994thesis

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herds could grow and calves could flick their tails in happiness and contentment. Aton put a ‘Nile in the sky’ for other peoples, so that they too could experience the abundance of life.

Moore cites calves’ joyful vitality in the Hymn to Aton as an emblem of the King archetype’s world-ordering fertility and its capacity to generate creaturely flourishing through cosmic benevolence.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting

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31.2a Conjoining one’s calves. 52.2a Bound: one’s calves.

Ritsema and Karcher’s concordance locates ‘calves’ at two pivotal hexagram positions — Conjoining (Hexagram 31) and Bound (Hexagram 52) — marking the term as a recurring structural image of constrained or joined movement in the divinatory text.

Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting

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working your way up your calves, paying attention to your knees and thighs, then back down, ending with your feet.

Ogden positions the calves as a somatic locus within a grounding protocol, sequencing attentional touch from feet upward through the calves as a means of restoring embodied self-awareness after trauma.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting

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you squeeze the upper arm, the shoulders, neck, thighs, calves, feet, etc. The important element is to be mindful of how your muscles feel from the inside as they are being squeezed.

Levine includes the calves within a somatic boundary-awareness exercise in which attentive proprioceptive contact with muscle groups is used to distinguish hyperarousal from immobilization and restore organismic aliveness.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting

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Being chronically ungrounded might be reflected physically in a restriction of the body’s energy flow that makes it difficult to feel our legs and feet.

Ogden establishes the theoretical context within which calves become therapeutically relevant: chronic ungroundedness manifests as diminished sensation in the lower limbs, making somatic attention to this region a clinical priority.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015aside

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when the Ark was being pulled in a cart by two cow

The Philokalia text invokes the Ark-bearing cows in an ascetic context of renunciation, tangentially evoking the sacred bovine symbolism present elsewhere in the corpus without directly treating calves as a theme.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995aside

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