The Seba library treats Europa in 8 passages, across 7 authors (including Kerényi, Karl, Nichols, Sallie, Hesiod).
the face of both mother and daughter was that of the moon, whereas the word phoinix means the reddish colour of the sun. It was told that Zeus beheld Europa as she was picking flowers by the seashore. He came to her in the shape of a bull
Kerényi reads Europa’s Phoenician lineage as encoding a lunar-solar polarity, situating the abduction myth within a cosmological register rather than merely a narrative one.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951thesis
beautifully the artist has caught the feeling of unconscious identity between Europa and the bull. The two seem to flow together as one being. She is indeed ‘carried away’ by the godly beast. And out of this union comes again a mixed blessed event – King Minos of Crete and the bestial (and magical) Minotaur.
Nichols employs the Europa myth as a psychological paradigm for unconscious identity with instinctual drives, contrasting her surrender to the bull with the conscious animal-mastery required by the Strength archetype.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980thesis
Zeus saw Europa the daughter of Phoenix gathering flowers in a meadow with some nymphs and fell in love with her. So he came down and changed himself into a bull and breathed from his mouth a crocus.
Hesiod’s Catalogue furnishes the canonical textual source for the Europa myth, establishing the crocus-breathing bull, the Cretan destination, and the three sons — Minos, Sarpedon, Rhadamanthys — as the foundational mythological data.
, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700thesis
Europa, mother of King Minos, 13
Campbell indexes Europa within the heroic genealogy as mother of Minos, anchoring her function as the generative link between divine abduction and Cretan kingship.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015supporting
Europa, i. 78 ; ii. 165 ; iii. 24
Cicero’s index citations place Europa within the Stoic and Academic debates on the nature of the gods, confirming her presence in the ancient philosophical-theological discussion of Jovian mythology.
, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45supporting
bull: Cretan 183, 351, 353, 355; Mithraic 185, 353; Poseidon as 356; Zeus as 183, 350; see also Taurus
Greene’s astrological concordance links Europa’s bull to Zeus and Taurus, situating the myth within the fate-pattern of divine seizure operative across Cretan, Mithraic, and Jovian bull imagery.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
Rhadamanthys 183, 350
Greene’s index cross-references Rhadamanthys as a descendant of Europa, integrating the myth’s progeny into her astrological mapping of fate and lineage.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
Wilfried Malsch, ‘Europa’: Poetische Rede des Novalis (Stuttgart, 1965), discusses the role of the French Revolution in shaping the design of Novalis’ Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799).
Abrams references the name Europa in its Romantic-political register, as the title of Novalis’s theological-historical tract, distinct from but resonant with the mythological figure.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside