Golden Calf

this image had remembrances in it not only of Apis and Egypt and Ishtar and Babylonia but of all the many gods and statues and images of all the other Mediterranean and Asian and African bulls and oxen and cows and steers and calves of all the surrounding heathen, pagan, polytheistic, animistic, iconophilic peoples: all that bull that the Bible stoutly denies.

Hillman reads the Golden Calf as a concentrated symbol of the entire pre-monotheistic theriomorphic imaginal world that biblical religion systematically suppressed.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008thesis

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The paradigm of this sin of preferring the created over the Creator is the confrontation between Moses, who like an eagle could look into the face of the highest, and the red or golden calf. That scene has in its background the theriomorphic division between eagle and calf.

Hillman, reading through Augustine and Paul, establishes the Golden Calf episode as the archetypal expression of the nature/spirit split in Western theology and psychology.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008thesis

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Accompanying God on one side, appeared twenty-two thousand angels with crowns for the Lévites, the only tribe that remained true to God while the rest worshiped the Golden Calf.

Campbell situates the Golden Calf within the Sinai theophany mythology, deploying it to explain the cultic election of the Levites as reward for their refusal of the apostate image.

Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015supporting

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The Israelites did not believe that Yahweh, the God of Sinai, was the only God but promised, in their covenant, that they would ignore all the other deities and worship him alone. It is very difficult to find a single monotheistic statement in the whole of the Pentateuch.

Armstrong’s henotheism thesis reframes the Sinai covenant — the context of the Golden Calf — as evidence that Israelite religion was not yet monotheistic, making the calf episode a defection within a pluralistic field rather than an absolute apostasy.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

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To make such human, historical phenomena as Christian ‘Family Values,’ ‘Islam’ or ‘the Holy Land’ the focus of religious devotion is a new form of idolatry. This type of belligerent righteousness has been a constant temptation to monotheists throughout the long history of God.

Armstrong extends the logic of the Golden Calf — idolatry as the substitution of human constructs for transcendent reality — into a critique of modern religious nationalism.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

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Moses went on to say, ‘I did possess all the reprehensible traits that the experts read in my face — and perhaps to a degree greater than they surmise. But I mastered my evil impulses, and the character I acquired through severe discipline has become the opposite of the disposition with which I was born.’

Hillman explores Moses’s own chthonic, Egyptian nature — the shadow-side of the law-giver — as context for understanding the tension that erupts in the Golden Calf episode.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007aside

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