Within the depth-psychology corpus, the Ox functions as one of the most richly layered symbolic animals, appearing across two principal registers that rarely intersect but mutually illuminate each other. In the Zen-Jungian literature — above all in Spiegelman’s sustained engagement with the Ten Oxherding Pictures — the Ox serves as the primary image for the unconscious itself: wild, instinctual, initially elusive, yet ultimately revelatory of the Self. The sequence of finding, catching, taming, riding, and finally being led by the Ox enacts the entire individuation arc, from ego-inflation through discipline to surrender. Spiegelman explicitly maps the gradual whitening of the black Ox onto Jung’s concept of the progressive integration of unconscious contents into consciousness. A second, quite distinct register appears in classical-religious scholarship (Harrison, Burkert, Seaford), where the Ox is the sacrificial beast par excellence — the center of archaic sacrament, communal distribution, and guilt-laden ritual killing (the Bouphonia). Here the Ox bulks larger than the god to whom it is ostensibly offered, bearing the community’s ambivalence about killing and eating. These two streams — psychological individuation symbol and sacrificial scapegoat — together define the Ox’s conceptual range in the library, with the Zen-Jungian passages constituting the dominant, most thematically developed body of material.