ull. When she first met Cuchulainn she had a cow on
whom the Brown Bull was to beget a calf, and she told the hero that "So
long as the calf which is in this cow's body is a yearling, it is up to
that time that thou art in life; and it is this that will lead to the
_Tain_."[500] This suggests that the hero was to die in the battle, but
it shows that the Brown Bull's calf is bound up his life. The Bull was a
reincarnation of a divine swineherd, and if, as in the case of
Cuchulainn, "his rebirth could only be of himself,"[501] the calf was
simply a duplicate of the bull, and, as it was bound up with the hero's
life, bull and hero may well have been one. The life or soul was in the
calf, and, as in all such cases, the owner of the soul and that in which
it is hidden are practically identical. Cuchulainn's "distortion" might
then be explained as representing the bull's fury in fight, and the
folk-tales would be popular forms of an old myth explaining ritual in
which a bull, the incarnation of a tree or vegetation spirit, was slain,
and the sacred tree cut down and consumed, as in Celtic agricultural
ritual. This would be the myth represented on the bas-reliefs, and in
the ritual the bull would be slain, rent, and eaten by his worshippers.
Why, then, should Cuchulainn rend the bull? In the later stages of such
rites the animal was slain, not so much as a divine incarnation as a
sacrifice to the god once incarnated in him. And when a god was thus
separated from his animal form, myths often arose telling how he himself
had slain the animal.[502] In the case of Cuchulainn and the bull, the
god represented by the bull became separate from it, became
anthropomorphic, and in that form was associated with or actually was
the hero Cuchulainn. Bull sacrifices were common among the Celts with
whom the bull had been a divine animal.[503] Possibly a further echo of
this myth and ritual is to be found in the folk-belief that S. Martin
was cut up and eaten in the form of an ox--the god incarnate in the
animal being associated with a saint.[504] Thus the literary versions of
the _Tain_, departing from the hypothetical primitive versions, kept the
bull as the central figure, but introduced a rival bull, and described
its death differently, while both bulls are said to be reincarnations of
divine swine-herds.[505] The idea of a fight for a bull is borrowed from
actual custom, and thus the old form of the story was further distorted.

The Cuch