78 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
where they had been maintained by priests. The kings brought their captured bull
into the sanctuary, then cut its throat over the top of the orichalcum column,
allowing blood to course over the inscription, which ended with a curse against any-
one who knowingly violated the laws of Atlantis. The bull’s remains were gathered
into separate containers. Its flesh was roasted, later divided into several portions for
the kings’ ritual meal and as a gratuity to the temple priesthood. The rest, together
with all the bones and most of the blood, were tossed into a sacrificial fire.
Afterwards, the kings cleaned the pillar, utensils, and sacred precinct, then
mixed a bowl of wine, into which was dropped one clot of bull’s blood for each of
them. They received their drink in golden cups, swore an oath on behalf of them-
selves and their descendants to uphold the law of their forefathers, emptied their
wine into the sacred flames, and drank a fresh cup of bull’s blood wine in a pledge
of atonement for any sins they may have committed. Only after completing this
libation did they sit down to their sacramental meal.
Bulls were associated with divine regents in Sumer, Egypt, Assyria, Minoan
Crete, Greece, Rome, Iberia, and Ireland. All of these cultures featured traditions
of a great deluge from which their ancestors came with all the accoutrements of a
high civilization, including, most importantly, matters of kingship. In each people,
their king was ritually identified with a sacred bull, because it was important for a
leader to identify with the tremendous strength and aggressiveness epitomized by
such an animal. In pre-Celtic Ireland, the new monarch had to undergo a ceremonial
bath of bull’s broth, which he then drank from an Atlantean-like golden cup.
The Egyptian Hape, better remembered by his Greek name, Apis, was the sacred
bull of Memphis. Like the bulls at the Temple of Poseidon, he was allowed to roam
free in a courtyard of the temple. After reaching his 25th year, “he was killed with
great ceremony,” according to Mercatante, just as the Atlantean bull was ritually
slaughtered every fifth year (the divider of 25). The manner of his death was unique:
he was drowned in a cistern. Was his religious execution meant to symbolize his cultic
origins in drowned Atlantis? The dead animal was believed to be reincarnated in a
new bull, “the Golden Calf,”—the same idol adored by the Israelites under Aron in
Exodus 32:4—which began again the process of identification with Hape.
Romans participating in the mysteries of Mithra drank the blood of a slaugh-
tered bull “as a sacramental act,” in which they were purified of their sins and
“born again for eternity”—all reminiscent of the atonement sought by the Atlantean
kings when they drank wine with bull’s blood. Their sacrificial meal even finds
echoes in the Last Supper, where Jesus tells his apostles that the wine they drink is
his own blood. The Messiah, too, was identified with the bull—a white one—in the
apocryphal Book of Enoch.
What might very well be an authentic artifact from Atlantis was discovered during
the 1889 excavation of a Bronze Age tomb at the Greek town of Vapheio, in Laconia,
5 miles south of Sparta. The item was an embossed gold cup depicting a bull roundup,
wherein the hunter is portrayed using only lassos—a scene straight out of Plato’s
Kritias. The item’s Atlantean identity is reinforced when we recall that he said the
kings who met in the Temple of Poseidon after their bull hunt toasted in cups of gold.