But what was the sacred bull of the religions of antiquity, or rather what its mythological value? Dr. Faber says expressly on this subject: “There is perhaps no part of the Gentile world in which the bull and the cow were not highly reverenced and considered in the light of holy and mysterious symbols.”[73] He cites the traditional founder of the Chinese empire, Fohi, as having a son with a bull’s head, this personage being also venerated by the Japanese under the title of the “ox-headed prince of heaven.” According to Mr. Doolittle, a paper image of a domestic buffalo, as large as life, with smaller images in clay of this animal, are carried in procession at the Great Chinese Festival in honour of spring, while a live buffalo accompanies the procession for some distance.[74] It is curious to find that at the other side of the Europo-Asiatic continent the bull was considered sacred by the Celtic Druids, it being reverenced by the ancient Britons as the symbol of their Great God Hu. Thus also the Kimbri “adored their principal God under the form of a brazen bull;” as the ancient Colchians worshipped brazen-footed bulls which were said to emit fire from their nostrils, which has reference to the sacrifices with which they were propitiated. Dr. Faber says as to the Great Phœnician God, called by the Greek translator of Sanchoniatho Agruerus, from the circumstance of his being an agricultural God, that he “was worshipped by the Syrians and their neighbours the Canaanites, under the titles of _Baal_ and _Moloch_; and, as his shrine was drawn by oxen, so he himself was represented by the figure of a man having the head of a bull, and sometimes probably by the simple figure of a bull alone”. The Persian _Mithra_ is also represented as a bull-god, and it is highly suggestive that in one of the carved grottos near the Campus Marjorum he is figured under the symbol of the phallus surmounted by the head of a bull. Even among the Hebrews themselves the golden calf was, under the authority of Aaron, used as an object of worship, a form of idolatry which was re-established by Jeroboam, if it had ever been abandoned. Dr. Faber, indeed, thinks that the calves worshipped at Samaria were copies of the kerubim in the Temple at Jerusalem. If we turn to peoples kindred to the Hebrews, we find that the Phœnician Adonis was sometimes represented as a horned deity, as were also Dionysos and Bacchus, who were, in fact, merely the names under which Adonis was worshipped in Thrace and Greece. Plutarch says that “the women of Elis were accustomed to invite Bacchus to his temple on the seashore, under the name of ‘the heifer-footed divinity,’ the illustrious bull, the bull worthy of the highest veneration.” Hence in the ceremonies, during the celebration of the mysteries of Bacchus and Dionysos, the bull always took a prominent place, as it did also during the festivals of the allied deity of Egypt—the bull Apis being worshipped as an incarnation of Osiris.