Europa, the Phoenician princess who gave the continent its name

Europa was a Phoenician princess and the bull, the Aryan animal par excellence

The name of the richest continent on the planet comes from a woman who, according to the mythological account recorded by Apollodorus, was the daughter of a Phoenician king and was abducted by Zeus transformed into a white bull. The paradox is no small one: the Europe that today claims to be the cradle of Western civilization owes its baptism to a princess of Semitic origin who swam on the back of an ox to Crete, where she gave birth to Minos, Sarpedon and Rhadamanthus.

Etymology does not solve the mystery either. The name has been translated as "wide-eyed", a lunar epithet, or "far-voiced", a correlate of the ancient Zeus Euríopes. The philologist A. F. Losev places her cult in the pre-Greek strata of northern Greece and Asia Minor, and links her to the chthonic deities: in Sidon she was indistinguishable from Selene and Astarte. A deity of the earth and fertility, not an ordinary matriarch.

The bull as a symbol of the Iberian Peninsula

The animal that kidnaps the princess is the same one that structures the iconography of half a continent. The bull represented strength, the fertility of the land and the domestication of livestock, and milk and its derivatives —cheeses, yogurts, ferments— became the daily sustenance that allowed entire populations to survive in times of poor harvests. The leap from hunters to herders allowed the ancient Europeans to settle and prosper.

Hence the myth leaps to the sky: after the abduction, the white bull is raised by Zeus to become a constellation. And hence also the discomfort of certain contemporary readings that want to see bullfighting as a custom foreign to Europe. The symmetry is exactly the reverse: the princess who gives the continent its name is Semitic and the bull is the totemic animal of ancient Europe, present since the Bronze Age and earlier throughout the continent, from the frescoes of Crete to the primordial cow that freed the first Norse god from the ice.

The sacrifice of the bull and the Mithraic heritage

There is a second reading, less kind to the animal. In the heroic tradition the bull is defeated: Theseus defeats the minotaur of Crete and bullfighting reproduces that scheme, with the bullfighter in the role of the hero who subdues the beast. The tradition has its roots in the Mithraic religion, widespread among the military of late Rome, where the sacrifice of the bull was the center of the rite. The bull must die so that we may all live, the formula sums up.

The myth, therefore, is not univocal. Fertility and sacrifice, abduction and constellation, chthonic goddess and subdued beast. The Phoenician princess who named the continent carries all those layers and a question that remains open: which part of that heritage is claimed and which part is preferred to be forgotten?