An exhibit in the Cowboy Hall of Fame says: “Rodeo was born during the 1860s and 1870s with informal contests held among working cowboys. Common at seasonal roundups, such ‘cowboy fun’ tested typical skills like bronc riding and steer roping. Between 1890 and 1910, rodeo emerged as public entertainment through various Wild West Shows and performances at Fourth of July celebrations and cattlemen’s conventions.”

This is the popular explanation of the origins of modern rodeo and of much of modern cowboy culture. The mysteries of costume, ritual and poetry are pursued no further. Cowboy culture is portrayed as a parthenogenetic child of American bravura—a fearless orphan born full blown in the virgin wilds of the American West.

It ís a charming and terribly down-home origin myth, but it doesn’t adequately account for canonized rodeo activities like bull-riding and steer wrestling. It does not account for the marginalization of women in rodeo over the course of the last century (early rodeos often had women participating at the same level as men). It does not tell us why the cowboys took so many Spanish words (like the word “cowboy” itself, derived from caballero) while consistently failing to acknowledge the Mexican roots of nearly everything cowboy in America. And finally, it is a woefully incomplete explanation for the emergence of those pastoral lyricists of American prairies and deserts, the cowboy poets.

I do not pretend to have the answer to why cowboy culture took root in the American West and has thrived as it has. Perhaps the stories of colonial America-of seamstresses, pewtersmiths and cherry trees-were insufficient for the task of settling this vast landscape, and the myths of most indigenous peoples would not embolden conquerors.

Stories show us how to live, and no culture can survive without them. To be able to make new stories to fit changing conditions is a sign of cultural health. But to adopt them without recognition of their origins is to invite the cluelessness of the amnesiac.

The things of this world were shaped by the things that came before them. Underneath St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome is the pit where the last official blood sacrifice of pagan Rome occurred. Hidden inside the most popular Christian holidays and stories are pieces of an older world with very different world views.

Very little of what is assumed to be uniquely American about cowboy culture actually is. In fact, the American cowboy is only the latest embodiment of rituals and cultures with roots that go beyond the New World, beyond Spain, beyond Rome, deep into the dimmest origins of humanity.

In the beginning was the bull, exalted for its strength and vigor since the time before agriculture. In old religions ranging from India and Persia to Greece and Egypt, the very first creature was a bull or a bull-headed man. Bulls and cows were major players in most ancient human faiths. The stories that have survived speak of them as divine creatures, but also often use them as symbols of the very cultures that venerated them, in the way that cows and bulls stand for cowboy culture today.

In our world’s past there are the Apis bulls, venerated oracles of Egypt, presiding in their arenas for a thousand years, as well as the warrior Amazons of Asia Minor, breasts intact, presiding over a Goddess-inspired cattle-driven empire which also domesticated the first horses. Frescoes of Minoan Crete still shine, depicting daring acrobats, male and female, leaping bravely over the backs of bulls. The altar in front of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem was adorned with bull horns endowed with magical powers...horns in the shape of the crescent moon, recognized by every society in contact with cattle. In India, through an impossibly obscure progression of stories, the bull and the cow become unassailable, and in the hoofprints and excrement of the cow sprouts soma, the magic mushroom, the food of the gods.

The bull represents masculinity by nature of its size, strength, and sexual power. The bull symbolizes earthly forces by virtue of its powerful root to the ground and at the same time lunar forces by virtue of its horns. For some, the ritual sacrifice of the bull symbolized the conquest of the feminine principle by the masculine. For others, the slaying of the bull represented the victory of man’s spiritual nature over his animality. Greek myth tells of the flesh-hungry Minotaur, half-man and half-bull, trapped in his labyrinth beneath Crete. When the violent and untrustworthy hero Theseus slew the Minotaur, he was wiping out older religions and clearing room for new ones.

The defining story of the subjugation of bulls is that of the savior god Mithras, whose cult spread throughout the entire ancient world before becoming the state religion of Rome. As an infant Mithras formed an alliance with the sun (a symbol associated again and again with the worship of one supreme god) and set off to kill the bull, the first living creature ever created (a symbol of nature worship). While the bull was grazing in a pasture, Mithras seized it by the horns and dragged it into a cave. The bull escaped.

With the help of his dog, Mithras succeeded in overtaking the bull and dragging it into the cave again. Seizing it by the nostrils, he plunged his knife deep into its flank. As the bull died, the world came into being and time was born. From the body of the slain beast sprang forth all the herbs and plants that cover the earth. From its spinal cord grew wheat to produce bread, and from its blood came the vine to produce wine.

Before Mithraism was absorbed and displaced by Christianity, the civilized world ritually killed bulls and baptized itself, literally, in the blood of the sacrifice. This complex rite evolved into the corrida, the bullfight. The arena—from the Latin word for sand—soaked up the sacrificial blood of the bull, and is still the place where today’s clean-cut cowboys play out their now virtually bloodless rituals.

Horses and bulls are old-world creatures, each with long and independent histories of association with humans and their cultures and religions. It is unlikely that their introduction to the new world cleansed them of their ancient characters; it is more plausible that the fine air of the Americas brought forth an amplification and hybridization of the formerly separate lines of warrior horsemen, reverent pastoralists, and blood-soaked mystery religions.

Digging at cowboy culture’s obscure roots may seem like a silly pedantic exercise. But there is more to all this cow and cowboy stuff than meets the eye; of that I’m sure. To fail to recognize the profound effect the cowboy myth has on everything we do—how we raise our children, how we take care of the land, how we treat men and women and animals—is to be affected by causes invisible to us. Perhaps it would be less significant if cowboyism was just a localized culture, informed daily by the working experiences of people who lived it, but it has become one of the defining mythic structures of the United States, and every day it is disseminated to other cultures around the world as a model of human society.

We live in a country that seems to have stepped outside of history, perhaps as a result of communications technology or as the natural consequence of melting-pot hybridization. What public discourse we have routinely ignores historical groundings, whether the subject is drugs, the environment, cowboy culture, or any number of other subjects cloaked in ancient mystery. We treat everything as if it were new to the world and created before our eyes.

To “rodeo” is to encircle...from the Spanish rodear. The roundup is a gathering together of all the random cattle spread out on the range, a sorting out of which was which and whose was what. It is a sweet metaphor for the never-ending process of real philosophy, and one that should be applied to cowboy culture itself.

Someday we will know a lot more about this. After all, until an obsessed German uncovered the remains of Troy a hundred years ago, the modern world believed that Homer’s story was just an allegorical myth. Meanwhile, the struggle with the bull, the skill of the horseman, the song of the lonesome cowherd and the stubborn pride of those who make a living from the earth...these are stories from the beginning of time, and they are the inheritance of all humanity.

Lenadams Dorris was made in Nevada out of a strange mixture of old and new world roots.