Bull-leaping
A Bronze Age Cretan ritual or sport in which young people grasped a charging bull's horns and vaulted over its back.
Also: Minoan bull-leaping, taurokathapsia
Bull-leaping is shown in the art of Minoan Crete, most famously in a fresco from the palace at Knossos painted around 3,500 years ago, in which one figure grasps the horns of a charging bull, another somersaults over its back and a third waits to catch. Small bronzes and seal stones show the same scene. Whether the leap was possible as shown is debated, and so is its meaning, whether sport, rite of passage or religious ceremony. Bulls were central to Minoan religion, seen in the stone horns of consecration on palace roofs and in the later Greek myth of the Minotaur. Leaping over charging cows survives in the course landaise of south-west France.