A murdered man is not so easily kept dead: he tells his brother, "Behold I am to become as a great bull," and "thou must sit upon my back", and by morning "Bata became in the form which he had told to his elder brother." This is the cleanest man-to-bull change on our shelf, and it comes from the Egyptian tale of Anpu and Bata, preserved in Egyptian Tales, Translated from the Papyri (from Middle and New Kingdom papyri, roughly 2000–1200 BCE). Bata, restored to his own body from a seed drunk in a cup of water, chooses the bull as his next life so that he may return to the court that wronged him. Carried to Pharaoh as "a great marvel," he is hailed as "bull of the Nine Gods," and when he finds the woman who betrayed him he speaks out of the beast's mouth: "Behold, I am alive indeed" — and then gives his name: "I am Bata." The bull is not a punishment but a stratagem — a man wearing an ox's body to outlive his own murder.

The Greek witness at this address turns on a very different bull. In the Library of Apollodorus (a Greek mythography of the 1st–2nd century CE), Zeus, in love with Europa, comes "turning himself into a tame bull," mounts her on his back, and "conveyed her through the sea to Crete", where she "bore Minos, Sarpedon, and Rhadamanthys". But here the shape is worn by a god descending to a girl, not by a man remaking himself; the Egyptian tale, not the Greek, holds the motif's true weight, while Apollodorus's Achelous and the other cross-referenced authorities on the address wait unread.

One bull hides a god coming down to a woman; the other hides a man refusing to die. When a person becomes the bull, is it disguise, revenge, or simply the strongest shape a wronged soul can find to come back in?