The shape a god borrows to win a woman is the beast — most famously the great bull that carried a princess out to sea. The clean form of this motif is the god who puts on an animal's body for the sake of seduction, and on our shelf it survives chiefly as a single, glancing identification. In Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography compiled in the 1st–2nd century CE), when the "seventh labour he enjoined on him" sends Hercules to "bring the Cretan Bull", the mythographer pauses over which bull this was: Acusilaus, he reports, said it was "the bull that ferried across Europa for Zeus". That half-line is the whole of it here — the swimming bull is named, but the courtship of Europa is left folded shut, a story the text gestures toward without telling.

Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this shape its number, filed the transformation-to-seduce widely — Irish and Hindu, Iroquois and Zulu and Congolese, with the Greek Europa at its head and a Chinese analogue set apart under Cf. That Chinese thread is the one other witness wired to served text, in Myths & Legends of China (published 1922), though it bends the motif toward trickery rather than love: the monkey-hero Sun, seeking a magic fan, "changed into the Ox-demon's shape" and came to the demon's wife, who, "thinking he was the Ox-demon, gladly received" him and gave up the fan. It is a shape borrowed to enter a woman's confidence — kin to the motif, but the borrowed form is a husband's, not a beast's, and the prize is a talisman, not the woman.

So the shelf is thin here: only the Greek half-line and the Chinese impersonation are tied to served text, while the fuller Europa narrative and Thompson's other authorities wait unread. Still, the pointing finger is eloquent. Why should so many traditions have imagined desire as the moment a god stops wearing his own face?