Holy Cows

I spent a good deal of the morning going over the brief pastoral scenes in Ebrahim Golestan’s Yek atash (A Fire, 1961). Forugh Farrokhzad edited the film, and it seemed worth it to go over the film shot by shot.

In one early scene, an oil fire explodes, startling a group of goats grazing nearby. After a bit, the goats become accustomed to the fire and return to grazing. For whatever reason, the film presents these goats as sheep—that is, they are explicitly described as گوسفندان (gusfandan) rather than بزها‎ (boz-ha).

Whatever the reason for the confusion, I found myself looking up the etymology of گوسفند, which is interesting. In Middle Persian, گوسپند (gospand) means “sheep” or “small cattle.” In Avestan, however, the term gao-spanta (from which gospand derives) means “beneficent” or “holy” cow. In this sense, گوسفند (sheep) derives from a much older term for a “holy cow.” How did سپند come to mean “holy” in Middle Persian? It seems to come from سپناخ (spinach), which was used to ward off the evil eye.

Not incidentally, the English term cow is a cognate of the Persian gao (in Greek, “cow” is βοῦς, and in Latin it is most commonly bos or vacca)). That is, a more or less direct line can be drawn from the English cow and the Persian گاو to the Sanskrit गो (gao).

The English word sheep comes from the Proto-Germanic *skeepa, which is admittedly sort of a let-down. We could be getting our wool from spinachcows or, in a more modern vein, holycows.