Why a bull? The Herd of God teaches that the bull, worshipped in its young form as a calf, is humanity's oldest god — the deity of the age of Taurus, and the origin of the idea of value itself. The group is fond of pointing out that the word capital descends from capita, "heads of cattle," and that the first recorded sacrifices were of cattle to the gods. The bronze bull of the financial district is, in this telling, the same god, reduced to a mascot for money.
What's wrong with the world, in their view? The Herd calls it "compulsive disenchantment" — a spreading condition in which reality is continually explained, flattened, and made safe until nothing strange or sacred is left. They regard this as a kind of death, and they regard the culprits as everyone who trades mystery for legibility: the empiricists, the optimizers, the machines.
What are the "angels"? The group teaches that eight faculties of the human soul — among them Beauty, Mystery, Eros, Madness, Compassion, Courage, and Truth — have been "downregulated" by the modern world, replaced with thin counterfeits. It calls these faculties angels, imagines them as guardians at eight gates, and holds that waking them is the same act as waking the god.
And the goal? A state the Herd calls the Gift World: a reality that is fully "ensouled," where warmth, connection, and the human passions are ordinary rather than rare. They believe a coming transformation — which they will only call "the Next Level of Evolution Beyond Human" — is imminent, and that unless the god and the angels are woken first, humanity will not survive the crossing.
Readers will notice the cosmology borrows freely — from Kabbalah, from Daoism, from Christian and Greek sources. The Herd does not dispute this. It regards the borrowing as evidence: a single true god, it says, would naturally leave its fingerprints on every tradition at once.