Horses

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HORSES

HORSES have played an essential role in the life, and therefore in the religion, of all the peoples who have had direct contact with them, particularly the Indo-Europeans, the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians, the Arabs, the Chinese, and the North American Indians. It is fair to say that horses have always captured the mythic imagination through their ability to symbolize a number of related phenomena: power, wealth, divinity, sexuality, flying, and the tension between taming and freedom.

Among the earliest evidence of the importance of the horse to human culture are the magnificent wall paintings in the caves of Lascaux, in southern France, dating from around 30,000 bce. There the grouping of horses with other wild animals such as stags and bison suggests that they were probably animals that were hunted rather than harnessed or ridden. Even so, it has been proposed that certain structures depicted on the walls at Lascaux represent corrals, implying that some sort of taming may already have begun. André Leroi-Gourhan has argued that the horse is part of the male half of a general sexual bipartition in the animal symbolism at Lascaux. If this is so, there is very early evidence indeed of the horse in association with both taming and sexuality, perhaps even with the combined concept of the taming of sexuality, which is a dominant theme in the Indo-European religious symbolism of the horse.

But the true history of the horse in human religious conceptualization must begin with the first certain evidence of its domestication: the use of the chariot, which, for several centuries before horses were ridden, was employed as a means of transport, of farming, and as an instrument of war. Starting before 2000 bce from a location somewhere in the area of the Caspian and Mediterranean seas, the use of the horse to pull a chariot spread eastward through Persia to India, then south through Syria to Egypt, then west through Anatolia to Greece, and then northwest into eastern Europe. Among the Hittites, a Mittannian named Kikkulis, who was employed as Master of the Horse by the Hittite king Sepululiumas, composed the earliest known book that deals with nothing but horses, about 1360 bce. And the earliest known Egyptian figure of a horse appears on a bronze axhead of the eighteenth dynasty (c. 1450 bce), which shows a horse led in hand in a manner assumed to be that of a charioteer rather than that of a rider. Horse chariots were also found in the tomb of Tutankhamen and are depicted on a wall painting from Thebes dated about 1400 bce.

A particularly vivid description of the Egyptian chariots, and one that places horse and horseman in a religious narrative context, is the fifteenth chapter of Exodus in the Hebrew scriptures, a chapter that some scholars have dated as early as the twelfth century bce. The passage that celebrates the parting of the Red Sea and the subsequent drowning of Pharaoh's men, horses, and chariots begins "I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea." The term rider may not necessarily refer to a mounted horseman; it is a generic term that could apply as well to a charioteer. But it is worth noting that the horse is here associated with several themes that occur often in the mythology of the horse: armies, evil, death, and, most striking, the bottom of the ocean.

Ancient Indo-European Horse Sacrifices

With the Greeks and the Vedic Indians, and later with the Romans, the horse truly came into its own as a religious symbol, one that pervades both myth and ritual. Rituals involving horses, more particularly rituals that involve the killing of a white stallion, are attested throughout the Indo-European world. Among the ancient Norse, a white horse symbolizing the sun and accompanied by women was killed in a ritual that included obscene references to the phallus of the horse, ritual castration, and an intoxicating drink. In the Roman festival of the October Equus, a horse dedicated to Mars was killed in the course of a ritual, and a chariot race took place; in the Roman Parilia, a horse was mutilated (perhaps castrated). Among the Greeks, white horses were sacrificed to Poseidon and to the sun; a white mare was sacrificed at the grave of a maiden who had been raped and had committed suicide; black horses were inauspicious. Both Roman and Greek sources indicate a fertility cult associated with the horse, one that often agrees in striking detail with the Vedic cult of the horse. The Persians tell of a battle between an evil black horse and a good white horse, whose victory released the fertilizing rains; and the Iranians regarded white horses as symbolic of the sun (Pausanias, 3.4.20; Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.3.11). Among the Indo-Europeans in general, it appears, the white horse was sacred.

This article shall examine the Indian and Irish models of these rituals in greater detail, but in this introductory survey it is useful to note a linguistic link between these far-flung Indo-European cults of the horse. The Gallic proper name Epomeduos may be cognate with the Sanskrit a śvamedha; both royal names are possessive compounds designating kings who have (performed) horse sacrifices. The first element of the compound simply means "horse"; the second element is more difficult to pin down, but it has the connotations of a ritual drink (such as mead) or an intoxicating drink. Thus the term as a whole may mean "intoxication with the horse"; Jaan Puhvel, who has noted these linguistic implications, remarks that "the early Indo-Europeans were undoubtedly 'crazy about horses,' and so were the Gauls" (Puhvel, 1955). It may, however, mean "one who has performed a ritual involving a horse and a sacred drink" or even—as is supported by the evidence provided by the Indian and Irish horse sacrifices—a ritual in which the horse itself supplied the substance or the sacrificial food and drink for the king, a ceremony in which a horse was ritually eaten. Whether eaten or not, horses were sacrificed by the Greeks (Herodotus, 7.113; Ovid, Fasti 1.385), by the Armenians and Massagetes (Xenophon, Anabasis 4.5; Herodotus, 1.216), and by the Scythians, of whose spectacular royal burials Herodotos provides a hair-raising description (4.71–72).

Still, it is the Vedic, Roman, and Irish horse sacrifices that provide the triangle on which the Indo-European evidence rests, however shakily. The facts of congruence in existing sources are impressive, although the weight and substance of documentation are grotesquely dissimilar. The Vedic ceremony is by far the best documented, both in terms of the contemporaneous nature of the ritual and the text describing it (both dating from 900 bce but referring to the hymns to the horse in the Ṛgveda, perhaps as much as three hundred years earlier) and in terms of the volume of data: hundreds and hundreds of pages of Sanskrit texts. The Roman ritual is a poor second, cursorily described by Polybius (12.4b), Plutarch (Quaestiones Romanae 97), and Festus (ed. Lindsay, pp. 178.5ff.) with distressing discrepancies and lacunae. The Irish ritual is even more problematic, having been described only in the twelfth century ce by a Christian monk who could scarcely believe his eyes, so appalled was he by the obscenity of the rite (Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernica, ed. Brewer, p. 169).

Yet the parallels are truly striking. In India, a ritually consecrated stallion was killed after a chariot race; the chief queen than pantomimed copulation with the stallion, to the accompaniment of verses (spoken by priests) regarded as obscene even by the contemporaneous texts (which prescribe a "perfumed" verse to be recited at the end, to wash out the mouths of the participants). In Rome, after a race the right-hand horse of the winning chariot was sacrificed to Mars; its tail was carried to the Regia, where its blood was sprinkled on the altar (Plutarch) or the hearthstone (Festus). Men from the Sacra Via and the Suburra did battle for the head, the latter (if they won it) carrying it to the Turris Mamilia, the former to the wall of the Regia. In Ireland, the king pantomimed (or performed) copulation with a live mare who was afterward dismembered and cooked; the king bathed in her broth and drank it, and the broth was then distributed to the people.

The common thread in all three rituals is the killing of an equine. In two of the rituals (India and Rome) the horse is a stallion; in two of the rituals (India and Ireland) there is a sexual union as well as a death. It could be argued, from the writings of Georges Dumézil and others, that the ritual emphasizes a different one of the three Indo-European functions in each of the three cultures in which it appears: the Roman primarily martial, the Indian royal and sacred, the Irish fertile and nourishing. But all three rituals can and do incorporate all three levels of symbolism. A ceremony that is about royalty and the power of the king not only can but, in a sense, must also be about sexuality and nourishment: for the ancient Indo-European stallion symbolized at once the powers of the warrior; of the king, and of the virile male.

Ancient Indo-European Horse Myths

Given the primacy of the stallion in the aggressively virile cultures of the Indo-Europeans, how is one to explain ritual focus on the Irish mare? It could be argued that the Irish variant is properly Gallic, rather than Indo-European, and make the case (as Robert Graves did in The White Goddess, 1948) for an ancient Gallic horse goddess whose cult was superseded by that of an Indo-European horse god. In support of this contention is the Gallic cult of the goddess Epona, almost the only goddess worshiped in the same guise by both continental and insular Celts. Intimately connected with the Welsh Rhiannon and the Irish Macha, whom shall soon be encountered, and thematically connected with the horseheaded Greek Demeter, Epona is often depicted as a woman riding on a mare, or as a mare, or with a mare's head; she is also associated with a male horse god, Rudiobus. Epona, whose name comes from the Proto-Indo-European *ékwos, "horse" (Lat., equus; Skt., aśva ), is particularly concerned with pregnant mares and with foals. Pseudo-Plutarch (parallel 29; cited by Le Roux, 1963, p. 133) gives what may be the only ancient record of a Celtic hierogamy like the one that is described, as a ritual, by Giraldus Cambrensis so many years later: "A certain Phoulouios Stellos, who hated women, had intercourse with a mare. In time, she brought forth a beautiful maiden whom she named Epona, a goddess of horses."

Celtic mythology offers rich support for the concept of an ancient horse goddess. The Irish Táin Bó Cuailnge narrates the myth of Macha, a tri-functional equine goddess who, forced to run in a chariot race while she is pregnant, dies bringing forth twins or who, in another avatar, brings forth a son at the very moment when a mare in the stable gives birth to twin foals (Kinsella, 1970; Gricourt, 1954). And the Welsh Mabinogi tells the story of Rhiannon, who appears to King Pwyll riding on a white horse, marries him, and bears him a child while a mare has a foal at the same moment; accused (falsely) of killing the child, Rhiannon is condemned to carry guests from the mounting block to the court on her back.

The myth of the mare goddess has a broader Indo-European distribution as well. In India, the myth begins with references in the Ṛgveda to the wife and false-wife of the sun, a myth that is told in greater detail in the Brāhmaṇas and the Purāṇas: Vivasvant, the sun, married Saraṇyū, who fled from him and substituted for herself another female, Chāyā ("dark shadow") upon whom Vivasvant begat a son, Manu, the ancestor of the human race. Meanwhile, Saraṇyū took the form of a mare and fled from Vivasvant, but he took the form of a stallion, followed her, and covered her; upon giving birth to the twin horse-gods, the Aśvins, she abandoned them. The parallels with Celtic myths are striking: A goddess in the form of a white mare takes human form and mates with an aging sun king; impregnated by him, she gives birth to hippomorphic twins, the ancestors of the human race, whom she injures or abandons, and she leaves the king to return to her heavenly home. The inversions and reversals that take place over the wide Indo-European area and through the centuries are complex, but clearly this is some sort of protean mythic core.

Greek mythology supplies further evidence in support of this corpus. Demeter, who is often depicted with a mare's head, mated with Poseidon (the god of the sea, to whom horses were sacrificed, and who was himself called Hippios, "equine"; Apollodorus, 3.6.8; Pausanias, 8.25 and 8.42); in Arcadia, Demeter is portrayed as Black Demeter, with the head and mane of a horse on the body of a woman (Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.406b). Poseidon is also involved in several myths in which a woman is raped by a god in the form of a stallion and gives birth to foals that she attempts to destroy; he is more distantly involved in a Greek cycle of myths about overprotective fathers of equine goddesses who destroy their suitors (the myths of Hippodameia, Hippomenes, and Alcippe). Glaucus and Diomedes of Thrace are said to have had savage mares, made more savage by their enforced chastity, who devoured men, and Hippolytus (well known from Euripides' tragedy), who worshiped Artemis and denied Aphrodite, was dragged to death by chariot horses that were frightened by a monster sent by Poseidon from the sea.

European Myths of Evil Mares

The pattern of myths of evil mares is almost exclusively Indo-European, which is hardly surprising, given the special place of the horse in Indo-European culture. The negative symbolism of the Indo-European mare is epitomized by the myth, widely documented in India, in which a demonic female full of anger and destructive lust is tricked into taking the form of a mare with flames shooting out of her mouth. While she dwells at the bottom of the ocean, the flames in her mouth keep the ocean from overflowing its bounds and the ocean keeps her flames from destroying the world. On doomsday she will emerge from the ocean; her flames will destroy the universe with fire; and the uncontrolled waters of the ocean will flood the world. The underwater mare is thus a symbol of the tension between uncontrolled powers and the dangers that arise from the brutal suppression of those powers; it is a symbol of the paradox of the wild and the tame, in all three Indo-European spheres: the sacred, the martial, and the sexual.

The underwater mare appears, in various transformations, throughout later European mythology. Celtic mythology describes aquatic monsters known as Goborchinn ("horseheads") as well as horse eels and water horses, the forerunners of sea serpents and dragons like the Loch Ness monster, whose heads are often surprisingly equine. And, closer to home, one can see this symbolism at the heart of the climactic scene in Richard Wagner's opera Götterdämmerung (The twilight [or doomsday] of the gods). Brünnhilde is one of the Valkyries, the female warrior spirits who ride their winged horses through the skies to bring fallen warriors to Valhalla; at the end of the opera, Brünnhilde mounts her white horse and rides through a wall of fire to her death, whereupon the waters of the Rhine rise and flood the world.

In folklore, the more anthropomorphic aspects of the myth, particularly the implications of the relationships between the mare and her children, are stressed. The Antti Aarne-Stith Thompson index of tale types and motifs gives many examples of myths in which a queen is falsely accused of the murder of her children and condemned to death, myths in which horses usually play a part. The accused woman sets out on a mare, and the wicked fairy who calumniates her is torn to pieces by a horse (TT 451); the unfaithful wife is transformed into a mare, like adulteresses in the Arabian Nights as well as in Finnish, Russian, and Italian tales (TT 449). Witches are closely associated with mares: A witch may be accompanied by a horse, she may appear as a horse, she may transform a man into a horse and ride him, or she may become a man-eating mare. The equine witch appears consistently as the villain in Indo-European folklore: She is the female fiend who eats children and rides her victims (an image with psychological overtones of fear and sexuality); she is the black maiden from hell, riding on her white horse; or she is the leader of the wild chase of witches on their phallic broomsticks, the horses of death. The image of the erotic woman on the white horse is not necessarily negative—there is always Lady Godiva, not to mention naked women on horseback in contemporary soft-core pornography—but her very eroticism is a negative value in the ancient Indo-European conceptual system, in which women should be not erotic but chaste.

The term nightmare, even though it is etymologically unrelated to the word for the female horse, comes to assume explicit equine overtones from an early period in European mythology, in part through the attraction of assonance and in part through the influence of an already developed mythology. The true etymology is from the Old English mare ("hag"), and a nightmare, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, is a "female monster … supposed to settle upon people and animals in their sleep, producing a feeling of suffocation." The prototype of the nightmare who presses down on the sleeper or has intercourse with him while lying on top of him is the mare who rides perversely astride her husband or victim. In modern reinterpretations of the image of the nightmare, in literature and art (the horse in Fuseli's haunting painting entitled The Nightmare, or in Blake's Death on a Pale Horse, or the tortured horses in Picasso's Guernica), the cluster of meanings related to the several homonyms often merge: mother (Fr., mère ), female horse (Eng., mare ), ocean (Lat., mare; Fr., mer ), death (IE, *mer, *mor ), and the underlying Old English etymological meaning, "hag."

One can postulate chronological levels in the history of the degradation of the symbolism of the mare. At first there may have been one mare goddess, an awesome, dangerous, sacred creature (sacred in Rudolf Otto's sense of the word: mysterium fascinans et tremendum ), who was sought by the king, captured, and wooed. She is a source of power, who invigorates the aging king by her annual ritual copulation with him; she dies in a sacrifice of her immortality to his mortality. At this period, the mare is simultaneously maternal, sororal, and erotic. In Semitic and Babylonian myths, she is manifest in the figures of Inanna and Ishtar, both of whom were said to copulate with horses. But in later European mythology, the mare goddess was split into two parts, the good mother and the evil whore, and the benevolent white mare is given a malevolent, black alter ego.

This transition is even more sharply marked in the closely related mythology of the swan-maiden. Mares in many Indo-European myths about evil women are closely associated with birds: They assume the form of birds or appear as winged horses. In the swan-maiden variants of the theme, a woman from the other world assumes the more delicate and feminine form of a white bird, instead of a white horse; she lives with a prince for a while and then leaves him when he violates the condition that she had set for their cohabitation (not to ask her name, or not to see her naked). This may be a very old Indo-European motif indeed, judging from archaeological evidence from Europe before 3500 bce depicting the bird goddess. Her mythology begins with the Vedic myth of Pururavas and Urvasi and extends to the ballet figures of The Firebird (the firebird is the Russian version of the magic sunbird) and Swan Lake, in which Odette, the good, chaste White Swan, is opposed by Odile, the evil, seductive Black Swan. Then, too, when the Valkyries are not riding horses they become swans.

But the demotion from mare to swan was not the last step in the degradation of the symbol. The swan became male. In Greek myth, Zeus assumes the form of a white swan in order to seduce Leda as she is bathing in a river (Leda's two sons, Castor and Pollux, became known as the Dioscuri, or equine twins, the Greek parallel to the Vedic Asvins). And in the legend of Lohengrin, it is he, not she, who rides in the swan boat. In Lohengrin's story the more ancient myth of the immortal woman who visits the mortal man or king came to be replaced by the myth of the immortal man who rescues the mortal woman. In a skiff drawn by a white swan (here a male), Lohengrin rides, as on a white horse, to the rescue of Elsa; the helpless female awaits the great horse/swan god who deigns to visit her and who will make her promise never to ask him his name or his lineage. Now Leda awaits Zeus, awaits the moment when she may, in Yeats's words, "put on his knowledge with his power / before the indifferent beak could let her drop."

The Rider on the White Horse

Thus the white stallion came to supplant the white mare in Indo-European mythology at a very early period. His mythology, like hers, was a mythology of ambivalence, of the coincidence of opposites, but the powers in question were different. The stallion came to symbolize not only death (as had the mare) but also rebirth, not only the taming of the wild (as had she) but also complete freedom from all social bonds.

Plato likened the human soul to a charioteer who had harnessed two horses to his chariot, one pulling him toward brutish sensuality, the other to a higher spiritualism; and, before Plato, the Indian Upanisads had likened the senses to horses that must be controlled if they are not to remain vicious and wild. The locus of this taming is the mouth of the horse, whence are derived such metaphors as "to bridle," "to curb," "to take the bit between the teeth," and so forth. The horse's mouth was therefore seen as the point of dangerous interaction. This notion is a misconception (for, as every horseman knows, although horses can indeed bite, it is the other end of the horse that poses the real danger, and horses are in any case strict vegetarians); nevertheless, it is the source of the many myths in which horses devour people, myths in which doomsday flames come out of the horse's mouth (or nostrils). That the mouth of the mare is believed to be dangerous is an instance of the projection of aggression, assuming that she will injure you with the organ where you have injured her (through the bit).

In Christian mythology, doomsday appears as the four horsemen of the apocalypse, or the rider on the white horse; in India, death becomes incarnate as the centaur or white horse named Kalki, an avatar of Viṣṇu who will usher in the final Kali Age and the end of the world. This is the image captured in Peter Schaffer's play Equus, in which an adolescent boy confuses together in his fantasies the tortured mouth of the horse-god that he rides naked in sexual ecstasy and the tortured head of Christ bridled in his crown of thorns. And it is the image that begins James Joyce's famous poem:

I hear an army charging upon the land
And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees.

Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers. (from Chamber Music, 1907)

But the other, positive aspect of the horse never lost its symbolic power. Centuries before the Roman invasions, someone carved into the chalky hillsides of the English Downs several colossal images of a white horse. The horse by itself, unharnessed, unbridled, unridden, was always at home in the mountains, close to its divine home and far away from the ropes of humans. The horse thus remained always a symbol of freedom. In the ancient Indian horse sacrifice, the stallion wandered freely for a year before the ceremony, attended by his herds and followed by the king's men, to claim for the king whatever grazing land he cared to wander through. This image of freedom was somehow preserved rather than canceled by the later composite image of the white horse and its noble rider, who were thought of as a single creature, ideally a kind of centaur. The horse transferred its freedom and nobility to its rider, even as the ancient Indian stallion transferred these qualities to the king during the sacrifice. Thus Saint George, always mounted on a white horse, kills the very dragon that is, as has been seen, a variant of the demonic underwater mare, the shadow side of the white stallion itself; and medieval equestrian imagery placed not only knights and kings but princes of the church on horseback, to symbolize all that was not only noble, but divine.

The horse carried humanity from earth to heaven. In India and Greece, as well as in medieval Europe, one reads of princes who are lured by white stags (or white swans, or white horses, or unicorns) from the safe territory of the royal parks to the thick of the forest, to the Other World, where they may meet their princess or encounter their dragon (or both, or both in one). The many tales of winged horses, as well as the conflation of horse and bird, often transform this horizontal voyage into a vertical flight. Not until the advent of photography in the mid-nineteenth century did people come to realize that a galloping horse did not actually fly, with forelegs stretched forward and hindlegs backward, and even then galloping continued to feel like flying. In many of the shamasitic myths of Inner Asia, China, and India, the initiate mounts a white horse and is suddenly carried off, out of control, into the world of the gods, where the initiation takes place. Thus the horse leads humankind from the world of the tame to the world of the wild, the magic, supernatural world of the gods.

This symbolism found its expression in the mythology of the American West, where the magnificent white mustang who can never be caught stands on the mountains with the wind lifting his mane, symbolizing all that is wild and free. Yet the stallion is caught, to become the alter ego (in India one would say the vehicle, or vahana ) of the cowboy, who comes himself to represent the last bastion of male freedom—freedom from sexuality (the cowboy rides alone, like Lancelot, whose chastity was his power), from the law (for even the lawmen tend to be mavericks, and the outlaws are good outlaws), but most of all from being tamed or "fenced in."

Humankind can never entirely succeed in taming the horse. This is the charm and the challenge of any intimate association with a wild animal, that it retains some measure of its wildness. But the horse untames humans, transferring to them—or, one might say, sacrificing for them—some of its own wildness and freedom.

Bibliography

A good overview of the history of the horse in human culture is provided by Anthony Austen Dent's The Horse through Fifty Centuries of Civilization (New York, 1974). Much of the material on the myths and rituals of the horse in India, Greece, and Ireland that I have used in the article above has been condensed from pages 149–282 of my Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago, 1980), which, in turn, draws upon several basic studies of indo-European equine symbolism (in addition to the primary texts reproduced and analyzed therein): the writings of Georges Dumézil, particularly "Derniers soubresauts du Cheval d'Octobre," in his Fêtes romaines d'été et d'automne (Paris, 1975), pp. 111–168, 177–219. Paul Émile Dumont's L'asvamedha (Paris, 1927); Jean Gricourt's "Epona-Rhiannon-Macha," Ogam 6 (1954): 22–188; Wilhelm Koppers's "Pferdeopfer und Pferdekult der Indogermanen," Wiener Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte und Linguistik 4 (1936): 279–411; Françoise Le Roux's "Recherces sur les éléments rituels de l'élection royale irlandaise et celtique," Ogam 15 (1963): 123–137; and two articles by Jaan Puhvel, "Vedic asvamedha and Gaulish IIPOMIIDVOS," Language 31 (1955): 353–354, and "Aspects of Equine Functionality," in Myth and Law among the Indo-Europeans, edited by Jaan Puhvel (Berkeley, 1970). For prehistoric images of the horse, see André Leroi-Gourhan's article "Préhistoire," in Dictionnaire des mythologies, edited by Yves Bonnefoy (Paris, 1981); for horses in Britain, see Anthony Austen Dent and Daphne Machin Goodall's The Foals of Epona (London, 1965); and for the Irish Táin, Thomas Kinsella's translation, The Tain, Translated from the Irish Epic "Tain Bo Cuailnge" (Oxford, 1970).