Striking similarities have been pointed out for over seven
decades between horse sacrifices in ancient India and Celtic Ireland. These
similarities quickly became one of the important pieces of evidence which
indicated that both the Aryans, who invaded India and began the Vedic Period
(c.1500 2,000 B.C.), and the European Celts
evolved from a common population which
began to fission and expand during the Neolithic (Dillon 1963). This stem
culture we now know to be the earliest Indo Europeans,
the Kurgan Culture; their original homeland was in southwest
Russia sometime prior to 4,000 B.C. Common features in ritual and linguistics
survived enormous differences of time, place and environment.
As O’Flaherty
(1980: ch.6) says, there are two basic questions about the horse sacrifices
that demand consideration. “1) Why did the Irish ritual involve a mare
and a king, while the Indian ritual involved a queen and a stallion? 2) Why
was the horse killed in the ritual but rarely in the myth? ... Each ritual
began with symbolic copulation between the royal figure and the equine figure
and ended with the slaughter of the animal and the eating of its flesh or
fluid.
“The skeleton of the myth may be read as follows. A goddess in the form
of a white mare or a water bird assumed human form and mated with an aging
sun king. Impregnated by him through her mouth, she gave birth to hippomorphic
twins, male and female, who incestuously begat the human race. The goddess
or evil black alter ego injured or threatened to devour her children or the
king. She then disappeared. The myth ends there, but the ritual elaborates
upon the disappearance of the mare and the simultaneous mutilation
of the king or the stallion or the son: in the ritual, the king killed the
mare and ate her to restore his waning powers” (O’Flaherty 1980:
149 150).
O‘Flaherty does not present this tale as the possible Indo European
prototype, that is the single myth that existed in parental Indo European
culture before it began to spread and fission. Rather, this is a “thematic
rather than a historic core” (O’Flaherty 1980: 151). It contains
those elements that may be identified within many variations from a variety
of Indo European cultures: Indian, Irish, Greek, Roman, Gallic, Welsh, and
Russian.
Perhaps this myth originated after Old Europe with its religion of the Great
Goddess, had been invaded and culturally overrun by various Indo
European peoples. This myth may to be syncretic, that is an attempt
to reconcile potentially hostile and adversarial mytho poetics that found themselves
close neighbors after the Indo European migrations. To call this a pure or
characteristic Indo European myth misses the point. After the Indo European
invasions, I believe several cultural regions saw the rise of religions that
attempted to integrate major themes from both the Thunder God mythic
structure of the Indo Europeans and the indigenous Neolithic religion of the
Great Goddess. These cultural regions are those where the myth of the Indo
European mare may be found, the earliest of which in written records is that
of Vedic India c.1,500 B.C.. Furthermore, while Indo European peoples apparently
swamped much of Old Europe, some Indo European tribes remained in contact
for some time with ‘islands’ of the earlier Neolithic culture and religion which survived
their invasions as was the case in classical Crete and several localities
on the European mainland. The mare is decidedly not Indo European in metaphor.
However, the choice of this animal to use as a mythic symbol is characteristically
Indo European. Old Europe did not domesticate the horse and it played no prominent
role in their ‘pure’ mythic structures, although wild horses may
have been occasional food animals.
The Goddess is ever present in the myth
and ritual of horse sacrifice. When her epiphany is that of a water bird and
not of a horse, then this is ‘pure’ Old European metaphor (Gimbutas,
1989). The fact that she is no longer reproductively self-contained, and therefore
no longer parthenogenetic, reveals the power of the Indo European invaders;
she mates with a sun king to become pregnant. However, her power remains absolute
in the ritual, for the king must eat her flesh or drink broth made from it
in order to restore his powers.
“The incident at the heart of it all involves two basic processes: a
sacrifice and a marriage. The sacrifice brings gods and humans together through
food that is obtained by slaughter.
The marriage brings men and women together through sex (here, as elsewhere,
expressed through metaphors of food and eating). The emotional components
of lust and fear/aggression, which we have seen to underlie so much of the
mythology of the Goddess, are present in this compound ceremony, ...”
(O’Flaherty 1980: op.cit.).
