Content deleted Content added
→Tail docking as insult: saga, and wording |
→Indo-European horse sacrifice: but ... |
||
Line 167:
[[Dumézil]] argued that the October Horse preserved vestiges of a [[Proto-Indo-European religion|common Indo-European rite]] of kingship, evidenced also by the [[Historical Vedic religion|Vedic]] ''[[ashvamedha]]'' and the [[Horse sacrifice#Irish|Irish inaugural sacrifice]] described by [[Giraldus Cambrensis]] as taking place in [[Ulster]] in the early medieval period.<ref>[[Georges Dumézil]], ''Archaic Roman Religion'' (1970), pp. 224–228; in connection to the Regia, ''The Destiny of a King'' (University of Chicago Press, 1973, 1988; originally published 1971 in French), p. 120.</ref> Perhaps the most striking similarity between the Vedic ritual and the Roman is that the sacrificial victim was the right-hand horse of a chariot team,<ref>[[Robert Drews]], ''The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East'' (Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 151; West, ''Indo-European Poetry and Myth'', p. 418.</ref> though not the winner of a race in the Vedic rite.<ref name="Pascal-p268">Pascal, "October Horse," p. 268.</ref> The head in the ''ashvamedha'', signifying spiritual energy, was reserved as a talisman for the king afterwards; the middle of the horse embodied physical force; and the tail was grasped by the officiant and represented the fertility of livestock.<ref name="Pascal-p268" />
A trace of horse sacrifice might be detectable among the [[continental Celts]] in the personal name ''Epomeduos'', meaning "Horse Sacrificer" in one interpretation of the name, found on silver coins of the [[Arverni]] in Gaul.<ref>Jones, "Saints and Other Horse Mutilators," n.p., in the context of the October Horse and Indo-European horse sacrifice.</ref> But no race was involved in the medieval Celtic ritual; the horse, a mare who seems to have been the sexual surrogate of the goddess of sovereignty, was consumed communally by king and people from a cauldron in which he was immersed and inaugurated. (In the ''ashvamedha'', the gender of horse and human is reversed.) Both the chariot race and an implied cauldron of initiation (to the extent that the latter might be relevant to the October Horse through the [[wikt:comparanda|comparanda]] of the Troy Game and Mars' assimilation to the child-god Maris) are generally regarded as the elements of the Roman festival most likely to be Etruscan, and thus of [[Etruscan origins|uncertain value as to an Indo-European origin]]
Some fundamental differences between the Roman rite and the Vedic and Celtic forms pose obstacles to situating the ''Equus October'' within the [[Trifunctional hypothesis|trifunctional schema]].<ref>Udo Strutynski, introduction to Georges Dumézil, ''Camillus: A Study of Indo-European Religion as Roman History'' (University of California Press, 1980), p. 12.</ref> The ''equus'' is sacrificed to the Roman god of war, not kingship. Dumézil's follower [[Jaan Puhvel]] deals with the Roman rite only glancingly in his essay "Aspects of Equine Functionality," exploring mainly the Vedic and Celtic evidence for an "Indo-European equine myth" that "involves the mating of a kingship-class representative with the hippomorphous transfunctional goddess, and the creation of twin offspring belonging to the level of the third estate."<ref>[[Jaan Puhvel]], "Aspects of Equine Functionality," in ''Analecta Indoeuropaea'' (Innsbruck, 1981), pp. 193 and 197. Puhvel finds the "transfunctional goddess" in Roman religion as ''[[Juno (mythology)|Juno]] Seispes Mater Regina'' ("Juno the Unblemished, Mother and Queen) whose [[Cult (religion)|cult]] was at [[Lanuvium]]. See also Miriam Robbins Dexter, "Consort Goddess," ''Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture'' (Taylor & Francis, 1997), p. 124.</ref>
| |||