The second account comes from an eighteenth-century veterinary manual:3 ‘I have been surprised at the Stupidity and Ignorance of the Vulgar who believe that their Horses are rode in the Night by Sprites and Hobgoblins because they find the Creature all of a damp Sweat in his stall, as if he had been a Journey; never considering that if the poor Horse did not sweat thus and Nature throw off the Superfluities of the Grass Food he (through want of care in the Owner) lives upon, that he would soon be in a much worse way than sweating in the Stable. But when the Piece of old Iron or Hollow Stone has been over his Back a week or a Fortnight on a String, and the Horse better taken care of with respect to Food and Exercise, the Filly Bitch-daughter leaves him; although he is in far better order for her riding than he was before. But I leave the Reader to judge in what the Remedy consisted: that is, whether it was the Charm or the other Requisites I have spoken of, namely, good Keeping and Exercise which performed the Cure, if it may be said to be a cure; which I apprehend it may, seeing all Creatures that are not at the proper standard of Health may be looked upon as diseased.’
The practice was once common, also, in other parts of Britain: in Sussex4 the flint was hung in windmills as well as in stables; and it was much used in Scotland5 and Ireland. Frazer records6 its use in eastern Germany where it was believed that cattle were especially exposed to the attacks of witches on Walpurgis Night (May Eve): ‘To protect their animals prudent farmers placed crosses on the door of the byres, also three horse shoes and holed flints.’ The flint had various names in different areas of Britain: a holystone, a ring-stone or a hag-stone. The last name is the most descriptive of the purpose of the stone, for a hag is another name for a witch. Aubrey wrote in his Miscellanies: ‘To hinder the Night Mare they hang on a String a Flint with a hole in it (naturally) by the Manger; but best of all, they say, hung about their necks…. It is to prevent the Night Mare viz. the Hag from riding the Horses who will sometimes sweat at Night. The Flint thus hung does hinder it.’ Attaching iron to the stone gave it additional potency, it was believed, in repelling witches and all evil influences.
But what was the significance of the holed flint and what principle was supposed to make it effective? There can be no doubt after examination of some of the flints so used in East Anglia that the hag-stone is a symbol of the eye, the hole standing for the pupil. It is, therefore, equivalent to the All-Seeing Eye which has always been an apotropaic device all over the world; this gives the flint its power as an amulet. It serves the same purpose as the painted eye or oculus on the prow of boats belonging to Mediterranean fishermen, especially Sicilian, who use it to this day. The square-and-compasses symbol once common on Scottish boats is very similar to the oculus if it is turned on its side; and it is suggested7 that the triangle enclosing the All-Seeing Eye, used in Freemasonry, is the design from which the square-and-compasses symbol derived. This is confirmed from another source:8 ‘The lamb, the dragon (or serpent), the dove above the altar, the triangle enclosing the all-seeing eye (common to Freemasonry) as well as the sacred fish-symbol … are the silent witnesses in the modern Christian churches of the symbols of paganism.’ In the Egyptian traditions the eye is a symbol of Horus who is identified with the moon, a very significant link when we are discussing the use of the eye-symbol in connection with horses. The myth9 records that Horus, the son of Osiris and Iris fought with his uncle Set and lost an eye in the combat. Thoth restored the eye of Horus by spitting on it; the eye thus became a symbol of all sacrifice. Its use as a symbol may, therefore, be a propitiatory one, a protection against evil influences not by the sacrifice of an eye but some object that will serve for it; or it may be a direct attempt at identification with the god as is suggested in its use by fishermen: by painting the eye on the prow of the boat they hoped to induce the god to take part in the enterprise in person, thus assuring themselves of success.
The symbol was also worn on the person, as a costly stone; and Westermarck, the Finnish anthropologist, has pointed out:10 ‘The splendid ornamentation in the Alhambra is in a great measure founded on designs which are at the present day still used in Morocco as amulets against the Evil Eye; conventionalized images of eyes or eye-brows and various combinations of the number five, representing the five fingers of the hand with which the evil influence emanating from the eye is thrown back on the eye itself – is, in a symbolic manner, put out.’ Belief in the evil eye and the use of the palm of the hand with the five fingers extended to ward it off is still to be found in Greece and Italy today.11 The eye-symbol as used in primitive art has also been taken over by painters of the modern school, though not out of any regard for its original ritual or apotropaic properties but for their own purposes of design; and probably, too, for the shock synthesis in one picture of both modern and primitive elements as though the artists are painting an instinctive and symbolic commentary on the presence in modern, technological man of large areas of primitivism or irrationality. They seem to be drawing attention by these symbols to an aspect in himself which twentieth-century man persists in ignoring; and in so doing they are making a kind of visual or plastic counterpart of the work of Pareto, Freud, and Jung. Picasso,12 for instance, in more than one painting or drawing has used the full, front-elevation eye in the profile of a face (just as the Egyptians did for ritual purposes); a device that would seem to have been the starting point for the fusion of two angles of a head on the same canvas.
The holed flint has been used as an amulet up to this day in Suffolk, and in a place other than the stable – although the principle behind it is the same. In the village of Woolpit it is hung on a bedpost as a preservative against nightmare – a use which emphasizes the origin of the word. A woman from the nearby village of Beyton also recalls that her grandfather used a similar precaution about fifty years ago. It is evident that the flint was used against something more specific than ill – luck or evil influences. Who, then, or what was the Mare whose night visitations were so dreaded and against which action had to be taken?
1 Leonard Aldous, Debenham.
2 cf. Herrick’s:
Hesperides: Hang up hooks and sheers to scare
Hence the hag that rides the mare,
Till they be all over wet
With the mire and the sweat.
This observed, the manes shall be
Of your horses all knot free.
3 Henry Bracken, The Travellers’s Pocket Farrier, London, 1755, p. 32.
4 R. Thurston Hopkins, Old Water Mills and Wind Mills, London, 1931, p. 172.
5 Thomas Davidson, Gwerin, Vol. II, No. 1, and I.F.W., p. 304; also The Holed Amulet and Its Uses, J. G. Dent, Folk Life, Vol. 3, 1965.
6 G.B., Part VI, p. 162.
7 T. C. Lethbridge, Boats and Boatmen, London, 1952, p. 60.
8 W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, London, 1957, p. 4.
9 G.B., Part IV, Vol. 2, pp. 121–38.
10 Quoted by H. R. Hays, From Ape to Angel, London, 1959, p. 186.
11 See also: F. T. Elsworthy, The Evil Eye, p. 127.
12 v. The Sculpture Studio (Etching, 1933); Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (Oil, 1907); Young Woman Drawing (Oil, 1935); see also Marc Chagall’s The Green Eye (1944).
19
What Was the Mare?
BEFORE trying to answer this question it will be necessary to turn aside to consider the history of the horse from earliest times. The true or, caballine, horse evolved on the plains north of the great mountain ranges of Asia; and there is general agreement that primitive man first hunted the horse for food. Cave pictures which he drew to give him magical power while hunting these horses still survive; and prehistorians who have studied the paintings of palaeolithic man in the caves at Lascaux in the south of France have pointed out that there is a similarity between the horses depicted and Przevalski’s, the most primitive type of horse, a few specimens of which still remain wild in Siberia. But the hunting of wild horses may have gone on long after the horse was domesticated. This, we are told,1 occurred at
some time in the third millennium B.C., and reached Macedonia by 2500 B.C.; it is certain that by 2000 B.C. the horse-drawn chariot had made its appearance right across western Europe, a picture which argues a long preceding period of domestication.
From this early domestication of the horse, it has been suggested, there grew up so strong a link between the horse and man that the horse became sacrosanct: his flesh became taboo and he acquired a sacred or exalted character. This was attributed to his swiftness and the difficulty – as opposed to other domestic animals – of breaking him in. But it is more likely that the horse acquired this ‘sacred’ character long before domestication; and this is confirmed by what has happened to other animals which have been held sacred in man’s history. For the sacred character was acquired irrespective of the animal’s attributes. The pig, for example, is an admirable and very intelligent animal, but no one could say that it has such noble and exalted attributes to merit a claim to a special or ritual regard. Yet the pig, as already inferred, had this distinction in man’s history; and even today among certain peoples the pig’s flesh is taboo. It seems then that the explanation for the horse’s sacred quality is to be sought in that time prior to his domestication, when his flesh was food and, therefore, life to those peoples who eventually sanctified him and held magical ceremonies for his increase.
Food and shelter, the basic essentials of survival, were man’s chief concern during that remote period when he existed in the primal undifferentiated horde. He lived where he could get food and if he lived chiefly on a herd of animals he followed the herd about until it dwindled or removed beyond his reach. But the indiscriminate hunting of one species of animal and the over-cropping of one kind of plant must have caused a gradual dividing up of the horde, an apportioning of one plant or animal to a family group or clan within it.2 The very necessities of surviving dictated a rudimentary differentiation; for starvation was the certain result of a haphazard use of a limited food supply over an extended period. As soon as this dividing off occurred man had made an important step in his evolution as a social animal: a new organization emerged – the tribe which could consciously direct a process that had already begun to evolve of its own momentum: for disputes, rivalries, seasonal shortages, and the pressure of natural events would have existed from the beginning and have suggested their own solution: an agreed apportioning of the available supply of food. And it was this trend that the tribe eventually embodied in a system.
Thus the animal or plant which had come to be the ‘share’ of each family group or clan became in time the clan’s totem. The clan developed a direct symbiotic relation with its totem and each member identified himself with it.3 At definite times of the year – the breeding time of the animal – they congregated at the breeding place and performed magical ceremonies to promote the animal’s increase. Australian aborigines who had reached the same stage of evolution as we are now discussing held exactly the same ceremonies in recent times: in the Aranda4 kangaroo-increase ritual, each clan or totem group was responsible for the fecundity and plentifulness of the animal or plant it stood for. It was a great responsibility, and magical aid was sought to help the group carry it out. For the clan was tied up with its totem, flourishing when it flourished and starving when the species failed to reproduce itself in adequate numbers.
But this arrangement or differentiation into groups or clans also had its disadvantages: it meant that a clan, if tied solely to one animal or plant, would not only have an unvarying and, therefore, monotonous diet but it would not be much better off than before if its totem animal failed it completely. Here, however, came another of those advances forward which moved imperceptibly step-by-step in response to the pressure of an uncontrolled environment, until it reached a stage when it became consciously recognized that a new disposition of the tribe was not only possible but inevitable. This was the point when it was realized that it would be better for the tribe as a whole if each clan, instead of killing and eating its totem, consecrated itself to preserving it for the use of all the other clans in the tribe. Thus the clan which had formerly lived on the horse ceased now to eat its flesh and became concerned primarily with its multiplication, themselves existing on the various other plants and animals preserved by other clans in the tribe. Horse-flesh became for them taboo, forbidden by direct injunction from their headman or priest, and their main function as a totem clan in relation to the horse was to celebrate the magical ceremonies and to implore the ancestral gods – the personification of the tribe with whom the clan became identified – to grant its increase. The animal became identified with one of the gods; and often the theriomorphic ancestor was believed to have been born of the god who was also an animal.
But an important question remains: why did the horse-totem reach such predominance over all the other cults associated with animals at this stage? It is suggested that the main reason is this: when man emerged from the hunting stage and acquired the technique of taming the animals he had formerly pursued, the totemic taboo on eating horse-flesh attained a new economic significance. The extended group, no longer a clan in the totemic sense, would live in part on mare’s milk and its derivatives – kumys, cheese and dried curd, exactly as did the Scythians5 – and mare’s flesh particularly remained taboo. Again, the increasing use of the horse as a means of quick transport and as a draught animal, both essentials for a nomadic people, emphasized its social importance. It was natural that this importance should be celebrated in the retention of the original totemic rites long afterwards, when an entirely different stage of social evolution had been reached; and when, indeed, the primitive origins of the cult had long been forgotten.
This, it is admitted, is an over-simplified and over-formalized treatment of the growth of horse-worship: but it is perhaps justified here as a first step to answer the question we proposed, and as a prelude to one of the earliest references to the horse in history: the horse-sacrifice performed by the king or a royal person as recorded in early China.6 Horse-sacrifice also played an important and symbolic part in early Indian religion; and, as Jung records,7 following the teaching of the Upanishads the sacrifice had a cosmic significance: a new state beyond the human was to be reached through that sacrifice. The sacrifice of the horse, in other words, was an analogue of the renunciation of the world, with which it was identified.
Now the sacrifice in its later sophisticated or cosmic form, stems directly from the ritual eating of the horse’s flesh at the totemic level. For the clan at its increase ceremonies broke the taboo by ritually eating the flesh to renew their essential identity with the totem: the totem was the clan and the clan was the totem. And the royal horse-sacrifice later retained this feature: the flesh of the sacrificed stallion was afterwards cooked and eaten by those taking part in the ceremony.
The horse-sacrifice has lasted into historical times in many European countries: in Scandinavia,8 where the horse’s blood was sprinkled on the altar and toasts were drunk in a form of communion which linked the worshippers symbolically with the gods of war and fertility and with their dead ancestors; in Ireland9 horses were sacrificed in the twelfth century; in Wales,10 even later. At a shrine near Abergele in Denbighshire – Llan Sant Sior – horses were offered to St George. The rich gave a horse to secure the Saint’s blessing on all the other horses they possessed. The cult had obviously been Christianized here; and it is significant that near this spot is Parc-y-Meirch (The Park of the Stallions) where the earliest and most extensive hoard of horse-trappings in Britain was unearthed11 during the last century. The hoard dates from the Late Bronze Age.
In the earlier sacrifices the participants, or just the priest alone, symbolically ‘took the totem inside him’ – ate it, in plain words – thereby joining himself with a wider reality; for the horse was considered as a link between the day-to-day life in this world and the life of the ancestors who had gone to another world, and were responsible for preserving the animals’ increase. But at a later stage, the horse-sacrifice represented a g
eneralized fertility and became the medium through which its spiritual guardian the Earth Goddess could be reached. She was the Ga Mater, also the Mother Goddess who has appeared in various guises and under various names throughout history: Artemis, Diana, Hecuba, the Great Mother, the White Goddess, Hecate, Epona. The names are repeated here because the relation of some of them to the horse will be easily recognized.
The horse, too, now came to be regarded not merely as a spiritual link with the Goddess but also as a kind of psycho-pomp who served to conduct the soul of the departed to the next world and also to see to his needs when he got there. This is the reason why the horse was slaughtered and buried with the chieftain – a practice which archaeologists have confirmed from eastern Asia to Scandinavia.
But in northern mythology the horse’s association with fertility is most marked12 and there were numerous survivals in Britain up to recent times which pointed to this aspect of the cult. Probably the most outstanding is the ceremony of Crying the Mare which used to be practised in Herefordshire. Here the Mare was directly linked with the Corn Spirit. Reapers left a small patch of corn standing in the field and then fashioned it into the shape of a horse by tying it into four bunches to represent the legs which were then fastened together at the top. The reapers then tried to cut it by hurling their sickles at it. The man who was successful was honoured by sitting opposite his master at the harvest feast;13 and the ‘Mare’ was plaited in a variety of ways and kept in the house until the following harvest. The hobby-horses that appear in many countryside ceremonies and ritual dances, notably the Hodening Horse, and the Mari Lwyd in Wales, also refer to the fertility aspect of the horse cult, and recall the primitives’ impersonation of the totem animal at their increase festivals – the wearing of the animal’s skin and its most characteristic mark, for instance, the horns.
The Pattern Under the Plough Page 16