Chapter II · (continued 2)

In the bridle which binds this hero who becomes a horse, I think I can recognise the lasso with which Varuṇas keeps Çunaḥçepas bound in the Âitareya Br. In the Ṛigvedas,[651] we have Sûryas, the sun, as Sâuvaçvyas, or son of Svaçvyas, that is, of him who has fine horses; but as, besides Svaçvyas, we find Svaçvas, he who has a fine horse, the sun itself would seem to be this horse. The legend narrates that Svaçvas, having no children, requested the sun to give him some, and that the sun, to please him, was himself born of him. Svaçvas, he who has a fine horse and has no sons, is perhaps the same as the old man who has lost his son by selling the horse; when the sun returns his son also comes back again. In the Vedic expressions, without a horse, born without a bridle, the sun (as a courser[652]), the hero would seem to be indicated who has not as yet that horse or that bridle, without which he is powerless; for the idea of the hero is rarely unaccompanied by that of the horseman.

For the horseman hero his horse is his all, and sometimes it even takes the bit in its mouth, then the hero punishes it. We have already noticed the well-known Hellenic myth of Phaethôn, who is, with both the chariot and the horses, precipitated into the waters, because the horses threatened to set the earth on fire. This happens every day towards evening, when the sun sets; the whole sky goes down, then the sun is thrown down into the ocean of night; the course of the solar steeds is interrupted, and the wheels of the chariot no longer turn. A similar catastrophe is repeated on St John's Day, at the summer solstice, in which the sun stops and begins to retire, for which reason the light of day, from this time to Christmas, grows less and less.

It is a custom on St John's Day, in Germany,[653] for hunters to fire at the sun, believing that they will thereby become infallible hunters. According to another popular German belief, he who, on St John's Day, fires towards the sun is condemned ever after to hunt for ever, like Odin, the eternal hunter; and both superstitions have their reason. In the night, as well as in the period during which the splendour of the sun diminishes, and especially in autumn, the gloomy forest of heaven is filled with every kind of ferocious animal; the sun enters this forest, becomes moon, and hunts the wild beasts in it during the whole of the night, or of the year that is, until he is born again. In the Ṛigvedas, where we have seven sister-mares yoked to the sun-chariot,[654] Indras, to please his favourite, Etaças, after having drunk the ambrosia, pushes the clouds that had fallen behind before the flying steeds of the sun,[655] that is to say, he prevents the solar hero, drawn by horses, either by the cloud in a tempest, or by the darkness of night, from going on; and he even strikes the wheels themselves of the solar chariot to arrest its incendiary course. From these Vedic data it is easy to pass to the Hellenic Phaethôn, who is precipitated into the waters on account of the horses. The hero killed on account of his horses is a frequent subject of mythology, and the Greek name Hippolytos refers to this kind of death. Hippolytos, the son of Theseus, fleeing from his father, who supposes him guilty of incest with his step-mother Phedra, is thrown from the chariot broken to pieces, when the horses that draw it approach the sea and are terrified by marine monsters. This is a variation of the legend of the young hero, persecuted by his step-mother, who is thrown into the sea, with the novel and remarkable accompaniment that it is his horses themselves which are the cause of his death. The Christian legend of St Hippolytos has appropriated this particular trait, representing the holy martyr, who was prefect under the emperors Decius and Valerian, as dying, having been condemned to be torn in pieces by horses. The poet Prudentius comments upon the story in these two curious distichs, on the occasion of the Roman judge pronouncing capital punishment against St Hippolytos—

But the horses which draw the hero into the water are the same as those that save him by carrying him over the deep, drawing the chariot or ship on the sea towards the shore. The Açvinâu do the same in the Ṛigvedas, where they save from the waves both themselves and other heroes upon their chariot, which is compared to a ship.[656] Hero and horse always have the same fate.

When the hero approaches, or when some fortunate incident is about to happen to the hero, his horse neighs for joy. In the Ṛigvedas,[657] on the arrival of the god Indras, the horse neighs, the cow lows, like a messenger between heaven and earth. The neighing of this horse, and the lowing of this cow, are the thundering of the sun in the cloud. By this neighing or lowing, man is informed that the hero-god Indras is beginning his battles in heaven. Another hymn, which calls the two horses of Indras two rays of the sun (sûryasya ketû), celebrates them as neighing and pouring out ambrosia,[658] i.e., the sun makes rain fall from the clouds; when he shows himself in the east at morn, his horse neighs and drops the dew on the ground.

Herodotus, and, after him, Oppianos and Valerius Maximus, relate the mythical story of Darius Hystaspes, who unexpectedly succeeded to the empire from having persuaded his colleagues to decree that he should obtain the crown whose horse happened first to neigh at the sight of the sun. It is narrated that when he came to the place, Darius, in order to assure himself of success, made his horse smell the odour of a mare.[659] Neighing is the laughter of the horse. We have seen, in the preceding chapter, how the bull speaks and the fish laughs at sight of coition; and so we have here, in the story of Darius, the horse who neighs on account of the mare.—To return to the horse of mythology; the solar horse neighs within the thundering-cloud which, as a cow, the bull makes pregnant, and as a mare, the stallion, and neighs at the approach of the aurora, who appears now as the driver of a hundred chariots[660] (a round number, like the hundred thousand horses which, in another hymn,[661] the god Indras drives; a favourite number, like seven, which is applied to the same solar horses, solar rays and Añgirasas[662])—on which account it can be compared with the Hellenic Aphroditê Hippodameia—now even as a real mare. The sun is now a driver of horses, and now himself a horse; in the same way, the aurora is now an Amazon horsewoman, now a driver of chariots, now açvâvatî, and now a mare. When the sun approaches the aurora, or when the horse approaches the mare, the horse neighs. We know how the Açvinâu considered themselves sons of the wife of the sun, Saraṇyû, daughter of Tvashṭar, who united herself to the sun in the form of a mare. Whether this Saraṇyû be the cloud or the aurora, we have in her, anyhow, a mare with which the sun, solar hero, or solar horse, unites himself to produce the twin heroes, who are, for this reason, also called the two sons of the mare.[663] We have already seen, in the preceding chapter, a hero and a heroine who are hatched from eggs; of the Dioscuri, we know that they were born of the egg of Leda; and the mare's egg is the subject of a story in the Ukermark.[664] Greek writers have handed down several cases of coition between men and mares, and between horses and women, with corresponding births of monstrous conformation. Now, unnatural as such births must appear to us, they are, in mythology, in strict accordance with nature. In the preceding chapter we saw the cow which leaps over the hare, and explained this phenomenon by the cloud or darkness covering the moon, and also by the earth covering the moon in eclipses. In Herodotus and Valerius Maximus, a mare, in the time of Xerxes, gives birth to a hare; and we must here understand the hare to be the moon, coming out of the darkness or clouds; and when we read that the hare suffocated the mare, we must understand it to mean the moon as dispersing the darkness or clouds (perhaps also the sun or evening aurora). We must have recourse in this way to the myth to comprehend the examples of parturition without coition found in some Hindoo legends, and applied to heroes, as well as the curious discussions and information which we find in the ancients, from Aristotle, Varro, Pliny, Columella, Solinus, and St Augustin, to Albertus Magnus and Aldrovandi, concerning mares, and especially Spanish and Portuguese mares, made pregnant by the wind (called by Oppianos[665] of the windy feet), and which are also spoken of in the Pentamerone,[666] with less decency, in reference to the myth of the maiden born of the tree.

The horse of Ariosto, too, has a similar nature—

The horse of Ciolle, in a Tuscan proverb, also feeds upon wind alone.

The horse of Dardanos, son of Zeus, was also said to be born of the wind, which brings us back to the Vedic Marutas, whose chariots have horses for wings, and to the volucer currus of the Diespiter of Horace.[667] In the Sanskṛit tongue, the expression vâtâçvas, or wind-horse, is very common, to indicate a very swift-footed horse.

No sooner is the horse Uććâiḥçravas born than he neighs; and like him, in the Mahâbhâratam, the hero Açvatthâman laughs, the son of Droṇas, properly he who has strength in his horse, which is the same as the hero-horse.

Moreover, as the horse exults by neighing over the good fortune of the hero who rides him, so he not only becomes sad, but sheds real tears when his rider is about to meet with misfortune.

When Râvaṇas, in the Râmâyaṇam, comes forth in his chariot, to join in final combat with Râmas, his coursers shed tears,[668] as a sinister omen, Râvanas is the monster of darkness and clouds; when the cloud begins to disperse, drops of rain fall, that is, the horses of the monster weep. The treacherous sister who is confederate with the monster against her brother, in Russian stories, is condemned by her brother, who kills the monster, to fill a whole basin with her tears.[669] These tears are also a legendary symbol of the rain which falls when the solar hero has torn the cloud in two.

Suetonius, in the Life of Cæsar, writes that the horses consecrated by Cæsar to Mars, and then set at liberty after the passage of the Rubicon, refused to eat, and wept abundantly.[670] Note that this legend of the horses that weep is connected with the passage of water, of the Rubicon (a river which no geographer has been able to identify with certainty, probably because the legend of Cæsar relating to it is a fable of mythical origin. We know how mythical beliefs incline to assume a human form, and are especially prone to group themselves round the great personages of history—Cyrus, Alexander, Romulus, Cæsar, Augustus, Vespasian, Attila, Theodoric, and Charlemagne are proofs of this; and perhaps a day will come in which Napoleon I. or Garibaldi will offer a new mannequin to some popular tradition, which is now uncertain and wandering). Thus it is said that Cæsar's horse itself shed tears for three days before the hero's death. In the Iliad,[671] the horses of Achilleus weep for the death of Patroklos, whom Hektor has thrown from his chariot into the dust; in the Paraleipomenoi of Quintus Smyrneus,[672] the horses of Achilleus weep bitterly for the death of their hero. This is a variety of the legend of the horses which throw the solar hero down into the waters, the ocean of night or the clouds, and of that of the horses of Poseidôn. The mists which after sunset in the evening impregnate the air, and the diurnal or nocturnal rains, as well as the autumnal ones, cause tears to fall upon the ground, or weep over the (apparent) death of the solar hero.

The dew of the morning, on the contrary, which comes from the mouth of the solar horse like foam, or from its hoof as ambrosia and salutary water, is fraught with every species of healthful influence.

The horse and the bull of mythology are pourers out par excellence. In a Vedic strophe—which seems in my eyes to be one of those riddles which are recited in order to loosen the thread of the tongue—relative to the two outpouring or fertilising horses of Indras, there is a continual play kept up upon the root varsh or vṛish, which means at once to pour out and to make fruitful,[673] and upon the letter r which enters into almost every word of the verse. Not only do the horses of Indras pour out and make fruitful; the same virtue is attributed to the chariot which they draw.[674] We have seen already that the horse of the Açvinâu is the killer of the monster serpent, and that the horse's head Dadhyańć, he who goes in the milk or in the liquefied butter, and who is found in a sea of milk, discomfits the enemies of Indras. A Vedic hymn sings that, with the foam of the waters, Indras beats down the head of the monster serpent.[675] In Tuscany, the whooping-cough is called the horse-cough or asinine-cough,[676] and it is thought that the cough is cured by giving the children to drink the foam from the horse's mouth, or causing them to drink in the water where a horse has been drinking. This is a remedy founded upon the principle similia similibus, the foam being used against the convulsive cough, which, like all convulsions in general, brings much saliva or foam to the mouth. The credit, however, of this marvellous medicine is slightly compromised when we read that the same foam is also very efficacious for ear-ache. Pliny, Sextus Empiricus, and Marcellus, quoted by Aldrovandi,[677] also recommend the saliva of a horse as a cure for cough, particularly in the case of consumptive patients, adding that the sick person is cured in three days, but that the horse dies; a superstition which must have had its origin in the mythical horse who feeds on ambrosia, and who loses his strength, and expires when his saliva, foam, ambrosia, or dew is taken from him. It is well known that the Açvinâu, besides being luminous horsemen, were, as friends of men, also exceedingly skilful physicians; nor could they be otherwise, having in their power the head of Dadhyańć which is in the ambrosia, that is, whose foam is ambrosia. The Dioscuri also frequently appear, in European legends, as unexpected and miraculous deliverers. With this mythical belief of the horse that produces ambrosia, is also connected the transformation, described by Ovid in the second book of the Metamorphoses, of Ocyroe into a mare, because she had predicted that Æsculapius would save men from death by the medical art. It is a well-known fact that Æsculapius was revered near fountains whose waters were supposed to have salutary effects, and that he was protected by the sun-god Apollo; and the two physicians, sons of Asklêpios or Æsculapius, seem to be nothing more than a specific form of the Dioscuri.

But the solar horse does not produce ambrosia with his mouth alone.

He has great strength in his hoofs (whence Isidorus and other mediæval etymologists derived the name caballus, thus, "Quod ungula terram cavet"[678]), and makes use of them in the myth, and in the legend, not only to combat the enemies, but also to break open the earth, and cause ambrosial fountains to spring out of it. Sometimes ambrosia pours out of the hoof of the horse itself. In the Ṛigvedas,[679] the horses of Agnis are said to have hands (i.e., hoofs of the fore-feet) that pour out; and the horse given by the Açvinâu to the hero protected by them (that is, to the solar horse, to the morning sun), with his strong hoof fills a hundred jars with inebriating liquor.[680] It is not necessary for me to instance here the famous fountain of the horse, or Hippokrênê, which Bellerophon's horse Pêgasos caused to spring out of the earth by breaking the soil with his hoof (called also for this reason Pêgasía krênê). In Latin tradition, the horse's hoof was worshipped on a spot near Lake Regillus, where it is said that the Dioscuri had appeared.[681] In a Russian story,[682] when Johnny (Ivanushka) sees a horse's hoof, he is sorely tempted to drink out of it, but is dissuaded by his sister. He experiences the same temptation upon seeing a bull's hoof, and afterwards that of a kid. At last he gives way, drinks from the kid's hoof, and is himself transformed into a kid. In the footprint of a horse's hoof, in other stories, the ant is in danger of being drowned; saved by a man, it is ever afterwards grateful to him.[683]

Several myths which we have already noticed in the preceding chapter as applied to the bull, occur again in connection with the horse; as, for instance, the birds which come out of the horse; the hero who takes the horse's skin off, seizing it by the tail in order to make a sack of it; the swift horse of Adrastus, which runs after the tortoise (a Greek proverb);[684] the lunar horse, and the solar one. These exchanges between moon and sun, and between bull and horse, are happily indicated by the Latin poet, Fulgentius:—

The gods had often a liking to transform themselves into horses; so much so, that the sacrifice of the god, that is, the god's death, is represented by the death of the horse. Every one knows that gods and heroes delighted in showing themselves good horsemen, or, at least, good charioteers. On this account, it would be difficult to say to which god in particular the horse is sacred. The Vedic Açvinâu, the Vedic aurora, who wins the race in her chariot, Agnis, Savitar, Indras, victorious and splendid by means of their steeds, the hippios Poseidôn, the hippeia Athênê, the hippodameia Aphroditê, the horsemen Dioscuri, Mars, Apollo, Zeus, Pluto, and the German Wuotan (like his alter ego, St Zacchæus), never show themselves otherwise than on horseback; hence the horse was naturally sacred to all of them. In the Christian faith, the innumerable gods of the ancients having become innumerable saints (when they were not so unfortunate as to degenerate into devils), the horse is now recommended in its stable to the protection of several saints, from the obscure Sicilian St Aloi to the no less modest Russians St Froh and St Laver, who take the horse, as well as the mule and the ass, under their especial protection, not to speak of the glorious horsemen St George, St Michael, St James, St Maurice, St Stephen, St Vladimir, and St Martin, especially revered by warriors, and in whose honour the principal orders of knighthood in Europe were founded. But religions being, from one point of view, the caricature of mythologies, there is now some difference between the mythical old deities and the legendary new ones, inasmuch as the former would at times ingenuously accept the homage of the animal in effigy, as we have observed in the preceding chapter; while the latter, and they who purvey to them upon earth, not being quite so simple, never leave their devotee in peace until they have received, at sight and without discount, the full value of their favours. In the Life of San Gallo, we read that, in the times of King Pepin (we already know what these times mean), a certain Willimar, being ill, promised, if cured, to offer a horse to the Church of San Gallo. Having recovered his health, he forgot his promise; but passing one day before the church of the saint, his horse stopped before the gate, and by no possibility could it be induced to-move on, until Willimar had at last declared his intention of fulfilling his vow. In the Life of St Martin, there is a rather gayer variation of the same anecdote. King Clodoveus, after having become a Christian, when fighting against the Visigoths, promises his own horse to St Martin, if he grants the victory to him. Having obtained it, Clodoveus regrets being obliged to deprive himself of his good charger, and beseeches St Martin to be kind enough to take money instead, offering him a hundred pieces of gold. St Martin thinks the sum insufficient, and asks for double, which Clodoveus gives; but, inasmuch as a little heretic blood still runs in his veins, he cannot refrain from aiming a pointed witticism at him: "Martinus, quantum video, auxiliator est facilis, sed mercator difficilis!"[685]