On Horses

“Horses… Horses…”

~ Patti Smith

I

In recent dreams I see centaurs and horses. They are tall and dappled, in motion or standing to stare. I’m not sure what they want. But I do know that the horse can be either solar or lunar depending on its color, its gait, and where it is seen. For the Christians, horses were symbols of solar lust. Buddhists believed the Buddha left his home on a white horse. Horses and centaurs accompany Dionysos and Pan in their Arcadian bacchanals. Black horses are funerary, while white horses grant vitality. In China the horse is one of twelve sacred creatures on the tree of life. Horses drew the chariot of the Sun god Helios, but also appear in the retinue of ocean god Poseidon. Helios’s horses have manes and tails of golden flame, while Poseidon’s horses sport webbed fins on their ankles, iridescent flanks covered in foam. Fertility and fire, chthonic humidity, oceanic churn, solar breath.

II

Horses symbolize speed, earthquakes, intellect, and light. They do not appear in Egyptian cosmologies—why not? The Devil can ride a horse and so can Apollo. Epona was the Roman protectress of horses, adopted from the Celts, who copied the story of Rhiannon and her cult of underworld horses in the Mabinogion. Rhiannon and her son Pryderi are often depicted in Welsh art as mare and foal. Demeter, the Greek mother goddess, was venerated as a mare in Arcadia, while Diana, the eternal virgin was symbolized by wild horses. The Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, soar through the sky in a chariot drawn by horses. The twins oversee Rome, where there are temples built for them. They are patrons of the city and patrons of good horsemanship, a necessity on the battlefield in their day.

III

The mythic Hippolytus was dragged to death by horses, thanks to Phaedra. He was revived by Asclepius, son of the solar god Apollo, and fled to Italy where he founded a city dedicated to the goddess Diana. Sitting inside the shrine to the goddess, he took the name Virbius, and forbade horses to ever enter the temple. In the middle ages, Roman martyr St. Hippolytus was the patron saint of horses. Ailing horses were brought to a church in St. Ippolyts, England to receive care and healing. Pegasus, the winged horse, sprang from the throat of Medusa, an emblem of poetry. According to Robert Graves, Indo-European invaders rode horses down from the eastern steppe, and imposed their Sun-God-Horse culture on the existing Moon-Goddess-Snake culture in ancient Greece, thus the Medusa myth is a half-remembered sublimation of the pain inflicted by the sun-horse and its worldview. Centaurs are half human half horse, and symbolize the meeting of the rational and irrational, the human versus its animal nature, the visceral and the cerebral all in one. Centaurs are known for their violence, like in the story of Nessus, or their healing wisdom, like Chiron. They mostly were fathered by Ixion, who coupled with a cloud in the shape of Hera, and was punished, lashed to a wheel-cloud and condemned by Zeus to roll through the sky forevermore.

IV

Horses are a favorite creature of young girls, who dream of riding a horse through dark forests and across fields of flower toward an unknown dream of freedom. Girls dream of fleeing on horseback because they half-remember their old friend the unicorn, who guarded them in Medieval days gone by. Unicorns were hunted for their horns, and slain for their life-giving blood. The unicorn is sometimes Christ. Odin possessed an eight legged mare and the clouds were considered the steeds of the Valkyries. In Hindu myth, Varuna is the cosmic horse, born of the waters, while Kalki is the white horse, thought to be the last incarnation of Vishnu, who brings peace to the world at last. The Gandhavas were also centaurs, and like their Greek counterparts, these horse-men were symbols of fecundity, but were also skilled in the intellectual arts, music, and healing.

V

Leonora Carrington gave herself an enchanted horse daimon in both her writing and her painting,  and envisioned her lover, Max Ernst, as a horse, too. She refused to elaborate on the idea of the horse in any interview with art historians in her lifetime. Odilon Redon painted many Pegasuses. Maxfield Parrish rendered Chiron as Jason’s teacher, while Botticelli depicts Chiron as a fearful suppliant of Athena. Eugene Delacroix’s painting “Horse Frightened by a Storm” captures the visceral nature of equine terror, horse side-eye flashing as bright as lightning. Hilma af Klint illustrated a manual on the topic of equine surgery in 1900. Franz Marc’s horses were always blue and red, while Kandisky’s horses reared before a blue mountain in 1909. Giorgio de Chirico painted flamboyant horses beside the Aegean, and also painted the Dioscuri training their horses. Matisse painted his son Pierre holding a white wooden toy horse, and Yves Klein painted a horse in the fauve style in 1949. Dali’s horse was born from a car with a telephone in its mouth. Picasso painted harlequins on horseback, young boys leading horses across landscapes, horses slain by minotaurs, picadors astride horses too. Da Vinci’s studies of horses seem electric and alive, a marvel of motion. Leonor Fini photographed herself dressed as a unicorn, and Dora Maar’s horses were collaged chess pieces, sculptural forms in a diffuse composition. 

VI

Of late I have had two dreams of centaurs and one of horses. In the first, I discovered a centaur in my bed, his two forms separated—horse body disconnected from masculine torso. There was no gore, but a quiet stillness, a disconnect. In the second, I noticed centaurs were throwing trash into my yard, asking for my attention, menacing. In the third dream, I had to trap a horse in a metal gated ring. The horse was brown and ran nervously along the edge of the enclosure, but I was relieved when he was secured.

VII

I remember walking in a field as a child on a winter morning toward a group of horses, grazing on the frozen grass. Their breath rose from their nostrils like smoke from the faces of dragons.