Horses
HORSES have played an essential role in the life, and therefore in the religion, of all the peoples who have had direct contact with them, particularly the Indo-Europeans, the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians, the Arabs, the Chinese, and the North American Indians. It is fair to say that horses have always captured the mythic imagination through their ability to symbolize a number of related phenomena: power, wealth, divinity, sexuality, flying, and the tension between taming and freedom.
Among the earliest evidence of the importance of the horse to human culture are the magnificent wall paintings in the caves of Lascaux, in southern France, dating from around 30,000 BCE. There the grouping of horses with other wild animals such as stags and bison suggests that they were probably animals that were hunted rather than harnessed or ridden. Even so, it has been proposed that certain structures depicted on the walls at Lascaux represent corrals, implying that some sort of taming may already have begun. André Leroi-Gourhan has argued that the horse is part of the male half of a general sexual bipartition in the animal symbolism at Lascaux. If this is so, there is very early evidence indeed of the horse in association with both taming and sexuality, perhaps even with the combined concept of the taming of sexuality, which is a dominant theme in the Indo-European religious symbolism of the horse.
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