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eigh  n.  1. the horse as sacred being  2. the rune eoh  3. (liturgical) the steed (personifier) of a god

"The god rides the man as meaning rides the rune."

They say that in the Old Language of the Witches, every word meant three things: something good, something bad, and something to do with a horse.

In those days, we were a Horse People.

We'd been a Horse People since ever we first rode out of the East; indeed, they say that it was we who first tamed them. Put differently, it is to us that the Horned first gave horses, back in the dawn of days.

(So let it never be said, when the young bucks of our tribe ride out horse-reaving, that they are stealing horses. The Horned gave horses to us. Everyone knows that you can't steal what's already yours.)

So important were horses to our world that we named a rune for one: eoh, the great life of the gods, the movement of the cosmos.

New ways came. We settled. From a People of the Horse, we became a People of Cattle. The joke then became “...and something to do with a cow.”

We lost the old word eoh—and much else—but if it had (mutatis mutandis) survived in continuous use, we would today say eigh (rhymes with hay; cp. neigh).

Among us today, as it did to the ancestors, eigh still means “horse,” but a horse in its intrinsic sanctity.

Still it names the horse-rune, eigh.

Also it names the steed of the god, the priest that the Horned rides in ritual: for, as they say, the god rides the man as meaning rides the rune.

An Army of One

The major problem in the US these days in many ways parallels the paradox at the heart of the pagan community: just how does a collectivity of self-centered, radically-individual individualists actually manage to hold itself together?

Alas: without some sense of overarching, shared identity, it usually doesn't.

Reductionisms

With Pride Month now in rearview, I confess myself, frankly, a little sick of flags.

The My-Own-Very-Special-Identity-of-the-Week flags that sprang up all over the neighborhood in the course thereof remind me in many ways of that silly hanky code that someone concocted during the oh-so-cruise-y pre-AIDS 70s, the color and placement of the hank telling the viewer exactly what permutation of sex you were looking for. I'll spare you the specifics.

Never bothered to learn the hank-code myself, just as I've never bothered to learn (or even closely read) the list of the supposed 72 (!) different gender identities either. (Sorry, waste of time and brain-space, both.) Ye gods: no wonder people vote Republican.

Really: just how self-absorbed, privileged, and entitled are we? Meanwhile, in Gaza, children starve to death.

Flags, flags, flags. Me, me, me.

Welcome to the Great Splintering: the Way of Atomization.

Earth-Horse, Moon-Horse

So I've commissioned my own flag.

 Match wits with Cattubuttas the druid.

In the days of king Cú Roí, Cattubuttas the druid—said to be the wisest druid in Ireland, though he had not then a single gray hair in his beard—sat in a grove with his students, and this is what he said.

“As to foods, my children,” he told them, “the gods have denied us nothing, not even the flesh of the fleet-footed horse, noblest of animals.

“But know this also,” he added, raising a finger of admonishment: “that should it so happen that you do eat of horsemeat, it is thereafter geis upon you to enter into a chariot for the span of some twenty-seven days; for twenty-seven days thereafter, you may not enter one.

“Thrice nine days,” he told them again. “Remember it well, my warriors.”

So spoke Cattubuttas the druid to the young warriors in the days of Cú Roí the king.

And indeed, we still remember.

So: why 27?

In the martial society of Iron Age Ireland, such a prohibition—its memory preserved like a leaf in amber in Old Irish literature—would indeed lay heavy upon a warrior; it would, in effect, ban him from the field of battle for nearly a month's time.

The logic of the prohibition is not difficult to follow: it is, in effect, a breach of hospitality. Why, though, one wonders, specifically a period of twenty-seven days rather than, say, a full lunar month?

If Cattubuttas the wise, cat of battle, in his wisdom, knew, I for one do not.

Here's my guess, though: that it's numeric.

Sleipnir is Odin's eight legged horse. The depiction of Sleipnir in art as having eight legs is also obviously a depiction of a regular four legged horse running very fast. He runs so fast his legs blur and you see them in all positions at once.

Sleipnir does not have a human-like form and does not speak in human-like words, but he is still a demigod with his own will. He doesn’t let just anyone ride him. In the Fireverse he lives in a stable as befits his form as a horse, but all the buildings in the Fireverse are metaphorical, made to appear the way they do so a human being can understand the story. The reality of the gods' world might have no relation to how it appears to my human mind.

In the court of the royal dún was found one morning a strange stallion, known to none. He was a well-made beast, and beautiful, but strangely-marked, white with red ears, like the cattle of the sidhe. But he laid back his red ears and bared his teeth, if any dared approach him.

Only for young Govan, of all the king's warriors, would he stand still.

So Govan mounted the horse, saying, Take me where you will.

The gates were opened, and they left the dún. To a green hill the strange horse bore him, and as they approached it, the hill opened, and they entered.

Govan found himself in a high and mighty hall, filled with fair people in many-colored clothing, and in the high seat a lordly woman, fairest of them all.

Welcome, son of Gawan, she said, so he dismounted and stood before her.

In this season of the ancestors, I remember Horse and Hench, the legendary brothers (some would say, lovers) who led their people to the Promised Land.

England, that is.

You may, perhaps, know them as Horsa and Hengist, as they would have been called in their own day: literally “horse” and “stallion.” Hench is a worn-down form of hengist: a henchman was originally a hengist-man, literally a horse (or stallion)-man: i.e. a squire or groom.

Some would claim them as historic figures. J. R. R. Tolkien—himself a Hwiccan lad— certainly thought so. But of course it's not that simple.

Inspired by the May traditions of Padstow, Cornwall, Dave Webber's May Song is a fine modern Beltane song in traditional idiom, heard here in a rousing performance by Magpie Lane.

The traditional May Day Hobby Horse's dance of sex, death, and resurrection has no known historical connection with the widespread and deeply sacred horse-sacrifices of the ancient Indo-European world.

None whatsoever.