#ashvamedha

[yudrilsthira]

🐎

doing an ashvamedha on this website now..... please reblog my horse to all corners of the web site so i can be King of the blogs

[sambhavami]

Women in Mahabharata - Brahmani [Ashvamedha, Krishna]

She called out her husband for not seeking any form of employment, and then her husband lectured her about meditation, told her that he's too scared of sin to actually do anything useful, then advised her to worship Narayana and finally convinced her to dismiss the entire world as mere illusion.

Her story was told by Krishna to Arjun as part of the Anu-geeta [when Arjun admitted to Krishna that he'd forgotten most of the previous geeta and Krishna, though angry, yapped a different set of philosophy at him].

This story spans almost 50 pages, and in the end, Arjun, impressed by the couple's prowess, asks Krishna if they can go meet these two, and then Krishna says that his heart is the brahmin and his intellect is the brahmani.

[arjuna-vallabha]

Maharaja Parikshit Ashvamedha yajna

[effondrementwest]

L'ASHVAMEDHA — LE SACRIFICE DU CHEVAL ET LE POUVOIR POLITIQUE DANS LE RIG VEDA

L’Ashvamedha — le sacrifice du cheval — est l’un des rituels les plus complexes et les plus commentés de toute la tradition védique. Dans les périodes ultérieures de l’histoire indienne, il a été récupéré et transformé en instrument de légitimation des conquêtes militaires — un cheval qu’on lâche dans les terres voisines, dont on suit la course, et dont le territoire parcouru devient celui du…

L'ASHVAMEDHA — LE SACRIFICE DU CHEVAL ET LE POUVOIR POLITIQUE DANS LE RIG VEDA

[effondrementwest]

THE ASHVAMEDHA — THE HORSE SACRIFICE AND POLITICAL POWER IN THE RIG VEDA

The Ashvamedha — the horse sacrifice — is one of the most complex and most commented rituals of the entire Vedic tradition. In later periods of Indian history, it was appropriated and transformed into an instrument for legitimizing military conquest — a horse released into neighbouring lands, whose course was followed, and whose territory became that of the king. But this is not what hymns 1.162…

THE ASHVAMEDHA — THE HORSE SACRIFICE AND POLITICAL POWER IN THE RIG VEDA

[house-carpenter]

I read Geraldus' "not to a prince but to a beast" [etc.] there as just a continuation of the authorial commentary. "The Celts may say this ritual confers kingship, but eww nope."

Yeah (I was actually thinking this while writing the post, but I ended up not mentioning it). He could be recording the Celt’s own perception of the ritual’s meaning, or he could just be telling us what he thinks of it—there’s no indication either way. The only other way of getting a deeper understanding of the ritual’s meaning would be to extrapolate what the Ashvamedha meant in the Vedic religion[1], and that’s not wholly reliable because there’s the possibility that the Vedic religion has innovated in at least some respects. What I’ve read about the Ashvamedha suggests that the bestiality part of it* was perceived as degrading by its participants. Though I haven’t read any detailed descriptions of the Ashvamedha, just the Wikipedia page and brief remarks about it in IE linguistics textbooks.

[1] Maybe the October Horse can also be used as a comparandum, but it has less in common with the Ashvamedha and the Irish ritual (it was just a horse sacrifice, had no bestiality element and doesn’t seem to have had the function of asserting kingship from my cursory reading of the Wikipedia article on it).

[2] I should make clear that this is just a part of it—it’s not just a bestiality ritual. Another spectacular part of the Ashvamedha is the prelude to the sacrifice: the sacrificial horse is allowed to wander freely, and warriors accompany it, and wherever it happens to wander, it implicitly asserts the king’s dominion over the land it treads, so that the inhabitants have to either challenge and defeat the warriors (I don’t know what exactly is supposed to happen if they win), or submit to the king. Only after this has gone on for a year does the sacrifice begin.

[house-carpenter]

What are your thoughts on the Ashvamedha?

It’s awesome! I mean, it’s kinda gross too, but…

And it’s especially cool that it seems to be reconstructable to the Proto-Indo-European religion. I’m still a little skeptical that it can be, although I find it more likely after recently reading about the Irish ceremony recorded by Geraldus Cambrensis:

There is in a northern and remote part of Ulster, among the Kenelcunil, a certain tribe which is wont to install a king over itself by an excessively savage and abominable ritual. In the presence of all the people of this land in one place, a white mare is brought into their midst. Thereupon he who is to be elevated, not to a prince but to a beast, not to a king but to an outlaw, steps forward in beastly fashion and exhibits his bestiality. Right thereafter the mare is killed and boiled piecemeal in water, and in the same water a bath is prepared for him. He gets into the bath and eats of the flesh that is brought to him, with his people standing around and sharing it with him. He also imbibes the broth in which he is bathed, not from any vessel, nor with his hand, but only with his mouth. When this is done right according to such unrighteous ritual, his rule and sovereignty are consecrated.[4]

As far as I can tell the only things this has in common with the Ashvamedha are that (a) a horse is sacrificed, (b) the sacrifice is carried out by the order of the monarch, and (c) the monarch, or the monarch’s consort, has to “exhibit [their] bestiality” (although in the Ashvamedha it’s after the horse’s death, and the queen could probably get away with just imitating the act). Neither (a) nor (b) seem like particularly unique features, and I have no idea about (c) (after all, cultures do all kinds of weird stuff—for all I know, ritual copulation with animals is cross-culturally common). But the combination of all three seems fairly convincing. And of course (c) might also be indirectly attested in the Hittite law code which makes a special exception for sex with horses in its laws against bestiality. (Although I should note that it doesn’t say it’s A-OK—it says it’s not punishable by death, unlike sex with cows, sheep, pigs or dogs[1], but it still says people who’ve had sex with horses should probably avoid approaching the king or trying to become a priest.)

One thing I find especially interesting about the Ashvamedha (perhaps we should calque the name into PIE as *eḱumeydʰos[2]) is the “status reversal” aspect of it. Apparently the chief queen in the Vedic ritual (the one who was supposed to copulate with the horse) was supposed to ritually plead for pity from the other queens, and the other queens were supposed to utter ritual obscenities at her during the act (so I’m guessing that pity was not granted). Similarly Geraldus talks about how the king was to be “to be elevated, not to a prince but to a beast, not to a king but to an outlaw”. I wonder if the Proto-Indo-Europeans did think of the sexual aspect of the ritual as shameful (as the Hittites evidently did, even if they didn’t punish people for it) and it was meant as a kind of ritual humiliation—maybe as a kind of King Canute-and-the-wave-style counterbalance to the general meaning of the ritual which is all about, “hey, look at me, I’m an almighty king who can conquer the world.”

[1] Unless the animal “leaps on [its victim] (in sexual excitement)”.

[2] As far as I know there is no IE etymology for Sanskrit medha- ‘sacrifice’; I’ve just naively projected the shape of medha- back into PIE as *meydʰos.