Marcello Barison

“AVIS, JASMIN VARNĀ NA Ā AST, DADARKA AKVAMS” MOUNTED INDO-EUROPEAN ARMY

In this essay, Marcello Barison analyzes the symbolic centrality of the horse in the Indo-European narrative by referring not only to the connection of the animal with the military function usually ascribed to it but also to its relevance in the spheres of religious activities and productive labor. The motive of the horse is taken as a transhistorical mythologem, the dynamics of which structures different cultural configurations and triggers a deep philosophical reflection on questions like existence, guilt and sacrifice, as well as the meaning, the scope and the destiny of symbols in human history.

The aśvamedha is everything.
Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa

THEME

“Avis, jasmin varnā na ā ast, dadarka akvams […]” – “[Ein] schaf, [auf] welchem wolle nicht war (ein geschorenes schaf) sah rosse […]” – “A shorn sheep saw horses […]”: so begins the ‘ancient fable’ invented by August Schleicher (1868), corrected by Hermann Hirt (1939) in “Owis, jesmin wьlənā ne ēst, dedork’e ek’wons [. ]” and then again revised by Lehmann and
Zgusta in ’79: “Gʷərēi owis, kʷesjo wl̥ hnā ne ēst, eḱwōns espeḱet […].”¹

The first Indo-European word, though wholly hypothetical, tells of a sheep and three horses: one pulls the chariot, the second carries a large load, and the third a man. Each of these terms—the sheep therefore the farming, the chariot as a technology of warfare and trans- portation, the horse as an animal at once military and symbolic—is a milestone element in Indo-European culture. To articulate a reflection on even this first line of our civilization’s narrative would allow us to tackle some decisive features of its simultaneously metaphysical and historical-political framework.

That the first line may then turn out to be essential for an understanding of even the last one, which is still far from being written, may apply principally to the subtle suggestion we intend to put in the ear of the reader, disquieted—but perhaps also legitimized—by the fact that in a Ridley Scott film that nevertheless has the merit of combining dawn and futurism, the algid Promethean android played by an impassive Fassbender, instead of proposing a variant of the abused refrain “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. ,” with a fantasy-philological gesture starts educating a computer straight off with the proto-Indo-European tale of the sheep, the chariot and the horses.

Here we will leave the sheep aside, to the chariot we will return later, while in the mean- time, in the preliminary warm-up phase, we will interrogate the horse to ask what its role is in defining the Indo-European paradigm. Will this be done to sound out the ‘primordial’, or “zu Gunsten einer kommenden Zeit”—“for the sake of a time to come”?² It is feared that this question will only be answered by archaeologists for whom we too will sooner or later become an indecipherable relic of the past.

Let us finally premise, to set the record straight as of now, that we will conclude in India with the Sun Temple of Konark, mentioning its colossal chariot structure drawn by the seven horses of Sūrya as an example of Nachleben, i.e., literally, of afterlife—configuring re-emergence

in expressed form—of the mythomorphism of the horse, saying that we employ this term to define the iconographic Nachleben of a specific mythologem, thus uniting in one the ‘Warburg- method’ and Kerényi’s fundamental insight. (Allowing for a somewhat allusive simplification, one could summarize the operation with the following ‘equation’: Morphism = Pathosformel – Pathos.)

As the Hungarian scholar explains in his Prolegomena, the becoming of mythical forms is equated with “[…] eine alte, überlieferte Stoffmasse, enthalten in bekannten und doch nicht jede weitere Gestaltung ausschließenden Erzählungen […]”.³ He then resorts to the term mytho- logem to refer to such a mass, concluding that “die Mythologie ist die Bewegung dieser Materie: etwas Festes und zugleich doch Bewegliches, Stoffliches und doch nicht Statisches, sondern Verwandlungsfähiges”.⁴

Mythomorphism will be nothing more than the surviving configuration by means of which the mythologem of the horse resurfaces, re-presenting itself historically in image.

The mythologem of the horse, we shall see, acts at different levels and in different historical epochs of the development of the Indo-European paradigm. Whenever it appears, it carries a mythosymbolic content composed) of a certain ‘amount’ of mythic material. The form in which this material recurs, however, while it varies from time to time, is likewise always a trans-formed form of the same icon, that, precisely, of the horse. In other words: the same mythical material, unitary as to the mythologem, must reappear in a different form by transferring its own ‘cultural’ survival into the image. What we call mythomorphism will thus be nothing more than the surviving configuration by means of which the same mythologem resurfaces, re-presenting itself historically as an image.

Let us then apply what has been said about the mythomorphism of the horse.

TRIFUNCTIONAL TRANSVERSALITY OF THE HORSE

We will start with a page by Harald Haarmann, who in his Auf den Spuren der Indoeu- ropäer summarizes with particular poignancy and conciseness the famous tripartite scheme elaborated by Georges Dumézil:

» sovereignty, order, and leadership due by right (personified by a priestly-type upper class, whose representatives enjoy both religious-ritual and legal or jurisdictional authority).
The deities paired with this social stratum mostly appear in pairs and represent the duality: religious authority/legal order (for example, the Indian pair formed by the gods Váruņa and Mithras, or the Norse deities Odin and Týr). “In the intermediate Vedic period, the horse was the preferred animal in the most important ritual sacrifices of kings.”⁵ […].

» protection of the community (represented by an aristocratic warrior class). The training of warriors responded to the need to defend the community from external aggressions
[…] The polarity of the two defensive and aggressive aspects in the ‘mission’ of a military élite is reflected in the functions of the Indo-European gods of war (Indra, Mars, Thor). Horses and bulls were offered in sacrifice to the war gods;

» productivity and protection of sources of economic subsistence (entrusted to shepherds and farmers). In mythology this social category is related to twin deities of both sexes, in which a brother is associated with horses. In India, for example, there are the Ashvins, a pair of divine twins on horseback, together with their sister Sarasvatī. They can be compared to the Greek Dioscuri, the twins Castor and Pollux with their sister Helen, who in some traditions were born from a single twin egg. Similarly, in Norse mythology appear the twins Freia and Freyr with their respective father Nyörðr; Freyr and Nyörðr are both closely related to horses.⁶

Note at the outset (this is quite peculiar), that only one animal appears in the description of all three ‘functions’: the horse. Let us therefore proceed with a kind of ‘sifting through’ of the quoted text since each point retains on the surface that which is related to our ‘leading animal’. Thus, the reformulation is somewhat deepened:

» Sovereignty is both religious and legal in order. The ruler is the supreme male priestly figure and the investiture that gives him power is theological in nature. Foundation and
theological legality of royal power means: the ruler receives power by direct attribution/ descendance from a supreme transcendent principle of solar/celestial character: Mithra/ Varuṇa⁷ (idem for its variations: Ahura (Mazdā) and Uranus). It is a paradigm destined to endure and recur until the more accomplished outcome of the Hobbesian “mortal God” and the ‘solarness’ of seventeenth-century absolutism. In the Vedic world, this theologi- cal-political plexus is celebrated through the most important of sacred rituals: the aśva- medha, the sacrifice of the horse, which thus embodies the symbolic center of royal power of Uranian emanation.

» The warrior function, Haarmann says, is also celebrated with the sacrificial offering of the horse (and the bull, another animal of eminent symbolic value, which we cannot dwell
upon here, however). Not mentioned, but implied, is the role of the horse in defining Indo-European military technology, which has cavalry and the war chariot as two constituent elements. To introductively specify the military function of the horse suffice the statements with which Gimbutas characterizes the Neolithic Kurgan culture that emerged from the Volga Basin, which, “with the domesticated horse and lethal weapons,” proceeded to invade ancient Europe. Its “basic peculiarities” were “patriarchy; patriline- arity; small-scale agriculture and animal husbandry, including the domestication of the horse not later than the 6th millennium; the eminent place of the horse in the cult; and, of great importance, armaments—bow and arrow, spear, and dagger).”⁸

» The ‘third state’ is that constituted by ‘producers’ and which, as is well known, finds its strictest formulation in the Platonic model of the Republic. Production is declined here in
agricultural terms and refers, thus Haarmann, to the pairs of divine twins associated— which is for us decisive—with the horse. In what follows, we will not exhaust this track, which would call into question concepts of very wide scope, beginning with the fertility of the female figures associated with the twin pair. We therefore limit ourselves to noting the absolute centrality of the horse even at this level of the functional tripartition.
With a gesture of ‘structural synthesis,’ let us now try to summarize the three points just described by focusing only on the role that, in each of them, is fulfilled by the horse.

First function
– Legitimacy and sacredness
– Kings and priests
– Potestas/Imperium
– Horse as a symbol of sovereignty

Second function
– Militarism
– Warriors
– Bellum
– Horse as a military technique

Third function
– Agriculture and manufacturing
– Manufacturers
– Labor
– Horse as productive masculinity

The horse thus appears as an element that cuts across all three functions, which unequiv- ocally demonstrates its symbolic centrality. If there is one animal figure capable of central- izing on itself the articulation of Indo-European ideology—theological-political, military and productive—this is undoubtedly the horse.

A clarification should be made, however, which concerns, even in reading the diagram, the relationship between the second and third functions and the role of the horse in this rela- tionship. The ambiguity lies in the fact that its relationship to agricultural production is in many ways enigmatic and not unambiguously structured, as is the case with the ox. On the one hand, the horse appears linked to the ‘spirit of grain’, as in Celtic mythology—fundamental, in this regard, is the Goddess Epona, Goddess of horses and dispenser of fertility, all characters that connect her, however, to a cult of pre-Indo-European origin, where, to be precise, the horse is not yet enlisted in the military ranks.⁹ On the other hand, the ambivalent role of the horse is also signaled in the other sacrificial rite that, along with the Irish one Giraldus Cambrensis recounts in Topographia Hibernica,¹⁰ most closely resembles the Vedic aśvamedha: the Roman october equus, which Dumézil discusses extensively.¹¹

The fact that the sacrifice of the horse essentially celebrates warrior power does not prevent it from performing, as a derivative effect, a function of protecting the harvest, since it is precisely war that, by protecting the borders, creates the conditions so that the ‘homeland soil’ can be transformed into a source of sustenance.

He it is, polemically discussing the theses of Herbert Jennings Rose,¹² who considers the agrarian significance of the practice, but only to demonstrate its secondary nature, which can be explained by the following remark: “S’il s’était agi […] d’un sacrifice offert à une divinité de la fécondité en remerciement de la génération, de la croissance physiologique (pariendis) de la moisson, on eût immolé un bovin, symbole di travail de la terre; mais comme il s’agit de reconnaître le service guerrier (bello) qui a écarté des champs l’armée ennemie ou les pillards, sans compter les mauvais Esprits, morbos uisos inuisosque, comme dira un autre rituel, c’est un cheval, symbole de la guerre, le πολεμιστής de Polybe, qu’on sacrifie.”¹³ The fact that the sacrifice of the horse essentially celebrates warrior power, does not prevent it from performing, as a derivative effect, a function of protecting the harvest, since it is precisely war that, by protecting the borders, creates the conditions so that the ‘home- land soil’ can be transformed into a source of sustenance (hence, again according to Dumézil, the apparent ambiguity of Mars,¹⁴ who remains an essentially warrior deity even when, but precisely as a warrior, he militarily watches over and protects the harvest).

To scrutinize these hypotheses in an accomplished manner would require an analyt- ical deployment that it is impossible for us to mobilize here, although these few hints may suffice to show the entire problematic nature of the horse’s relationship to the second and third functions, regardless of whether, as we also believe, its action qualifies first as military and only subsequently as agricultural. Only by way of hypothesis—conjecture that, to tell the truth, already hovers in our outline—would we take the liberty of suggesting: what if the role of the horse in the third and final level did not concern the agricultural symbolism of produc- tion, but that of the producers, understood as the male labor force? It would then be a matter of attempting an equine gender genealogy of ‘productive forces’, inviting a remaking on an archeo-mythological basis of the ‘critique of political economy’ (Marx rethinking his own cate- gories, ‘reformulating’ them with Dumézil and Gimbutas…).

While unable to unravel the intricacies of these assessments, it is worth reporting an insightful observation from the monumental work of Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Prince, which certifies their compossibility:

“There are, however, other specifically Roman issues at stake—as we can see clearly in the (contested) division between military and agricultural festivals. Our own system of classi- fication rigidly separates those two areas of activity. But, as we have seen, in early Rome agriculture and military activity were closely bound up, in the sense that the Roman farmer was also a soldier […] In the case of the October Horse, for example, we should not be trying to decide whether it is either a military, or an agricultural festival; but see it rather as one of the ways in which the convergence of farming and warfare (or more accurately of farmers and fighters) might be expressed.”¹⁵

Having clarified the ‘phenomenon of interference’ between the role of the horse in the second and third functions, let us then dwell briefly on the former and then return to focus on the latter singularly taken, where, applied to Konark’s colossal chariot, it exhibits in a single object the iconological ‘target’ with respect to which we are meanwhile endeavoring to adjust our aim.

AŚVAMEDHA

In two eminent pathways of the Opera senza nome in which, more than in others, he has decided to twist his lancet into Vedic wisdom, the most ritualistic of civilizations, “where the invisible prevailed over the visible”, Roberto Calasso devotes pages of disconcerting perspi- cuitas “to the most imposing sacrifice—the ‘horse sacrifice,’ aśvamedha—which involves the participation of hundreds and hundreds of men and animals.”¹⁶

Innumerable reconstructions have been provided of the aśvamedha, fairly in agreement as to the main stages of liturgical performance,¹⁷ which must, however, be framed within the broader framework—perhaps even coinciding with the very limits of cosmic experience— defined by the act of sacrifice in the Vedic universe.¹⁸

In a nutshell, and framing the discourse, so to speak, into a ‘circumstantial’ consideration, the aśvamedha is the ritual that, officiated by a king, is associated with the generation of his dynastic descendants and, in some interpretations, also with the annexation of new territories to the kingdom, thus with the definition and protection of borders. In the rite, which lasted three days and involved a staggering number of animal victims¹⁹—and a procession of priests, the ruler’s favorite (vāvātā), a virgin, a hundred princesses and a host of other ‘extras’ in a series of practices calibrated with ruthless precision—a sacred stallion, which is an expression of the Sun²⁰ and military power (kṣatra, which in Sanskrit also means the ruling military caste; kṣatriya, on the other hand, is the name of both a member of that caste and the tawny-haired horse), is killed so that its power can be inherited by the ruler who, having remained as chaste as the animal for an entire year, must now give birth to a strong and valiant offspring.

The male political authority of royal power, its military strength and solar symbolism are thus mythically unified in the figure of the horse. Overseeing the ritual is Prajāpati, the Progenitor, not merely the ‘dedicatee’ of the sacrifice but the divine equivalent of what it actu- alizes.²¹ In the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa Prajāpati is made at once to coincide with the totality of what is, with the year in which the cycle of preparation for the sacrifice is accomplished, with all the animals involved in the sacrifice, and with the sacrifice itself: “Prajāpati is the sacrifice” (14, 3, 2). (The profound meaning of this stunning series of identities constitutes—in this as in all the other invocations in which it is similarly uttered—the very core of the supreme Hindu tautology, its bursting and transversal pervasiveness, at once dissolving and unifying, so far removed from what modern man is willing to understand.)

Evidently, then, on this side of the political significance related to royal investiture and the renewal of its power in terms of legitimacy, descent and conquest, aśvamedha calls into question something far deeper and more constitutive, concerning the status of reality and its original institution. And it is precisely on this point that Calasso’s analysis marks a clear differ- ence, detaches the ‘group’ of δόξαι and proceeds alone into uncharted territory. Thus, in Ardor:

“What is the horse? An eye of Prajāpati, which had swelled and then detached. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa does not linger for a moment on this statement (nothing is strange to the Vedic ritu- alist), indeed it immediately goes on to draw far-reaching consequences from it: “The eye of Prajāpati swelled up; it detached: from it was produced the horse; and inasmuch as it swelled up (aśvayat), that is the origin of the horse (aśva). By means of the sacrifice of the horse the gods rearranged it [the eye] in its place; and verily he who celebrates the sacrifice of the horse makes Prajāpati complete, and becomes complete himself; and this indeed is the expiation for everything, the remedy for everything. With it the gods overcame all evil, even the killing of a brahman they overcame with it; and he who celebrates the horse sacrifice overcomes all evil, overcomes the killing of a brahman.”²²

And in Ka, where an entire chapter is woven around aśvamedha,²³ in an almost overlap- ping way:
“Everything begins, everything ends with the eye, in the eye. In the beginning Prajāpati saw the horse sacrifice. He saw it as one sees an animal passing in front of us. But what was the horse? Prajāpati’s eye.

This had happened: Prajāpati looked and wished, into emptiness. His left eye began to swell (aśvayat). His left eye fell to the ground. Prajāpati looked at his swollen, detached eye, which had fallen into the dust, and saw that it was the horse (aśva). He thought then that first of all he would have liked to become whole again, recover the eye. At that moment he saw the sacrifice, saw the white horse with black patches passing by, mane in the wind. He knew that he would kill it, that he would incise the horse’s flesh on its left flank so that its left eye would return to the socket of the orbit, where it used to be. But this time with the almost impercep- tible mark of a suture. That scar would be the sign of sacrifice, of life passing away.”²⁴

What is the meaning of the reported passages? What kind of operation is Calasso attempting by referring to the relationship of identity and sacrificial tearing between the Progenitor and the horse?

The eye where everything begins and ends is that of reflection. Calasso—and this is the focus of his Work, what he identifies with the mystery of the mind—intends to pose in Vedic terms the question about the essence of Nachdenken.

For there to be conscious reflection, there must be given, for the purpose of thinking, an object on which to reflect, toward which the act of thinking is projected and which, once achieved, can reverberate cognitively on what the thought arose from. All Western noetic reflection, from Plato to Hegel, via Descartes and Kant to Husserl, merely interrogates the form of this relationship. The existence of which, however, confronts a tremendous evidence: the act of thinking something, that is, the fact that, for the thinking, a content of thinking is given, provides for the being of a separation, that between what-is-thought and the thinking. What- is-thought, which is also thought by the thinking, and therefore in a certain respect inevitably contained in it, cannot be, at least immediately, the same thing as thinking. To heal this differ- ence is the deepest task of all knowing. If ‘healing’ fails, no knowledge—and, consequently, no concrete experience—can be given. The theoretical history of the West is the attempt, carried out at different levels and with a capacity for invention that is sometimes astounding, to conceive analytically a set of logical-metaphysical structures capable of justifying and thus producing scientifi- cally—thus objectively—the mutual and coherent integration of thinking and thought. Calasso, however, looks elsewhere. His is a Vedic gaze and moves from another and in some ways complementary assump- tion. Knowledge, to be such, must be complete, that is, integral, i.e. absolute. The formula of this intuition is a religious evidence and could perhaps be adduced as proof of the ‘existence of God’ (therefore this warning applies here too: He who has ears to hear, let him hear): if one does not know everything, it is impossible to know even something.

Assuming that the horse as object of thought emanates from the principle of thought, i.e. the Progenitor, separateness, whereby the object is seen as external, negates the foundation of knowledge and experience, that is, the absolute unity of thinking and thought, and therefore exists as guilt—the most execrable guilt of not knowing and not being.

According to this perspective, there does not exist, nor has there ‘ever’ existed, a thinking and a to-be-thought that is thinkable and therefore only potentially thought, but the to-be- thought, which cannot have participial form but must maintain the infinitive form of being- thought, exists and can exist only as an internal emanation generated at the very act of thinking. The to-be-thought as being-thought emanates from thought as intrinsic to its reality—not, therefore, to its ‘ideality,’ a dutiful specification because one would otherwise misrepresent the profound meaning of this approach, where the being of the Progenitor, thus the supreme act of its being-and-generating incessantly within itself, is immediately identical to the universal form of the world, thus to the concreteness of real configurations necessarily taken in unity. Not a thought that posits the world, then, but the thought that, as such, is world. The conse- quences of this conception, and an adequate discussion of it, would take us very far. Without losing sight of our own scope, let us instead, more diligently, try to understand how it intersects the ‘horse question’.

Excerpts from Calasso provide sufficiently insightful elements in this regard. Assuming that the object of thought, the horse, emanates from the principle of thought, the Progenitor, separateness, whereby the object is seen as external, negates the foundation of knowledge and experience, that is, the absolute unity of thinking and thought, and therefore exists as guilt—the most execrable guilt: of not knowing and not being. In language that borders on Orphic doctrine, we might say that the existence of things as separate from the principle is the supreme ontological guilt.

Separateness—thus any existence experienced as a form in its own right, having its own apparent degree of ontic independence—is as such a violation of absoluteness. The very hypnotic existence of forms is a guilty violation. To heal this violation, thus to justify its experience, we shall say, ex parte subjecti, and at the same time to restore the violated integrity, sacrifice is necessary. It is, at bottom, nothing more than the ‘reversive’ act that has to be undergone in order to justify the ‘factum’ as a participial form of existing. Exist- ence itself, in order for its manifestation to be legitimate and thus to be said to be concrete, to be enacted and truly experienced, must constantly reintegrate itself into the Wholeness that, in order to be, it has violated. Remembrance and reaffirmation of the fact that it actually exists only within that Wholeness is the sacrifice by which it must ceaselessly reintegrate itself into that.

Existence itself, in order for its manifestation to be legitimate and thus to be said to be concrete, to be enacted and truly experienced, must constantly reintegrate itself into the Wholeness that, in order to be, it has violated. Remembrance and reaffirmation of the fact that it actually exists only within that Wholeness is the sacrifice by which it must ceaselessly reintegrate itself into that.

To exist in separateness is in itself a violation that must be ritually restored by the reconversion ad Unum effected by the sacrifice that restores the world into Prajāpati, that rein- tegrates the world into Prajāpati, that reincorporates the horse into Prajāpati, thus the thought into the constituent thinking that emanated and fulfilled it. The sacred text says that Prajāpati “swelled (aśvayat)” into “horse (aśva)”. Since the eye, i.e., the world mirrored as an ‘object,’ is thus a swelling of Prajāpati from Himself everted and finally detached, the sacrifice that annihilates this reflection, the apparent independence of the world as a separate manifestation, i.e., the visible and seen form of the horse, will achieve the outcome of ‘resufflating’ the separate back into the breath that genetically vivified it.

The last word on the essence of things is not and can never be ‘political’. With his simultaneously premonitory and regressive elucu- brations, Calasso thus has the merit of exhibiting how this swirling insistence on the horse ulti- mately leads not only to the ‘political’, but to the constitutive center of the relationship between being and thinking, between thought and experience. The invisible Vedic wisdom prescribes the world under the sign of the horse.

All that will remain of it, etching itself into the background of the visible, is a scar, that of the wounded God-world enabled to return to itself, the one inflicted by the knife that performed the sacrifice and in so doing created the human time that apparently passes and consumes. The act that kills knows that it is moved by the God. In the moment it sinks, the hand that marks the victim experiences its own unity with the Progenitor, it annihilates itself in the Progenitor since He, who heals the violation of the sacrifice, is the sacrifice itself. “Prajāpati is the sacrifice” and the sacrifice is the aśvamedha. But never forgetting that “the aśvamedha is everything.”

THE SOLAR CHARIOT

That [sun] burning up there is the aśvamedha.
Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad

In Valéry’s famous dialogue, Eupalinos confides to Phaedrus, “Ce temple délicat, nul ne le sait, est l’image mathématique d’une fille de Corinthe, que j’ai heureusement aimée.”²⁵ He alludes to a miraculous transposition: the matrix of something that had existed in organic form and action is re-acted in the marble of the temple. If this circumstance can occur, who can reject as impossible the idea that an architecture can be the synthetic material expression of what unfolds in an Indo-European treatise? How, in other words, does the mythomorphism of the horse find rigorous conformation and architectural confirmation?

At Konark,²⁶ in Orissa, there is an absolutely peculiar temple because, like the one located at Hampi and dedicated to Garuḍa, the divine progenitor of birds, it architecturally replicates the form of a colossal chariot. Garuḍa, as his vehicle (vāhana), is the one who transports Viṣṇu in his solar aspect; similarly, the temple at Konark is known as the Temple of the Sun since it is dedi- cated to Sūrya, a deity who, within the Indo-European equivalences system, corresponds, as has been shown by several parties,²⁷ to the Greek Apollo.
Even in the Indian context, the chariot is a solar symbol par excellence. The connection is primarily figural, since the spokes of the wheels compositionally recall a stylization of the rays emanating from the star. As Miranda Green duly notes in a contribution that is decisive for us:

“In the image of the wheel, the spokes, which may face inward or outward, correspond to those of the sun and the rim to the solar corona. This solar symbol is especially typical of late prehistoric art from European regions within the temperate belt. From the beginning of the first millennium B.C., when the chariot became widespread in central and western Europe, the wheel was used to repre- sent the sun, as witnessed by authors of the classical world […] For Greeks and Romans the sun was in perpetual motion, above the earth during the day and in the underworld during the night. The movement and circular shape of the wheel thus made it a perfect solar symbol.”²⁸

To Miranda Green we likewise owe a very accurate reconstruction of the primary role played by the Sun in ancient Celtic culture; in fact, in her study, and not coincidentally, the solar symbol of the chariot is repeatedly recalled (the Danish find of the Trundholm bronze disk, placed on a horse-drawn chariot, is particularly important in this regard).²⁹

There are, however, differing opinions as to whether the Sun is a central element in all Indo-Eu- ropean theology. Minimizing the ‘conflict of interpretations’, suffice it to say that in the paragraphs of his Treatise devoted to The Sun and Solar Cults, even Mircea Eliade, following in the footsteps of Adoph Bastian and Frazer, takes care to point out that the symbolism of the Sun, contrary to what one would be led to believe, is far from universally widespread (it would in fact be almost entirely absent in Africa—except, of course, for Egyptian culture—Australia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and Indonesia). It would thus be a constitutive recurrence only for some Mesoamerican civilizations, above all the Incaic and Aztec, and in the Asian and Archaic European contexts. It is difficult, however, to generalize its meaning, so much so that—the Romanian scholar notes not without a vein of controversy—“le soleil a fini par devenir un des lieux communs de l’‘expérience religieuse indistincte’ dans la mesure même où le symbolisme solaire s’est vu réduit à n’être qu’un outillage banal d’automatismes et de clichés.”³⁰ In the classical sphere, then, Eliade tends to decisively downplay the importance of solar symbolism, openly arguing that “en Grèce et en Italie, le Soleil n’a occupé dans le culte qu’une place de tout deuxième plan. À Rome, le culte solaire a été introduit sous l’empire par la voie des gnoses orientales et s’il y est développé d’une manière pour ainsi dire extérieure et artificielle, à la faveur du culte des empereurs.”³¹ Similarly in India where Sūrya, the Vedic god of the Sun, is a figure “de deuxième catégorie” who “jamais […] ne s’élève à une condition prééminente.”³²

Also on the same wavelength is a page by Bernard Sergent, a controversial but undoubt- edly first-rate figure whose theses deserve in our opinion the most serious consideration, and who writes in this regard:
“Such a conception of the sun should be linked back to the position occupied by the diurnal star (and the other stars) within Indo-European theologies. In Greece, Helios is an absolutely secondary god, external to the group of the twelve Olympian gods. If he is depicted often enough, he is rarely the object of a cult; not very consistent on the theological level, in some conceptions he is the eye of Zeus or the image of Apollo. In India an identical phenomenon occurs: Sūrya, the Sun, is a second-rate god, subordinate to the other deva, and the Vedas know of but one or two myths concerning him. Among the Germans, the sun, although depicted in famous images dating back to the Nordic Bronze Age, is a very drab theological figure. Identical situation in the Celtic world, in which, if literary allusions to the sun, or depictions of the star (wheels, crosses, swastikas, etc.) are frequent, in vain one would look in the Celtic pantheon for the god, or rather, the sun goddess. Sol is a very evanescent Roman god. The only exception in the Indo-European world is the Great Goddess of Arinna, the Sun goddess— who, however, bears a Hatti name, Wurusemu, and therefore pre-Indo-European. In several cultures, the Sun is a figure connected with the Indo-European ‘third function’: in Rome, for example, she was part of the deities introduced by the Sabine king Titus Tatius; in several Greek cities Helios is connected with Pan, Demeter, Aphrodite, and Apollo the healer; and in Scandinavia, as in Rome, he was part, along with the Moon, of the retinue of a more important third-function deity.”³³

Sergent’s piece has the advantage of effectively and succinctly enucleating all the points we would like to contradict.

First of all, he limits the discussion of the Sun only to the hierophanies in which the solar symbol acts directly as a ‘protagonist’. This approach is, however, certainly questionable, for in many cases the Sun appears as an associated symbol, as in the case of the link with Apollo, which has the effect of placing the Sun at the very center of the Greek pantheon, in a position that is anything but marginal (not exactly minor also is the link with Aphrodite, Demeter and Pan—the first two, moreover, like Apollo, deities belonging to the Olympian δωδεκάθεον—on the basis of which it is not clear how the author can speak of a cult that is “not very consistent on the theological level”).

While for the Celtic world the already-mentioned—and in our opinion faultless—anal- yses of Miranda Green apply, on the Indian context we will say something shortly. Indeed, I am of the opinion—and the case of the Konark Temple must finally make this clear—that in both cases such a radical downsizing of the solar symbol—in accordance with a skepticism surpris- ingly anticipated even by Eliade—really turns out to be an unworkable option.

In the ancient world, moreover, mythical symbolism and philosophical allegory cannot be distinguished at all, and in the most impressive mythopolitical conception of the Greek world, the one presented in the Platonic Republic, the Sun appears precisely in the form of the supreme principle which, situated at the summit of the cognitive hierarchy, is also the purest object of contemplation that, philosophically achieved, determines the political superiority of the ‘wise men’ in charge of the government of the polis. It is thereby implicitly asserted that the Sun is an element that unifies political sovereignty and priestly power:³⁴ philosophers are in fact for Plato true priests of the solar cult, in a model where knowledge of the divine and political authority comes to complete identification. It is thus not at all a question of third function, as Sergent argues! At the apex of the Greek world, the Sun evidently represents the first of the functions defined by Dumézil, marking royal and priestly sovereignty. It enshrines, in mythical terms, the theological unity of wisdom and power, and is proof that, as to the original foundation of the Indo-European form of the political, the problem cannot be posed in merely theological terms, but must be carefully rethought on a mythical basis—and in this George Dumézil’s lesson turns out to be truly revolutionary and indispensable.

Solar is thus the chariot of Apollo, with which the Platonic one recounted in the Phaedrus overlaps,³⁵ but also, in the Indian context, that of Sūrya, which serves a similar function³⁶ and of which the Sun Temple at Konark is an eminent architectural example.³⁷

Its construction during the 13th century is attributed to the ruler Narasingha Deva I of the Eastern Ganga dynasty.
We had said, following the method suggested by Eupalinos, that we wanted to read in its structure the articulation of the Indo-European paradigm. Well, there is certainly no shortage of elements to that effect: seven, like the seven metrical types of Sanskrit prosody, are the horses that pull it, twenty-four the carved wheels, so that each symmetrical pair corresponds to a month of the Hindu calendar; around the temple there then meet other imposing equestrian statues, where the animals, whose pose and harness accentuate their use in a military context, are flanked by heroes in the act of subduing the enemy, crushed by the horse under its own shield.

Once again, therefore, chariot, sun and horse are included in a single coherent symbolic context that unequivocally associates the religious significance and ritual practices of vener- ation taking place in the temple with a specific military ascendant. For there is no doubt that the Konark stone chariot displays all the characteristics of the Indo-European war chariot. At stake, then, in the solar devotion to Sūrya, is again the theological investiture of sovereignty, which, through the chariot, is placed in relation to a peculiar war technology. The chariot, in fact—and on this point Sergent’s analysis is instead impeccable³⁸—is a fundamental element in understanding how, since at least the third millennium B.C.,³⁹ Indo-European expansion has been possible, that is, how, moving from the steppes⁴⁰ of southern Russia, the nomadic Kurgan culture was able to invade and subjugate such a vast territory to its rule, gradually knocking out the resistance of the local populations.
Haarmann himself (but the references could be many), devoting a specific chapter to The War Chariot: A Little Cultural History, makes explicit reference to Sūrya,⁴¹ concluding his argument with a hint that is undoubtedly obvious but therefore no less decisive:
“This mythological image of the war chariot appears in Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue⁴² and, quite similarly, in a Vedic text written in Sanskrit (Katha Upanishad). How to explain such parallels in the mythological tradition of two regional Indo-European cultures? Do they perhaps refer to a common origin, to be found in the period of the spread of that chariot in Eurasia (i.e., in the 2nd millennium B.C.)? This would not be an entirely weird hypothesis, since ancient mythical figures such as the Proto-Indo-European shepherd god, for example, have also been preserved in the peripheral areas.”⁴³

Touché! A promising correspondence is alleged, which would culturally motivate its appearance, between the Platonic chariot of Apollo and that of Sūrya. But then, with all that has been said and shown, is one implicitly bringing back an eminent form of the Greek philo- sophical narrative to the archaic Indo-European plexus that sees Sun, chariot and horse myth- ologically associated? Precisely. And what is still lacking to graft the discourse onto the solarity of the chariot in the articulation of the Platonic ἐπιστήμη?

In it, the absolute luminescence of the Good is solarized not as the form of military power, but as the intelligible summit of thinking and being, from which, epistemologically, derives the possibility, for the νοῦς that grasps the true, of thinking the being. Again, then, the ‘model’ is primarily metaphysical and not political. The solar ‘allegory’ chariot and horses (in the plural, like the winged pair in Phaedrus) therefore finally refer to the supreme principle of a metaphysics of light that may represent the culmination of the whole Indo-European celestial system. Let us then explore this further element, proceeding with a final remark that rather than being properly carried out we shall merely formulate in the guise of a hint.

Again in relation to architectural objects—demonstrating how solar symbolism does indeed play a primary role in the Indian articulation of the experience of the sacred—Adrian Snodgrass, in a paragraph with an already explicit title, The Sun as a Centre, makes the following point (the relationship between stupa architecture and solar symbolism is at stake, which the author addresses by illustrating the diagram shown):

“The orientation of the stupa plan is determined by reference to the movements of the sun; the plan is a geometric diagram of the solar cycle; its axes locate the successive positions of the sun’s course. This has a more than merely astronomical significance and expresses the symbolism of the metaphysical Sun, the source and centre of the worlds.
In both the Brahmanic and Buddhist traditions the sun is the symbol of the supreme Principle, the transcendent Centre of the universe. In the Brahmanic texts the Sun is Cosmic Intelligence and the light it radiates is intellectual Knowledge; it is the abode of Brahman and Puruṣa and the seat of the cyclic legislator, Manu. The Sun’s rays measure out the worlds, bring all things into existence, quicken all beings […] The Sun is the sacrificial Person who is “poured out upon the earth from East to West” […] The Sun’s light is progenitive, “for progeny indeed is all the light”. The Sun’s rays are his sons and every animate being is filiated from the Sun […].”⁴⁴

It should also be noted that in the Pali tradition the Buddha is himself referred to as “kinsman of the Sun […] the Buddha, like the Sun, sees all things simultaneously.”⁴⁵ Like the example of the Sun Temple in Konark, therefore, the case of the stupa demonstrates that there is a wholly relevant set of—religious, anthropological, architectural—practices in which the Sun takes on the value of a true supreme metaphysical Principle around which are organized both the intangible system of symbolic representations and the objects and constructions in which material culture is articulated. The explicit reference to Brahmanical culture also makes clear how the understanding of the Sun as “Supreme Principle” is the overall prerogative of the Indian world, not of its Buddhist component alone.

Of Snodgrass’s description, two elements deserve particular attention because they corre- spond precisely to what can be found in the Platonic doctrine of truth set forth in the Republic. Here, too, the Sun is “Cosmic Intelligence,” that is, it is characterized as the supreme principle of a epistemological character, exactly like the pure act of thought—νόησις—which for Plato— thus, in fact, the Analogy of the Line set forth in Book VI—identifies the purest and most intense moment of supersensible knowledge. But the supreme Understanding also coincides with the constituent capacity of the Absolute, which, as in the case of the Good, makes ontologically possible the essential existence of ideas, made visible in their appearance by the primordial luminosity that spreads over them. The Sun, then, is not only the supreme cognitive principle where the formal identity of each idea with itself is safeguarded; it, in fact, emanates a light that constitutes each idea in the determinate space of its own existence (“bring all things into existence”), thus being the generative (“progenitive”) foundation that not only establishes, by revealing it, the form of essence, but likewise posits the existence of essence, extruding its concrete content into the transcendental medium of visibility. The Sun, in other words, symbol- izes not only the suprareal One that logically safeguards identity as the sovereign category of Being, but is also the father of that which, concretely, realizes Being as noetically intuitable concrete content. And precisely this dual character, jointly epistemological and ontological, of the solar Principle, expressly unites both the Platonic model and the sacred architecture of the stupa.

The coincidence of supreme knowledge and solarity as the ontotheological foundation of the political, while on the one hand demonstrating how the legal legitimacy of power must be thought of on a mythical basis, on the other hand reproposes the radicality of the model defined by Calasso, who, with exceptional acuity, had suggested how, already on a ‘Vedic basis’ thus in the remotest primordial of the Indo-European ritual ‘trace’, the question of the horse could not be reduced to a genealogy of the ‘political’. but, going to the first and last Principle from which the reciprocal nexus between being and thinking springs, posed itself first and foremost from a metaphysical point of view.

(Missing from this perspective would be a proper mythological-comparative analysis of the Winged Chariot of the Phaedrus that, keeping in mind both the horse-chariot-solarity nexus and the equestrian principle of the sacrificial Progenitor, thus the unity of Prajāpati and aśva- medha, would unveil the deeper meaning of the Platonic myth by grafting it securely into its archaic Indo-European matrix. However, the pivotal points from which it is possible to proceed are all already fixed).
Through the reference to the Temple of Konark and the solar chariot of which it consists, we thus find ourselves confirming the preliminary nature—and thus the necessity—of a meta- physical approach to the problem. Chariot and horse, though symbols of power, declined both in political (first function) and military (second function) terms, finally refer to the luminous, perhaps even blinding nexus that—from the most archaic India to Plato, and then again, returning to the East, in the Orissa of the Gangas—links the metaphysical firstness of concrete knowledge of the Absolute to the sovereign mythologem of solar light.

CODA

It might occur to some to wonder why so much effort is put into the analysis of these ‘oddities’. What is significant about (wanting?) to find in a temple not only the architec- tural articulation of the equestrian mythologem but even the action of what, symbolically, acts through that form. A political-social paradigm or, more deeply, a conception of the world—or even more deeply: an essential ordering (ṛta) that should concern the being in form of things as such then but, fatally, also now. If it is true that, of the many things that, of the past, have actually passed away, it cannot be ruled out that something, and perhaps precisely the essential ordering we have mentioned, has been able to propose itself in such an extreme and affirmative way as to hinge on being in a perpetual manner, that is, being capable of existing both in a past form. Since it concerns that which of the past cannot pass away in a form that, never having passed away, has been able to reach and mark the present as well. This persistent form is a mystery that we certainly do not imagine we can unravel. We can at best train ourselves to recognize some of its many appearances.

As when, between the Bundestag library and the dome of Berlin’s Reichstag, poised over the Spree, we see Marino Marini’s Etruscan Miracle tossed into the air, mangled, does the king-cavalier plummet backward, unseated by republican egalitarianism? Elsewhere, in front of the Quirinal, then a papal residence also known as Monte Cavallo (!), the two Dioscuri of the Fountain commissioned by Sixtus V are mighty warriors with menacing steeds in a rampant posture (a sculptural colossus reworked and translocated, perhaps, from the Baths of Constantine, which some have even wanted to interpret as a doubling of Alexander with Bucephalus): perhaps, unlike reunified Germany, Italy’s is an invariably clerical Republic lagging perpetually behind itself, where the ‘reigning’ President dwells in the palace of the high priest, an equestrian Republic therefore and never quite secular.

Aristotle attributes to Thales the sentence that “everything is full of gods” (An., I, 5, 411 a 8). We may borrow it by saying that everything is full of myths and make it the ‘label’ of our mythosophy. Indeed, we seem to glimpse myths everywhere: they establish the ‘political’, they encircle us, they test our gaze; or perhaps it is just projective mania and we clothe the world with improvident intellectual smokescreens? King Arthur, Cangrande harnessed in plain color above the Scarpian ark in concrete and gray cantilevered support, Gattamelata in front of the ‘minarets’ of the ‘nameless saint’, Verrocchio’s serenissimo Colleoni, Charles V with extended spear for Titian, Napoléon d’après David, the whole Indo-European equestrian dynasty, emperors and captains of fortune of one fearsome ‘mounted army’…

But one may perhaps dare to go even further. A friend who thinks shrewdly even goes so far as to assume in one of the most extraordinary and contracted hallucinations in cinematic history, “the horse that turns to the ground in Andrei Rublev’s prologue”, “the passage of the symbol through time”; while—we speculate by (perhaps somewhat twisted) counterpoint—the horse that, during the Tartar sack, tragically collapses from a scaffold, disarticulating itself like a constructivist toy, could be the way the same symbol reveals the moment when time no longer filters through and something destroys itself: Andrei has killed and possible redemption finally exits history, dramatically tipping over into damnation. Hence the incomparable silence of the Holy Painter.
Do we want to see too much, making everything the gaze passes through a “forest of symbols” and exaggerating with the unification of everything with everything? What are we looking for? What do we really want to find, we ask again, contemplating a temple that reproposes—and admittedly in an all too recent era—yet another variation on the mythical morphism of the horse?
The temple alludes to a time permanently foreclosed. By persisting in observing it, we essentially want only one thing: to relive the ancient rituals even though we know that they can never again occur according to the practices that performed them. The temple, then, is our gateway not to aśvamedha, but to that which through it was propitiated even before the temple existed. The deeper we go into the garbha gṛha, the ‘womb-chamber’ of the sanctuary, the more we are overwhelmed, starkly and potentially lethally, by the same One which acted on the ‘backstage’ of those primordial sacrifices, set them up and made them be. We must learn to experience the same thing even if, at least in appearance, before our eyes nothing is accomplished: the temple stones remain motionless, the carved images ignore us.

Naming this very special and very risky form of learning is a word whose meaning has reached such a level of degradation today that its primary and most promising sense is obscured: study, studium: assiduous application of the mind to something and, at the same time, that which indicates the ‘object’ of this application. That is, we are conjecturing that by assiduously applying itself to the temple, the mind becomes the temple, and that, when this happens, it is invaded by the same mythic power that posited the temple and that, in even earlier times, required, in order to be and to make the World Order be, to be evoked through the sacrifice of the horse.
The existence of the temple only serves to produce in actuality the awareness that aśvamedha, which “is everything”, has never ceased to be celebrated. In studying the temple, the mind reenacts and repeats sub specie aeternitatis the horse sacrifice. Any reasonable person will find this idea insane, absolutely specious and in any case impos- sible. It is better for everyone that the vast majority of men continue to think this way.

1. The ‘fable’ first appeared in A. Schleicher, Eine Fabel in indogermanischer Sprache, in “Beiträge zur vergleichenden Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der arischen, celtischen und slawischen Sprachen,” hrsg. von
   A. Kuhn und A. Schleicher, 5. Bd. (1868), pp. 206-208. A discussion of it within the question of how and whether it is actually possible to reconstruct a common Indo-European source language is conducted in the chapter Cómo podemos conocer su lengua in F. Villar, Los indoeuropeos y los orígenes de Europa. Lenguaje e historia, Gredos, Madrid 19962, pp. 167 ff. For an accurate reconstruction of the different versions of the ‘fable’, see the entry Schleicher’s Tale in the monumental D. Q. Adams, J. P. Mallory (ed. by), Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, Fitzroy Dearborn, Chicago 1997, pp. 500-503. After the aforementioned Lehmann and Zgusta, many in recent years have tried their hand at reformulating the ‘fable’: Dank (1986), Adams (1997), Lühr (2008), Voyles and Barrack (2009), Kortlandt (2007 and 2010), Melchert (2009 and 2014), Byrd (2014). It seems safe to say that the exercise on variations of the fable has become a literary genre in its own right: hypothetical variations on an unattainable beginning.
2. F. Nietzsche, Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen. Zweites Stück: Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben, in Kritische Studienausgabe (15 Bde.), hrsg. von G. Colli e M. Montinari, De Gruyter, Berlin-New York 1999, Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, I, p. 247; my translation.
3. “[…] An ancient mass of material transmitted in well-known tales that nevertheless do not exclude any further shaping” (C. G. Jung, K. Kerényi, Einführung in das Wesen der Mythologie, Gerstenberg Verlag, Hildesheim 1980, p. 11; my translation).
4. “Mythology is the movement of this matter: something solid and yet mobile, material and yet not static, but susceptible to transformations” (ibid, p. 11; my translation).
5. Here Haarmann quotes A. Parpola, Deciphering the Indus Script, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1994, p. 158.
6. H. Haarmann, Auf den Spuren der Indoeuropäer. Von den neolithischen Steppennomaden bis zu den frühen Hochkulturen, Munich 2016, pp. 80-81; my translation.
7. Obvious reference is G. Dumézil, Mitra-Varuṇa. Essai sur deux représentations indo-européennes de la souveraineté, Gallimard, Paris 1948 (in the first version the text appears under the title Ouranós-Váruṇa. Étude de mythologie comparée indo-européenne, Adrien-Maisonneuve, Paris 1934). In the interplay of titles lies all the oscillation (for Iranian/Eurasian medium), between the Vedic world and the archaic Roman world, of the great French comparatist, on whose work, “monumental and solitary” (Lévi-Strauss) appropriately calibrated words are expressed by E. Montanari, Presence of Dumézil, in “Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica,” Vol. XXIV, No. 3 (1986), pp. 169-174. For a more concise—but still highly articulate—approach, see the ‘little paragraph’ Les grands dieux souverains védiques, Mitra et Varuṇa in Mythe et épopée I. L’idéologie des trois fonctions dans les épopées des peuples indo-européens, Gallimard, Paris 1986, pp. 147-149.
8. M. Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, Thames & Hudson, London 1989, Introduction, p. xx.
9. MacKenzie Cook’s seminal book devoted to Epona does not fail to point out this ambiguity punctually (see P. D. MacKenzie Cook, Epona. Hidden Goddess of the Celts, Avalonia, London 2016, p. 73 ff.). Starting from the fact that in the Celtic culture the horse as a military animal was introduced only very late (“Although the Celts did not learn to ride horses, and thus did not make it the central animal of their society and culture until the 8th century BC, it had been an important cult animal since the Bronze Age”), MacKenzie deduces, in our opinion correctly, the symbolic ambivalence of the Goddess: “The hidden dimensions of the term ‘Horse Goddess’ come from the fact that it can have two very different meanings. Perhaps the more obvious of these is that it suggests a goddess of horses: the ‘Lady’ concerned with their breeding, care and protection. The other evokes the ‘Divine Mare’—the idea that Epona and the horse were intimately mingled in each other’s essence, or that the horse was her special way of manifesting in the world […] In this sense of the term ‘Horse Goddess’, even the mare-and- foal images may have been ambiguous: conveying the Lady’s association with the domestication, fertility and protection of horses and having a special concern with the craft of horse-breeding. / As Lady and Rider, Epona was more than just the protectress of horses. She also protected mounted Celtic warriors and the men of the Roman cavalry who adopted her. An inscription to Epona from a riding instructor suggests that the Celtic ‘Lady of the Horse’ also personified equestrian skill and mastery.” Demeter herself, just to mention an eminent case, is not entirely unrelated to the first côté of the reported ambiguity, when, in order to escape Poseidon, she assumes the guise of horse-Goddess. In some cults, precisely recorded by Barbara Walker, she is in fact worshipped as Aganippe, manifesting herself in the form of a winged black horse: “Some of the Destroyer’s other, earlier names were Melaina, the Black One; Demeter Chthonia, the Subterranean One; or The Avenger (Erinys). Her black- robed, mare-headed idol, her mane entwined with Gorgon snakes, appeared in one of her oldest cave-shrines, Mavrospelya, Black Cave, in Phigalia (southwest Arcadia). She carried a dolphin and a dove, symbols of womb and yoni. Like the devouring death-goddess everywhere, she was once a cannibal […] The legendary medieval Night-Mare—an equine Fury who tormented sinners in their sleep—was based on ancient images of Mare- headed Demeter” (B. G. Walker, The Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Harper & Row, San Francisco 1983, p. 219). It would be interesting to probe in depth the historical-symbolic implications of these findings, for everything suggests transitional figures: Demeter is a fertility figure who predates the formed Indo-European pantheon. In order to survive in it, her figure is delegitimized, associating her with the chthonic dimension of subterranean darkness, with infanticidal cannibalism (a constant, from the Russian Baba Jaga to the Sicilian ‘Serramonica’ who, with her face covered, appeared in the middle of Lent to punish “the children who, instead of staying at home, amused themselves in the quadrivi” (L. Sorrento, Folclore e dialetti d’Italia, in “Aevum. Rassegna di scienze storiche, linguistiche e filologiche,” Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Anno I, Milano 1927, p. 768; my translation); the same ‘monstrification’ we see at work in the Erynnian vengeance and in the “angui d’inferno” that ‘corollate’ the face of the Gorgon). The horse linked to fertility becomes in this context deadly equine fury; not therefore a military horse, but a willfully nefarious degradation of the ‘agricultural’ horse, a figure of fertility rendered chthonic, thus discredited—hence the nocturnal rendering of the mythologem, exactly contrary to its solar association, to which we shall return shortly, ubiquitous in the Indo-European paradigm and where, as with Apollo and Sūrya, the symbol of the chariot recurs concomitantly.
10. So Carlo Donà, in an itinerary of vast and refined sensibility, excellently summarizes the sacrificial act aimed, says Giraldo, at “regem creare”: “[…] The new king simulated or consummated a love union with a white horse, which was then sacrificed, cut into pieces and boiled. The king and his retinue would eat the meat, but the king also had to wash himself in the broth, drinking some of it straight from the cauldron. Once this ritual was completed, Giraldo explains, his coronation was finished and his authority complete” (C. Donà, Per le vie dell’altro mondo. L’animale guida e il mito del viaggio, Rubettino, Soveria Mannelli 2003, p. 189; my transla- tion). The original tale in G. Cambrensis Opera, ed. by J. F. Dimock, Vol. V (Topographia Hibernica et Expugnatio Hibernica), Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, London 1867, Distinctio III, XXV, p. 169: “Est igitur in boreali et ulteriori Ultoniae parte, scilicet apud Kenelcunnil, gens quaedam, quae barbaro nimis et abominabili ritu sic sibi regem creare solet. Collecto in unum universo terrae illius populo, in medium producitur jumentum candidum. Ad quod sublimandus ille non in principem sed in beluam, non in regem sed exlegem, coram omnibus bestialiter accedens, non minus impudenter quam imprudenter se quoque bestiam profitetur. Et statim jumento interfecto, et frustatim in aqua decocto, in eadem aqua balneum ei paratur. Cui insidens, de carnibus illis sibi allatis, circu- mstante populo suo et convescente, comedit ipse. De jure quoque quo lavatur, non vase aliquo, non manu, sed ore tantum circumquaque haurit et bibit. Quibus ita rite, non recte completis, regnum illius et dominium est confirmatum.”
11. Cf. G. DumÉzil, La religion romaine archaïque avec un appendix sur la religion des Etrusques, Payot, Paris 19742, pp. 225-239. To an explicit ‘paralleling’ of aśvamedha and october equus are devoted the reflections in ibid., pp. 235-238.
12. Ibid, pp. 227-235.
13. Ibid, p. 230 (a thesis also anticipated with minor variations in Id., Primordia Civitatis, in “Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire,” no. 39, 1 (1961), p. 65).
14. See Id., La religion romaine, cit. pp. 239-240.
15. M. Beard, J. North, S. Price, Religions of Rome (2 vols.), Vol. I, A History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996, p. 48.
16. R. Calasso, L’ardore, Adelphi, Milan 2010, p. 17; my translation.
17. On the complex ritual of aśvamedha, see the insightful S. Fuchs, The Vedic Horse Sacrifice in Its Culture-historical Relations, Inter-India Publications, New Delhi 1996, but especially the magisterial P.-E. Dumont, L’Aśvamedha. Description du sacrifice solennel du cheval dans le culte védique d’après les textes du Yajurveda blanc (Vājasaneyisamhitā, Śatapathabrāhmaṇa, Kātyāyanaśrautasūtra), Paul Geuthner, Paris 1927; also to Dumont must be ascribed a shorter but very informed contribution on the subject, Id., The Horse-Sacrifice in the Taittirîya-Brâh- mana, in “Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,” vol. 92, no. 6 (1948), pp. 447-503; also of compre- hensive but extremely pregnant approach is the volume by P. Chierichetti, L’Āśvalāyanaśrautasūtra come fonte per lo studio dell’aśvamedha, Fondo di Studi Parini-Chirio (Università degli Studi di Torino), Torino 2013, which offers its first perspective on the subject in Id., The Aśvamedha in the Rāmāyaṇa: A Way to Re-establish the Primordial Unity of the Sacrifice, in The Sacrifice at the Basis of the Construction of Indian Identity: Two Specific Studies, edited by A. Pelissero and P. Chierichetti, Edizioni dell’Orso, Alessandria, 2011, pp. 1-66; very precise, though narrower in scope, is the contribution of R. Zaroff, Aśvamedha. A Vedic Horse Sacrifice, in “Studia Mythologica Slavica,” no. 8 (2005), pp. 75-86, paragraph 314. L’aśvamedha et les rituels apparentés en Europe et Iran in B. Sergent, Les Indo-Européens. Historie, langues, mythes, Payot, Paris 20052 , VI.2, § 314, pp. 348-350; and again: the paragraph devoted to The Example of the Ashvamedha in R. F. Talbott, Sacred Sacrifice. Ritual Paradigms in Vedic Religion and Early Christianity, Wipf & Stock, Eugene (Oregon) 2005, pp. 107-166; the inspiring, as it advances theses at once innovative and ambitious, C. D’Onofrio, Le ‘nozze sacre’ della regina col cavallo, in «Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni», nn. 24-25, (1953-1954), pp. 133-162; E. La Terza, L’Aśvamedha nel RigVeda, in «Rivista indo-greca-italica», n. 6 (1922), pp. 133-142; finally, the conspicuous work of A. Dhar, A Dichotomic Interpretation of the Sacrifices of Rājasūya, Vājapeya and Aśvamedha: Their Ritualistic and Monarchial Strata with Reference to the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa (Doctoral Thesis submitted to the Assam University Slichar, Department of Sanskrit, 2016).
18. On which there is an immense literature available which, because of its vastness and diversification, we do not think it is appropriate to be recalled here, where we shall limit ourselves, with great selection, to referring to the classics: S. Lévi, La doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brâhmaṇas, Ernest Leroux, Paris 1898 (on p. 137 a quick passage devoted to aśvamedha); A. K. Coomaraswamy, La doctrine du sacrifice, Dervy-Livres, Paris 1978, where the editor Gérard Leconte has brought together eight articles explicitly devoted to sacrifice by the Sri Lankan scholar, which, focusing on the two basic modes of decapitation and metamorphosis, cannot fail to also touch on the subject of the aśvamedha (expanded on in Id., A note on the Aśvamedha, in “Archiv Orientální,” VII (1936), pp. 306-317).
19. Six hundred and nine according to the count stated in Vājasaneyisamhitā, 24, 1-40.
20. In a paragraph expressly devoted to The Solar Horse, to which we refer for any broader consider- ation, Miranda Green, in a text that is capital for us, reasons as follows with regard to the politically structuring sacrificial link between the horse and the solar element: “Horses played a prominent part in Indo-European myth and ritual, and the origins of this may be in the secular value that was placed on the animal […] The horse is and was in antiquity an animal of great prestige. It is large, handsome, fast, courageous and invaluable in warfare and hunting. It is also a relatively expensive creature to maintain, requiring quantities of high-quality grain. These two features, relating to war and aggression, on the one hand, and prosperity on the other, may have caused the horse to be adopted as a symbol of both war and peace. The animal is a natural beast to use for parades and display, as a symbol of power and leadership […] If the horse was so valued in life, the evidence that exists for horse-sacrifice in the Indo-European world suggests that the divine recipient must have been regarded with great awe. A major horse-sacrifice which took place in Rome was that of the October Horse, a ceremony in which a horse-race was run on the Ides of October and the right-hand horse of the victorious team was killed with a spear and dismembered. The tail of the sacrificial animal was hung up originally in the house of the king and its blood, mixed with ash from the sacred hearth onto which it was allowed to drip, was connected and used in the agricultural spring-festival of the Parilia. We have seen that horses were sacrificed to the sun by the Spartans and Rhodians. Several ancient authors mention that horses were sacred to the Persian sun-god and that they were sacrificed by being burnt entire. This type of sacrifice is known as ‘holocaust’, an offering where nothing is left for the worshipper, an act generally reserved for the underworld powers or where sacrifice was made for a particularly urgent reason. In the case of a holocaust to the sun-god, the awe and reverence of this high deity is aptly demonstrated, but there may also be the factor of fire, appropriate for the fiery solar divinity and perhaps the idea that the consumed horses would rise in the smoke towards their celestial destination. In a Persian sun-hymn of Zarathustra, the sun is referred to as ‘swift-horsed’” (M. Green, The Sun-Gods of Ancient Europe, B. T. Batsford, London 1991, pp. 116-117. It should be pointed out that the association between the horse and the sun is not limited to the Vedic context, but is widespread throughout the archaic Indo-European context. As Miranda Green again notes, “solar deities and horses were consistently linked in the European cult-imagery from the Middle Bronze Age to the Romano-Celtic phase” (ibid., cit. p. 23).
21. As perfectly understood by J. C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition. Essays in Indian Ritual, King ship, and Society, Oxford University Press, Delhi 1985, p. 50: “Prajāpati is the personification of the systematized ritual.” For a precise explanatory reference about the ‘ontosacral’ identity between aśvamedha and Prajāpati, see also at least P.-E. Dumont, L’Aśvamedha. Description, cit., p. 167 and the very insightful contributions of J. Gonda, Vedic Gods and the Sacrifice, in “Numen,” XXX (1), 1983, pp. 3-17 and Id., Prajāpati and Prāyaścitta, in “The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland,” 1 (1983), p. 48. On the figure of the Progenitor, unavoidable for depth and perspicuity are the considerations made in R. Calasso, L’ardore, cit., IV, pp. 93-128 (the chapter is aptly entitled IV. The Progenitor).
22. Ibid, p. 100; my translation.
23. R. Calasso, Ka, Adelphi, Milano 1999, pp. 153-182.
24. Ibid, p. 157; my translation.
25. P. ValÉry, Eupalinos L’Âme et la danse Dialogue de l’arbre, La Républiques des Lettres, Paris 2021, p. 29.
26. कोनार्कin devanāgariī, variously transliterated—which explains the variants in the bibliographical references to follow—as Konarka, Konarak, Konārak, Kanarak, Konārka. For our part, we have adopted and will adopt the spelling Konark.
27. See S. Lal Nagar, Sūrya and Sun Cult in Indian Art, Culture, Literature, and Thought, Aryan Books International, New Delhi 1995, pp. 149-150 and p. 389. In his discussion of the correspondences between Sūrya and Apollo, Lal Nagar takes up a particularly significant passage devoted to the same issue (albeit discussing an ornamental matter of specific Buddhist scope) from A. Cunningham, Archaeological Survey of India (23 vols.), Rahul Publishing House, New Delhi 1994, III, p. 97.
28. M. Green, The Sun Gods, cit. pp. 57-59, tr. it. di M. Ortelio, Le divinità solari dell’antica Europa, ECIG, Genova 1995, pp. 51-52; for editorial reasons, this excerpt has been translated into English from the Italian version of the text. In a following passage, it is then reiterated: “The abundant evidence for the sun-cult in Bronze Age Europe manifests itself above all in the symbolism of the wheel. Sometimes a full-size chariot could evoke solar imagery […]. There is significance evidence that wheels and sun-motifs are very closely linked”. Of the book, see then in general the paragraphs expressly devoted to The Solar Wagon (ibid., pp. 66-67) and The Chariot of the Sun (ibid., pp. 112-116). In the latter, the author writes, “The image of the sun as driving in a horse-drawn carriage or chariot is common to many Indo-European peoples. We find it in the Vedic mythology of Indra; Xenophon observes that the Persians thought of the sun as a charioteer. By the second century BC the Roman sun-god Sol, probably the old Italian Sol Indiges, was represented in a quadriga” (ibid., p. 112).
29. “The earliest Irish ‘sun-discs’, sheet-gold dress-ornaments dating to the very earliest Bronze Age or Beaker period, are frequently decorated with either cross-in-circle or concentric circle motifs. These may have nothing to do with a sun-cult, but the later Bronze Age ‘sun-discs’, which are larger and may be of gold or bronze, are another matter. These are frequently decorated with concentric circles, like that at Lattoon, Co. Cavan. Unequivocally solar is the gilded bronze disc at Trundholm in Denmark, pulled on a miniature wagon by a bronze horse and decorated with concen- tric circles and spirals […]. There is other Scandinavian bronzework, too, which must possess a solar association. The so-called ‘sun-drum’ from a bog at Balkåkra near Ystad, Scania, for example, consists of a cylinder whose lid is a flat disc decorated with lines and concentric circles; the cylinder itself is supported on ten model wheels” (ibid. p. 41).
30. M. Eliade, Traité d’histoire des religions, Payot, Paris 1964, III, § 36, p. 116.
31. Ibid, § 44, p. 129.
32. Ibid, § 45, p. 130.
33. B. Sergent, Celtes et Grecs / 1. Le livre des Héros, Payot et Rivages, Paris 1999, tr. it. edited by G. de Turris, Celti e Greci. Il libro degli Eroi, Edizioni Mediterranee, Roma 2005, pp. 73-74; for editorial reasons, this excerpt has been translated into English from the Italian version of the text.
34. Fundamental from this point of view are the considerations on the juridical nature of solar symbolism made in the classic R. Pettazzoni, L’onniscienza di Dio, Einaudi, Torino1955, pp. 255-277 and taken up under the heading “Ordalia e divinità” in M. Eliade (a cura di), Dizionario dei riti, Jaca Book, Milano 2018; my translation: “The god in whose name one swears is, in essence, evoked as a judge: historically it is usually the gods of the Sun or of light, as such omniscient. Raffaele Pettazzoni (1955) has regarded this judicial role as the fundamental function of an omniscient deity.” The union of wisdom and political power, as it occurs at the apex of the Platonic onto-theological framework, expresses as such a legal foundation.
35. Apollo is the god of the rational illumination of the ‘mind’ under whose watchfulness, according to Plato, it grasps the pure forms of Being. This implicit mythological afference, essentially, is what is implied in the Phaedrus through the adoption of an Apollonian solar symbol such as the chariot.
36. An exception in this all-male list would be Saulė, the Baltic Sun Goddess mentioned by M. Gimbutas, The Balts, Thames & Hudson, London 1963, pp. 198-202. The reference is important because it implies the survival, in Indo-European context, of an earlier mythological figure, in which the solar vocation, rather than showing itself united with male sovereign power, is still associated with the generative ‘energy’ that fuels bene- ficial natural cycles.
37. A novel, A. Gupta, The Treasures of the Sun God, Bloomington 2012, is devoted to the religious signifi- cance of Konark’s Sun Temple—so iconic in Indian culture that it is depicted on the reverse side of the 10 Rupee bill—which, although a work of fiction, devotes ample space to an interpretation of the temple on a historical and symbolic basis. There are also numerous monographic descriptions (not infrequently intended for tourist fruition) expressly devoted to the monument, among which it is worth mentioning Th. E. Donaldson, Konark, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005, where the author frames its construction characteristics within the general framework of Orissian-style temple architecture, also placing it in its historical context and discussing the architectural and sculptural details of the main body and adjacent shrines; also significant, especially for the quality of the photographic reproductions signed by the Japanese photographer Oki Morihiro (and although we still prefer the yellowed snapshots of Mary Binney Wheeler, who, moreover, does not share with Morihiro the guilt of having also immortalized Mother Teresa of Calcutta in the catalog, sic), the volume B. Bäumer, M. Konishi, Konārka. Chariot of the Sun-God, D.K. Printworld, New Delhi 2007. In contrast, a true critical monograph, with specific attention to architectural fact and its symbolic interpretation, is the comprehensive K. S. Behera, Konarak. The Heritage of Mankind, Aryan Books International, New Delhi 1996. As far as we have been able to sound out, on the Konark Sun Temple the most conceptually relevant contribution seems to us to be that of D. Bandyopadhyay, Architectural Description of Konark Sun-Temple, in “Loukik,” IV, 1-2, pp. 111-121, which confirms the theses advanced by the foremost interpreter of Indian temple architecture, Stella Kramrisch, according to which the structure of the building was derived from a precise architectural transposition of metaphysical-reli- gious instances (in contrast to the views of N. K. Bose, Canons of Orissan Architecture, Cosmo Publications, New Dehli 1982). Kramrisch dealt with the symbol of the Sun and the chariot in Hindu temples on several occasions in her magnum opus, originally published in 1946 in Calcutta, see S. Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple (2 vols.), Motilal Banarsidass, New Delhi 1976, I, p. 40, p. 159, pp. 281-285 and II, pp. 373-374, pp. 422-423. More specifically, see also S. Kramrisch, Review of A. Boner, R. P. Dāsa, R. Ś. Sadāśiva, New Light on the Sun Temple of Koṇārka. Four Unpublished Manuscripts Relating to Construction History and Ritual of This Temple, in “Artibus Asiae,” 37, no. 4 (1975), pp. 306-307, which refers to the seminal volume edited for Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, Vara- nasi 1972, with respect to which it is impossible not to agree with the enthusiasm of the scholar who speaks, commenting on its reading, of “an unusual emotion: the awe of certitude”, since “the temple in its purpose and in all its parts is literally accounted for in the manuscripts that are here published and translated for the first time.” We therefore refer to this same publication for a more in-depth study of the monument in question.
38. See in this regard paragraph 248. La question du char de guerre, in B. Sergent, Les Indo-Européens, cit., VI.2, § 248, pp. 316-317.
39. At least to that era, Haarmann points out, should be backdated the introduction of the chariot that the nomadic herders of the steppe would first develop and employ in their warlike feats of conquest: “The oldest remains of a two-wheeled car with the characteristics of a war chariot come from the southern Urals and date from the late 3rd millennium B.C. The high age of this find suggests that it was the prototype of a war chariot. Evidently, it was the tomb of a warrior, for among the grave goods are arrowheads and bronze weapons (dagger, axe). Also present are animal bones indicating the ritual burial of a horse. Examination of these and other horse bones found in graves containing chariots reveals that the steppe nomads used a large horse, with a height at the withers of 160 cm, as their draught animal” (H. Haarmann, Auf den Spuren der Indoeuropäer, cit., p. 104; my translation. For the data concerning the horse Haarmann refers in turn to E. E. Kuzmina, The Prehistory of the Silk Road, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2008, p. 61).
40. The hypothesis that the invention of the war chariot should be located in the Near East is thus reason- ably refuted (cf. H. Haarmann, On the Traces of the Indo-Europeans, cit., p. 104). Indeed, the flat character of the Eurasian steppe proves to be a fundamental morphological condition allowing its development. As noted in a for us fundamental contribution by D. W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel and Language. How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford 2007, p. 403: “Two-wheeled war chariots were first invented in the steppe zone, where they found use for war purposes.”
41. Cf. H. Haarmann, Auf den Spuren der Indoeuropäer, cit., p. 105; my translation: “Also in the world of the Indian gods does the two-wheeled chariot make its appearance: it is the means of transportation of Sūrya, god of the sun […] His chariot is drawn by seven horses and the wheels have twelve spokes. Sūrya’s charioteer is Aruna.”
42. Haarmann’s reference here is D. S. Werner, Myth and Philosophy in Plato’s Phaedrus, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2012, pp. 110 ff.
43. H. Haarmann, Auf den Spuren der Indoeuropäer, cit., p. 106; my translation.
44. A. Snodgrass, The Symbolism of the Stupa, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, New Delhi 1992, p. 24.
45. Ibid.