One ritual common to several Indo European peoples – the Celts, the Siberians, the Vedics and the Italics – is the horse ritual, known in the Rig-veda as the asvamedha.
Myths connected with the horse sacrifice usually feature some sort of coupling between the horse and the queen, or the mare and the king. Sometimes, twins are produced from this coupling – and it’s notable that among the oldest gods of the Rig-veda are the Asvins, the twin horse storm gods.
By the time we get to the later Srimad Bhagavatham and Mahabharata (c.1,000 BC), the horse is no longer sacrificed, but is the focus of a sacred ceremony in which wherever the king’s horse wanders, accompanied by a troop of soldiers, becomes the land of that king.The primary archaeological context of horse sacrifice are burials, notably chariot burials, but graves with horse remains reach from the Eneolithic well into historical times. Herodotus describes the execution of horses at the burial of a Scythian king, and Iron Age kurgan graves known to contain horses number in the hundreds. There are also frequent deposition of horses in burials in Iron Age India. The custom is by no means restricted to Indo-European populations, but is continued by Turkic tribes as the cultural successors of the Scythians.
I will be looking for examples of the horse sacrifice in the rituals and myths of ancient cultures, and posting them up here.
