Spirit of the Horse

Oracle Card. Imbas Dispatch #42

A Chairde, Friends,

The spirit of the horse is with us as we approach the Sagittarius new moon. Today, I share the ‘Horse’ card from my oracle in progress, Celtic Dream Oracle: Ancient Symbols to Guide Your Modern Life.

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Horse

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Keywords:

Spirit, Endurance, Grace

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Suit:

The More-than-Human Allies

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Symbol:

Human and horse as one spirit. Goddess, god, or mortal can all embody the horse as a guide to their north star.

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Lore:

The horse symbolises a nobility of soul. It is an exalted animal in Celtic traditions, where it holds anthropomorphic qualities. Horses in Ireland are said to have once held the power of speech, of putting breath into sound. They embody the spirit of air, of winds that blow from the Otherworld into our world. The three horses of the Tuatha Dé Danann (Irish deities) were called Gaeth meaning ‘wind’, Athach meaning ‘blast’, and Sithe meaning ‘whirlwind’. Énbarr, meaning ‘the one or unrivalled mane’, the horse of the sea god, Manannán Mac Lir, can gallop across sea and land in equal swiftness, never allowing a rider to fall from her back. The white foam that blows atop the waves are the horses of Manannán.

Horses move between worlds, between life and death, between time and timelessness. In Irish folk tradition, to dream of a white horse is to dream of luck; to dream of a black horse is to dream of a funeral. The white horse is a creature of the sídhe, of the fairies. Horse-rider Niamh Cinn-Óir, ‘Niamh of the Golden Hair’, gallops across the waves on her white steed that carries her to our shores from the otherworldly island of Tír na nÓg, the land of eternal youth. Three years in Tír na nÓg time can pass as 300 years in Irish time. The white horse of Rhiannon, the ‘Divine Queen’, carries her at an enchanted pace so that although it seems she is moving leisurely, no mortal can catch up with her.

As with life and death, fertility and sacrifice are themes we associate with the horse. The white mare, like the white cow, was worshipped as kin of the fertile, abundant, generative land-goddess. The 12th-century Welsh chronicler and priest Giraldus Cambrensis claimed that sacrifice of a white mare was part of the banais ríghe, the marriage ceremony of a king to the goddess of sovereignty. One of the names for the Dagda as king of the Tuatha Dé Danann is Eochaid, meaning ‘horseman’. He is said to have once lived at Ireland’s sacred centre at the Hill of Uisneach. There lie the remains of a potential ‘horse temple’ with two underground passages that are shaped like a mare and a stallion, goddess and king.

We see the animal’s endurance embodied in Welsh Rhiannon and Irish Macha as goddesses of the horse spirit. Both suffer through the poor judgement of their mortal partners, victims of ego’s performance for the collective. Macha’s husband Cruinniuc boasts that she can outrun the king’s horses, forcing her to race while heavily pregnant. She wins, giving birth to twins on the threshold of the finishing line. In the rage of her humiliation and heartache, she curses the onlooking men so that they may suffer the pangs of childbirth in their time of greatest hardship. Rhiannon’s king consort, Pwyll, is pressurised by his court to punish her after she’s falsely accused of infanticide. She is forced, for seven years, to carry all visitors to the court on her back like a burdened horse. She does so with grace.

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When this card appears:

Where are you burdening the freedom of your own spirit by succumbing to the whims of your ego: wanting to be the ‘best’, or to look, perform, or behave in a certain way not because it’s authentic to you, but because of others’ expectations, or to get one up on someone else, to look better, be more successful, to ‘show them’, whatever it may be? The ego of lack may be riding on your back and if so, it’s time for it to come off.

Work with the spirit of the horse, of the noble soul, to help the healthy, conscious aspects of your ego saddle up and take the reins. How many folk tales are there of horses guiding a rider who is lost out of the forest? The horse knows true north; it follows your guiding star. Where would the horse have you go?

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Invocation:

Close your eyes. Place a hand on your heart, as your inner compass. Invoke:

‘I trust the spirit of the horse in this moment to guide me home to my true star.’

Croí isteach,

Jen x

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Sources:

The Fate of the Children of Tuireann, translated by Richard O’Duffy.

The Sacred Isle: Belief and Religion in Pre-Christian Ireland by Dáithí Ó hÓgáin.

Giraldus Cambrensis, The Topography of Ireland translated by Thomas Forester.

Mythic Ireland by Michael Dames.