Horse sacrifice

Horse sacrifice is the ritual killing and offering of a horse, usually as part of a religious or cultural ritual. Horse sacrifices were common throughout Eurasia with the domestication of the horse and continuing up until the spread of Abrahamic religions, or in some places like Mongolia, of Buddhism.

Quotes

• Kazanas appears to be on fairly sound ground when he argues that the horse sacrifice in a late Ancient Mesopotamian text is due to Vedic influence. A rich horse mythology is attested in almost all Indo-European traditions, the horse sacrifice is referred to in late hymns of the Ṛgveda (RV 1.162 and RV 1.163), and is perhaps alluded to in the early family books (RV 3.53.11), and the peculiarity that in both the Vedic and Ancient Mesopotamian traditions a priest whispers into one of the horse’s ears would seem to indicate that the borrowing is a certainty.
  • Levitt, S. H. (2012). Vedic-ancient Mesopotamian interconnections and the dating of the Indian tradition. Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 93, 137-192.

• The savage dies — they sacrifice a horse
  To bear to happy hunting-grounds the corse.
  Our friends expire — we make the money fly
  In hope their souls will chase it through the sky.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Word Book (1906), "FUNERAL, n."