Abstract
Several medieval works on the Christianization of Slavic gentes that were settled on the coastline of the Baltic Sea contain information about a divinatory technique using a sequence of watching horses and drawing lots. Using this ritual, the tribal council decided whether to go to war and plunder or not.
The horse was allegedly led by a deity seated on its back, and decisions were made by means of that god's will. This paper focuses on the meaning of this Western-Slavic hippomantic and astragalomantic divinatory ritual in a context of the social-cultural, political, and religious ideology of the Western Slavs, and also in a relation to a general Indo-European (IE) mythological and ritual horse symbolism.
The aim of this survey is to analyse medieval sources (such as Thietmar, Herbord, Ebbo, Vita Prieflingensis, Saxo Grammaticus) and to compare the features of Slavic hippomancy with the other well-known IE horse-rituals, such as the Germanic hippomancy known from Tacitus, the Vedic aśvamedha, or the Irish ritual instalment of a king. The hypothesis (based on a thorough source-analysis and the methods of comparative mythology) is that the horse in the symbolic system of Western Slavs was deemed sacred primarily in a relation to the contemporary social ideology and its demands and values, which were embedded in the complex symbolic system of Slavic religion.
The symbolic value of the horse lies in the polysemantic association with the domains of warfare, political and judicial decisions, social hierarchy, and the economy of Slavic political units. The horse divination ritual was in this sense a powerful mediating instrument between the realms of so-called 'sacred' and 'profane' - this seeming division is only our modern conceptual bias.
Thus, Slavic hippomancy needs to be understood as one of the products of a complex organizing symbolic system, and as a mediator able to integrate many of its mutually interconnected 'domains' into one coherent whole.