custom of the country

One little known fact about my part of the world is that it’s the venue for the annual Spring Horse Sacrifice, which takes place today. No one knows where it came from, though my theory is that it was of Scythian origin and originally brought to the UK by Sarmatian legionaries in the Roman army, who were posted in this region.

Whatever its origins, the Horse Sacrifice has persisted down the centuries through the long dark night of Christianity and into today’s secular era. On the appointed day, many thousands travel to a shrine which consists of a round circle of beaten grass. There is drinking and feasting. Wealth is displayed. Money is ceremonially burned through the agency of traditional intermediaries drawn from the ‘bookmaking’ tribe.

When the time comes for the sacrifice to begin, the crowds gather round the circle. The horses are then ceremonially driven through barriers of wood and thorns erected for the purpose. When enough have been killed in this manner, the sacrifice ends with the award of a prize to the rider of the surviving horse leading the procession. Many wealthy people buy horses specifically for the sacrifice. It is considered a great honour to guarantee the success of the harvest in this way.

Comments

[a3t]

Could you keep this up to novel-length? I could read a description of our England seen through the eyes of a visiting anthropologist from the developed world.

[Barry Freed]

Not England (though close enough) and a classic of the genre (if not the ur-text itself): Body Ritual among the Nacirema

[ejh]

I was thinking of the old gag about the aliens/visitors from remote places who go to Lord's and think it's a religious ritual designed to produce rain.

[Kevin Donoghue]

Shame about Synchronised. Throwing the jockey before the start of the race seemed like a very intelligent move.

[guthrie]

I liked that. I was thinking "Now why havn't I heard of this so called festival thingy, I thought I knew about many of them already?"

[skidmarx]

Herodotus thought the Scythians could get stoned by smoking hemp seed, which would be quite an impressive feat.

[Strategist]

Loving the "Ladies' Day" collection of pics in the sidebar of the Telegraph piece you linked to. I bet they'd scare the crap of your average Scythian.

[chris y]

I dunno. I don't get the impression that Scythians scare easy these days.

[CMcM]

My feed has just thrown up the factoid that the (human)death rate @ Gold Beach on 6/6/44 was only a third of the (equine) death rate at yesterday's GN.

Sobering if true -& I don't know a quicker way to verify this than posting here.

[Barry Freed]

How many horses ran yesterday? Wikipedia says usually about 40; so with 2 horses dead that's a 5% fatality rate. Wikipedia also says about 25,000 troops landed on Gold Beach the first day with about 400 casualties for a 1.6% casualty rate (putting aside for the moment the fact that casualty ≠ fatality). So yeah, that sounds about right if Wikipedia and my arithmetic are to be trusted (and if the latter is off I shall be forever ashamed).

[Barry Freed]

OTOH, something about that comparison makes me queasy. At the very least it's in bad taste (that's bad taste as opposed to good bad taste à la John Waters). Has someone just seen War Horse?

[Barry Freed]

bad taste s/b bad bad taste

[CMcM]

Bad taste? Horses ain't human, true enough. & I'm no Pete Singer: I don't think an animal life is worth a human one under any circumstances.

But fun is what the GN promises. (So did bear baiting I'm told). & yet it has an attrition rate comparable to the first day of the biggest invasion in history. The bad taste is in conceiving of this as fun.

[Igor Belanov]

I think attrition is the right word, when so little of the field actually finishes. I know a few big racing fans who don't really consider the Grand National to be a 'serious' race. There might be a touch of sporting snobbery in this, but at least part of it is down to the fact that suffering for the horses seems to be considered all part of the 'thrills and spills' for the masses.

[Barry Freed]

Bad taste? as I wrote, "at least." Actually I find it pretty much downright offensive (the comparison that is). But hell, I'm in the middle of trying to figure out my taxes and feeling very harried and out of sorts at the moment.

[Strategist]

I think attrition is the right word, when so little of the field actually finishes. I know a few big racing fans who don't really consider the Grand National to be a 'serious' race.

The Red Rum guy, Ginger Rogers or Ginger Baker or whatever he's called, was saying on the radio today that it's definitely the size of the field, not the height of the fences, that is behind the carnage. I agree, and I have some expertise on this, as I have been over a couple of GN fences personally.

Though not actually mounted on a horse. A leg up from a mate and they're a piece of piss, though a bit prickly. (The occasion was the year the IRA bomb scare called the race off and everyone was evacuated onto the pitch, or whatever it's called. The carnage that day was restricted to the beer tent.)

[Strategist]

Chris Y: Oh yeah? How many rounds do you think your Scythian could go with these three?

[chris y]

How many rounds do you think your Scythian could go with these three?

Woah... What we have here is a Germanic priestess/seer (probably Veleda and a couple of her ancillae) who would have no trouble getting any passing Scythian to go as many rounds as she wants. The smart money says to stay clear of the Gaulish frontier until the storm passes.

[Douglas Young]

The Galway kings use to start their kingships by sacrificing a horse then having sex with it, after that cutting it up and boiling it in a cauldron, taking a bath in the cauldron and drinking the broth, then eating some of the meat (according to Gerald of Wales).

Merging your Spring Horse Sacrifice and this should be simple.

[Richard J]

I wouldn't suggest mixing it with the Viking funeral described by Ibn Fadlan, though. Even in Liverpool, human sacrifice [1] remains frowned upon.

[1]Generations of Wee Free ancestors frown at me here muttering about 'transubstantiation'.

[ajay]

Could you keep this up to novel-length? I could read a description of our England seen through the eyes of a visiting anthropologist from the developed world.

It would fit rather nicely into my unwritten blood-and-thunder novel about a young man in Mumbai who discovers that his uncle stole a sacred statue from the Bishop of Sodor and Man and is now being pursued by merciless Church of England assassins.

[Richard J]

Raiders of the Lost Sark, Ajay?

[bert]

To appease the gods a champion athlete's body hair is plucked out and woven into a crude matting which he wears as a hat. His concubine is painted orange and they are mocked by the crowd.

[dsquared]

I know a few big racing fans who don't really consider the Grand National to be a 'serious' race. There might be a touch of sporting snobbery in this, but at least part of it is down to the fact that suffering for the horses seems to be considered all part of the 'thrills and spills' for the masses.

*raises hand*

It's not snobbery - it's simply that the field's too big. Which makes it a lottery rather than a sensible betting proposition. But you need to have lots and lots of horses in order to have the 150/1 longshots that grannies like to bet 50p on. So basically what we are seeing here is that horses are slaughtered in order to satisfy the human lust for fat-tailed returns distributions.

[ajay]

Off topic, but the B&T Book Recommendation Synod has come through again: I bought "The Tiger Who Came To Tea" based on the recommendations here, and it was a terrific success.

[bert]

To get rich is glorious. To pull off an accumulator will be even gloriouser.

http://www.sportspromedia.com/sportspro_blog/the_next_generation_tianjinequine_culture_city/
http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/maeve-dineen-irish-breeders-on-to-a-winner-as-chinese-take-up-racing-3081630.html

[Richard J]

Off topic, but the B&T Book Recommendation Synod has come through again: I bought "The Tiger Who Came To Tea" based on the recommendations here, and it was a terrific success.

I can disrecommend Lewis-Stempel's Six Weeks[...], BTW, as being infuriatingly point-missing about the junior British subaltern. Yes, it's to their eternal credit that they were self-sacrificing, thought of their men before themselves, etc., but (as acknowledged on about two or three pages tacitly) the young muscular Christian chap fresh out of public school just wasn't very good at the business of not putting his men in situations where they wouldn't die in large numbers.

[ajay]

Good job I didn't get that for the three-year-old, then.

[Richard J]

No, my daughter is showing regrettably few signs of being interested in anything other than tigers of the furry variety, rather than of the Mk VI. Pzkw sorty.

[ejh]

Got this one?

[Strategist]

Cheers Chris Y, Bert.
On the off topic, does anybody else share my theory that there never was any tiger, rather that Mummy had failed in her housewifely duties of getting the groceries & Daddy's beer in, and is teaching the daughter a few feminine wiles for wangling a meal out down the cafe instead?
I don't think the sheer glamour of stepping out down to your local shopping parade after dark has ever been better portrayed.

[CMcM]

Driving further off topic, can I also recommend:

a) Eat Your Peas for Ajay's friend's 3 yr old's next birthday. (video here - but I prefer reading the parental part in tones of increasing shrieking desperation and the child's responses in a flat Brummie monotone...)

b) Thomas Penn's Winter King: the Dawn of Tudor England for any passing commentator with a financial and legal background - say an accountant - who also has an interest in how the tools of their trade can be made to work as a web of absolutist tyranny. It's splendidly creepy: don't let its' failure to mention Tigers of either variety put you off.

[ajay]

Thanks for the suggestion, but the 3 year old in question is actually showing a very heartening obsession with Heroic Age polar exploration, which I plan to encourage at future birthdays.

[Emma]

Ajay, your three year old might also like The Pizza Kittens, by Charlotte Voake, which, like the Tiger Who Came to Tea, is bearable to read thousands of times. Also if you ever see it, buy Margaret Mahy's The Lion in the Meadow, but take care, there are two versions, and the one with the happy ending is naff.

[Alex]

the 3 year old in question is actually showing a very heartening obsession with Heroic Age polar exploration

Neo-Edwardian child!

[dsquared]

I have just about convinced my seven-year-old that the directions given to Robert Falcon Scott were "head South until you see the Norwegian flag".

If we're doing book recommendations, then Joris "Banking Rage Blog" Luyendijk's book about his time as Middle East correspondent of De Volksrant, "People Like Us" is IMO really very good and refreshingly free of the usual foreign correspondent check-out-the-big-balls-on-me stuff.

[ajay]

buy Margaret Mahy's The Lion in the Meadow, but take care, there are two versions, and the one with the happy ending is naff.

Bit like Blade Runner then.

[belle le triste]

Never one not to twist the knife, Roland Huntford argues that Scott did exactly this in the very closing stages of reaching the pole. The Norwegians had carefully "boxed" 0º S (because so hard to be exact at that latitude), by planting flags at a sensible distance on all sides -- in other words, even if they never quite stood AT the pole they had been"beyond" it in every possible direction. (Presumably after the Cook and Peary debacle, he was super-paranoid about cheating by his rivals.)

The Brits, when they arrived, mistook one of Amundsen's non-polar boxing flags for their actual official polar flag, and headed for that.

(It's one of -- many -- moments where Huntford seems to be bending over backwards to be unkind to Scott: he allows the Norwegians to adjust for approximation; while Scott is mocked for not achieving an impossible super-precision...)

[belle le triste]

ps ajay, I can't work out if this will be good or terrible, or at all relevant to the interests of a 3-yr-old fan of things polar, but I just encountered it in my day-job, so I thought I'd pass it on.

[ajay]

Grrr, Huntford... don't get me started.

The Nowhere Island project sounds good though.

[Chris Williams]

My kids' school gave one of the Year Three classes the name Scott. Which is cool. Huntford can sod _all_ the way off, in my opinion.

ObChildren'sBook: 'Tom Crean's Rabbit'. Crean (along with Wild and Lashley) is one of the unsung heroes of that heroic age.

[Barry Freed]

I never thought I'd have to make a children's literature section to the B&T reading list but, well, here we are. I'm not quite sure they fit in with the children's illustrated Clausewitz though.

[belle le triste]

There's quite a bad biography of Tom Crean, which I recommend avoiding, whatever age you are. Also probably best avoid the book written from the perspective of McNeish's cat on the second Shackleton expedition, though it has nice pictures.