Journal:Archaeologia Baltica
Volume 11 (2009): The Horse and Man in European Antiquity (Worldview, Burial Rites, and Military and Everyday Life), pp. 314–327
Abstract
Apart from being a status marker with strong ritual connotations it is suggested that the horse in prehistory is a liminal agent between sea and land. As gender he represents land. The ship is as female as the sea. But the gender is contextual and culture specific. The connections of the horse with the ship are attributed to the opposition between the two elements. Since this opposition belongs to maritime cultures in the North the structural “cosmology” in question may have filtered over also to inland agrarian conditions. Symbols are polysemic and may even have represented different things to different social classes, like in recent times.
Journal:Archaeologia Baltica
Volume 10 (2008): Astronomy and Cosmology in Folk Traditions and Cultural Heritage, pp. 62–65
Abstract
Ancient cultures of the northern hemisphere created symbols, myths, and rituals that related deer to certain astronomical phenomena, to cosmological and cosmogonical ideas, and to hunting calendars. From their knowledge of the animal’s appearance, behaviour, and phenology they derived conceptions of power, fertility, creation and renewal, life and death, and psychosomatic transformation during a shamanistic seance.