The Horse Archetype

In Poetry and

Anthroposophy

by Sylvia Plath¹

Two virtues ride, by stallion, by nag,
To grind our knives and scissors:
Lantern-jawed Reason, squat Common Sense,
One courting doctors of all sorts,
One, housewives and shopkeepers.

The trees are lopped, the poodles trim,
The laborer's nails pared level
Since those two civil servants set
Their whetstone to the blunted edge
And minced the muddling devil

Whose owl-eyes in the scraggly wood
Scared mothers to miscarry,
Drove the dogs to cringe and whine
And turned the farmboy's temper wolfish,
The housewife's, desultory.

In the "Death of Myth-Making" Plath associates the horse with human thinking. Here the horse is a swift, airy vehicle carrying thoughts instantaneously in the mind of the thinker. Despite the rapidity of thought creation, the limitations of dead concepts in a non-living intellectualism combined with pure utilitarian practicality result in the death of a creative, living thinking. Reason and common sense allow us short term security but force us to think in a chain of endless causes and effects. The capacity to think creatively with inspired awareness is lost and the direct cognition of the world of ideas, the source of all myth, is replaced by sense-bound thinking. The subject-object dichotomy separates us from the rest of the cosmos.

The two horseman of this foursquare duality arrive on the scene to banish Lucifer and the fear caused by his superstitions. What we gain in suppressing the mysticism of Lucifer we lose in our inability to perceive the realities of the cosmos that lay behind the appearances.

But why do these "virtues" ride on horseback? What is the relationship between the horse and human thinking?

Rudolf Steiner in his lecture series The Apocalypse of St. John (pages 84-85) takes a radical view of the horse archetype. As a background for understanding Steiner's view of the horse, we should recall that Steiner maintained that human thinking is part of an objective world reality and he consequently rejected a purely mechanistic view of earth evolution. All experience requires thinking which supplies the connection between observed phenomena. Science correctly demands our meticulous perception of outer experience; however the lawful connectedness of this observed experience is provided by human thinking. Human thinking must be experienced and studied as rigorously as outer phenomena in order to create a coherent science.⁴

We carve out our portion of thought from an objective world thought. We only know the world through human thinking and this thinking is permeable and can be entered by other thought beings. Any object or animal that we can think about is united with us in the very act of cognition. My thoughts about a horse are an attribute of the horse and part of the horse as much as its hooves and tail. It's no objection to declare that an observer is necessary for the horse to have this attribute of human thinking. Food is necessary for the horse to have life and hence tail and hoof.

Therefore when we think about the horse, we unite with the horse. Presently our method of thinking, the Reasonable and Practical(like in Plath's poem), dictates that we separate the horse from out of ourselves. But human thinking and consciousness evolve over time and we can envision a thinking of the past that transcended both human and horse and subsumed them into one unified thought form. The radically different consciousness of this "proto-human/horse", a consciousness that wasn't necessarily a self-consciousness, felt the horse as much a part of its own being as we think of our eyes and ears as part of our own being today.

The transcending, macro-thinking entities continued to differentiate and consciousness of self was moving into smaller and smaller thinking units. For this evolution to take place, the human entities had to force out of themselves thought forms that hindered the development of self consciousness. The human horse component allowed larger macro thought forms to stream directly into the human being and prevented humans from feeling thought was contained within their own individual being. By becoming aware of these thought matrixes, humans could begin to objectify the horse archetype and move it outside of themselves. Although retaining an intimate connection to this animal, we were able to completely change out thinking nature by establishing a degree of independence from this animal.

Although Steiner views human intelligence as a pinnacle of evolution, he believes that humans once encompassed the present day animals and over time “cast out” the archetypes of these forms. This makes sense if we remember that all of our perceptions and ideas about animals are mediated by our own thinking. We now apply the concept “subject-object” when we confront the animal, but “subject-object” is simply a result of our own thinking. It is possible that in a primordial past we did not apply this particular concept to animals resulting in no subject-object dichotomy and hence a union between human animals or more exactly a primordial human that contained all the animal archetypes within.

Despite the complex epistemological foundations of Steiner’s philosophy it is interesting to consider the statements that result from his clairvoyance. One need not accept his statements as truth-they may be read as curious literature that has an inner effect on the reader; but I believe that reason doesn’t preclude the possibility of Steiner’s knowledge or the existence of an “Akashic” record.

Steiner’s horse comments:

“... If we take a muddy liquid and allow the gross matter in it to settle to the bottom, the finer part remains at the top. In the same way the grosser parts which man would have been unable to use for his present condition of development have been deposited like a sediment in the animal forms. Through man having cast out of his line of development these animal forms-his elder brothers, as it were ,he has reached his present height. Thus man rises by throwing out the lower forms in order to purify himself and he will rise still higher by separating out another kingdom of nature, the kingdom of the evil race. Thus mankind rises upward. Man owes every quality he now possesses to the circumstance that he has rejected a particular animal form. One who with spiritual vision looks upon the various animals knows exactly what we owe to each one of them. We look upon the lion form and say : If the lion did not exist in the outer world, man would not have had this or that quality; for through his having rejected the lion he has acquired this or that quality. This is the case too with all the other forms in the animal kingdom.”

“Now the whole of our five ages of human development, the various cultural ages from the ancient Indian to our own, really exist in order to develop intelligence and reason and all that belongs to those two capacities and forces. Nothing of this existed in the Atlantean epoch. Memory was present and also other qualities, but to develop the intelligence and what pertains to it, while turning our attention to the outer world, is the task of the fifth epoch. Directing our clairvoyant vision to the surrounding world we inquire: To what do we owe the fact that we have become intelligent? What animal form have we put forth from ourselves in order to become intelligent ?-Curious and grotesque as it may appear, it is nevertheless true to say that if there were not around us the animals which belong to the horse nature, man would never have been able to acquire intelligence.”

“In former times men were still aware of this. All the intimate relations existing between certain races of men and the horse originate from a feeling which may be compared to the mysterious feeling of love between the two sexes, from a feeling of what man owes to this animal. Hence when the new culture arose in the ancient Indian age, it was a horse that played a mysterious role in religious ceremonial, in the worship of the gods. And all customs connected with the horse may be traced back to this fact. If you observe the customs of ancient peoples who were still close to the old clairvoyance such as, for instance, the old Germanic peoples, and notice how they fixed horse-skulls to the front of their houses, this leads you back to the awareness: man has grown beyond the unintelligent condition by separating out this form. There is a profound consciousness that the acquisition of cleverness is connected with it. You need only remember Odysseus and the wooden horse of Troy. Such legends contain deep wisdom, much deeper than our science contains. The horse species is not employed in legend without reason. Man has grown out of a form which once contained within it what is now embodied in the horse; and in the form of the centaur art still represented man as connected with this animal in order to remind him of the stage of development out of which he had grown, from which he had struggled free in order to become the present human being.”

“What thus took place in bygone times in order to lead to present mankind will be repeated at a higher stage in the future. It is not the case, however, that this would in the future have to run its course in the same way in the physical world. Those who become clairvoyant at the boundary between the astral and the devachanic planes can see how man continually purifies and develops what he owes to the separation from the horse nature. He will accomplish the spiritualizing of intelligence. After the great War of All against All he will elevate to wisdom, to spirituality, what is today merely reason, merely cleverness. This will be experienced by those who then will have reached the goal. The fruits of what was able to develop in humanity in consequence of the separation of the horse nature will be manifested.”

Rudolf Steiner, The Apocalypse of St. John.(Lectures given June 1908).Anthroposophic Press 1993. (pages 84-85).

Albrect Dürer: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1498)

The horse archetype is a force which enables the human being to counteract the hardening forces of gravity. The Horse’s speed and power lets us fly in the air above the Earth’s continuous suction and move in conjunction with the heavenly bodies. Pure imaginative thinking is the vehicle for the ego to ride. Rudolf Steiner expresses the essential horse-air experience in his fourth mystery drama: The Representative of the Air Element: “Escape from heavy weight of Earth existence
which kills the being of thyself in sinking.
Take flight from it with lightness of air.
In cosmic space search for reality in brightness.
Bind to thy semblance that which thou dost find;
in flying, it will grant to thee existence.”
(Rudolf Steiner, Four Mystery Dramas. Rudolf Steiner Press. Translated by Ruth and Hans Pusch) The primordial human, working towards incarnation, was forced to drive out the airy, swift quality of the horse. Our thinking slowed and hardened to logical Reason and Practicality, enabling freedom and autonomy but disconnecting us from direct perception of archetypal realities. In Ariel, Sylvia Plath captures the essence of this “airy” ride where motion dominates and fixed objects become blurred. The poet anticipates our reunion with the horse at a higher future level. Steiner’s “reality in brightness” is achieved at the poem’s conclusion where the rider’s spirit achieves a solar union: Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks——Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else
Hauls me through air——Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
White
Godiva, I unpeel——Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning. (Plath, Sylvia, The Collected Poems. HarperPerennial Edition, Copyrighted by Plath Estate.)² In Lilith, George MacDonald recounts a nighttime ride where the moon’s intervention leads to disaster: “He turned his head this way and that, snuffing the air; then started, and went a few paces in a slow, undecided walk. Suddenly he quickened his walk; broke into a trot; began to gallop, and in a few moments his speed was tremendous. He seemed to see in the dark; never stumbled, not once faltered, not once hesitated. I sat as on the ridge of a wave. I felt under me the play of each individual muscle: his joints were so elastic, and his every movement glided so into the next, that not once did he jar me. His growing swiftness bore him along until he flew rather than ran. The wind met and passed us like a tornado.
Across the evil hollow we sped like a bolt from an arblast. No monster lifted its neck; all knew the hoofs that thundered over their heads! We rushed up the hills, we shot down their farther slopes; from the rocky chasms of the river-bed he did not swerve; he held on over them his fierce, terrible gallop. The moon, half-way up the heaven, gazed with a solemn trouble in her pale countenance. Rejoicing in the power of my steed and in the pride of my life, I sat like a king and rode.
We were near the middle of the many channels, my horse every other moment clearing one, sometimes two in his stride, and now and then gathering himself for a great bounding leap, when the moon reached the key-stone of her arch. Then came a wonder and a terror: she began to descend rolling like the nave of Fortune’s wheel bowled by the gods, and went faster and faster. Like our own moon, this one had a human face, and now the broad forehead now the chin was uppermost as she rolled. I gazed aghast.
Across the ravines came the howling of wolves. An ugly fear began to invade the hollow places of my heart; my confidence was on the wane! The horse maintained his headlong swiftness, with ears pricked forward, and thirsty nostrils exulting in the wind his career created. But there was the moon jolting like an old chariot-wheel down the hill of heaven, with awful boding! She rolled at last over the horizon-edge and disappeared, carrying all her light with her.
The mighty steed was in the act of clearing a wide shallow channel when we were caught in the net of the darkness. His head dropped; its impetus carried his helpless bulk across, but he fell in a heap on the margin, and where he fell he lay. I got up, kneeled beside him, and felt him all over. Not a bone could I find broken, but he was a horse no more. I sat down on the body, and buried my face in my hands.” In Lilith Mr. Vane and his steed meet with disaster. Vane is caught up in the swiftness of pure thought. The horse ride becomes an unbalanced and negative experience where the self is tempted into disincarnation and hence loses its integration with the world. Here the excitement of the ride is interrupted by a sudden eruption of the subconscious where the horse is slammed by the shadowy moon forces.
Vane rides towards this disaster because he breaks his promise to Mr Raven (Adam) to join the Dead. Vane desires to bypass Death and escape the cycle of reincarnation. Here the night ride accurately portrays the forces of disincarnation which Steiner refers to as “Lucifer”. The world of high imagination where the airy forces rule must be balanced by the weight of Earth.

4"What, for the rest of experience, must first be brought from somewhere else — if it is applicable to experience at all — namely, lawful interconnection, is already present in thinking in its very first appearance. With the rest of experience the whole thing does not already express itself in what appears as manifestation to my consciousness; with thinking, the whole thing arises without reservation in what is given me. With the rest of experience I must penetrate the shell in order to arrive at the kernel; with thinking, shell and kernel are one undivided unity. It is only due to a general human limitation that thinking appears to us at first as entirely analogous to the rest of experience. With thinking we merely have to overcome our own limitation. With the rest of experience we must solve a difficulty lying in the thing itself. "

"In thinking, what we must seek for with the rest of experience has itself become direct experience."-The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception(Chap.8)
by Rudolf Steiner."

From the same chapter:

"Thus far we have arrived at the following truths. At the first stage of our contemplation of the world, the whole of reality confronts us as an unconnected aggregate; thinking is included within this chaos. If we move about within this manifoldness, we find one part in it which, already in the form of its first appearance, has the character the other parts have yet to acquire. This part is thinking. What is to be overcome in the rest of experience, namely the form of its immediate appearance, is precisely what we must hold onto with thinking. Within our consciousness we find this factor of reality, our thinking, that is to be left in its original form, and we are bound up with it to such an extent that the activity of our spirit is at the same time the manifesting of this factor. It is one and the same thing, looked at from two sides. This thing is the thought-content of the world. On the one hand it manifests as an activity of our consciousness, on the other as a direct manifestation of a lawfulness complete in itself as a self-determined ideal content. We will see right away which aspect has the greater importance. "

(So our thinking, which presents itself complete and unmediated, is both our own inner activity and an objective world content. Thinking is objective because its lawfulness is self-determined. As individuals we have different relationships to this objective world content, but the laws inherent in thinking are in no way subjective. -ed.)