Ritual Details of the Irish Horse Sacrifice in Betha ... - Clarkriley.com

Ritual Details of the Irish Horse Sacrifice in 319
Betha Mholaise Daiminse
without its detractors. Some of these have criticized the
connections among the rites. Vangaard, for instance, finds
it “strange” that anyone has connected the October Equus
and the aßvamedha, holding that the only thing the two
rituals share is that “in both a horse is killed” (1979: 94–
95).
In particular, the response of critics to Gerald’s
account has sometimes been quite heated. Reactions have
ranged from Geoffrey Keating’s 17th century comparison
of Gerald to a dung beetle, who ignored flowers for the
sake of manure (2002: section 1), calling the report a
“malicious unwarranted lie” (2002: section 3); to John
O’Meara’s description of Gerald’s “apparent credulity which
must have delighted the hearts of the Irish” (1951, 1952:
17), to Katherine Simms’ suggestion that the sacrifice
“derived from a literary or oral tradition about a long
discontinued rite“ (1987, 2000: 21). Gerald certainly had a
motive; as a prominent member of the invading Norman-
English, it would have been to his advantage to paint the
Irish as barbarians, with the invasion being therefore a
civilizing mission. A ritual which involved not just pagan
sacrifice, but bestiality, would have been a fine
contribution to this. I would add the possibilities that
either Gerald mistook the symbol of a marriage of a king to
a woman described as a horse for its reality, or, that when
hearing of a ritual of that type, he was taken in by a local
who said something like, “That’s nothing; in Ulster they
use a real horse.”
The criticisms gain strength from Gerald’s status as
the only person to report the ritual; there is no
independent confirmation to counter any biases he may
have had. I will argue here, however, that there is indeed a
second source, one that, furthermore, strengthens the
comparisons with the other Indo-European rituals, and
allows us to find still more Irish parallels.
The source in question is the overlooked Lives of
Saint Molaise of Devenish (also known as Lasrian, and not
to be confused with the other Saint Molaise of Leighlin);
in particular, the Irish Life, Betha Mholaise Daiminse
(BMD), seems to have preserved details of a ritual similar
to that of Gerald. There is a Latin Life as well, Vita Sancti
Lasriani (Plummer 1922, 2: 131-140), which in turn
Volume 40, Number 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2012