The Horse

The distant ancestors of the horse were among the Earth’s oldest mammals with a lineage reaching back long before the first whales appeared and many millions of years before the first monkeys or man… By the time modern humans were beginning to make a mark on their surroundings, the horse had already undergone 50 million years of design...The people of far Eastern Europe were the first to learn to capture and domesticate horses. They were soon followed by people in other parts of the Eastern Hemisphere… A new and evolutionary partnership was born…

The journey of human civilization began with this partnership and without it human history would have been quite different. First driven and then ridden, domestic horses revolutionized land transport and impacted all facets of life: food growing and gathering, trade, territory, social status and warfare.

By the late 1930’s and early 1940’s horses began to lose their importance with the arrival of the tractor and the automobile and a new age of industrialization… Except for a few specialized cases, horses no longer serve any purpose. For the first time in human history we have no need for the horse’s physical strength or attributes. But what we do need, perhaps more than ever is the horse’s spiritual power…

The horse is a prey animal that lives within a herd. The instinct to live within a group is one that shows a certain intellect indicative to the survival of its species. . Living within this social structure gives the horse certain characteristics…When you read a horses body language you are quite literally reading its mind. A horse is constantly giving off signals about what it feels, whether it’s anger, defiance, fear, boredom, fatigue, relaxation or submission. They compete to find their proper niche, to find out how they’re all going to live together in a herd…

In a herd the horse that loses the battle is not regarded as a victim. In fact in prey consciousness the loser is actually empowered because it acknowledges a stronger horse that will look after it. Horses know that after any contest of wills, they must still live together in a herd. They compete in a way that makes that possible for them – a way that offers us a model of how we can earn our own place in society while strengthening that structure instead of weakening it. They compete with each other while keeping the welfare of the herd in mind. Horses know they have to stick together to survive.

The horse in modern times seems to have lost its practical value but I feel that the horse is so much more than just a recreational partner or pet. They are also our teachers…Not only have they been our partners throughout history but they have become a strong archetype for many cultures. In studying and living with them we can learn by their example as to how to become more sensitive to the interactions and interrelationships between ourselves and the people and the world around us. We are still evolving as a species and are now in a time of Globalization. Like horses we must come to realize that our survival depends on those interrelationships and cross-fertilizations in order to survive both socially and environmentally…Today, the human spirit is poised for transformation. The old predatorial warrior spirit has brought us this far, but it’s now struggling to achieve a balance with the peaceful co-existence of prey consciousness. Perhaps the strong spiritual bond that exists between horses and humans will be but one guiding light that will help us on our continuing journey of evolution….

Kim Deutsch