The Three-Legged Horse

Given the possibility of a tripedal protohominid in our own ancestry, it is interesting to learn that three-legged creatures feature in the mythologies of many cultures. The attributes of tripedal animals encompass the sun and divine power (‘sanzuwu,’ the East Asian crow, and an Irish solar horse), earthly fortune and luck (the ‘chan chu,’ a Chinese money toad; ‘kratt,’ an Estonian fire-serpent, and ‘chanchito,’ a Chilean pig), aquatic purification and fertility (a giant offshore Indo-Iranian donkey), the male sexual principle (Mycenaean bulls, and perhaps Malian stallions), amusement for children (Saharan terracotta figurines), and even sacrifice and death (bulls in Mycenaean and Egyptian ritual, Danish ‘helhest’ or ghost-horse, and Malian terracottas from funeral chambers). This illustrated research essay constitutes an original synthesis of topics that previously have only been considered in isolation.

Autorizzazione del Tribunale di Pisa n. 41 del 21/12/2007 Direttore responsabile: Fabrizio Serra * A norma del codice civile italiano, è vietata la riproduzione, totale o parziale (compresi estratti, ecc.), di questa pubblicazione in qualsiasi forma e versione (comprese bozze, ecc.), originale o derivata, e con qualsiasi mezzo a stampa o internet (compresi siti web personali e istituzionali, academia.edu, ecc.), elettronico, digitale, meccanico, per mezzo di fotocopie, pdf, microfilm, film, scanner o altro, senza il permesso scritto della casa editrice.

It's just a draft.

In the myths of Iran there are so many creatures with unknown origin, one of the important ones is the "three-legged donkey" which is involved in the myth of creation. It plays an important role in Pahlavi book Bundahišn but the more books we read on the myths of Iran the less we know about this giant creature. First we took a look at the creation myth to see which part of the myth it belongs to. Then we studied all the sentences about the creature to have complete features of it.

Epiphany: a literary journal, 2018

2018

H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2020

book review

2010

A collection of fiction, nonfiction, and prose poetry that explores imagination through different shapes in form, content, and genre. Includes award winning nonfiction, "The Storekeeper," and award winning fiction, "The Fantôme of Fatma." v TABLE OF CONTENTS I. CRITICAL INTRODUCTION…………………………………….

Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines No. 49, 2019

Gyi ling is a Tibetan term indicating horses with outstanding features. It can be found in horse science manuals as well as in songs and rituals. It is part of a rich vocabulary that captures equine features in multiple dimensions. Indicating a particular type of horse within hippological classifications as well as excellent horses whose qualities can be attributed to divine origin, the notion of gyi ling seems to straddle pathways that cut across the symbolic and the real, reflecting a deep history of human-animal relations. In this paper we look at a text on gyi ling horses from the Tucci collection as well as more recent Tibetological and ethnographic materials from Eastern and Central Tibet to interrogate this notion. Gyi ling emerges as part of a set of terms that highlight particular features of horses linked to their military, political, and social importance in wider cosmopolitical arrangements. We suggest that the idea of gyi ling and its link to the cultivation of actual horsemanship, horse medicine, and the breeding of excellent horses needs to be looked at in the different contexts of use and deserves further cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural exploration.

Journal of Tibetan Literature, 2022

Link: https://journaloftibetanliterature.org/index.php/jtl/article/view/40 “The Tale of the Separation of Horse and Kiang,” a 9th- or 10th-century Tibetan ritual text recovered from Dunhuang, is a work of both simplicity and of extraordinary richness. This article offers a guided reading through this performative text, and describes its use of various poetic devices common to the genre of ritual antecedent tales. It also teases out some intriguing structural parallels and reversals in the plot of the narrative, and in the relationship it imagines between horses and humans. An application of Peter Rabinowitz's typology of four audiences reveals how the tale operates on different levels, simultaneously appealing to an ideal narrative audience of equine listeners, an ideal human audience that takes the world of this tale as real, a literary/performative audience that is familiar with the genre of ritual antecedent tales, and an actual audience of readers and listeners ranging from those who are ignorant of these tales and their genre to those who know them well. Considering also the plot's arc and the role of affect in the bodies of the tale's listeners, the article offers suggestions for how such tales impacted their various audiences.