The Seba library treats Stallion in 9 passages, across 6 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Burkert, Walter, Hillman, James).
She became a mare, he a stallion; she became a she-ass, he an ass; they joined and the hoofed animals were born.
Jung cites the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad to demonstrate how the stallion functions as the masculine libidinal pole in a cosmogonic series of divine couplings that projects the conversion of psychic energy into material creation.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
she transformed herself into a mare to escape Poseidon, but he changed himself into a stallion and covered her. Thereafter Demeter gave birth to Areion and a mysterious daughter.
Burkert establishes the Greek mythological core in which Poseidon’s stallion-transformation enacts an irresistible chthonic sexuality, begetting the fabulous horse Areion from the resistant, disguised goddess.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977thesis
or they were described more picturesquely as dog and bitch, horse (stallion) and donkey, cock and hen, and as the winged or wingless dragon.
Jung documents the alchemical tradition’s theriomorphic coding of the coniunctio, in which the stallion-and-donkey pairing represents the masculine active principle seeking union with the contrasting feminine element.
, The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, 1954thesis
its stallion thrust, the god’s unstoppable power; its hoof
Hillman explicitly ties the stallion’s erotic forward drive to Poseidon’s oceanic omnipotence, positioning it as the emblem of a libidinal force that is both elemental and mythologically precise.
, Animal Presences, 2008supporting
the noble animal was identified not only with the sun but also with the king in whose name the rite was to be celebrated; whose queen then had to enact in a pit a ritual of simulated intercourse with the immolated horse
Campbell analyses the Vedic aśva-medha to show how the stallion’s identification with solar kingship required ritual sexual enactment, making the horse the sacrificial vehicle through which sovereign power was cosmically renewed.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting
Originally it was the custom for the horse to nuzzle the woman’s genitals. The horse, like the ass, has the significance of a priapic animal.
Jung extends the horse’s priapic symbolism into Germanic folk-custom, connecting its phallic-generative significance to fertility rites involving pregnant women and white horses.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting
Tritaia bore Meknippos, “the black stallion”, to Ares
Kerényi registers the stallion within heroic onomastics, noting that a priestess of Athene bore a son named ‘the black stallion’ to Ares, encoding martial-equine power in the hero’s very identity.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
Robinson Jeffers, Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems
Campbell cites Jeffers’ Roan Stallion as a literary reference point in discussing the importance of rites, gesturing toward the stallion’s role as a figure of dangerous, transgressive libido in modern mythopoetic literature.
, Myths to Live By, 1972aside
As for the horse, its associations range over heaven and
Bly opens a sustained analysis of the three-legged versus four-legged horse in fairy tale, treating equine wholeness as a symbol of psychic completeness without focusing on the stallion’s specifically generative character.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990aside