Wish on a white horse.
I was introduced to the phrase by a very dear friend of ours. I’d never heard it before, but it’s one she learned from her mother, who learned it from hers, and so on. They’re not Native; her deepest roots lie in Italy, but her family has thrived in the land of the East Coast and the Upper Midwest for generations now.
When she came to visit us a couple of years ago, she mentioned her mother’s (and grandmother’s) saying.
Of course, we didn’t have an actual white horse then. We do now — a rescued mustang named Ice who found his way to us, starving, abused, abandoned, just before Christmas in 2013 — and he has since become her godhorse.
So when I came across this little guy yesterday, my thoughts went immediately to our friend, and to her saying above. I thought he had sold more than a year ago, but no: He had gotten tucked away on a shelf in the corner of the studio, facing forward unobtrusively, his color and placement making him nearly invisible.
So I drew him out of his hiding place, back into the light of day.
He’s a beautiful little miniature, a delicate sculptural piece that looks almost Asian in form and affect to me. From its description in the Other Artists: Sculpture gallery:
Randy Roughface (Ponca) has cajoled this miniature horse into emerging from a block of white alabaster so translucent, it looks like calcite. His abundant mane and tail flow freely; head lowered, he appears ready to spring into a gallop at any moment. He stands atop a thin point of Pilar slate. Length, from tip of tail to point of base, is 3.75″; height including base is 1-7/8″ (dimensions approximate).
White alabaster; Pilar slate
$125 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I love this little horse, all the more because he reminds me of our own. But I was curious about the origin of the notion of wishing on a white horse. And late last night, unable to sleep, I looked up the saying itself to see whether it was something specific only to our friend’s family or more widely used. It turns out that, while there isn’t a whole lot of information about it on the Internet, it is something that appears more widely.
The contemporary American practice of wishing on a white horse appears to be rooted mostly in the Upper Midwest, my own lands, but strictly in populations of European ancestry. It also seems to be something known and practiced mostly by women (perhaps because for many women in this country, horses were their first adolescent love?), women of a certain generation (which is to say, Baby Boomers, give or take, who learned it from their mothers and grandmothers). It seems largely to have vanished among younger women, with the exception of a few here and there who remember hearing it from their elders as children and who continue the practice.
And for some, a “practice” it is indeed. Our friend’s version, as I understand it, involves simply making a wish upon seeing a white horse; it’s supposed to bring good luck and make the wish come true. But a little Googling reveals that for others, there is an entire ritual that accompanies the wishing, involving stamping one’s thumb (and/or fist) into the opposite palm; for some, repeating words as an incantation; and other minutiae that varies from one retelling to the next.
It’s actually perfectly natural that such a practice should have grown up around white horses, particularly in a dominant culture not much removed from its European roots. White horses have been symbols throughout history, across cultures the world over, of significance and even of the sacred. Such connections are found throughout Europe before the arrival of the Church; in the sacred texts of the Church itself; in ancient Greek and Norse mythology; in the Middle East and South Asia; in the Far East; and even among some Native cultures on this continent, although most of the color-specific imagery seems to be wrapped up in traditions from elsewhere.
Much of it is no doubt due to the relative rarity of white horses. And even then, of course, most of them are not truly white, ours included: Ice has a blue-tick undercoat in a roan pattern, but the outer layer manifests as snow-white, and, indeed, it was the sight of the afternoon sun on his coat, rendering each individual hair as its own crystallized icicle, that gave him his name. [Whether he ever had a name of his own before his arrival here, we don’t know; he was certainly half-wild. But he responded to “Ice” immediately.] But the scarcity of “white” horses generally makes it understandable that people would regard the sudden appearance of one as a harbinger of sorts, an omen, a sign of impending good fortune.
Perhaps the oldest traditions revolving around the appearance of a white horse come from the East (all of Asia and the ancient world now known as the Middle East). In the Philippines, a white horse warned an ancient people of impending danger; in Korea, one appeared and directed a people splintered by war and in need of a unifying leader to the person who would become king. Centuries later, Bach Ma (White Horse) appeared in a dream to the leader of what is now VietNam, directing him to build as his base what is now the modern city of Hanoi. Bach Ma is the city’s guardian, and has its own temple. The white horse appears in Buddhist, Hindu, and Zoroastrian traditions, as well: as servant, as sacrifice, as symbol of divinity and power. It also appears in Ancient Greek mythology as Pegasus, the Wingéd Horse, an image that has always reminded me of the more northerly unicorn, also perennially depicted as white. And in Islam, it was the white horse named Al Buraq who carried the prophet Mohammed on the famed Night Journey, and who also put in an appearance as a bearer of Abraham.
Closer to American dominant culture, the white horse finds ancestry in two major traditions: the Abrahamic faiths, especially the much younger, newer Christianity; and the exceedingly old pre-Church traditions. In the former, it appears in Judaism as one of the spirits of Heaven, set by God as a guardian of Earth. In the Christianity, it appears in revelatory guise, as a harbinger of doom and as the coming of peace: Among the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the last, death, rides a pale horse that it widely supposed to be gray-white, and a sign of the End of Days. He is ultimately followed, however, by the Messiah on a glowing white horse — and depending upon one’s interpretation, that arrival can be seen as heralding massive slaughter on an unprecedented scale, as the coming of the light and peace on earth, or as a combination of the two. Except for the profoundly religious who follow that tradition, it doesn’t sound especially like good fortune, however. Then, too, there are Christian “saints” depicted as riders of white horses; for our peoples, such iconography indeed turned out to be one of impending doom.
Among older European traditions, now commonly called “Pagan,” but perhaps better described simply as older, pre- and non-Christian or non-Abrahamic traditions, though, the white horse carries far more pleasant associations. In what is now the U.K., Rhiannon was said to have ridden a white horse, and spotting her on the horse was said to be a sign that good fortune would follow. Her horse may have been the inspiration for the Bronze-Age Uffington White Horse a mound figure in Oxfordshire, England. White Horse Taverns once abounded in both the U.K. and parts of the northeastern U.S. where there are substantial English settlements, and one wonders whether the name was a nod to the mythology of good fortune and an overt attempt to increase custom. White or gray-white horses also appear in Norse, Slavic, and Middle and Eastern European historical traditions. And then, of course, there is always the white horse ridden by that feminine hero of the ordinary people, Lady Godiva.
For our peoples, color has often been less important than more practical concerns: Is it swift? Sure-footed? Able to handle the dangers of the hunt and the rigors of battle, agile enough to aid its rider in counting coup? And, too, many of our peoples have painted their horses much as themselves, whether for ceremony, battle, or both: It’s not uncommon to see depictions of Indian ponies with coats adorned in bright symbols, and those with white coats perhaps show off such imagery to best advantage.
Whatever the origin of the phrase, we’re lucky enough to have a white horse upon which to wish every day, although our greatest wish is for his continued health and recovery from the physical infirmities with which he came to us. But his miniature likeness, his little alabaster avatar, belongs back out in the light of day where he can, like Ice, find a safe and permanent home
Back where someone else who needs a little good fortune can wish on him.
~ Aji
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