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:''For other uses of 'Epona', see Epona (disambiguation)''

In Gallo-Roman religion, 'Epona' was a protector of horses, donkeys, and mules. She was particularly a goddess of fertility, as shown by her attributes of a patera, cornucopia, and the presence of foals in some sculptures (Reinach, 1895). And H. Hubert^[1] suggested that the goddess and her horses were leaders of the soul in the after-life ride, with parallels in Rhiannon of the Mabinogion. Unusually for a Celtic deity, most of whom were associated with specific localities, the worship of Epona, "the sole Celtic divinity ultimately worshipped in Rome itself",^[2] was widespread in the Roman Empire between the first and third centuries CE.

Contents

Etymology of the name

Evidence for Epona

Iconography

Trivia

See also

See also

References

External links

Notes

Etymology of the name

Although only known from Roman contexts, the name Epona, "Divine Mare" is from the Gaulish language; it is derived from the inferred proto-Celtic
★ epōs (horse)^[3] — which gives rise to modern Cymric ''ebol'' (foal) and old Cymric ''epa'' (to steal horses) — together with the ''-on-'' frequently, though not exclusively, found in theonyms (for example Sirona, Matronae), and the usual Gaulish feminine singular ''-a''. (Delmarre, 2003:163-164). In an episode preserved in a remark of Pausanias,^[4] an archaic Demeter too had also been a Great Mare, who was mounted by Poseidon in the form of a stallion and foaled Arion and the Daughter who was unnamed outside the Arcadian mysteries.^[5] Demeter was venerated as a mare in Lycosoura in Arcadia into historical times.

Evidence for Epona

Benoit found the earliest attestations of a cult of Epona in the Danubian provinces and asserted that she had been introduced in the ''limes'' of Gaul by horsemen from the east. This suggestion has not been generally taken up.
Although the name is in origin Gaulish, dedicatory inscriptions to Epona are in Latin or, rarely, Greek and were made not only by Celts— an inscription to Epona from Mainz, Germany, identifies the dedicant as being Syrian ^[6] — but also Germans, Romans and other inhabitants of the Roman Empire. A long Latin inscription of the first century BCE, engraved in a lead sheet and accompanying the sacrifice of a filly and the votive gift of a cauldron, was found in 1887 at Rom, Deux-Sèvres, the Roman Rauranum. The inscription offers to the goddess an archaic profusion of epithets for a goddess, ''Eponina'' ("dear little Epona"): she is ''Atanta'', horse-goddess ''Potia'' ("powerful Mistress; compare Greek ''Potnia''), ''Dibonia'' (Latin, the "good goddess")",''Catona'' of battle", noble and good ''Vovesia''^[7]
Her feast day in the Roman calendar was December 18 as shown by a rustic calendar from Guidizzolo, Italy (Vaillant, 1951), although this may have been only a local celebration. She was incoporated into Imperial cult by being invoked on behalf of the Emperor, as ''Epona Augusta'' or ''Epona Regina''.
The supposed autonomy of Celtic civilisation in Gaul suffered a further setback with Fernand Benoit's study^[8] of the funereal symbolism of the horseman with the serpent-tailed("''anguiforme"'') daemon, which he established as a theme of victory over death, and Epona; both he found to be belated manifestations of Mediterranean-influenced symbolism, which had reached Gaul through contacts with Etruria and Magna Graecia. Benoit compared the rider with most of the riders imaged around the Mediterranean shores.
Perceptions of native Celtic goddesses had changed under Roman hegemony: only the names remained the same. As Gaul was Romanized under the early Empire, Epona’s sovereign role evolved into a protector of cavalry (Oaks 1986:79-81). The cult of Epona was spread over much of the Roman Empire by the auxiliary cavalry, ''alae'', especially the Imperial Horse Guard or ''equites singulares augustii'' recruited from Gaul, Lower Germany, and Pannonia. A series of their dedications to Epona and other Celtic, Roman and German deities was found in Rome, at the Lateran (Spiedel, 1994). As 'Epane' she is attested in Cantabria, northern Spain, on Mount Bernorio, Palencia (Simón).
A bizarre euhemerist account of the birth of Epona that does not reflect Celtic beliefs can be found in Plutarch's life of Solon: Giambattista Della Porta's edition of ''Magia naturalis'' (1589), a potpourri of the sensible and questionable, remarks, in the context of unseemly man-beast coupling, Plutarch's Life of Solon, in which he "reports out of Agesilaus, his third book of Italian matters, that Fulvius Stella loathing the company of a woman, coupled himself with a mare, of whom he begot a very beautiful maiden-child, and she was called by a fit name, Epona..."

Iconography

Sculptures of Epona fall into five types, as distinguished by Benoit: riding, standing or seated before a horse, standing or seated between two horses, a tamer of horses in the manner of ''potnia theron'' and the symbolic mare and foal. In the Equestrian type, common in Gaul, she is depicted sitting side-saddle on a horse or (rarely) lying on one; in the Imperial type (more common outside Gaul) she sits on a throne flanked by two or more horses or foals (Nantonos, 2004). In distant Dacia, she is represented on a stela (Szépmüvézeti Museum, Budapest) in the format of Cybele, seated frontally on a throne with her hands on the necks of her paired animals: her horses are substitutions for Cybele's lions.
Epona is mentioned in ''The Golden Ass'' by Apuleius, where an aedicular niche with her image on a pillar in a stable has been garlanded with freshly-picked roses. ^[9] In his ''Satires'', the Roman poet Juvenal also links the worship and iconography of Epona to the area of a stable. ^[10] Small images of Epona have been found in Roman sites of stables and barns over a wide territory.
The probable date of ca. 1400 BCE ascribed to the giant chalk horse carved into the hillside turf at Uffington, in southern England, is too early to be directly associated with Epona a millennium and more later, but clearly represents a Bronze Age totem if some kind. The English traditional hobby-horse riders parading on May Day at Padstow, Cornwall and Minehead, Somerset, which survived to the mid-twentieth century, even though Morris dances had been forgotten, may have deep roots in the veneration of Epona, as may the English aversion to eating horsemeat.^[11] At Padstow formerly, at the end of the festivities the hobby-horse was ritually submerged in the sea.^[12]
The Cymric moon goddess Rhiannon rides a white horse.

Trivia

★ Link, from The Legend of Zelda series games, rides a horse named Epona in three installments: (1998), (2000), and (2006).

See also

★ Horse sacrifice

See also

References

★ Benoît, F. (1950). ''Les mythes de l'outre-tombe. Le cavalier à l'anguipède et l'écuyère Épona''. Brussels, Latomus Revue d'études latines.

★ Delamarre, X. (2003). ''Dictionaire de la Langue Gauloise''. 2nd edition. Paris, Editions Errance.

★ Green M. J. (1986), ''The Gods of the Celts'', Stroud, Gloucestershire.

★ Nantonos and Ceffyl (2004) Epona.net, a scholarly resource

★ Oaks, L. S. (1986), "The goddess Epona", in M. Henig and A. King, ''Pagan Gods and Shrines of the Roman Empire'' (Oxford), pp 77-84.

★ Reinach, Salomon (1895). Épona. ''Revue archéologique'' 1895, part 1, 113, 309, 317ff.

★ Simón, Francisco Marco, "Religion and Religious Practices of the Ancient Celts of the Iberian Peninsula" in ''e-Keltoi: The Celts in the Iberian Peninsula'', '6' 287-345, section 2.2.4.1 (on-line)

★ Speidel, M. P. (1994). ''Riding for Caesar: the Roman Emperors' Horse Guards''. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press.

★ Thevenot, Emile 1949. "Les monuments et le culte d' Epona chez les Eduens," ''L'antiquite Classique'' '18' pp385-400. Epona and the Aedui.

★ Vaillant, Roger (1951), Epona-Rigatona, ''Ogam'', Rennes, pp190-205.

★ http://www.celtnet.org.uk/gods_e/epona.html

External links

★ Epona

Notes

1. Hubert, "Le mythe d'Epona" ''Mélanges linguistiques offerts à M. J.Vendryes'' (1925) pp 187-198.
2. Phyllis Pray Bober, reviewing Réne Magnen, ''Epona, Déesse Gauloise des Chevaux, Protectrice des Cavaliers'' in ''American Journal of Archaeology'' '62'.3 (July 1958, pp. 349-350) p. 349. Émile Thevenot contributed a ''corpus'' of 268 dedicatory inscriptions and representations.
3. Compare Latin ''equus'', Greek ''hippos''.
4. Pausanias, viii.25.5, 37.1 and 42.1 The myth was noted in ''Bibliotheke'' 3.77 and reflected also in a lost poem of Callimachus and in Ptolemy Hephaestion's "''New History'' (Theoi.com: texts).
5. Karl Kerenyi, ''The Gods of the Greeks'' (1951) pp 184ff "Demeter, and Poseidon's stallion-marriages"
6. ''CIL'' 13, 11801
7. G.S.Olmstead, "Gaulish and Celti-Iberian poetic inscriptions" ''Mankind Quarterly'' '28'.4, pp339-387.
8. Benoit 1950.
9. ''"respicio pilae mediae, quae stabuli trabes sustinebat, in ipso fere meditullio Eponae deae simulacrum residens aediculae, quod accurate corollis roseis equidem recentibus fuerat ornatum."'' (iii.27). In Robert Graves' translation of ''The Golden Ass'', he has interposed an explanatory "the Mare-headed Mother" that does not appear in the Latin text; it would have linked Epona with the primitive mythology of Demeter, who was covered as a mare by Poseidon in stallion-form (see above); there is no justification for identifying Epona with Demeter, however.
10. ''Satire VIII'' lines 155-57, where the narrator derides a consul for his inappropriate interest in horses:

: Meanwhile, while he sacrifices sheep and a redish bullock : in the fashion of ancient king Numa, before the altar of Jupiter : he swears an oath only by Epona and the images painted at the reeking stables.

: ''interea, dum lanatas robumque iuuencum'' : ''more Numae caedit, Iouis ante altaria iurat'' : ''solam Eponam et facies olida ad praesepia pictas.''

11. Theo Brown, "Tertullian and Horse-Cults in Britain" ''Folklore'' '61'.1 (March 1950, pp. 31-34) p. 33.
12. Herbert Kille, "West Country hobby-horses and cognate customs" ''Proceedings of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society'' '77' (1931)