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Next time you put on a pair of pants, thank the Horse Goddess.

According to current evidence, pants were invented by those same horse-riding, pot-smoking, milk-drinking Indo-European pastoralists who, starting about 6000 years ago, spread out in all directions from the Pontic-Caspian steppes to take over the known world: our linguistic ancestors.

Why, one might wonder, did they invent pants?

Easily told: because they were also the first to ride horses.

Did you ever try riding a horse while wearing a kilt?

Every word's a story.

In their 6000-year history, the lower, bifurcated garment has gone by many names, and pants are only the youngest.

The word, of course, is short for pantaloons, named for a stock character of 17th-century Italian comedy whose signature form of dress they were. Another version would have it that "pantaloons" was a nickname for Venetians, whose patron saint was St. Pantalone. Your call.

Older than pants were trousers, derived from the Gaelic triubhas. The Scots word trews remains more faithful to the original Celtic pronunciation than the longer, extended Southron version, which would seems to have acquired its extra syllable under the influence of drawers, something you draw on.

Older yet, the tunic-ed and toga-ed Romans were horrified to discover the barbarous inhabitants of Gallia Comata (“long-haired Gaul”) wearing leg-coverings that they called braccae. Germans wore them too—you know, those hairy barbarians are all alike—and called them by the same name, whence English breeches, and the Americanized britches. (Once again, Scots breeks remains faithful to the old Celtic pronunciation.) To the Hwicce, the original Anglo-Saxon Tribe of Witches, they were bréc, the plural of bróc, “leg covering.”

Braccae take us back in time about as far as we can go. The word exists in both Celtic and Germanic stocks, so in all likelihood derive, at the very least, from the time of the common tongue from which both language stocks derive: possibly 3500-3000 BCE.

What the original horse-riding, pot-smoking, milk-drinking pastoralists called them on the prairies of eastern Europe 6000 years ago, we don't know.

eigh  n.  1. the horse as sacred being  2. the rune eoh  3. (liturgical) the steed (personifier) of a god

"The god rides the man as meaning rides the rune."

They say that in the Old Language of the Witches, every word meant three things: something good, something bad, and something to do with a horse.

In those days, of course, we were a Horse People.

We'd been a Horse People since ever we first rode out of the East; indeed, they say that it was we who first tamed them. Put differently, it is to us that the Horned first gave horses, back in the dawn of days.

(So let it never be said, when the young bucks of our tribe ride out horse-reaving, that they are stealing horses. The Horned gave horses to us. Everyone knows that you can't steal what's already yours.)

So important were horses to our world that we named a rune for one: eoh, the great life of the gods, the movement of the cosmos.

New ways came. We settled. From a People of the Horse, we became a People of Cattle. The joke then became “...and something to do with a cow.”

We lost the old word eoh—and much else—but if it had (mutatis mutandis) survived in continuous use, we would today say eigh (rhymes with hay; cp. neigh).

Among us today, as it did to the ancestors, eigh still means “horse,” but a horse in its intrinsic sacrality.

Still it names the horse-rune, eigh.

Also it names the steed of the god, the priest that the Horned rides in ritual: for, as they say, the god rides the man as meaning rides the rune.

 Match wits with Cattubuttas the druid.

In the days of king Cú Roí, Cattubuttas the druid—said to be the wisest druid in Ireland, though he had not then a single gray hair in his beard—sat in a grove with his students, and this is what he said.

“As to foods, my children,” he told them, “the gods have denied us nothing, not even the flesh of the fleet-footed horse, noblest of animals.

“But know this also,” he added, raising a finger of admonishment: “that should it so happen that you do eat of horsemeat, it is thereafter geis upon you to enter into a chariot for the span of some twenty-seven days; for twenty-seven days thereafter, you may not enter one.

“Thrice nine days,” he told them again. “Remember it well, my warriors.”

So spoke Cattubuttas the druid to the young warriors in the days of Cú Roí the king.

And indeed, we still remember.

So: why 27?

In the martial society of Iron Age Ireland, such a prohibition—its memory preserved like a leaf in amber in Old Irish literature—would indeed lay heavy upon a warrior; it would, in effect, ban him from the field of battle for nearly a month's time.

The logic of the prohibition is not difficult to follow: it is, in effect, a breach of hospitality. Why, though, one wonders, specifically a period of twenty-seven days rather than, say, a full lunar month?

If Cattubuttas the wise, cat of battle, in his wisdom, knew, I for one do not.

Here's my guess, though: that it's numeric.

What's missing from Minoan art?

Before you answer "The women's shirts," let me clarify that I mean here: What kind of animal is missing from Minoan art?

There are all kinds of animals in Minoan art, inhabiting the realms of land, sky, sea, and imagination. But there's one that doesn't show up until very late in the game, for very specific reasons.

Image use by permission of Mari Lwyd Larcher