Me>> [Horses are Taboo in Prax b]ecause they are not beasts of Waha.
>Are all Beasts not-of-Waha taboo in Prax? I think not.
They are shunned by praxians to some degree or another. Cattle, which are also foreign to prax, are noted as being inferior but edible.
>Horse has always
>seemed to have been singled out as a taboo Beast. Is it unclean? Is it
>Evil? Is it Forbidden for some other magical reason? What, really, is
>the motive behind the taboo nature of Horse? It seems more of a magical
>reason than a socio-political one, IMO, although microcosm mirrors
>mesocosm mirrors macrocosm (bla-bla-bla) as always in Glorantha.
The only information I could find on the origin is the Waha writeup in ToTRM#15 where 'Waha distrusts horses, for horse-riding folk have long warred on his people'. Therefore it seems that Horses are hated because enemies ride them in battle just as much as ogres are hated because they eat people.
In the clear lack of any mythic clash in the Old Days (for a culture which can remember Waha subduing the River God or Storm Bull creating the Block), it seems probable that the tabooed nature of horses arises from simple ethnic dislike.
>Waitaminnit. Is it because Horse is really a carnivorous mount ?
No, it isn't. It's oft claimed in legend to be but all scholars can clearly see that horses are herbivores. Moreover the first age Galaninae myths (Tradetalk #3) paint a different picture of the relationship of the hippogriffs to horses than that known in Wyrm's Footprints.
>> woolly mammoth
>Do the Praxians have a taboo against wooly mammoths?
No, they have a bias against all beasts that are not from Prax. Woolly Mammoths are from Aggar and hence incur the bias against foreign species. They were not part of the Survival Covenant
>> There is no linguistic link between the Pentans and the Praxians.
>Well, my inference (not necessarily correct, BTW, which is why I bring
>it up) comes from the OOP source "Languages of Dragon Pass" from WF No 6.
Which I take with grains of salt snorted liberally up the nose. In paricular, I doubt the implications that everyone spoke Old Mantongue in the Good Old Days.
Nils Weinander:
>> Are all Beasts not-of-Waha taboo in Prax? I think not.
>Seems not. The zebras are a dubious case and the
>mules used by Issaries traders are OK according
>to Cults of Prax.
The mules are claimed to be not-horses. Furthermore the Waha What My Father Told Me tells his son that it is forbidden to eat horses or donkies or mules. Hence it seems the nomads are not as gullible as the Goldentongues would have you believe.
As for the Zebras, they were a fusion of a pre-existing Waha species with horses. One could make mammoths acceptable to prax by breeding them with long-nose beasts.
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