Horror
Horror a passion excited by an object which causes a high degree of fear and detestation. It is a compound of wonder and fear. Sometimes it has a mixture of pleasure, from which, if predominant, it is denominated a pleasing horror. Such a horror, seizes us at the view of vast and hanging precipices, a tempestuous ocean, or wild and solitary places. This passion is the original of superstition, as a wise and welltempered awe is of religion. Horror and terror seem almost to be synonymous; but the former refers more to what disgusts, the latter to that which alarms us. Horse- sacrifice, a ceremony celebrated by various ancient nations, in which a horse was offered in sacrifice to a deity, usually the sun. The Massagetee, a great and powerful nation, whose territories extended beyond the Araxes to the extreme parts of the East, sacrificed horses to the sun. The practice prevailed in Persia in the time of Cyrus, and may have been anterior to that sovereign. Horses were sacrificed to Neptune and the deities of the rivers, being precipitated into the sea or into the rivers. The Lacedemonians sacrificed a horse to the winds, which, by their force, carried the ashes of the victim to a distance. Among the ancient Romans a horse was sacrificed annually to Mars in the Campus Martius, in the month of October. The blood that dropped from the tail of the October horse, as it was called, was carefully preserved by the vestal virgins in the temple of Vesta, for the purpose of being used at the Palilia or shepherd festival. In the Rig Veda are two hymns in honor of the horse-sacrifice, called Aswanzedha, which describe the horse as "bathed, and decorated with rich trappings, the variously-colored goat going before him." The horse is led three times round the sacrificial fire; he is then bound to a post and slaughtered with an ax; and the flesh is roasted on a spit, boiled, made into balls, and eaten; and finally "The horse proceeds to that assembly which is most excellent; to the presence of his father and his mother (heaven and earth). Go, horse, today, rejoicing to the gods, that (the sacrifice) may yield blessings to the donor." The horse-sacrifice at this day is one of the great annual ceremonies of the Hindus.
