Petrang Kabayo: A queer horse goddess classic film, free on YouTube

I'm reading a memoir called Horse Barbie by Geena Rocero. She writes: "We loved the campy 1989 Filipino queer classic Petrang Kabayo, a film in which a horse goddess has the power to cast and reverse curses, punishing people who are unkind to their steeds and rewarding others for their courage."

Hey, it's on YouTube! If you have a couple hours...

Related: An alchemist wants to ascend the The Holy Mountain (directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mexico, 1973) to replace the gods. The film doesn't seem to be on YouTube, but YouTubers have opinions about it.
A podcast about the director.

'Our whole eunuch civilisation': The horse in 'St. Mawr' by D. H. Lawrence (1925)

Louise is a married woman who calls herself "the harem type" insofar as she is given to relaxation, "only I never want the men inside the lattice." One day, she spies the stallion St. Mawr, an animal intended to be used as a stud but who reportedly didn't "seem to fancy the mares for some reason," and, "already half in love," she wants to buy him for her husband Rico.

"He was of such a lovely red-gold colour, and a dark, invisible fire seemed to come out of him. But in his big black eyes there was a lurking afterthought. Something told her that the horse was not quite happy: that somewhere deep in his animal consciousness lived a dangerous, half-revealed resentment, a diffused sense of hostility. She realised that he was sensitive, in spite of his flaming, healthy strength, and nervous with a touchy uneasiness that might make him vindictive."

A man warns her:

"...every horse is temperamental, when you come down to it. But this one, it is as if he was a trifle raw somewhere. Touch this raw spot, and there's no answering for him. ... If he was a human being, you'd say something had gone wrong in his life. But with a horse it's not that, exactly. A high-bred animal like St. Mawr needs understanding, and I don't know as anybody has quite got the hang of him. I confess I haven't myself."

Lou sees it:

"Not any raw spot at all. A battle between two worlds. She realised that St. Mawr drew his hot breaths in another world from Rico's, from our world. Perhaps the old Greek horses had lived in St. Mawr's world. And the old Greek heroes, even Hippolytus, had known it.

"With their strangely naked equine heads, and something of a snake in their way of looking round, and lifting their sensitive, dangerous muzzles, they moved in a prehistoric twilight where all things loomed phantasmagoric, all on one plane, sudden presences suddenly jutting out of the matrix. It was another world, an older, heavily potent world. And in this world the horse was swift and fierce and supreme, undominated and unsurpassed.–"Meet him half-way," Lewis said. But half-way across from our human world to that terrific equine twilight was not a small step. It was a step, she knew, that Rico could never take. She knew it. But she was prepared to sacrifice Rico."

Lou swears that she doesn't want "intimacy," that she is "too tired of it all."

"I love St. Mawr because he isn't intimate. He stands where one can't get at him. And he burns with life. And where does his life come from, to him? That's the mystery. That great burning life in him, which never is dead. Most men have a deadness in them, that frightens me so, because of my own deadness. Why can't men get their life straight, like St. Mawr, and then think?"

She says: "I want the wonder back again, or I shall die."

St. Mawr becomes a tragic figure. A character named Phoenix reports hearing someone say "cut him – else shoot him. Think they cut him – and if he die, he die." St. Mawr is too old to geld. Lou cannot believe it.

"Do you think it is true?" she asked. "Lewis? Do you think they would try to geld St. Mawr – to make him a gelding?" Lewis looked up at her. There was a faint deadly glimmer of contempt on his face.

"Very likely, Mam," he said.

She was afraid of his cold, uncanny pale eyes, with their uneasy grey dawn of contempt. These two men, with their silent, deadly inner purpose, were not like other men. They seemed like two silent enemies of all the other men she knew. Enemies in the great white camp, disguised as servants, waiting the incalculable opportunity. What the opportunity might be, none knew.

Lou resisted the news: "You know, I can't believe it. I can't believe Sir Henry would want to have St. Mawr mutilated. I believe he'd rather shoot him." The horse's buyer, a Miss Manby, reportedly asked – in Lewis's words – about gelding the difficult animal to "make a horse of him."

Lou watches the horse:

She could see St. Mawr himself, alone as usual, standing with his head up, looking across the fences. He was streaked dark with rain. Beautiful, with his poised head and massive neck and his supple hindquarters. He was neighing to Poppy. Clear on the wet wind came the sound of his bell-like, stallion's calling, that Mrs. Vyner called cruel. It was a strange noise, with a splendour that belonged to another world age. The mean cruelty of Mrs. Vyner's humanitarianism, the barren cruelty of Flora Manby, the eunuch cruelty of Rico. Our whole eunuch civilisation, nasty-minded as eunuchs are, with their kind of sneaking, sterilising cruelty.

Yet even she herself, seeing St. Mawr's conceited march along the fence, could not help addressing him:

'Yes, my boy! If you knew what Miss Flora Manby was preparing for you! She'll sharpen a knife that will settle you.'

Not only the animal and human world, but the plants as well, suffer from this enervation.

"The very apples on the trees looked so shut in, it was impossible to imagine any speck of 'Knowledge' lurking inside them. Good to eat, good to cook, good even for show. But the wild sap of untameable and inexhaustible knowledge – no! Bred out of them. Geldings, even the apples."

She imagines telling Miss Manby:

"...you may have my husband, but not my horse. My husband won't need emasculating, and my horse I won't have you meddle with. I'll preserve one last male thing in the museum of this world, if I can."

She thinks of Lewis:

"In spite of the fact that in actual life, in her world, he was only a groom, almost chétif, with his legs a little bit horsy and bowed; and of no education, saying 'Yes, Mam!' and 'No, Mam!' and accomplishing nothing, simply nothing at all on the face of the earth. Strictly a nonentity."

And yet she has also seen that Lewis inhabits "another world, silent, where each creature is alone in its own aura of silence, the mystery of power: as Lewis had power with St. Mawr, and even with Phoenix."

The origin of the Chinese saying ‘point to a deer and call it a horse’

A version of the fable of "the emperor's new clothes" is attributed to the eunuch Zhao Gao in the third century B.C.E. This article was originally posted to Helium Network on July 11, 2011.

Zhao Gao was born in the third century B.C.E. to a low-ranking, condemned woman in the Chinese palace. Through his legal studies and persuasive personality, he rose through the ranks, becoming the Director of Palace Coach-houses and keeper of the imperial seal. He served Qin Shihuangdi (known as the "First Emperor" of the Qin dynasty, r. 249-209 B.C.E.).

When Qin Shihuangdi died, only one of his sons, Huhai, and a half-dozen eunuchs, including Zhao Gao, were immediately aware. They concealed the emperor's body in a carriage and masked the odor with salted fish, claiming he wanted some time alone. According to the "Historical Records," written a century later by Sima Qian, who was himself a eunuch (quoted here in a translation by Raymond Dawson), Zhao Gao told Huhai: "Just at this moment authority over the Empire and its salvation or destruction depend upon you, sir, and me, together with the Chief Minister [Li Si], and nobody else..."

Through a forged document, Zhao Gao established Huhai as crown prince, who then became the second Qin emperor. The dead emperor was buried along with "all palace ladies who had not borne him a child," according to Mary Anderson in "Hidden Power: The Palace Eunuchs of Imperial China." His children, too, were probably executed. Anderson writes: "Archaeologists recently have found a tomb near the First Emperor’s tumulus containing a group of small skeletons believed to be those of the Second Emperor’s young brothers and sisters."

The young Huhai allowed the powerful eunuch Zhao Gao to conduct his business and heartily defended him against detractors. Sima Qian (again in Dawson's translation) described Huhai as having once said:

"This Gao has long been an eunuch, but he has not given scope to ambition for the sake of his own security, and he has not changed his mind because of danger. By keeping his behaviour clean and practising his skills, he has enabled himself to attain this position. Through loyalty he has obtained access to me, and through good faith he has preserved his position. We truly consider him a man of quality, so why do you, sir, doubt him?"

Zhao Gao, promoted to manage the agency that oversaw all palace eunuchs (see Shih-shan Henry Tsai's "Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty"), proved to be ruthless and anything but loyal. He flogged Li Si a thousand times until he made a false confession, then sliced him in half at the waist, and thus was able to succeed him as prime minister.

Huhai did not survive long as emperor with Zhao Gao around. His downfall became a legend and a cautionary tale to monarchs. In 206 B.C.E., Zhao Gao brought a deer to the palace and prodded other courtiers to insist it was a horse, executing those who truthfully maintained it was a deer. Huhai was confused by this, and the Grand Diviner convinced him that he was mistaken - the animal was indeed a horse - and advised him to propitiate the gods until they allowed him to see that it was truly a horse. After this, Sima Qian includes two slightly divergent versions of the story: either the emperor offended the gods by killing an innocent man while he was supposed to be fasting, or else he requested a dream interpretation and wished to plan a sacrifice. In either case, he was encouraged to stay in another palace. Zhao Gao seized the opportunity of the emperor's absence. He faked an edict telling the palace attendants to arm themselves against marauding bandits who had allegedly stormed the palace where the emperor was staying. He then sent an official to charge the palace with a thousand men. The emperor naturally believed the army had turned against him, and Zhao Gao convinced him, as the unfortunate emperor stood there with only one surviving eunuch by his side, to kill himself. 

Zhao Gao hung the imperial seal from his own belt but he was not accepted as the ruler, so he gave the seal to the Qin Shihuangdi's younger brother, Ziying, whose first major order of business was instructing another eunuch to fatally stab Zhao Gao and to kill all his relatives. Soon afterward, Ziying fell and the capital was destroyed, ending the Qin dynasty.

“Forever afterwards," Anderson writes of Zhao Gao, "his despised name would be held up to Chinese emperors as a dire warning against allowing eunuchs any influence over them.”

The historian Sima Qian, writing in detail about Zhao Gao, keenly felt this animosity against eunuchs on a personal level. Having been sentenced to death for political reasons, Sima Qian elected to commute his sentence to three years of imprisonment followed by castration and palace service so that he could continue writing his historical records. He complained (translated by Burton Watson, "Records of the Grand Historian of China") that "there is no defilement so great as castration. One who has undergone this punishment is nowhere counted as a man."

Photo: White-tailed deer in Raleigh, N.C., taken by Clay Heaton. © Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Wikimedia Commons.