马作为陆地上最善奔跑的动物,在世界各地的神话中均被奉为神的象征符号,缔造了神圣化的人—马关系象征体系。以马为核心在世界各民族文化中建构起来的高度同一的神话象征体系有力地证明了人类都拥有大致相同的大脑结构及其对经验世界的现实体悟,因此他们的精神具有同一性。具体到中华民族的本土文化,催生了"马胫"、"马首"和"马生人"等具有鲜明民族特色的神话意象,体现了华夏先民以马为神、通过与马进行仪式性的肉体对接来达到通神的信仰观念。这些意象最终升华为华夏民族特有的、代表马与龙并置合一的"龙马"祖先神话。
The horse as the most running-capable animal in the land is worshipped as a deity token in mythology all over the world,establishing the sanctified man a horse-related symbolic system. The highly-unified horsebased mythic symbolic system established in the nations the world over strongly proves human beings possess roughly-identical brain structure and realistic experience of the empirical world. As a result,they have an identical spirit. For the native Chinese culture,such mythic images as "horse shin","horse head"and "horse-borne man"rose in Chinese culture,expressing the perception of Chinese worship of communicating with the god by the horse's ceremonial flesh,which was regarded as the god by the Chinese ancestors. All this was finally sublimated into the Chinese "dragon-horse"ancestral myth representative of a Chinese-characteristic synthesis of dragon and horse.