The ashvamedha begins with a release. A stallion of prescribed marks, consecrated by the priests, is set free to wander for a year, and where the horse goes, the king's claim goes with it: an armed escort follows, and any ruler whose territory the horse enters must either submit or fight. The year of wandering is thus a slow-motion assertion of sovereignty, a map of empire drawn by an animal's footsteps, and the epics remember it exactly this way, with the Ramayana and Mahabharata both turning on horse sacrifices and the challenges they provoke. When the horse returns, the rite proper unfolds over days of the highest Vedic solemnity: a great soma sacrifice with hundreds of animal victims in the classical prescriptions, the sacrifice of the horse itself, rites involving the chief queen that the brahmana texts describe with a frankness later tradition found uncomfortable, and distributions of wealth to the priests on an imperial scale.
The Rig Veda's horse hymns, which accompany the immolation, address the victim with striking tenderness, assuring the horse that it does not truly die but goes to the gods on paths made easy, a consolation formula that is among the oldest surviving reflections anywhere on the ethics of sacrifice. The whole rite could be undertaken only by a king strong enough to back the horse's wanderings with force, which made its mere announcement a political act, and its successful completion the ancient Indian equivalent of a coronation above coronations.