White horse (mythology) Poseidon was also the creator of horses, creating them out of the breaking waves when challenged to make a beautiful land animal. In Norse mythology, Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir, "the best horse among gods and men", is described as grey. Sleipnir is also the ancestor of another grey horse, Grani, who is owned by the hero Sigurd. In Slavic mythology, the war and fertility deity Svantovit owned an oracular white horse; the historian Saxo Grammaticus, in descriptions similar to those of Tacitus centuries before, says the priests divined the future by leading the white stallion between a series of fences
Eight-legged essay pluralistic ideology characteristic of the Tang Dynasty to a neo-Confucian ideology based on Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi's philosophy. The eight-legged essay came into existence under this background, coinciding with the shift in ideology and embodying the new orthodoxy. The essay format didn't become prevalent as a standard essay in the civil service examination until early Ming dynasty (1368-1644), when the composition of the essay was clearly specified. In the seventeenth century, Gu Yanwu stated that this form of essay-writing became standardized precisely during the 15th century, when the eight parts of the essay were determined. The term "eight-legged essay"