Traces of the devotion to the horse’s head on the part of the Indo-European peoples can be found in the archaic Roman ritual practice,
Roman legends, Greek “feasts of the dead,” or Avar burial rituals; such a devotion has survived among the Byelorussians living in Polesie, etc.(Ivanov, 1989: 79, 80, 83, 84). During the “feasts of the dead” – ancient Greek wakes – the feast would take place in front of the horse’s head, which is represented on funerary reliefs (Sternberg, 1916: 183). At these ancient nekrodipnoses, the deceased appeared to be feasting in the midst of his family and servants;
the representations of a horse’s head and a snake were present there (Freidenberg,1997: 62). E.E. Kuzmina interpreted them as expressing the notion “of the ability of the horse, especially its head,to revive the person” (Kuzmina, 1977: 42), whereas O.M. Freidenberg believed that “the semantics of thesnake and horse as the underground principles has long been revealed” (Freidenberg, 1997: 62).