It is a well-known fact throughout the literature that Mongol people credit theirhorses with a special ability to feel the presence of things – “souls,” “ghosts” or“ land masters” – that remain invisible to ordinary humans most of the time. Drawing on fieldwork with the Dörvöd herders of Northwestern Mongolia, this chapter develops this idea, and analyses four horse behaviours – shivering, neighing, stopping and micturition – interpreted by Mongols as reactions to different kinds of presence. Electromagnetism is taken here as a metaphor to understand people’s relationship to “invisible things”; it is argued moreover that, through a complex technology of dressage, horses are used as instruments comparable to magnetometers, expected to react to invisible presences proportionally to their proximity and to the intensity of their manifestation.
 

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