Hero, Beast, or Both? The Complex Lore of the Centaur

(host) Humans have domesticated animals as beasts of burden for thousands of years.

And the vital role horses play in the evolution of culture in particular has inspired countless equine folklore.

But none are quite like the centaur.

With the lower body of a horse and upper body of a human, they maybe should be dismissed as a completely impractical creature.

But even with dubious origins, history has embraced the lore of the centaur.

I'm Dr. Emily Zarka, and this is "Monstrum."

A centaur is always upper half human and mostly always lower half male horse.

The centaurs of antiquity were not known to be docile, quite the opposite.

They were violent meat eating predatory creatures that hunted and terrorized humans.

In lore, the human half of the centaur often represents civility, while the horse half is bestiality and uncontrollable desire.

Depictions of centaurs trace the monster back as far as the Babylonian period in the 16th century BCE, to when the Kassites entered the Fertile Crescent on horseback and seized control of Southern Mesopotamia.

They used carved boundary stones called kudurru to indicate land transactions.

Some of these artifacts depict centaurs, a human man attached at the torso to the body and legs of a winged horse.

In examples produced between 1186 to 1172 BCE near what is now Iraq, the centaurs are depicted hunting with bows and weapons and likely served as symbols of protection or warning.

Kassite influence likely extended to the Aegean civilizations, including the Mycenaean Greeks.

While it is unknown exactly when their cultures interacted, many scholars believe that the two influenced one another and they may have introduced the idea of the centaur to Greece where it really took hold in folklore and culture.

The centaur began to appear in Greek art beginning in the 10th century BCE.

The Lefkandi Centaur is believed to be the oldest such example.

While all four legs of the centaur appear to be hooved, bronze and terracotta artifacts from sixth and eighth century BCE show the centaur with the full legged body of a man with the rear end of a horse seemingly grafted onto the back.

Around the eighth century BCE, two centaur origin stories dominate Greek texts, the benevolent demigod Chiron, the immortal instructor, and the vicious race of Centaurs.

Chiron is the half-horse, half-human son of a nymph named Philyra and the Greek god of time, Kronos.

Versions differ on who exactly is genetically responsible for Chiron's horse half.

In some versions, Philyra desperately shape shifts into a mare to avoid Kronos' unwanted advances, only to have him take the form of a stallion and attack her anyway.

In the other version, the two are happily engaged in an affair until they are caught in the act by Kronos' wife Rhea.

To avoid being caught, the god of time quickly shifted into a horse to avoid his wife identifying him.

Philyra is horrified when she births a half horse baby and abandons him.

Apollo and Artemis take the child in and under their divine instruction, the Chimera demigod becomes a notable healer, astrologer, hunter, and prophet.

He marries a nymph and they have multiple children.

He also becomes a teacher to infamous heroes Perseus, Achilles and Heracles.

In the early fifth century, ancient Greek poet Pindar gives us the second canonical centaur origin story, that of Ixion and the race of Centaurs who are far less noble.

These creatures are the grandchildren of Ixion, king of the Lapiths and Nephele, who's basically a cloud made into a beautiful woman.

After Ixion assaults Nephele, she gives birth to a unique son.

Depending on the story, this is either the first horse-human hybrid, a true monster, or a human man named Centaurus who would eventually mate with multiple Magnesian mares, unions that all resulted in herds of hybrid children.

Either way, it's a dark story.

The race of Centaurs are often portrayed as lust-filled drunk, dangerous beings.

Sexual assault and violence underscore almost all encounters.

And that's before we get into the Centauromachy, or what I like to call the bloody wedding.

The Centauromachy is a key part of Greek mythology, an epic battle between the Centaurs and the Lapiths, an Aeolian tribe, that began when the hybrid race got really drunk and tried to rape all the women at the wedding, including the bride.

For the Greeks, the Centaur race was a representation of dangerous hyper-masculinity.

They can't hold their liquor and they're physically and sexually violent.

Homer refers to the race of Centaurs as mountain-bred animals.

For the ancient Greeks, the mountains were synonymous with danger, directly opposing the groomed fertile plains associated with civilization.

The connection between centaurs and sexuality, particularly sex outside of a marital union, marks them as ready metaphors condemning such practices in the real world, given that they are also associated with negative animality.

Just look at the Centaurs' forefather Ixion.

He gets out of paying a dowry by killing his father-in-law, tries to seduce Zeus' sister slash wife and gets with a cloud, not exactly a pillar of the community.

And he ends up pinned to a flaming wheel for all eternity.

The entire history of the centaurs from their very creation is marked with negativity.

According to Greek lore, all the centaurs were slaughtered by Heracles after a centaur named Nessus tried to steal Heracles' bride.

Chiron tries to intervene, but is grazed by a poisoned arrow.

Unable to die but in great pain, he exchanges his immortality for Prometheus's freedom.

Upon his death, he is placed in the stars as the constellation Centaurus or Sagittarius.

Chiron is the only exception to centaurs' representation of the supposedly uncivilized other.

And the Greek's attempts to demonize cultures they found barbaric.

Unpredictable, on the fringes of society, and more animal than human, they provide a ready scapegoat, one that unfortunately would be applied to real people.

Ancient Greek and Roman art suggests that the centaurs were metaphorical exaggerated representations of the Persians, replacing real outsiders with monstrous, fictional outsiders.

It has also been argued that the Centauromachy may be a fictional representation of the real conflict between the Argive and Theban people before 1200 BCE.

Hailing from the Argos region, the Argives were famous for their horses and agriculture.

The aptly named city of Thebes was an influential hub of trade.

The Parthenon in Greece includes the Centauromachy and its architecture.

The marble sculptures depicting the monsters as muscular threatening opponents to the humans rearing triumphantly over their kills.

The temple of Apollo Epikourios is also adorned with images from the Centauromachy, but the centaur's human heads are older bearded men and the assaults are more sexually graphic.

In all these hard won centaur human battles, the Greek male citizen triumphed, emphasizing their importance and visibility in Greek culture.

During and after the real Persian Wars, the creation of the city-state or polis bound Greeks together with a centralized democratic government and a shared language.

Social hierarchy within the polis was determined by birth and gender.

At the top, free adult men born legitimately to citizen parents, aka the heroes of the Centaur stories.

Below them, foreigners and foreign residents, aka the centaurs.

In an effort to establish legitimate citizenship for Greek heirs, Greek men were to marry virgin Greek women.

Foreigners, depicted as centaurs, threatened Greek citizenship and government with their sexual lasciviousness.

There is some argument to be made about the novelty of the rider on horseback when such mounts were first encountered by cultures whose ecosystems did not naturally include horses.

Whether seen first in war, trade or conquest, the shock of seeing a human on horseback may have given some inspiration for the centaur.

To that point, some scholars argue that the centaur myth may be based on the first mountain riders in the Thessaly region, pre-Trojan war tribes believed to be named Centaur and Lapith.

The Centaur people according to Greek author Palaephatus hailed from a village named Nephele.

During Ixion's reign as king, a herd of wild bulls terrorized the region and inhabitants of Nephele were the only ones daring enough to ride horses into the herd of bulls, slaying them with javelins.

After they were rewarded by the king, they turned hostile toward the townspeople of Larissa, called Lapiths, kidnapping women and burning homes before retreating to the mountains.

But Palaephatus is known for trying to rationalize myths, so who really knows?

Other attempts to bring the centaur to reality include pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Empedocles, who proposed a theory of human evolution that included the centaurs as part of ancient generations of animals that existed before species differentiation.

There were also reports of real centaurs.

In the early first century CE, Roman Emperor Claudius received word that a centaur had been found.

Reportedly captured in Arabia and transported to Egypt as a gift for the emperor, it was said that the meat eating creature did not survive the change in climate.

After its death, it was embalmed and sent to Rome.

Emperor Claudius displayed the embalmed centaur with a face fiercer than a human face, hairy arms and hands and a tawny mane at his palace.

While this story seems like fiction, there is a bit of fact, or rather trickery.

The supposed centaur submerged in honey was likely made from the mummified remains of humans and horses.

The honey not only preserved the corpse but would've been difficult to look through.

A blurry centaur is more easily believed.

The creature was still on view nearly a century later.

You would think such hoaxes would've faded with the development of biological studies.

But in the 1980s, a supposed centaur skeleton was exhibited in the US.

Created by zoologist William Willers as a social experiment, the remains now reside in the John C. Hodges Library at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville as an art installation.

Beginning in the sixth century CE, centaurs and satyrs became increasingly conflated, with the former disappearing from the retelling of myths even though their image remained in art.

It seems the centaurs were too supernatural, too uncivilized.

However, in the Middle Ages, centaurs began reappearing in Christian churches.

Associated with bestial desires or even the devil on the hunt for souls, they retained the negative associations of the past.

Centaurs would go on to appear in Dante's "Divine Comedy" as the inhabitants of the first ring of the seventh circle of hell.

You know, the one with the river of blood.

They stand on the banks as jailers of the souls boiling in the river, shooting arrows at any who try to escape.

Centaurs increasingly moved from presumed fact to fiction.

By the 19th century, interpretations of the centaur focused on their connection to nature, with the creatures personifying tornadoes or mountain streams.

Centaurs today occupy the fantasy genre, appearing in books and movies as dangerous but fantastic creatures.

Given the genre's mass appeal and often younger target demographic, the brutal violence, particularly sexual violence, is mostly downplayed in favor of more culturally digestible pieces of the monster's ancient origins.

In C.S.

Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia," they are strong, noble, bearded warriors who fight for good along Aslan.

While physically imposing, Lewis makes sure centaur characters are positioned as educated civilized allies, who excel in medicine and reading the stars.

In J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, centaurs are likewise intelligent healers and quite skilled at archery, astronomy, and divination.

Almost all choose to remain apart from humans, seeing them as unworthy of attention since they have already read their fates in the stars.

Even though Rowling's interpretation attempts to make the creatures respectable, they are also portrayed as wild and uncivilized which takes a disturbing turn when temporary Hogwarts Headmistress Dolores Umbridge is carried off by centaurs into the woods and returns incapable of speaking with bits of twigs and leaves and her disheveled hair.

Rowling's centaurs seem to retain as much of Ixion as they do of Chiron.

I'm sorry Professor, I must not tell lies.

What are you doing?!

(Dr. Zarka) In Rick Riordan's "Percy Jackson" series, the original Chiron of Greek myth teaches the heroes of the story, at first choosing to hide the lower half of his body with a blanket and a wheeled box with fake human legs.

In the books at least.

The Centaur race also appears, described as talented warriors and big partiers.

While threads of the original centaurs linger, today the centaur is more commonly used as a symbol that unites rather than divides humans and animals.

Because the centaur is made from two beings that really exist, not entirely fictional beasts, they are more easily transmissible and translatable across time.

Positive or negative, they force us to confront our relationship with non-human animals as both celebration and condemnation of the human animal relationship.

Wes, a bro-- a bronze arrowhead.

The brutal violence, particularly sexual violence, is mostly down paid- Epikori-- It's definitely Epikourios.

Epikourios.

At first choosing to hide.