(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.