Centaur Research
Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.
Fun for those of you who’ve been enjoying my recent ultraviolent centaur stories: I thought I’d share a little bit of my recent research into the centaur myth and fascination.
The word “centaur” means “race skilled with horses”, and referred originally to a race of people living in the mountainous valleys of Thessaly, west of Mount Olympus. At some point probably generations before Hesiod composed the Hercules heroic cycle, some nameless greek storyteller recast them as the horse-human hybrids we know. From Hesiod through Homer and Virgil, 450 years, centaurs were consistently nasty, bloody, drunk and lusty. They got the crap kicked out of them a lot by heroes. See Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book XII, for some serious brutal ass-kicking of the skull-crushed, teeth-kicked-out variety.
In classical myth, not surprisingly, there are several competing stories as to the centaurs’ origin. The most prevalent is that in which Ixion, a king of Thessaly, tried to rape Hera. Zeus made an example of him, and Ixion ended up impregnating a raincloud and getting a fat lightning bolt to the head. My favorite version is the one in which the North Wind was flying along minding his own business one day when he happened on a herd of really hot Thessalonian mares and decided to swoop down and fuck the whole lot of them.
Nowhere in the original myths can I find reference to there ever having been a female centaur. Chiron, the one centaur to break the mold and not be an ultraviolent lech, was apparently married and had at least one daughter--but all the texts I’ve found are pretty ambiguous as to the physical appearance of these women, and as far as I’m concerned they could easily both have been human.
The only exception I’ve encountered is a mosaic dating from the era of the Roman colonization of North Africa which depicts two female centaurs crowning Venus. I’m discounting this because of the obvious cultural cross-pollinization. You might as well call this ancient fan-fic, because the style of the depction has a lot more in common with Holy Rome, and hell, Renoir, than it does with Hellenistic Greece. Perhaps you did not take Art History in school and have no idea what I’m talking about. If such is the case, have a look at this, by way of comparison: The Abduction of Hippodameia, by Carrier-Belleuse (one of Rodin’s masters, who may reputedly have had Rodin’s help with the mold). Now that is some sculpting. Makes me shiver its so good.
So, if you’ve been reading my centaur stories, you’re probably beginning to get an idea of where the whole gay ultraviolent cannibal angle comes from. That isn’t even the half of it. Do not open the following link at work or anywhere else where anybody might catch you. You don’t need that. Trust me. boytaur.net
The bottom line is that centaurs are wicked cool and for some reason a lot of people are obssessed with them. Below in no particular order are a few of the fun centaury things the internet has to offer.
http://web.utk.edu/~blyons/centaur.html A decade-old hoax perpretrated by the University of Tennessee in an attempt to convince people centaurs were real.
http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/377/16284_centaur.html
Another hoax. Less well-thought-out, but more entertaining. The fact that this site exists at all has me pretty overjoyed. It’s a Russian tabloid news site. At least, tabloid is the closest adjective I can come up with to describe it. If it’s sensational, involves exotically-dressed pretty ladies or gruesome death, they’ll post about it.
It appears that there actually is somebody named Christopher Chippendale in the employ of the University of Cambridge.
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/10/28/centaurs-were-real/
A poorly-executed and hilarious refutation of the aforementioned hoax.