Centaur
Centaurs are monstrosities that combine the body of a horse and the torso-up of a man where the equine neck should be. They are most common in Greek and Roman mythology, and were said to inhabit the sparsely-populated Mount Pelion and Folóï Oak Forest in Greece. They were proverbially lustful, and their aggressively amorous advances to women often landed them in bother. For example, their famous battle with the Lapiths came about when they tried to carry off Hippodamia and the Lapith women on her wedding day. The ensuing bloody battle was a popular subject in Classical Art.
The Centaur’s lustiness perhaps comes from the part of the creature that is horse. In Roman thought, man was separated from the animals by his rationality. His exact opposite was the horse, whose life is entirely ruled by passion, not rational thought. A famous illustration of the dangers of allowing passion to oust rationality in decision making is an exhausted and beleaguered man being ridden enthusiastically by a horse, rather than vice versa. Thus, perhaps, the Centaur is ruled by the equine half of its nature; the customary depiction of Centaurs with enormous penises certainly supports this hypothesis.
Very closely related to the Centaur is the Satyr, which is near-identical in form and behavior but for having the lower half of a goat. Goats have long been associated with lasciviousness, probably due to the size of their testicles, which again accounts for the Centaur/ Satyr’s lechery. A possible explanation for the legends of Centaurs comes from Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies: ‘centaurs are fabulous animals that are part man and part horse. Some say that this idea came from the horsemen of the Thessalians, because in battle on horseback they appear to be one body, horse and man.’
The Christian application of the story of the Centaur and its monstrous sexual appetite hardly needs elaboration, and its message as a monster is simply the danger of the sin of lust. Bestiaries chiefly locate the Centaur and Satyr in Ethiopia, and maps throughout the medieval and Early Modern period depict Centaurs in far-flung outposts of the known world, such as the Italian cartographer Urbano Monte’s 1587 atlas. They advise people not only to be wary of lust and of the dangers of travel but also evoke the strange customs amongst strange peoples who populated the fringes of civilization.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
Barber, Richard, trans. Bestiary. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992.
Baxter, Ron. Bestiaries and their Users in the Middle Ages. Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 1998.
Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. London: Reaktion Books, 1992.
Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. by John M. Marincola. London: Penguin, 2003.
The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages.
Pliny the Elder. Natural History. Trans. by John Healey. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.
Van Duzer, Chet. Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps. London: British Library, 2013.
White, T.H., trans. The Book of Beasts. New York: Putnam, 1960.
