Centaur

“ Two days after the departure of the Centaur the lookout on the top of the rock saw a frigate under a tremendous press of canvas endeavoring to run between the rock and the shore and make for Fort Royal. Far away, and coming along like a gigantic white cloud, was a ship which was presently made out to be the Centaur. A drummer-boy, not the least important member of the crew of the Diamond Rock, beat to quarters, the men sprang to their stations, and the huge guns were loaded and carefully trained on the unsuspicious French ship. ”

“ His thirst for blood outstripped his fleet horse, who seemed to him, in his impetuous haste, to be creeping like a snail. He drove his spurs deep into the sides of the frightened animal, which almost leaped through his girth. A less expert horseman would have been unseated; but an earthquake could not have thrown this Centaur out of his saddle.
The forests, hills and houses flowed past him like a river. ”

“ Though nearly seventy, he is staunch and straight, and spending most of his day on horseback, with his calm, large-featured, sandstone face, filling easily and handsomely with clear-souled anger and delight, he suggests the thought of a Centaur, an impossible, noble dream of horse and man created by a god dissatisfied with man and beast. Thirty centuries ago such a man, so marvellously in harmony with the earth, would have gone down in men’s memories as a demi-god or the best-loved of the fauns. ”

“ The Centaurs are represented with the body of a horse, and bust, head, and arms of a man. (Fig. 146.) In Christian archæology, the Centaur is a symbol of the swift passage of life, the force of the instincts, and in a special sense, of adultery. The war of the Centaurs and the Lapithæ is the subject of the frieze at the British Museum, from a temple of Apollo in Arcadia. Hippo-centaurs were half horse ”

“ One of the old Greek gold staters has a man driving a chariot in which the horse has a human head; while the man is urging the horse with the sacred three-branched rod, each branch of which terminates in a trefoil. The centaur has a yet unallotted place in the symbolism of the sun-myth. Classic mythology says Chiron the centaur was the teacher of Apollo in music, medicine, and hunting, and centaurs are mostly sagittarii or archers, whose arrows, like those of Apollo, are the sunbeams. ”

“ Such also are the Centaurs, men down to the waist and the remainder horses. They are a noble race of monsters. One of them, as you know, was able, guided by the light of reason alone, to direct his steps towards eternal blessedness, and you sometimes see his heroic bosom prancing on the clouds. Chiron, the Centaur, deserved for his works on the earth to share the abode of the blessed; he it was who gave Achilles his education; and that young hero, when he left the Centaur’s hands, lived for two years, dressed as a young girl, among the daughters of King Lycomedes. ”

“ The pale, green globe of Centaur hung in a black sky; greatened and darkened and Kendall was looking out across the huge rocket port from which the Centaurians planned to launch Terra's destruction.
Now, for the first time, he saw the Centaurian without the mask. The man was handsome. He had the cruel black eyes of all Centaurians. He smiled coldly. "We've come a long way, Kendall. I suppose you want to see your wife." ”

“ Our traveller turned round and saw a man, or rather a Centaur, for the most perfect harmony imaginable existed between horse and rider. The latter was of a robust and plethoric constitution, with large fiery eyes, rugged features, and a black mustache. He was of middle age and had a general air of rudeness and aggressiveness, with indications of strength in his whole person. ”

“ The other embraces the statue, which is a stiff archaic image wearing a polos; with her left hand she clings to her mantle which has been seized by the Centaur. The Centaur is attacked from behind by a Lapith who kneels on his back, has his left arm round the Centaur's neck, and is about to strike with the sword originally held in the right hand. On the right is a tree, with a lion's skin hanging from a bough. The appearance of a deity near his own image is not infrequent. ”

“ And for his type, thus representing some power of unexpended mythological values strayed back into modern life to find itself denied and ridiculed⁠—he had chosen a Centaur! For he wished it to symbolise what he believed was to be the next stage in human evolution: Intuition no longer neglected, but developed equally with Reason. His Centaur was to stand for instinct (the animal body close to Nature) combined with, yet not dominated by, the upright stature moving towards deity. ”

“ Again we have the picture of a Centaur as to his outward form, i.e. a being with two natures. Not now far down in the south, or connected with His sufferings and sacrifice as man; but high up, as a sign of the Zodiac itself, on the ecliptic, i.e. in the very path in which the sun “rejoiceth in his going forth as a strong man.”
According to Grecian fable, this Sagittarius is Cheiron, the chief Centaur; noble in character, righteous in his dealings, divine in his power.
Such will be the coming Seed of the woman in His power and glory:—
“The sceptre of Thy kingdom is a right sceptre. ”

“ THE CENTAUR. The centaur iz not an Amerikan, but blooms in the land far away to the eastward, whare the muskeeto iz unknown, and whare the pensiv kokroach putteth in no appearance. He is haff horse, and haff sum other phellow, and hunts for fun, and sumthing to eat. He haz got a hed on him like Demostheneze ov old, and wears hiz hair short in front, but flooded down on hiz nek, and over hiz shoulders, like a growth ov yung hop vines, in a hot house. ”

“ Chiron, whom the poets represent as a Hippo-Centaur, has the form of a man in an engraving of him in Gronov. Thes. Gr. Ant. 1. y.y.y.y. from an ancient MS. of Dioscorides. Some, from a passage in Lucian, thought his feet only were like those of a horse. Centaurs were consecrated to Apollo, as may be seen in many medals, especially those of Gallienus. Pliny, N. H, vii. c. 3, asserts that he saw a centaur preserved in honey, brought from Egypt to Rome, for Claudius Caesar. Some beautiful engravings of male and female centaurs may be seen in the Antiquities of Herculaneum. ”

“ While some seemed centaurs, quick in fight and rape;
Naked, or mantled in outlandish skin.
These doting sires, those striplings bold in sin.
LXII
This gallops on a horse without a bit;
This backs the sluggish ass, or bullock slow;
These mounted on the croup of centaur sit:
Those perched on eagle, crane, or estridge, go.
Some male, some female, some hermaphrodit,
These drain the cup and those the bungle blow.
One bore a corded ladder, one a book ”

“ And that I count a great improvement on the breed, far better than being united to the animal, body and soul. The old centaur, I imagine, must have been for ever in difficulties; as a horse, he could not use the wonderful inventions of man, and as a man, he could not enjoy the proper pleasures of a horse. ”

“ A winged horse, in like manner, is provided with wings, without any means of working them. A centaur, as in the noble sculptures of Phidias, has the upper part of the trunk of a man superadded, not to the hind quarters of a horse or other quadruped, but to the entire trunk of such an animal, so that the abdomen of the human figure lies between the upper half of the human trunk and the corresponding part of the horse’s trunk, an arrangement anatomically preposterous. ”

“ In scenes of conflict, in the archaic representations, it is the human part of the Centaur which bears the brunt of the fight, and the weapon used is a branch of a tree, the primitive human weapon; the Centaur fights as a man fights. If he had been depicted with horns or teeth or claws as his weapons of offence, then the animal part of him would fairly symbolise his bestial violence; but who could discover a trace of pugnacity in his equine loins and rump, hind legs and tail? ”

“ Is it not because the Centaurs assumed by sorcery the form of bears? There is some probability then that the equine type of Centaur, the conventional Centaur of Greek Art, was a comparatively late development, and that the remote age which gave to the Centaurs the name of Pheres believed rather that that tribe of sorcerers were wont to transform themselves into the more monstrous and terrible shapes of bears and other wild beasts. ”

“ Though a Centaur at rest is a noble figure, symbolic of strength, swiftness, intelligence, and protection of man by the Olympian gods, the position which the creature was supposed to assume in his contact with man, as shown in many mural tablets found at Pompeii, and now in the museum at Naples, is ridiculous and impossible. ”

“ But if Rabbe admired antiquity madly, it was because he felt it strongly; his piece, Le Centaure, is André Chénier in prose. Let us give the proof of what we have been stating—
THE CENTAUR
"Swift as the west wind, amorous, superb, a young centaur comes to carry off the beauteous Cymothoë from her old husband. The impotent cries of the old man are heard afar.... Proud of his prey, impotent with desire, the ravisher stops beneath the deep shade of the banks of the river. His flanks still palpitate from the swiftness of his course; his breath comes hard and fast. He stops ”

“ We have, in the first rank, the couch grass, that execrable weed which three years of stubborn warfare have not succeeded in exterminating. Next, in respect of number, come the centauries, grim looking one and all, bristling with prickles or starry halberds. They are the yellow-flowered centaury, the mountain centaury, the star thistle and the rough centaury: the first predominates. Here and there, amid their inextricable confusion, stands, like a chandelier with spreading, orange flowers for lights, the fierce Spanish oyster plant, whose spikes are strong as nails. ”

“ The ancients were too fond of a horse to consider the union of his nature with man's as forming a very degraded compound, and accordingly the Centaur is the only one of the fancied monsters of antiquity to which any good traits are assigned. The Centaurs were admitted to the companionship of man, and at the marriage of Pirithous with Hippodamia they were among the guests. At the feast Eurytion, one of the Centaurs, becoming intoxicated with the wine, attempted to offer violence to the bride ”

“ It is therefore impossible to reconstruct the separate groups with much certainty, although the subjects can, to a certain extent, be conjectured. An attempted restoration of a combat between a Lapith and a Centaur is exhibited. The frieze also included chariots and horses; warriors in chariots, and on foot; and perhaps scenes with Harpies.
The central group on the cornice with the combat of a Centaur and Lapith is composed of the following fragments. See Journ. of Hellen. Studies, x., p. 2, for sketches of No. 46, 1-18.
31
46. ”

“ After the creation of the Fauns and Sylvans by the poets, the imagination of the latter invented the Centaur, a monster, of which the superior part was that of a man, and the remainder that of the horse. ”

“ Already a good horseman, he was now initiated into the arts of the manege, which, when carried to perfection, almost realise the fable of the Centaur, the guidance of the horse appearing to proceed from the rider's mere volition, rather than from the use of any external and apparent signal of motion. ”

“ Never were there more complete Centaurs than these Hamran Arabs; the horse and man appeared to be one animal, and that of the most elastic nature, that could twist and turn with the suppleness of a snake; the fact of their separate being was proved by the rider springing to the earth with his drawn sword while the horse was in full gallop over rough and difficult ground, and, clutching the mane, he again vaulted into the saddle with the agility of a monkey, without once checking the speed. ”

“ I sprang up, overturning the chair in my eagerness and twirling my goblet high, shouted: "I drink to the glorious eyes of my inamorata, Alpha Centauri!"
The effect was startling and enough to sober any man. A pall of silence fell upon the guests deeper than the polar stillness and in profound respect all rose stiff, erect as soldiers, murmuring in hushed, reverential tones the name: "Alpha Centauri." ”

“ Besides, he is a winged steed and by no means quiet in harness, if we may credit what Schiller tells us in his ballad. I am not a sportsman, alas! and deeply do I regret it, for I am as fond of horses as if I had five hundred thousand a year, and I am entirely of the opinion of the Arabs concerning pedestrians. The horse is man’s natural pedestal, and the one complete being is the centaur, whom mythology so ingeniously invented. ”

“ He supposes Hippodamia to have been a Centauress, married to the prince of the Lapithæ, and thus accounts for the Centaurs having been at the wedding. Mr. Keightley, in his ‘Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy,’ remarks that ‘it is certainly not a little strange that a rude mountain race like the Centaurs should be viewed as horsemen; and the legend which ascribes the perfecting of the art of horsemanship to the Lapithæ, is unquestionably the more probable one. The name Centaur, which so much resembles the Greek verb κεντέω, ‘to spur,’ we fancy gave origin to the fiction. ”

“ The centaur is the elemental spirit and the woman the divine spirit of the path Samec and the golden heart is the central point upon the cabbalistic tree of life and corresponds to the Sephiroth Tipereth. ”

“ The old legends of the Amazon race and of the Centaurs are deviations from realities, the woman who much preferred to wield a spear rather than bear a child, and the man who so dominated his horse that he seemed a part of it. ”