While it’s currently fashionable to badmouth American news agencies, sometimes I find foreign ones to be a lot more mystifying. Russia’s Pravda service is a great example of that, with articles like this: Centaurs Appeared After Copulation Between Humans And Animals.While I absolutely LOVE that this is in their news service, I really have to wonder just how valid this really is as a news item.

The article follows the exploits of two researchers, Paul Takon of the Australian Museum in Sydney, and anthropologist Christopher Chippendale from the University of Cambridge. The two men studied over 5,000 rock paintings, ranging in age all the way back to 32,000 years ago, looking for what they call “teriantrops” or animal-human hybrids (I’ve also seen this term spelled “therianthropes” elsewhere). Their conclusions upon conducting this research, however, seem highly questionable at best:

They arrived at a conclusion that animal men actually existed in the remote past. They believe that primitives could hardly draw what they never saw.

The operative word there is certainly “believe” because there’s certainly no factual basis to suggest that primitive people couldn’t or weren’t drawing images out of their imagination. In fact, if anything, evidence points to the opposite - that it was all out of their heads. Sure they might have seen wooly rhinos and bisons and whatnot, but they didn’t bring them down into the caves to paint from life. Hence, they were working from their imaginations.

Aside from all the wild speculation though, there were a couple things in this article that I thought were pretty interesting, like this revelation about the origin of the word centaur:

The word centaur is a compound of KEN (kenw) meaning “I kill” and TAUROS meaning “bull”, and it reveals astronomic knowledge of our ancestors. When the constellation of Sagittarius (Centaurus throwing a spear) appears in the night skies, we can no longer see Taurus, one of the Sun [zodiac] symbols.

Right after that though, they start throwing around the word “buggery” a whole lot, and even at one point make mention of what’s very clearly racist mythology:

At the end of the past century, some British researchers wrote about black women living togetehr with gorillas. Children born as a result of such contacts could even do easy work about the house and even speak. Unfortunately, researchers had no chance of seeing these creatures because the hybrids felt seriously hurt and escaped to jungle.

They also easily wave away the scientific improbability of actual cross-species fertilization, suggesting that if genetic recombination can be done in the lab, there’s no reason it can’t be done in the wild. I’m not knowledgeable enough in the reproductive sciences to really tackle that in a formidable way, so I’ll just leave that to somebody else…

In any event, I personally love the possibility that centaurs and other animal-human hybrids really do or did exist at some point in the past. But I also think it’s a big fat mistake to interpret ancient and pre-modern stories, myths and art from the perspective of modern man. Simply put, animal-human hybrids are psychologically and mythologically potent symbols. And they need not have actual physical existence to be the carriers or transmitters of psychic energy and meaning. Plus, it’s very easy for us to misread cultural signs that have since lost or changed meanings. An example from that article:

Respectable scholars - Paracelsus, Cardano and famous accoucher of the 16th century Fortunio Liceti - several times registered birth of hybrids, animal kids born by humans and human kids born by animals. Their notes mention horses, elephants, dogs and even lions.

I don’t know about Cardano and Liceti, but as far as I understand it, Paracelsus was a well-known alchemist. In other words, he was somebody whose stock in trade it was to deal in coded symbolic language which related to arcane mysteries of consciousness and spiritual transformation. And this is the same realm from which the centaur has been passed down to us today.

Although, who knows… maybe it did exist, or does exist in some alternate dimension parelleling our own. I’m certainly open to that possibility.

[via Weird Events]