Photo Illustration by Sara Cwynar

My father kept him in a stall, because he didn’t know where else to keep him. He had been given to my father by a friend, a sea captain, who said that he had bought him in Salonika; however, I learned from him directly that he was born in Colophon.

I had been strictly forbidden to go anywhere near him, because, I was told, he was easily angered and would kick. But from my personal experience I can confirm that this was an old superstition, and from the time I was an adolescent I never paid much attention to the prohibition and in fact spent many memorable hours with him, especially in winter, and wonderful times in summer, too, when Trachi (that was his name) with his own hands put me on his back and took off at a mad gallop toward the woods on the hills.

He had learned our language fairly easily, but retained a slight Levantine accent. Despite his two hundred and sixty years, his appearance was youthful, in both his human and his equine aspects. What I will relate here is the fruit of our long conversations.

The centaurs’ origins are legendary, but the legends that they pass down among themselves are very different from the classical tales we know.

Remarkably, their traditions also refer to a Noah-like inventor and savior, a highly intelligent man they call Cutnofeset. But there were no centaurs on Cutnofeset’s ark. Nor, by the way, were there “seven pairs of every species of clean beast, and a pair of every species of the beasts that are not clean.” The centaurian tradition is more rational than the Biblical, holding that only the archetypal animals, the key species, were saved: man but not the monkey; the horse but not the donkey or the wild ass; the rooster and the crow but not the vulture or the hoopoe or the gyrfalcon.

How, then, did these species come about? Immediately afterward, the legend says. When the waters retreated, a deep layer of warm mud covered the earth. Now, this mud, which harbored in its decay all the enzymes from what had perished in the flood, was extraordinarily fertile: as soon as it was touched by the sun, it was covered with shoots from which grasses and plants of every type sprang forth; and, further, its soft, moist bosom was host to the marriages of all the species saved in the ark. It was a time, never to be repeated, of wild, ecstatic fecundity, in which the entire universe felt love, so intensely that it nearly returned to chaos.

Those were the days when the earth itself fornicated with the sky, when everything germinated and everything was fruitful. Not only every marriage but every union, every contact, every encounter, even fleeting, even between different species, even between beasts and stones, even between plants and stones, was fertile, and produced offspring not in a few months but in a few days. The sea of warm mud, which concealed the earth’s cold, prudish face, was one boundless nuptial bed, all its recesses boiling over with desire and teeming with jubilant germs.

This second creation was the true creation, because, according to what is passed down among the centaurs, there is no other way to explain certain similarities, certain convergences observed by all. Why is the dolphin similar to the fish, and yet gives birth and nurses its offspring? Because it’s the child of a tuna and a cow. Where do butterflies get their delicate colors and their ability to fly? They are the children of a flower and a fly. Tortoises are the children of a frog and a rock. Bats of an owl and a mouse. Conchs of a snail and a polished pebble. Hippopotami of a horse and a river. Vultures of a worm and an owl. And the big whales, the leviathans—how to explain their immense mass? Their wooden bones, their black and oily skin, and their fiery breath are living testimony to a venerable union in which—even when the end of all flesh had been decreed—that same primordial mud got greedy hold of the ark’s feminine keel, made of gopher wood and covered inside and out with shiny pitch.

Such was the origin of every form, whether living today or extinct: dragons and chameleons, chimeras and harpies, crocodiles and minotaurs, elephants and giants, whose petrified bones are still found today, to our amazement, in the heart of the mountains. And so it was for the centaurs themselves, since in this festival of origins, in this panspermia, the few survivors of the human family also participated.

Notably, Cam, the profligate son, participated: the first generation of centaurs originated in his wild passion for a Thessalian horse. From the beginning, these progeny were noble and strong, preserving the best of both equine and human nature. They were at once wise and courageous, generous and shrewd, good at hunting and at singing, at waging war and at observing the heavens. It seemed, in fact, as happens with the most felicitous unions, that the virtues of the parents were magnified in their offspring, since, at least in the beginning, they were more powerful and faster racers than their Thessalian mothers, and a good deal wiser and more cunning than black Cam and their other human fathers. This would also explain, according to some, their longevity, though others have attributed it to their eating habits, which I will come to in a moment. Or their longevity could simply be a projection across time of their great vitality, and this I, too, believe resolutely (and the story I am about to tell attests to it): that in hereditary terms the herbivore power of the horse counts less than the red blindness of the bloody and forbidden spasm, the moment of human-feral fullness in which the centaurs were conceived.

Whatever we may think of this, anyone who has carefully considered the centaurs’ classical traditions cannot help noticing that centauresses are never mentioned. As I learned from Trachi, they do not in fact exist.

The man-mare union, very seldom fertile today, produces and has produced only male centaurs, for which there must be a fundamental reason, though at present it eludes us. As for the inverse, the union between stallions and women, this has scarcely ever occurred, and comes about through the solicitation of dissolute women, who by nature are not particularly inclined to procreate.

In the exceptional cases in which fertilization is successful in these rare unions, a dualistic female offspring is produced, her two natures, however, inversely assembled. The creatures have the head, neck, and front feet of a horse, but their back and belly are those of a human female, and the hind legs are human.

During his long life Trachi had encountered very few of them, and he assured me that he felt no attraction to these squalid monsters. They were not “proud and nimble” but insufficiently vital; they were infertile, idle, and transient; they did not become familiar with man or learn to obey his commands but lived miserably in the densest forests, not in herds but in rural solitude. They fed on grass and berries, and when they were surprised by a man they had the curious habit of always presenting themselves to him head first, as if embarrassed by their human half.