Editing Centaur (section)

=Who ''were'' they?=
In their creation myth, the centaurs were descended from a mythical culture called the Lapiths, via their douchebag king Ixion. In short, Ixion was an asshole who murdered his father-in-law by burning the dude alive - [[Heresy|a ''huge'' no-no for the Greeks]]. Somehow, Zeus decided to be a super-chill guy, and not only forgave Ixion, but actually brought the asshole to Olympus to have dinner with the gods. Did Ixion realize just how lucky he was? Nope; asshole started eyeing Zeus's wife/sister, Hera. Zeus got suspicious, so he made a double for Hera out of clouds, called Nephele, and had her take Hera's place serving Ixion some dinner. Ixion promptly attacked and raped Nephele, for which Zeus smote his ass with a lightning bolt, then tied his spirit to a burning wheel and sent it spinning endlessly through the "sky" of Tartarus. Nephele got pregnant and her kids were fucking half-horse somehow.

Ironically, one of the Centaur myths describes their interactions with the Lapiths. The Lapiths invited the Centaurs to one of their weddings, and then things went haywire very, very fast. Though the Centaurs had been benevolent beforehand, the copious amounts of wine being served got them all drunk, which meant they turned on a plate during the wedding, trying to rape the women and kill the men of the Lapiths. This ended up as one huge brawl, ending with a Lapith victory. This was the Greek way of saying [[Humanity Fuck Yeah|"Hey, nature? You suck."]]

Chiron, a great healer and teacher of heroes in Greek myth, was a rare case of a friendly centaur. The constellation Sagittarius is rendered in Chiron's image. Consequently, the prefix "sagittar-" is commonly used to denote centaurs, blissfully ignorant of the fact that "sagittarius" translates to "archer" (Chiron's favorite way of killing shit) in ''Latin'', not "centaur".

A centaur by the name of Nessus was also responsible for slaying Hercules (original Greek name Heracles). Nessus tried to kidnap Hercules's wife Diania to rape her at his leisure, and Hercules shot him with one of his poisoned arrows that was dipped in the Hydra's blood for it. As he was dying, he told Hercules' wife to secretly soak a cloak in his blood, promising that if Hercules' eye started to wander, all she'd have to do is make him wear it and he'd fall back in love with her, failing to mentioned that his blood was now poisoned by the arrow. She believed him, but the gory cape drove Hercules mad with pain, as the cloak burned his skin to the bone. He simply burned himself alive on a funeral pyre that he built in order to find relief.

If you want to know about the real world origin of the Centaur, well, consider where Greece is. Go too much farther north and your hit the Ukrainian and Russian Steppe, where the horse was first domesticated and where nomadic tribesmen practically learned to ride before they could walk. It's believed that the early Greeks saw either early horsemen or the first horsemen at a distance and could not understand that they were looking at a human ON an animal (a distinction that the Spanish report the Aztec had trouble grasping), and instead saw a horse with the top half of a man. And thus the Centaurs were born.