Onocentaur

Also Known As: Greek Ὀνοκένταυρος, Onokentauros, “donkey centaur”; Latin Onocentaurus; feminine Onokentaura
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology, Medieval Mythology, Christian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It combines a man’s face, arms and hands with the spine, belly and hind legs of an ass, using its hands as forefeet when it runs and sitting down when it wants to grip something.
Role in Mythos: First reported as a real African animal by Greek observers, it was later used by the Septuagint translators to populate the ruins of Isaiah’s prophecies and by the Physiologus to stand for the hypocrite.
Relation to Humans: It is described as violent tempered and impossible to keep, refusing all food in captivity until it dies. Medieval writers add that it throws sticks and stones at anyone who chases it.

Somewhere south of Egypt, in country that Greek officers only half believed in, a man was sent to look at an animal and came back with a description nobody could file. He was called Pythagoras, he served Ptolemy II Philadelphus, and the creature he had seen had a man’s face under a thick mat of hair, a man’s neck and shoulders and forearms and hands, breasts standing out on its chest, and then, from the waist down, the spine and ribs and belly and hind legs of a donkey. Its coat was the grey of wood ash, going pale and nearly white under the flanks. Aelian copied the report into his book on animals four centuries later and noted that Crates of Pergamon vouched for it, and he added the sentence that made the whole thing dangerous: anybody who had seen one would never again doubt that centaurs had once existed.

The best detail in Aelian is not the anatomy. It is the gait. The hands do two jobs. When the animal needs speed it drops them forward, sets them down in front of the hind legs and runs as fast as anything else on four feet. When it wants to pick something up, or set it down, or hold it tight, it stops, folds itself onto its haunches, and what were feet a moment ago become hands again. The image is precise and faintly unsettling, because it is the one thing in the account that no artist ever bothered to draw.

Aelian’s onocentaur has a temper, too, and it does not survive contact with people. Taken alive, it will not accept handling, refuses everything put in front of it, and starves. It would rather die than be kept.

Where it lived depended on who was asking. Aelian’s informants placed it in Africa, and Theoi’s summary of the tradition puts its home in Ethiopia. Pliny, gathering marvels for the seventh book of his Natural History, listed fauns and satyrs and onocentaurs together among the strange shapes reported out of India. In time the Greeks and Romans quietly demoted it and began using the word for a kind of ape, most likely the chimpanzee, which is a fair guess about what Pythagoras had actually been shown.

Then the word went somewhere no zoologist could follow it. When the translators of the Septuagint worked through the Book of Isaiah in the last centuries before the common era, they reached for onokentauros four times. Twice it renders the Hebrew ‘iy, some kind of howling desert or island beast, perhaps a jackal, perhaps a hyena. Once, at Isaiah 34:14, it stands in for lilith, a night demon. Once, at 34:11, it has no Hebrew word behind it at all. The translators simply put it there. Jerome kept the decision when he made the Vulgate, and the Latin verse that came down through a thousand years of liturgy reads et occurrent daemonia onocentauris, the demons shall meet the onocentaurs.

So the animal acquired a landscape. Isaiah’s Babylon is a burnt city with nobody in it, and into that rubble the Greek text sends onocentaurs to settle down among the nesting hedgehogs, calling across the stones to the demons and to each other, and stopping there because they have found rest. Wycliffe, translating into early English, gave up on the word and wrote out the picture instead: wonderful beasts, like men in the higher part and like asses in the nether part. The King James translators went the other way and called it a satyr.

The pairing at Isaiah 34:14 decided the creature’s future. Because the siren and the onocentaur stand next to each other in that verse, the Physiologus treats them in a single chapter, and the allegory writes itself. Here is a thing with a man’s mouth and an animal’s body. It can speak beautifully about virtue with the top half while the bottom half goes on being a donkey. Philippe de Thaon put it plainly enough: a man is rightly called a man when he tells the truth, and an ass when he does evil. The onocentaur became the emblem of the hypocrite, and specifically of the churchman who preaches one thing and lives another, which gave illuminators several centuries of quiet fun.

Isidore of Seville, filing it in the eleventh book of his Etymologies, kept the explanation short: it is called an onocentaur because it seems half human and half ass, just as the hippocentaur is thought to mix the natures of horse and man. Later compilers were less disciplined. Thomas of Cantimpré turned the creature upside down, giving it the head of an ass on the body of a man, while acknowledging that others still drew it with a horse’s body and a man’s torso. He gives it a hideous face and hands fit for any work, and one genuinely eerie trait: onocentaurs sound as though they are on the verge of speech when they cry out, but their lips are not accustomed to it and no human voice comes. He passes on the claim of a writer he calls Andelmus that the thing is not an original creature at all but is born wherever a man couples with a bull or a horse, then notes that many people contradict this. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, working from a gloss on Isaiah, has it bred between a bull and an ass, lecherous as the one and thick necked as the other. And there is a desert sighting attached to Saint Antony, who is said to have met a creature that was human as far as the thighs and ass below.

Artists made their own decision. Where the centaur stands solidly on four legs, the onocentaur in the manuscripts is usually upright on two, and sometimes the donkey half has no forelegs at all, a man’s trunk rising straight out of a pair of hindquarters. It looks wrong on purpose.

Its powers are modest and physical. It has a quadruped’s speed and a man’s grip, and it can swap between them without losing either. It has strength enough to be worth reporting. Thomas, quoting the compiler he calls the Experimentator, says that it hurls sticks or stones back at whoever is pursuing it, which makes it the rare bestiary monster that fights with a thrown weapon.

Its limits are where the creature becomes interesting. It cannot be tamed, cannot be fed, cannot be owned, and dies rather than be handled. It cannot finish the one act its human half keeps promising, since the cry always stops short of a word. And in the tradition that kept its name alive longest it has no defence at all, because the moralists were not describing an animal. They were describing a man they already knew, and the ass end of him was never in doubt.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an onocentaur?

An onocentaur is a hybrid creature with the upper body of a man and the lower body of a donkey. Its name comes from the Greek onos, meaning donkey, joined to kentauros, centaur. It appears first in Greek natural history as a supposedly real African animal and later in the Greek Bible and in medieval bestiaries.

How is the onocentaur different from a centaur?

A centaur combines a human upper body with the body of a horse, while an onocentaur combines it with a donkey. Medieval artists also tended to draw the onocentaur upright on two legs, sometimes with no forelegs on the animal half, rather than as a four-legged figure like the centaur. Isidore of Seville treated the two as a matched pair, naming the horse hybrid the hippocentaur.

Who first described the onocentaur?

The earliest account comes from an officer named Pythagoras, who served under Ptolemy II Philadelphus and reported the creature from Africa. His description survives because Aelian quoted it in his work on the characteristics of animals in the second or third century, adding that Crates of Pergamon confirmed it. Pliny the Elder separately listed onocentaurs among the marvels said to come out of India.

Why does the onocentaur appear in the Bible?

The Septuagint translators used the Greek word onokentauros four times in the Book of Isaiah, where it renders Hebrew terms for desert creatures and, in one verse, for the demon lilith. Jerome kept the word when he produced the Latin Vulgate, so onocentaurs remained in the ruined-city prophecies of Isaiah for centuries. Later English translators either described the creature instead of naming it, as Wycliffe did, or substituted the word satyr, as the King James Version does.

What does the onocentaur symbolise?

In the Physiologus and the bestiaries that followed it, the onocentaur stands for the hypocrite. Its human upper half can speak eloquently about goodness while its animal lower half continues to behave like a beast, which made it a favourite emblem for clergy who preached virtue and lived otherwise. It is treated in the same chapter as the siren because the two creatures appear side by side in Isaiah 34:14.