"Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies," says Charles Lamb, "may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false, come to affect us at all?—or
"Names whose sense we see not,
Fray us with things that be not?
Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury?—O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body—or, without the body, they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in Dante—tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons—are they one half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following him:
"Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
For having once turn'd round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual—that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth—and that it predominates in the period of sinless infancy—are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence."[98]
Prentice Mulford firmly believed that the supposed fables in the ancient mythologies concerning beings half-men, half-beasts (such as centaurs or mermaids) had had their origin in spiritual truths. "Our race," he says, "has been so developed out of the animal or coarser forms of life. Countless ages ago all forms of life were coarser than now. As these grew finer, man attracted and absorbed the spirit of the finer."
"The history of animals such as the ancients have transmitted to us," says Eusebe Salverte,[99] "is filled with details apparently chimerical: but which are sometimes only the consequence of a defective nomenclature. The name, Onocentaur, which seems to designate a monster, uniting the form of a man and an ass, was given to a quadrumanus which runs sometimes on four paws, but at other times uses its forepaws only as hands: merely an immense monkey covered with grey hair, particularly on the lower part of the body...."
M. Geoffroy de St. Hillaire described a polydactyle horse as having hairy fingers separated by membranes: yet when ancient authors have spoken of horses, the feet of which bore some resemblance to the hands and feet of a man, they have been accused of imposture.[100]
The Centaurs were mythical creatures which inhabited Thessaly. They were said to have sprung from a union of Ixion and a Cloud, or, according to other authorities, to be the offspring of Centaurus, son of Apollo, by Stilbia, daughter of Peneus. The famous battle of the Centaurs with the Lapithæ was occasioned by a quarrel at the marriage of Hippodamia with Pirithous. The Centaurs having come to a state of intoxication, offered violence to the women present, an insult for which they received due punishment.
A vivid presentment of what changing shape from man to horse would mean is to be found in Mr. Algernon Blackwood's "The Centaur,"[101] in which story the Irish hero, Mally, watches his own transformation into the figure of the Urwelt, with amazement.