Centaurs as Misinterpretations and Products of the Human Imagination
Kevin R. Henke
September 15, 2022
In Henke (2022b), I commented on some claims in Lundahl (2022f) about a “half-human, half-snake” being a birth defect:
“Once more, Lundahl (2022f) makes a huge mistake of just assuming that whatever view an ancient community may have had about its origin, it must be reliable history. No. Such stories about the founding of various communities may be fairly accurate history or they may contain legends or consist entirely of myths without historical evidence. It’s the job of historians to separate history from fantasy. Although we have plenty of evidence about New Amsterdam proceeding New York City, there’s not a shred of evidence for the existence of Moses or the Exodus, Moroni’s ghost and his golden plates, or the events in Matthew 28 and Acts 2 (Finkelstein and Silberman 2001; Fitzgerald 2013; Loftus 2010; Loftus 2011). Rather than realizing that half-human and half-snake creatures are probably just made-up stories like the centaurs, Lundahl (2022f) thinks that they may have been humans with fused legs. While such a birth defect is certainly possible, his reasoning for this defect in Lundahl (2022f) is not. Without any evidence whatsoever, Lundahl (2022f) argues that nuclear wars before Noah’s Flood contributed to their conditions. Of course, Flood geology is bogus and there’s no evidence whatsoever in the Precambrian for a 4,400-to-6,000-year-old civilization with nuclear weapons (see my essays against Flood Geology here). If Mr. Lundahl has evidence for such a nuclear ancient civilization, I want to see it and I’m willing to change my mind. Until that evidence ever comes forward, Mr. Lundahl is totally failing to separate history from his fantasies about the nuclear pre-Flood civilizations. The speculations about pre-Flood nuclear wars in Lundahl (2022f) are so bizarre, outrageous and unfounded that I doubt that even the young-Earth creationists at Creation Ministries International and Answers in Genesis would take them seriously.” [my emphasis]
Lundahl (2022o) further comments:
“I actually do not think that centaurs are just made up stories. It could be a case of very early riders (for the region at least) seen from a distance by most observers. Hercules and Jason arguably were educated by such and told not to break the mystique surrounding them.”
Well, I see no reason to believe these stories about Hercules or Jason. However, I agree with Mr. Lundahl that people on horseback, from a distance, may be easily mistaken for centaurs. Apparently, when Native Americans first saw the Spanish conquistadors on horseback, they thought the same thing. At the same time, human imaginations are also more than capable of just inventing half-human/half-animal hybrids, such as the half-human/half-horse (centaurs), half-woman/half-fish (mermaids), part-human/part-bull (minotaurs), etc.