The Centaur with Two Hearts

Narnia movies had centers in that Harry Potter movies. Pierce Bronson even hoofs it up in Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, which is amusing to look at because it's one of these cases where the centaur is wearing clothes on its human part. It's just weird. Yeah, and then the horses naked, of course, and you're like, why aren't you even wearing a shirt? You know? In our films, it's interesting because they use various elements of costume and makeup and CG. I generally need to create these. A

centaur is an idea that is kind of monstrosity. In the best of cases. But if you throw in kind of shaky c g I or makeup, it looks even weirder and a little more troubling to behold. Yeah, I have to say that in the Narnia series that for whatever reason, that Center drives me nuts, Like, not in a good way anyway, it is. It's a fine line. Yeah.

I mean, they're ridiculous yet oddly perplexing, and in large part because they do embody the dual nature of man, this idea of the man and beast hybrid, you know, much like the Saturday that we had mentioned before. It represented the duplicity of man's be steel and pious nature. So it's why you also find centaur's running around in Dante's Inferno, thrusting centers back to their assigned depths in

boiling rivers of blood with spears um. Elsewhere in the world of sculptures, you find them choking heroes and punching heroes. They're always engaging in physical violence. With a few exceptions. You do have some notable centaur teachers who are very wise and want to help people, but a lot of Center seemed to be perfectly happy, was just punching dudes

in the face. Yeah, it's funny because when you first think of them, it's sort of like in the realm of unicorns and they seem cute and you know, like randier unicorns, half man, but they really are sort of bloodthirsty folk. When you look at the tales of them. You see them in various mythologies. Their most famous for their role in Greek mythology, but you also find them in India. The Gandharva's are are basically centaurs, and then you find other cultural traditions that take new takes on

what a centauri is. For instance, according to Carol Rose, historian has written a lot about monsters and symbolic meaning of monsters, points out that centers often pop up in European traditions to represent quote, the suffering of Christ as the man and the revenge taken upon his betrayal, which I find rather interesting and kind of hard to imagine. And then you also find some interesting takes on centaurs

in sculpture. Versus, if you traveled to the Louver and you see the old centaur there, which is this statue of the centaur and his arms are bound behind his back and upids riding on his back. There originally two of these, you have the old centaur and the young centaur, and the young center is free and in love, and the old one has his arms bound by Cupid behind

his back. So there's this idea of his dual nature of man and sort of the bestial urges that are commanding the human portion of ourselves, and what the ramifications of that might be in later years. Well, and we wanted to focus on Center today because we thought, you know, what, what if a centaur were to actually exist, what might it look like physically? What sort of vital organs would it have, much like when we talked about King Kong

or god Zilla. So we're gonna kind of take you guys through this a little bit today, talk about not just centaurs, but mythology, mistaking mythology for science, and you know, in a historical context. And then we're gonna take a look at our own bodies and try to figure out why we are designed the way we are designed. Yeah, first of all, we should stay just for the record, again, there's no such thing as a center. They do not exist as real creatures. As powerful as the idea maybe

and as interesting as the topic. Maybe there has never existed a human horse hybrid creature. That doesn't mean that people didn't try to convince us otherwise. Right, We've always tried to make sense out of fossils that we find a way bones are aligned in the earth, the ruminants of bones, So it's not impossible that one might come across the mixed bones of a human and a horse or horse like creature and wonder, hey, I wonder one of these are the same creature? How how might these

pieces fit together if I symble them wrong? And then of course you have stories about the Spanish conquistadors arriving on horseback in Central America and the native people thinking at first that they were one creature composed of horse and man. How to explain the first time someone rode a horse? Right, and you see that cruising by, Yeah, you might think, what so a lot of these fantastic idea I mean, monsters, on one hand, are always symbols.

Monsters symbolize something. And so we've discussed a little, and we'll continue to discuss a little about what a into our means and what it represents about us. But then also we create monsters in attempt to understand something or to illustrate something that exists in the world, such as people riding horses or strange ways that bones are turning up in the earth. Yeah. The Fermbank Museum here in Atlanta, I guess I was, but it was a year and a half two years ago had an exhibit that actually

talked about these mythical creatures. And I did not see it, unfortunately, but you did see it, right, nephew. Yeah, And so they wanted to talk about with the public specimens and fossils of prehistoric animals and try to investigate how they could have, through misidentification, speculation, fear, or imagination, inspired the development of some legendary creatures. They were talking about narwhal tusks from the North Sea, which they think could have

given credence to this idea of the unicorn. Right, I mean, if you've ever seen the narwhal tusk two, you can actually see the way that it's spiraling upward, just like you think of a unicorn. And how dinosaurs might have been mistaken for griffin for instance, or undersea monsters like giant squid could have become these Yeah, the cracking, these crazy creatures that rose up with you in these hundred foot waves. Hundred foot waves, true rug waves, but not

so much giant three headed octopus. That exhibit which I believe there's a Smithsonian traveling exhibit. They also had a Fiji mermaid, which which is a lot of fun, which of course one of these side show carnival hybrid deals where they would take the remnants of a monkey and the remnants of a fish, sew them together and display the mummified remains and it's it's frightening and horrifying and

wonderful and wonderful at the same time. You tend not to see that kind of specimen with centaurs, because you're talking of a horse is a big animal to deal with, and even if you had a large enough monkey so on to that body that you're still talking about a lot of work to click, a lot of bones for that one. But you do see some examples of people combining the bones of a man in the bones of

a horse, specifically with an artistic result in mind. Yeah, I attended the University of Tennessee and Knoxville some years ago and they actually have an exhibit there in their library. I assume it's still there. Perhaps any U t K. Listeners out there can correct me on this if I'm wrong. But they have this exhibit called the Center Excavations at Volos, and it's made to look like the fossil remnants of

a cent our skeletal system. We've always kind of thought, well in the description and the photo I saw, I mean, it's really pretty mapped out so that it looks like it is indeed the real thing. And it's tuned in a case with a faux marble base and stimulated wood panels at these skeletal remains of what they call a

centaur burial, along with inscribed clay tablets. And you see there's a panel and it says it's one of three Center burials discovered in nineteen eighty by the Archaeological Society of Argos near Volos, Greece, and they include a map. Would cut. I mean they make it look like, you know, this is a real thing, and the idea is that it supposed to be an object lesson on the importance

of skepticism. Yeah, right, like it just because something is presented in a way that looks like it's got authority doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, these bones are the real thing. I think it's it's fascinating and of course, as you said, it's meant as is artwork as well. Yeah, I kind of wish it would have become more of a heart for the university because the football team was the Tennessee Volunteers, and I never really paid any attention to the football, but but I might have had they

been the Tennessee Centaurs if that had been like the mascot. Yeah, it's very possible, right, and then they should have taken that whole heart, because I think that's an I wish my university had had such an exhibit. But what if, what if a center could be real? Well, we should explore that after a fifth break. All right, we're back the anatomy of the center. It's a fascinating thing to

think about, and we've discussed before. I love it when someone with the scientific mind applies that scientific mind to something ridiculous, not in an attempt to prove that ridiculous thing true, but sort of has a thought experiment. So we actually have an example of that. Year. There's a wonderful paper that actually it published in the Annals of Improbable Research. And these are the guys to do the Ignoble Prizes every year, and just a little background on that.

They highlight real and legitimate scientific research that seems absurd. Generally, these experiments or papers or studies that they highlight there's generally something to them. It's not just complete nonsense, and there's there's always science to it. A lot of these scientific experiments are things that elected giggles from certain members.

I'm thinking about the scientists who a forty year study of his own cracking of his knuckles proved to his mother that it wasn't going to cause I don't know, our fridays or something, as his mother had claimed years and years. And that's a great example because on one hand, question answered, mystery solved. This dude set out and using science, using rigid system of evaluation take that mom, investigated his mom's statement and proved it wrong, you know. So that's awesome.

But then in the other hand, it's a guy cracking his knuckles and keeping track of it for this large portion of his life and then publishing the results. So a lot of stuff since the lineup like that. For instance, there was the I think was the Las Vegas study into the ovulation of strippers and how that affected their tips like that was also a study that ignoble prizes anson probably research fla that research, by the way, has been questioned, yes, by the way recently, but a lot

of researches. But still it was a scientific inquiry. And so we encounter a paper titled Anatomy of the Centaur. And this is from a German anatomous by the name of Reinhard. Do you have his full name? Yeah? HC. Reinhard v Puts of Germany's Ludwig Maximilian University, Unique Institute of Anatomy. Yeah. And he writes a paper where he just sets out with this question in mind. All right, so the centaur is not real, but what if it was. If the center was real, how would it's an atomy work,

How would its circulatory so isom work? How would it digest food? There are a number of anatomical problems that emerge and trying to imagine how a centaur works. And this guy decided to create an answer using actual science, using everything you knew about human and equine anatomy to combine those and create a probable centaur. Yep, you've got a hybrid system. So you have to keep this in mind.

So centaur's heart, or we should say hearts right right, the centaur's going to need two of them, primary and secondary to pump blood. Through this mash up of bodies, you're also getting into questions of well, how does it digest food? All right, so the stomach would be in the horse section, but it would need to have a human stomach because the centaurs, according to most records, they're

not going around eating hay or anything. They're going around eating human food, so they would have to have a human gastro intestinal system. Well, and lots of libations too. According to right big drinkers, they live large. And then he also gives a certain amount of consideration to the reproductive organs of the center pis. Yes, most depictions is he discusses show no penis in the front of the center,

and most centers in art are are males. You'd see no penis at the front of the center because that's like the front of the horse. That's like the horses sternum more or less. Right, So i'd be like a penis on a sternum, right, So you tend not to see it there, you tend to see it back in the back. So where the horses actual reproductive organs would be right. There was no definitive that like where the

placement is right. It just sort of makes sense that it would be in the hind quarters, though you do see a certain variety points out the cretion variety of center, which you'll see in some like mid eighth century BC Greek artwork, where you see a center that has more human legs in the front and human genitalia in the front, but then but then it's unknown if it also has genitalia in the back. This is the problem when you start start trying to imagine mythical, unreal things as real

anatomical creation. And now I'm just laughing that we're sitting here discussing the penis placement on the center. Yeah. I don't know how we got here, but we did. One of the things we found most interesting was the idea that Reinhart argues that it would need to hearts, that you need the human heart and the horse heart both achieving a certain synchronicity in order for this being to exist, which led us to think, Okay, we've got two lungs, two kidneys, two eyes, why don't we have two hearts?

Exactly yeah, why is there? Why is there just one of these? Is? Okay, there's there's there's there's a really good reason for this Record's University anthropologists Susan Cashell says that the one heart to lung system began to emerge about three hundred million years ago when animals first moved from seed to land, and the idea is that this one heart too lung system was an easy blueprint to iterate as animals evolved into such divergent species as birds

and insects and humans. Um, So we all evolved to have stomachs digest food, lungs to breathe air, kidneys to filter waste, and this became the most efficient mold for nearly all species to evolve here and live on earth. That is why, my friend, And here's another thing. If we were to have two hearts, it really wouldn't make a difference because your body is a system that functions at full capacity, so the addition of extra heart wouldn't

really do much. So it seems like a cool thing, like, hey, yeah, why not have two hearts? It seems like that could really get us to move faster, pump more blood to our system, more oxygen to our brain. But that is not actually what would happen. I ran across an excerpt from a paper by a man by the name of

Nikolai Siniston. He was working at Gorky Medical Institute in Moscow, and this is from and he says, for a number of years my laboratory has been studying the problem of transplating the heart of vertebrate animals in the animal kingdom. Many necessary prerequisites exist for carrying out this important and at first sight impossible operation. The first stage was my

work on cold blooded animals, frogs and fishes. After a number of experimental variants and the perfection of the operation technique, I succeeded in transplanting to a frog a second heart taken from another animal. I planted the second heart in the same area is the heart of the host. Animals with two hearts show no difference from control frogs, and experienced biologists invited to examine them were unable to distinguish

one from the other. Two hearted frogs went through the usual nuptial period in spring and cast their spawn in the ordinary way, which is a delightful way of saying. Two hearted frogs also did it in the baby frogs did it just fine. Yeah, And so they weren't able to tell. Scientists looking at the frogs weren't able to tell. So to your point, an animal with an extra heart thrown into the mix is not going to be a super frog or a super animal. It's gonna work out. Yeah.

You could actually do the same to a human if you were to intervene in the embryonic stage. Because here's the deal. During the embryonic stage of development, we actually do have two hearts, and this is called the heart primordia, which eventually fuses together into one heart with four chambers.

And we're also outfitted with two eyes during the embryonic stage, although we begin with one primordia of the eye, which eventually separates to formed do so if the primorny were to be kept from splitting, we would have a cyclop side. How crazy, awful and great is that. I think we could also consiuerably engineer two hearts at that early stage exactly. But I believe they have achieved that with frogs, Yes

they did. You could do it frogs, You could do it with humans, but obviously this is not something you'd want to do. But there is something called heterotopic heart transplant that we should mention, Yes, we should, because it has to do with a guy human who actually does have two hearts. Earlier this year, an older man was admitted to a hospital in Verona, Italy, and doctors were amazed because they could detect two heartbeats, both of which

were displaying signs of dys rhythmia. And what they found out is that this guy had undergone a procedure known as heterotopic heart transplant, which we don't really do anymore because technology has gotten to the point where it's not necessary. But for a while, if you were going to transplant an additional organ kidney, you wouldn't necessarily take the old organ out right because it might be too difficult to extract, or there was the hope that the organ might recover

while the new organ took over day to day functions. Right, it's kind of like, oh, well, we don't want to fire this person. Let's have them train their replacement for a few for a week or so, and it works out, we'll just keep them both. And that's what happened in the chest of this Italian man. Yeah, yeah, that the transplant team made it his new heart with his malfunctioning old one, and the chambers and blood vessels of the two hearts were married so that the new heart could

support the old one. The problem though, is that you can develop two independent heart rhythms, especially in a scenario where one heart gets a little bit better, and in this guy's case, to just rhythmic problems led to him actually flatlining. Fortunately, though, he was jolted back to life with a defibrillator and his pacemaker was replaced. But it did kind of put you know, doctors on alert to like, oh, yeah, hey, there are some people walking around with two hearts from

this procedure. He would have a great excuse, I guess if he was caught by his adi looking around, you know, and he would say, hey, what can I do? I got two hearts? You know, Hey, I got a lot of hearts, got a lot of heart Yeah, something like that. Yeah, I'm sure he would love that joke. Seriously. It's it's amazing, though, I think there are individuals out there with two hearts in their chest. It's possible conceivable at an early stage

to interfere in human development and create two hearts. So even these things that would factor into the existence of a mythical creature we can pinpoint in the anatomical world at large, and also like the discovery, at least for me, that we did have this primordia I that separated that. If it didn't, you would have a cyclopsize. So centaurs. There you go. That's just kind of a a quick run through what they are and some of the science tied up around them. One of the more thought provoking

ideas I ran across. I discovered it through some of the writings of author and theorist Ken Wilbur who was drawing from the works of Hubert Benoir, Jane Alexander, and Eric Erickson, and they used the centaur to describe the integrated state of mind and body. So the idea here is, especially modern humans, we tend to think of ourselves in our body, our brain in our body as a rider on a horse. We are the rider, our body is the horse, and inevitably our horse ends up failing us.

It's not going as fast as we wanted to go. It's got a bum legs trying to buck us. You know, it's up, so we're whipping it. We have this relationship where we're the mind, the body is a horse, and we kind of treat the horse like this thing that is subservient to us, where in reality, the state is

more like a centaur. It is an integrated state. So we've discussed before we're not just a brain, and we talked about the way our diet and the way whatever is going on in our digestic system, how that influences our state of being. Where this integrated being, where this centaur when it comes to the mind body relationship, and that's definitely the more healthy and the more accurate way

of looking at the relationships. So if your horsey parts aren't happy, you're not happy, Yes, exactly, speak because you are your horsey parts. That's that's that's the one takeaway from this this episode. So there you have it. Centaurs. If you would like to share your lots on centaur's, your favorite centaurs from fact or fantasy, let us know

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