Onokentauros

The Septuagint translators reached for the onokentauros when they needed a Greek word for the desolate creatures haunting ruined Babylon. The Hebrew original described something wild and unclean living in abandoned places. The translators chose the donkey-centaur — a creature that was already strange in Greek folklore and became stranger in biblical context.

Isaiah 13:22 and 34:14 in the Greek Old Testament placed onokentauroi among the creatures that would inhabit Babylon after its destruction — alongside owls, jackals, and ostriches. They were markers of desolation, animals (or quasi-animals) whose presence signified that civilisation had retreated and wildness had reclaimed the ground.

In the Physiologus, the Christian bestiary that shaped medieval natural history, the onokentauros received a moral reading. Its human half represented rational thought. Its donkey half represented carnal desire. The creature was a living sermon about the divided self — capable of wisdom but enslaved to appetite.

This moral reading gave the onokentauros a second life. It appeared in church carvings, manuscript margins, and sermon illustrations throughout the medieval period, always as a cautionary figure. Monks who struggled with temptation were compared to onokentauroi — their higher nature perpetually dragged down by their lower.

The creature had travelled from Greek folklore through Jewish scripture into Christian moral theology, accumulating meanings at each stage. By the time it reached a medieval church wall, it bore almost no resemblance to whatever the original Greek storytellers had imagined — a wild thing in the desert, half-human and half-donkey, running from anyone who approached.