Drunk, rowdy guests disrupt a king’s wedding and try to kidnap
the bride and other women there.
These troublemakers are Centaurs, half-man and half-horse,
described either as a man with the barrel and hind legs of a
horse extending from his back, or a horse with a man’s body from
the waist up in place of the horse’s neck and head (H.J. Rose,
A Handbook of Greek Mythology, Including Its Extension to
Rome, New York: 1929).
In attacking the wedding of Perithus, king of the Lapiths, the
Centaurs, who lost the ensuing battle, disrespect marriage. Other
hybrids in Classical mythology, including the Sphinx and the
Minotaur, also foreshadow the anti-life, anti-family agenda.
Not that all mythological hybrids were evil. Chiron, a Centaur,
tutored Achilles, Asclepius, and Jason and knew the healing arts
(Oxford Classical Dictionary 1970). Myths, furthermore,
didn’t develop to serve as morality plays. And no oracle revealed
that the British Parliament in May 2008 would vote to allow
scientists to combine human and animal DNA in human cloning
attempts, with resulting embryos killed 14 days later (see
LifeNews.com, May 19, 2008).
But in their mythical lives and origins, these hybrids suggest a
primordial horror that can reside in the blending of the human
and the animal.
The Centaurs had an evil progenitor, Ixion. He came to Zeus to be
purified because he had murdered his father-in-law, to avoid
paying the agreed-to bride-price for his wife, Dia. “As this was
very near to murdering a blood-relation, if indeed they were not
actual blood-kin, and no one had ever done such a thing before,
no one would purify Ixion until at last he took refuge with Zeus,
who consented to purify him,” wrote Classicist H.J. Rose. But
Ixion, with characteristic disregard for ties of blood, marriage,
or friendship, attempted to seduce Hera, Zeus’ wife.
Zeus retaliated by creating a replica of Hera, Nephele, out of a
cloud, and by her Ixion fathered the first Centaur or the race of
Centaurs. Ixion’s offspring “were as rough and impious as their
father,” Rose noted.
Equally telling are the origins of the Sphinx, who is usually
portrayed with wings, a woman’s face, and the body of a lion. The
Sphinx, along with Cerberus, Hades’ watchdog, and other monsters,
issued from the underworld’s serpent-woman Echidna, and her mate
of multiple dragon heads, Typhon.
The Sphinx was plaguing the city of Thebes when Oedipus arrived
there. She asked a riddle of all and killed those who could not
answer it. The riddle: What moves on four legs in the morning,
two legs at noon, and three legs at night?
Oedipus solved it: The answer is man, who crawls in infancy (four
legs), walks in adulthood (two legs), and uses a cane in old age
(three legs).
The enraged Sphinx killed herself. Her intellectual pride had
been thwarted. She needed to dominate through her intelligence
and killed those “inferiors” who couldn’t figure out her riddle.
When Oedipus defeated her, she took her own life, the ultimate
anti-life act.
“For, of course, power is what Pride really enjoys: there is
nothing makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to
move them about like toy soldiers,” as C.S. Lewis wrote in
Mere Christianity.
That is a description of genetic manipulators, who wish not
merely to move people about, but to redesign them. Like the
Sphinx, they wish to dominate out of intellectual pride.
It’s interesting that the Sphinx’s riddle involved something
definitional to a human: walking upright on two legs.
With human-animal hybrids, however, we lose our sense of what is
human.
The Minotaur of Crete — a human-bull hybrid — reduced human
beings to fodder by devouring Athenian youths and maidens
imprisoned in his Labyrinth. The humans became the food of the
inhuman.
Crete, according to the myth, held Athens as a vassal state and
demanded that every year it send seven youths and seven maidens
as a tribute. The young Athenians were locked in the Labyrinth
and either starved or got eaten by the Minotaur.
He came by his cruelty through origins as vile as the Sphinx’s.
The god Poseidon gave Minos of Crete a beautiful white bull.
Instead of sacrificing it to Poseidon as promised, however, Minos
kept the bull and offered a lesser victim to the god. Poseidon
retaliated by making Pasiphaë, Minos’ wife, desire the bull. The
Minotaur resulted from their union.
But human love defeated him. Theseus, a prince of Athens,
volunteered to be one of the victims, and journeyed to Crete with
the ill-fated others. In Crete, Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, fell in
love with Theseus and gave him a thread that would let him find
his way out of the Labyrinth. Once inside, Theseus encountered
the Minotaur and slew him.
With the thread, Theseus escaped from the Labyrinth and then
sailed away with Ariadne and the intended Athenian victims.
Theseus defeated the Minotaur, the Lapiths defeated the Centaurs,
and Oedipus defeated the Sphinx.
Human-animal hybrids must be defeated by legislation banning the
practice. Senators Sam Brownback and Mary Landrieu on July 9
introduced such a ban. The measure parallels their 2007 bill,
later introduced in the House by Congressman Chris Smith.
“Creating human-animal hybrids, which permanently alter the
genetic makeup of an organism, will challenge the very definition
of what it means to be human and is a violation of human dignity
and a grave injustice,” said Brownback.
Brownback’s press release explained that the bill “only affects
efforts to blur the genetic lines between animals and humans,”
and does not bar “the use of animals or humans in legitimate
research or health care where genetic material is not passed on
to future generations.”
On April 30, 2008, in a statement supporting a U.S. human-animal
hybrid ban, Cardinal Justin Rigali said: “While this subject may
seem like science fiction to many, the threat is all too real.
The United Kingdom is preparing to authorize the production of
cloned human embryos using human DNA and animal eggs, setting the
stage for the creation of embryos that are half-human and
half-animal.”
Rigali, chair of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life
Activities, added: “Researchers in New York have boasted of
implanting ‘mouse/human embryonic chimeras’ into female mice, and
California scientists say they may produce a mouse whose brain is
entirely made up of human brain cells.”
It is not science fiction. Nor it is mythology.
