Since then the belief in the metamorphosis of men into Callicantzari existed before that epoch--a quite indeterminate epoch, I am afraid--in which the word λυκάνθρωπος fell into desuetude[626] and was replaced by λυκοκάντζαρος, where are we to look for the origin of the idea?
Since the Callicantzari bear the name of the Centaurs, it is obvious that the enquiry must be carried yet further back, and that the ancient ideas concerning the Centaurs’ origin must be investigated. Pindar touches often upon the Centaur-myths; what view did he take of the Centaurs’ nature? Were they divine in origin or human? We shall see that he held no settled view on the subject. Both traditions concerning the origin of the Centaurs were familiar to him just as both traditions still prevail in modern accounts of the Callicantzari; sometimes he follows the one, sometimes the other. On the one hand the Centaur Chiron is consistently described as divine. ‘Fain would I,’ says Pindar[627], ‘that Chiron ... wide-ruling scion of Cronos the son of Ouranos were living and not gone, and that the Beast of the wilds were ruling o’er the glens of Pelion’; and again he names him ‘Chiron son of Cronos[628]’ and ‘the Beast divine[629].’ In Pindar’s view Chiron, be he Beast or God, is certainly not human; and if he is once named by the same poet ‘the Magnesian Centaur[630],’ the epithet need only perhaps declare his habitation. His divinity is plainly asserted, and the legend that he resigned the divine guerdon of immortality in order to deliver Prometheus accords with Pindar’s doctrine.
But on the other hand the story of Ixion as told by Pindar reveals another tradition. Ixion himself was human; for his presumptuous sin of lusting after the wife of Zeus ‘swiftly he suffered as he, mere man, deserved, and won a misery unique[631].’ The son of Ixion therefore by a nebulous mother could not be divine. The cloud wherewith in his delusion he had mated ‘bare unto him, unblest of the Graces, a monstrous son, a thing apart even as she, with no rank either among men or where gods have their portion; him she nurtured and named Centauros; and he in the dales of Pelion did mate with Magnesian mares, and thence there sprang a wondrous warrior-tribe like unto both their parents--like to their dams in their nether parts, and the upper frame their sire’s[632].’ The first Centaur then, the founder of the race, though only half-human in origin, was in no respect divine. How then came Chiron, one of that race, to be divine? The two traditions are inconsistent. Pindar as a poet was not troubled thereby; he chose now the one, now the other, for his art to embroider. But in the science of mythology the discrepancy of the two traditions is important. Once more we must carry our search further back--to Hesiod and to Homer.