I recognize that few if any will read this, but I need to get this fact off my stomach, as it were.

Centaurs look like they are a blending of Homo sapiens and equines; A sort of Homo equinus. That's fine, though, and I have given this way too much thought frankly, centaurs are neither man nor horse but an entirely different being that arose not from the Father of Greek mythology, Zeus, having his way with an unsuspecting mare while posing as a stallion, but from a lesser deity, Ixion, mating with the cloud-being Nemphale and producing male, bestial offspring. At least as far as I remember, that's the myth. I'm open for correction. (I haven't gone racing off to do research in Bullfinch's Mythology while writing this.)

Anyway, because of this difference, I would think that this fact---that centaurs do not possess a human umbilicus---would be fairly obvious. Yet, I find that even though that is obviously so, most accomplished artists like, for example, Boris Vallejo and his wife, Julie Bell, (IMHO, truly great illustrators) insist on giving centaurs a human navel.

Let's be a little bit realistic in our fantasy realm centaur creators, eh? I think most artists whose work isn't primarily abstraction or full of surrealistic symbols strive to present a realistic view of mythical beings. We try to make them look like they actually can and do exist. At least that is what I strive for, with frequently mixed results.

The centaur can be a very difficult subject because of the almost unnatural appearing division that can arise between the being's human-like torso and its equine-like trunk, that area that most artists fail to master when executing a centaur picture. Getting the musculature and hide covering those muscles at the blending point just right is really tricky. When it is achieved, it is a thing of beauty to behold. The realistic blending makes the mythical become, in effect, real.

You can say it is a matter of taste, but if a centaur were to actually be born of a centauress dam with two umbilical cords, the birth would be a nightmare of entanglement. There would be a lot of death during child birth. And what, pray tell, could be the reason for two umbilicals on any creature? Oh, you say, that the centaur has multiple stomachs and thus needs more than one umbilicus? Well, I really have to disagree for artistic and logical reasons with that thinking. I have read so many different interpretations of what a centaur actually might be it leaves my head spinning. I'm going with this overarching concept: The centaur is an animal that is mammalian in nature. Mammals have only one umbilicus and so too does this mammal, the centaur.

So there you have my reasoning for supporting a ban forevermore on depicting centaurs with flagrant midsection-marring bellybuttons. I don't care if they are "innies" or "outies" and whether or not they might appear as sexy as the cut and defined abdomen of a fit centaur, or the idea that the human torso looks somehow incomplete without that depression sitting there. A bellybutton doesn't belong there any more than horns do on the centaur's head. (Sue me, I'm a damned purist. Though I find myself far more tolerant of horns than I do the lowly and ineffective umbilicus.)

Please, in the future when creating more arguably realistic centaurs, try to correct this lamentable oversight. Deep six the damned navel. Put a second one on a satyr or a faun, it makes as much sense! Draw them on all your oranges. But don't ever do it on a centaur!

It's insulting!