The Archer, the Centaur, and the Centre of the Galaxy

The Mesopotamian figure is MUL PA-BIL-SAG, a divine archer, sometimes shown winged and with more than one head, and the Greeks made it a centaur drawing a bow. Ancient writers were divided about which centaur: some named Chiron, the wise healer and teacher, though others assigned Chiron to the separate southern constellation of Centaurus and made this figure the rougher satyr Crotus. The confusion is old and is not resolvable. The constellation is astronomically remarkable for a reason unknown to the tradition: the centre of the Milky Way galaxy lies in this direction, behind the dense star clouds of Sagittarius, and the radio source Sagittarius A-star at that point is now understood to mark a supermassive black hole. The brightest part of the Milky Way is visible here to the unaided eye, which is why the region is so rich in the star lore of many traditions.

The identity confusion between Chiron and the satyr Crotus noted here has a textual root: Eratosthenes' Catasterismi, one of the main surviving sources for constellation myths, gives Crotus, the son of Pan and a nurse of the Muses, credited with inventing archery and granted a place in the sky for his skill, while other authors keep the wise centaur Chiron in this constellation instead of assigning him only to Centaurus. Modern astrology's Chiron, the small icy body discussed under the Planet Chiron entry, is an entirely separate twentieth-century object named for the same mythological figure and has no connection to this ancient constellation dispute beyond the shared name.