ABSTRACT
Operation Centaur is an organisation set up to promote the relevance of the working horse in urban sites. Chiron was the eldest and wisest of the Centaurs, a Thessalian tribe of half-horse men. In a seminal study of traditional horseback cultures, and more broadly the archaeological history between horses and humans, Olsen describes the traditional Kazakh nomads and their horses. In the Upanishads, the human is seen through the metaphor of the horse–human relationship, with the self as the charioteer: Know the Self to be sitting in the chariot, the body to be the chariot, the intellect the charioteer, and the mind the reins. The shift that natural horsemanship identified and strengthened has placed the horse more in line as a colleague to humans, and this is very much how we see our horses at Operation Centaur. In its current, intersubjective guise, it is an ideal modality from which to understand the horse–human relationship in equine-assisted psychotherapy and coaching.
