and risked being caught and killed themselves, they violated the social laws and became outlaws, who in Indo-European traditions are symbolised by the wolf like the wolf, the hero-warrior was conceptualised as a lone hunter who also acted as a member of a group, attacked at night and in winter, lived outside human society, and sometimes disguised himself as an actual wolf thus the Thracian hero was linked to a notion of wolf and antagonist The Thracian initiate warrior, thus, during his transition to manhood, was an outsider inhabited the realm of "nature," that is the animal realm, in opposition to the realm of culture or of "man," that is the community of kinship. The wolves were also the symbol of the young initiate warrior-hero because the wolf was associated with initiation in Thracian culture. Thus, the half-outsider status of the young Thracian warriors was also represented in animal transformations. In addition to the wolf, the bear, an animal representing strangeness and alienation in Thracian culture, also represented the young warrior during his initiation. The third creature the initiate warrior was associated with was the centaur, who constituted a non-individualised all-male group with a common name, thus representing a ritual community, such as an initiation group of young warriors. This connection with the centaur, which was an animalistic identification similar to the dog and wolf emblems, arose from the Indo-European association of the horse with the god of war, the warrior class, and the military aristocracy. Thracian warrior initiates were taught to ride, and were associated with the horse, which was their emblematic animal. The association between young men and horses itself was derived from the cult of the Divine twins (who are attested as the Ashvins in India and the Dioscuri in Greece, and to whom might have been connected the double image of the Hero during the boar hunt), who are connected to the horse. In mythology the hero is usually born at the same time as his horse, and young men who had been initiated at the same time were considered "brothers" or "twins" because they were socially "born" together. Out of this connection between the man and the horse arose the myth of the dual-natured centaur. The young warrior-hero was symbolised by asymmetry (this heroic asymmetry represented a direct opposition to the symmetry of social order), being one-armed, one-legged, and one-eyed, but sometimes simply represented as