by Barry Lopez
I recall one afternoon, sitting in a university library, reading in the Journal of Mammalogy about a biologist named Eugene Johnson who was in Alaska observing wolves. He was able to approach a wolf pup in his canoe without being seen. In his lap he had a small shotgun loaded with buckshot. Each time the pup, who was walking along the riverbank, looked up, Johnson put the paddle down and raised his gun. “There was not the slightest chance,” he wrote, “that two buckshot might find a vital spot at that distance, but I felt we ought not to deny ourselves what satisfaction we might get out of frightening the beast to the utmost of our ability.”
That was written in 1921. It is, of course, an isolated incident, but it properly belies the sometimes arrogant claims of science to objectivity. It was just such biologists as this whom stockmen sought out in the twentieth century to support with “scientific testimony” ideas about wolves that they might as well have gotten from Edward Topsell.
That some scientists obliged them is one of the sadder facts of man’s association with wild animals, and of the politics of science.
Twelve
SEARCHING FOR THE BEAST
YOU DO NOT HAVE to explain to anyone that wolves and sheep don’t get along. When Lord Byron wrote in The Destruction of Sennacherib that “the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,” he did not leave his readers struggling for his meaning, and when Chaucer wrote in The Parson’s Tale of “the devil’s wolves that strangle the sheep of Jesus Christ,” his Christian audience did not wonder that it should be wolves who do the Devil’s work. War correspondents writing of German wolfpacks prowling the North Atlantic clearly conveyed the Allied perception of the Third Reich as a creature of abominable cruelty and greed preying on Europe. And people reading of The Wolf Lair, a fanciful Allied name for the Führer’s military retreat in eastern Prussia, found it very apt. Had someone noted, further, that the name Adolf was a contraction of Edel-wolf, the noble wolf, the reader would have understood.
The human mind entertains itself with such symbols and metaphors, sorting out the universe in an internal monologue, and I think it delights in wolves. The wolf is a sometime symbol of evil, and the mind dotes on distinctions between good and evil. He is a symbol of the warrior, and we are privately concerned with our own courage and nobility. The wolf’s is also a terrifying image, and the human mind likes to frighten itself.
The symbolism and metaphor of wolf imagery is not vast, but it is potent. It is rooted in the bedrock of the soul. The tradition of the wolf as warrior-hero is older than recorded history. The legends of Romulus and Remus and other wolf children point up another ancient image, that of the benevolent wolf-mother. The deaths of those taken for werewolves and burned alive in the Middle Ages represent yet another, focusing negative feelings about the wolf. As old as these, though not as widespread outside Europe, is the sexual imagery associated with wolves, the Latin lupa for whore and female wolf, the wolf whistle, and the French idiom elle a vu le loup. On the walls of a Roman catacomb the story of the compromising of the voluptuous Susanna by two elders is depicted as a sheep crowded by two wolves.
I wrote above of the wolf as a symbol for twilight. Other writers have suggested, and I agree with them, that the wolf was a symbol reflecting two human alternatives at war: instinctual urges and rational behavior. In Hesitant Wolf and Scrupulous Fox, Karen Kennerly says the wolf is the creature who is most like us in animal fable. “Out of phase with himself,” she says, “he is defeated alternately by hubris and naiveté… . He becomes the irreconcilability between instinct and rational thought.” His attempt to live a rational life is defeated by his urge to behave basely. Thus, the human and bestial natures.
Throughout history man has externalized his bestial nature, finding a scapegoat upon which he could heap his sins and whose sacrificial death would be his atonement. He has put his sins of greed, lust, and deception on the wolf and put the wolf to death—in literature, in folklore, and in real life.
The central conflict between man’s good and evil natures is revealed in his twin images of the wolf as ravening killer and (something we have not examined before) as nurturing mother. The former was the werewolf; the latter the mother to children who founded nations.
Today we, like most people in history, are favorably inclined toward surrogate wolf-mothers, even if we consider such things folklore. But we have lost track of werewolves in the twentieth century. Werewolves were a stark reality in the Middle Ages. Their physical presence was not doubted; at a symbolic level the werewolf represented all that was base in man, especially savagery and lust. If, as Kennerly and others suggest, to love what was good in the wolf was really to express self-love, and to hate what was evil in the wolf was to express self-hate, then the hunting down of werewolves was simply the age-old attempt to isolate and annihilate man’s base nature. That it went on for so many hundreds of years indicates an abiding self-hatred in man.
Reflection on what happened in the Great Plains in America during the wolf wars reveals a certain amount of self-hatred, but we are drawn back inevitably to the Middle Ages. At a time when no one knew anything about genetics, the idea that a child suffering from Down’s syndrome—small ears, a broad forehead, a flat nose, prominent teeth—was the offspring of a wench and a werewolf was perfectly plausible. The Middle Ages were a melancholy time, accurately reflected I think in the surreal and grotesque imagery of painters like Heironymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Younger; a time of famine, of endless wars, of epidemic disease, of social upheaval. Civilization was not as precious as it is to us today. The temptation to strike back at a painful world must have been strong. There were herbs to be purchased. There were Faustian pacts that could be made. Wanting to be a werewolf, in other words, was somehow understandable. In a history of witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Jeffrey Russell has written that some peasants were moved by “the Promethean urge to bend both nature and other people to their own ends … to obtain the objects of their pecuniary or amatory desire or to exact revenge on those whom they feared or hated.”
Given a depressed populace, a belief in werewolves, and the intimidation practiced by the court of the Inquisition, it is not surprising that people panicked and confessed precipitously to being werewolves, to having committed crimes against nature. And it wasn’t just werewolves; in 1275 a deranged woman named Angela de la Barthe confessed to the Inquisition at Toulouse that she had given birth to a creature that was half wolf, half snake, and that she had kept it alive by feeding it human babies she stole. In 1425 in Neider-Hauenstein near modern Basel a woman was sentenced to death for consorting with wolves, on whom, it was alleged, she had ridden across the night sky.
The Middle Ages were years of very deep frustration for human beings, caught in the twilight between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance. It was the time of the wolf. And anger that men felt over their circumstances, they heaped on wolves.
The beast in the wolf.
But before the story of the werewolf can begin, another story must be told. There is a character in the bestiaries, L’homme sauvage, the wild man of the woods, whose path intersected the werewolf’s. The wild man was the product of an evolutionary synthesis of Pan and Dionysius, Roman
gods of the pasture and the harvest respectively. Dressed in a suit of bright, tattered cloth, he was a central figure throughout the Middle Ages in the ancient pagan midwinter celebrations. In that same tattered suit he later became the harlequin figure in the commedia dell’arte and also Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest. A carnal, frivolous, somewhat slow-witted prankster most of the time, he was also thought of as a somber, almost ascetic loner, wandering the vast stretches of thick forests that lay between medieval settlements, eating berries, roots, and wild game. He shared the dank, dismal woods with religious and social outcasts and with the wolf, who stood as symbol for them all. Most importantly for our interest, the wild man was associated with acts of depravity and sexual indulgence. As his image began to diffuse in the 1400s and 1500s, these qualities
were impressed on the werewolf.
The wild man, depicted in scenes such as the Rape of Proserpine (where he appears as Pluto), was widely popular. The art historian Richard Bernheimer, speculating on the vigor of the wild man’s survival through the ages, writes: “It appears that the notion of the wild man must respond and be due to a persistent psychological urge. We may define this urge as the need to give external expression and symbolically valid form to the impulses of reckless physical assertion which are hidden in all of us but are normally kept under control.”
And the historian Jeffrey Russell says in his Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: “The wild man, both brutal and erotic, was a perfect projection of the repressed libidinous impulses of medieval man. His counterpart, the wild woman, who was a murderess, child-eater, bloodsucker and occasionally a sex nymph, was a prototype of the witch.” The latter recalls the vargamors in Scandinavia, women who procured human victims for their wolf companions, frequently by promising sexual favors. Bernheimer’s and Russell’s statements both reflect the beast in search of a violent sexual connection. And indeed it is not surprising to find as a common theme, especially in the later Middle Ages (and still later more violently in pulp novels), men who became werewolves solely to avenge rejection by a lover. (It is rare that women become werewolves. When they do, it is almost always as a means to an end—to steal a child victim for a sabbat, for example.)
There are other places where the paths of the wild man and the werewolf cross. The Twelve Days between Christmas and Epiphany were the days of the wild man rituals in Europe and also the time when werewolves were supposed to be on a rampage. The men who dressed up to portray wild men during the celebrations were expected to drink to excess, to abuse women, to behave like Berserker, a fanatic cult of Teutonic warriors who dressed in wolf and bear skins. In the Baltic countries, in fact, their behavior was hardly distinguished from the rampages of the Wild Horde in Teutonic legend.
The wild man and the werewolf alike were metamorphosed from formidable forces in the pagan imagination, through the grotesque, almost psychopathic imagery of the Middle Ages, to become the derivative, often impotent and pathetic caricatures we find in movies and pulp literature today.
The legend of the werebeast is almost universal. In each country primitive beliefs in shapeshifting (the human ability to change to an animal form) combine with beliefs in sorcery to produce a fearsome local werebeast who goes about at night usually, but not always, slaying human beings. In Africa there were werehyenas, in Japan there were werefoxes, in South America there were werejaguars, in Norway there were werebears. In Europe there were werewolves.
The werebeast might be a sorcerer bent on killing an enemy, like the Navajo werewolf. He might be a victim under a sorcerer’s curse, wandering melancholy about the countryside, as was said of werewolves in White Russia. Or he might be benevolent and protective, like Alphouns, the werewolf of a twelfth-century romance, William of Parlerne, who acted as a protector to the rightful heir to the Sicilian throne. There is nothing inherently evil in the idea of shapeshifting, which is why some benevolent werewolf stories survive. But as the wolf came to stand more and more for the bestial, for the perverse, for evil in every form, the simple phenomenon of shapeshifting was overshadowed by the presence of a terrible creature that preyed on everything human and, in the most voyeuristic stories, engaged in a level of violence and sexual depravity that had not the remotest connection with any animal but man himself. It is important to keep this in mind, because in looking to the “werewolves” of primitive ages there is a tendency to telescope backward ideas that only developed much later.
The werewolf of our legends took form, in part, in Greece. At the tip of the Balkan peninsula lies a landmass known as the Peloponnesus and at its center is a region known as Arcadia. According to Greek legend, Lycaon, the son of Pelasgus, civilized Arcadia and instituted the worship of Zeus there. Word later reached Zeus that Lycaon’s many sons were lax in their religious duties and arrogant toward their father. Zeus decided to visit them, disguised as a day laborer, and see for himself.
When he came to Lycaon’s house he was welcomed, but Lycaon’s sons convinced their father to serve the stranger human flesh, to see if he might be Zeus in disguise. Nyktimos, one of the sons, was killed and his entrails were mixed with the meat of sheep and goats. A bowl of this was then set before the god. Zeus hurled the bowl to the floor, changed Lycaon and all his sons into wolves (except Nyktimos, whom he restored), and stormed out.
Still angry over Lycaon’s blasphemy and incensed at the ways of men in general, Zeus unleashed a flood to drown them all. Deucalion’s flood (named for the man who built an ark and escaped) destroyed Lycaon and his sons, but some survivors who later emigrated to Arcadia ritually killed people to satisfy the gods. These survivors were former residents of the country around Mount Parnassus. Ironically, they had been awakened on the night of the flood by the howling of wolves who led them to high ground. An Arcadian practice in later centuries, according to the geographer Pausanius, was to prepare a meal like the one served Zeus and set it before a group of shepherds. The one who found human entrail in his bowl ate it, howled like a wolf and, leaving his clothing hung on an oak, swam across a stream where he remained in a desolate region as a werewolf for nine years. If in that time he ate no human flesh he regained his human form.
This is the story Pliny tells in the Historia naturalis. He adds that an Arcadian youth named Damarchos who had become a wolf under these circumstances abstained from human flesh, regained his form, and later won a boxing match in the Olympic Games. Socrates alludes to the story in Plato’s Republic when he says that a beneficent ruler (like Lycaon) is destined to become a tyrant if ever he tastes human flesh, that is, if he should ever arrange to have a political enemy murdered.
Lycaon’s name is preserved in the scientific name for the Eastern timber wolf, Canis lupus lycaon, and in the name for a kind of delusion and melancholy in which a person believes himself to be a wolf but retains his human form—lycanthropy.
The origin of this story is vague. Most scholars shy away from regarding Zeus as a wolf-god to whom humans might have been sacrificed. They hold that he was a god of light and that the terms were, again, confused in Greek. The element of human sacrifice and the inclusion of wolves in the story may have come about like this. The Arcadians were an agricultural people. It may have been the custom for the reigning king to take his own life to propitiate the gods if the crops failed. In time, a modification of this practice was introduced whereby the king had someone else sacrificed in his place. To expiate his guilt at this, the king shared responsibility for the murder with those whom he invited to a ritual meal. One of this number was then chosen by lot to atone for the sin by being banished from human society—for nine years.
This is all plausible and probable. It may have been, too, that later the cult of Zeus was grafted onto an existing wolf cult in Greece that actually sacrificed human beings in an effort to placate wolves (the Arcadians kept flocks and the Peloponnesus was thick with wolves). Deucalion’s flood, then, may represent the civilizing Hellenistic invasion that wiped out the practice of human sacrifice, leaving it to survive only in isolated places like Arcadia.
Whatever its origin and meaning, the story offers a perception of the wolf as bestial man who can, if he controls his animal appetite for nine years, attain the status of a human being. The connection between the outlaw or outcast and the wolf is also made clear.
We draw most of our werewolf tradition from northern and eastern Europe, but I chose this Greek legend to begin this section on werewolves because it is so succinct. It grew up among people who probably considered wolves enemies, and it voices one of the most persistent taboos in the folklore of Western man, that against eating human flesh. The wolf seen eating human carrion on a medieval battlefield was reviled because he was held to be sufficiently endowed to know that what he was doing was wrong but was base enough to do it anyway. The quintessential sinner.
A poignant aspect of the wolf’s predicament emerges here. In a hunter society, like that of the Cheyenne, traits that were universally admired—courage, hunting skill, endurance—placed the wolf in a pantheon of respected animals; but when man turned to agriculture and husbandry, to cities, the very same wolf was hated as cowardly, stupid, and rapacious. The wolf itself remains unchanged but man now speaks of his hated “animal” nature. By standing around a burning stake, jeering at and cursing an accused werewolf, a person demonstrated an allegiance to his human nature and increased his own sense of well-being. The tragedy, and I think that is the proper word, is that the projection of such self-hatred was never satisfied. No amount of carnage, no pile of wolves in the village square, no number of human beings burned as werewolves, was enough to end it. It is, I suppose, not that different from the slaughter of Jews at the hands of the Nazis, except that when it happens to animals it is easier to forget. In the case of the werewolf, however, it must be recalled that we are talking about human beings.
Herodotus wrote that the Neurians who lived in present-day western Russia changed into wolves for a few days once a year. The Neurians were hunters who probably had a totemistic relationship with wolves and wore wolf skins in an annual ceremony; but this mention by Herodotus is commonly cited as evidence that early on there was a race of werewolves. Pliny and others mention a wolf cult at Mount Soracte near Rome. The members danced in wolfskins and walked through fire carrying the entrails of sacrificial animals. It is not hard to see how the propitiation of wolves who threatened flocks, combined with older totemistic relationships, easily created the impression of werewolves hundreds of years later.
The story of the werewolf in Petronius’s Satyricon is often cited as evidence of a belief in werewolves in Rome at the time of Christ, but people tend to forget that the story was written to entertain. Any historical value is fortuitous. Petronius’s tale is of a man who changes into a wolf and attacks a herd of cattle before being driven off with a pitchfork wound in the neck. The narrator in the story later finds his good friend suffering from a pitchfork wound in the same place. It is convincing evidence that he is, in Petronius’s word, a versipellis, a skin changer. (This element—a wolf is wounded and a human being is later found with a similar wound—was the basis of proof in many werewolf trials.)