Find Part 1 here:
WEREWOLVES
Yes, that’s right, I said Werewolves. You know… people who on the full-moon are transformed into hairy, aggressive, wolven therianthropes, overcome by an implacable force, guided by an inscrutable intention.
1 Howl he:
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy...
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking…
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room…
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination…
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time…
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed…
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head…
the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies…
I spent one Halloween in my twenties, sober by accident, on King Street West in downtown Toronto, where I watched a well-adjusted looking young man in expensive leather shoes intentionally and uninhibitedly, throw his own head into a brick wall repeatedly, while a streetcar rolled by unaffected. Are moderns more familiar with ghouls than we care to admit? More familiar with werewolves than only through film? How many of us howl? More importantly why?
OGNI PENSIERO VOLA
After the Latvonian crusades, when hunting was reserved as a privilege of German nobility, December was known as wolf’s month. In these darker days, without dogs or weapons, the fear one had of ‘real’ wolves who hunted livestock would have been difficult to differentiate from that fear inspired by the werewolves who roved among them. Men, either dressed in wolf skins or transformed into the mindfulness and/or body of a wolf, were thought to live among them; meeting on the islands of the river Brasla. Wolves were considered the embodiment of the dead. Likewise men who live in the wilderness, outside of society and the domain of lawfulness, were considered ritually dead. In Italy, it was said that the werewolves of Zues Lycaios would change back to men after 9 years, if they had not killed nor eaten any human.
Dolon wearing a wolf-skin. Attic red-figure vase, c. 460 BC.
“In the sixteenth century, a werewolf was caught by the peasants in Masuren and taken to the court of Duke Albrecht in Konigsberg, the man was unkempt and sparsely clad and apparently resembled a wolf more than a human. He confessed bluntly that twice a year he turned into this animal.”2
“Another one, also caught by peasants in 1541, near Patauium, fared much worse. ‘Finally the people caught him with a great deal of trouble. He tried to convince them that he was really a wolf, only his skin was turned inside-out Thereupon some people, even more foolish than the wretched man, hacked off his arms and legs to see if this was so. When they found that it was not the case, they took him to a physician so he could be cured, but he died a few days later’ ”3
Looking at reports from antiquity to the middle ages, ‘surviving’ in some regions into early modernity, beings who fell under our term ‘werewolf’ or associated with wolves, roamed through the wilderness at night. Often these were bands of youths, but there were also lone individuals. It was understood that because these youth stood outside of the social order, they had the right to judge and punish it through vandalism, violence, and theft. In this way they participated in the social order, renewing it from the rot of internal corruption. There were laws written against them and an equal and opposite actions taken against them. Ultimately Werewolves were burnt alongside witches during the inquisition. But these people were also thought to maintain a form of natural (or supernatural, depending on your frame) order as well. In the Baltic, ‘barley wolves’ drove away demons who brought infertility and famine.
Woodcut of a werewolf attack by Lucas Cranach der Ältere, 1512
“Beings which during the days ‘between the times’ threatened life and fertility and therefore needed to be combated and finally driven away… Agoboard, Archbishop of Lyon, reports that the people believed in the existence of a demonic society ‘which stole grain in large quantities, transporting it on ships through the air to the fabled land of Magonia.’ ”4
We see some recurring themes spread across these reports, mythologies, and wives tales—some of which have made it to our televisions screens: full moons, transformation, eating raw meat, and drinking blood, fits of rage that overcome the will of otherwise well-meaning members of a community, and confusion after the fact. In sympathy with the Capitoline wolf, Baltic mythology tells of Tittenwif, the rye wolf’s wife, who would feed those who had lost their way with milk from her iron nipples (yes you read that correctly). I can’t help but see a lot of these same themes coming up in the Hight-T discourse as lion diets and the civilization founding myth that, ‘hard times make strong men, and strong men make good times.’
“These wild young men, who ate raw meat and drank blood, also professed to having Odin, the god of death, as their leader.” 5
Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime, 229.
Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime, 231.
Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime, 231.
Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime, 62.