26 The New York ReviewBishop Wulfstan, when he is reminding
the clergy to protect the faithful from
“the wodfraeca werewulf, the ‘rag-
ing Devil,’” and again, soon after, in
an ordinance by King Cnut (Canute);
Ogden cites Gervase of Tilbury deriv-
ing it from vir, Latin for “man,” but
Ogden prefers a connection to Anglo-
Saxon w(e)arg, meaning “strangler” or
“outsider.”
In this he follows the British occult-
ist and Anglican pastor Sabine Baring-
Gould, author of the influential Book
of Werewolves (l865), who also noted
the Gothic word varys for “fiend” and
quotes the Anglo- Saxon law against
both forms of wearg—beast and out-
law: “He shall be driven away as a
wolf, and chased so far as men chase
wolves farthest.” This law provides the
theme of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,
in which the werewolf (wargus in his
rendering) represents the figure of the
interdicted bandit, the pariah and out-
cast. “What had to remain in the col-
lective unconscious,” he writes,as a monstrous hybrid of human
and animal, divided between the
forest and the city—the werewolf—
is, therefore, in its origin the figure
of the man who has been banned
from the city.^4In popular culture today, the mon-
strous has acquired a new seductiveness.
Particularly among Goth, New Age, and
Wicca cultists, acoustic associations with
“weird” prevail, however mistaken and
fanciful—leading to new compounds,
including the splendid Were- Rabbit
from Wallace and Gromit, who erupts by
the light of the full moon into a mighty
monster. In French, loup- garou may de-
rive from garer, “to beware,” as in gare à
toi. It’s interesting that these derivations
point to the underlying apotropaic mo-
tives of the myth, to warn of danger and
hence defend against it and, at the same
time, express compensatory wish fulfill-
ment: “Watch out! Deep down I am a
werewolf of extraordinary power!”
How does the beast- human conjunc-
tion work? Ogden wrestles with the
varying arrangements of “carapace”
and “core” in the different stories. By
“carapace” he means the clothes, hair,
skins, pelts, and hides that figure cru-
cially in the magical transformations
the tales enact. In the Marie de France
story, her benign, wronged werewolf
Bisclavret is condemned to remain in
animal shape when his treacherous
wife urges her lover to steal his clothes,
knowing this will make it impossible
for him to revert; by contrast, in the
seventeenth- century fairy tale “Il ser-
pente” (The Snake), by Giambattista
Basile, a king burns the snakeskin of his
daughter’s spellbound husband to free
him from another bout of shapeshifting.
Shapeshifting beings in fairy stories,
Eastern and Western, are usually am-
biguous, intermediate creatures—Circe
is described in Homer as both a goddess
and a woman. Figures like the beauti-
ful fairy princess Peri Banou, from The
Thousand and One Nights, are neither
fully divine nor monstrous, but like
Circe they can bring mortals knowledge
of other worlds. In the tale “Hasan of
Basra,” the hero’s jinniya w i fe has an en-chanted cloak of feathers that changes
her into a bird; when she is bathing, she
sets it aside and the smitten Hasan of
Basra steals it, thus pinning her to this
world as his wife—against her will.
This tale closely resembles many
Celtic and northern tales of selkies—
mermaids or mermen—who come to
live a human life while their real skin is
kept hidden; if their human partner de-
stroys it, they can never return to their
original form. But such seal husbands,
serpent and bear bridegrooms, fox
brides, fish- or dragon- tailed Melusines,
and swan princesses share features with
werewolves in this carapace-shedding
aspect only. They do not convey the
same degree of fear combined with at-
traction, that shiver of sexual excitement
that werewolves inspire in their screen
incarnations, including Lon Chaney Jr.’s
Wolf Man series of horror film classics.The “core” of the werewolf is the inner
being, enclosed in the carapace; it is the
spirit or soul of the person whose qual-
ities are often made manifest, following
a kind of ethical punning, in the meta-
morphosis. For example, Aristomenes,
the seventh- century- BCE hero of the
Messenian resistance against the Spar-
tans, makes an appearance in several
different histories by Herodotus, Pliny,
and others: at his death he was cut open
and the Spartans “found his innards to
be extraordinary and his heart to be
shaggy.” “The worst wolves,” Angela
Carter tells us, “are hairy on the inside.”
But in Aristomenes’ case, his shagginess
betokened his cunning and valor.
The most cited origin story for ly-
canthropy—or shapeshifting between
human and wolf—enacts a neat match-
ing of carapace to core. It is alluded to
in passing in the Hesiodic Catalogue of
Women, but Ovid gives the best- known
and fullest version of the tale in the
first book of his Metamorphoses. At
the beginning of time, Lykaon rules
Arcadia, a region famous for its many
wolves—in this myth, his name reflects
his territory even before he commits
a sacrilege that exposes his barbarous
inner nature. When Zeus, king of the
gods, pays a visit, Lykaon scoffs at his
guest’s claim to divinity and decides to
test him by serving up human flesh—a
“Molossian hostage” he is holding—in
the casserole he offers him for dinner.
Zeus detects the crime and, outraged,
turns Lykaon into a wolf. The punish-
ment confirms the Olympians’ general
disgust with humans, whom they de-
cide to destroy. The flood ensues and
the world is swept away. Only Deu-
calion and Pyrrha survive, classicalcounterparts of the biblical Noah and
his nameless wife.
In many ways Lykaon’s punishment
is a classical version of the Fall, for
his transgression exiles him and ruins
Arcadia. But, Ogden asks, is Lykaon
a true werewolf? His transformation
is permanent, as are most of the etio-
logical stories Ovid relates, whereas
werewolves follow a lunar cycle and
are restored—after differing periods
of time and a return to their clothes—
to their human form. “I sympathize a
little,” Ogden writes, “with [the] pro-
testation that Lykaon... is not thereby
a werewolf.” No images of Lykaon sur-
vive from antiquity, but in the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance, he is usu-
ally depicted as a wolf- headed hybrid,
a counterpart to a centaur or mermaid
(see illustration on page 24).^5
The Latin term Petronius uses for his
werewolf in the Satyricon is versipellis,
a skin changer or skin turner—in sum,
a creature who can slough its carapace.
For Ogden, it is this protean capacity
that above all characterizes the true
werewolf, and he reviews many accounts
in antiquity of such magical transforma-
tions, mostly attributed to witchcraft.
Of the Neuri, a Scythian tribe said to
engage in cannibalism, for example,
Herodotus reports, “These people may
well be sorcerers. It is said... that every
year each of [them]... becomes a wolf
for a few days, before returning to his
previous form.”
The lineage includes some of the
most famous figures in myth and brings
into this discussion of werewolves,
who are commonly male, many female
mages such as Circe, Medea, and Pam-
phile, from Apuleius’s The Golden Ass,
as well as the terrifying Erictho, from
Lucian’s Pharsalia. These “crawlers”
(as Robert Louis Stevenson called such
stories) are pretty lurid and lubricious:
witches going about their business
are wolfish in that they roam at night
“bare- groined and howling through the
cities,” and scrabble for herbs to brew
their potions, finding the most potent
growing on graves or from the body
parts of the unburied dead. The drugs
they concoct, as we know from the per-
sistence of these beliefs in witchfinders’
handbooks, give their users the power
to change shape, fly, and perpetrate
horrors. Ogden seizes this connection
to argue for the entanglement of were-
wolf lore with fantasies of witchcraft
down the centuries, although he has to
admit that the transformations in these
stories rarely specify wolves as such.
However, he closes in on some fas-
cinating overlaps. In the Epic of Gil-
gamesh, for example, the hero bitterly
rejects the goddess Ishtar, reproaching
her for destroying her lovers:You loved the shepherd...
You struck him and turned him
into a wolf,
so his own shepherd boys drive
him away,
and his dogs take bites at his
thighs.In the Odyssey the animals who fawn
on Circe include wolves and lions.
They are, it is implied, her former vic-
tims—possibly lovers—whom she has
enchanted and transformed, just asshe transformed Odysseus’s men into
pigs. When the hero resists her, defend-
ing himself against her magic with the
milky flower moly, which Hermes has
given him, she becomes pliant to his
wishes and tells him how to reach the
Underworld safely. She also changes
his men back to their human shape, and
“they look younger than ever, /taller by
far, more handsome to the eye.” Circe’s
forebears, Ogden suggests, are the god-
desses of Babylon and Assyria, such
as the figure known as the Mistress of
Animals.Lykaon’s name was echoed across the
map of the ancient world and its stories.
In the Natural History, Pliny relates
that on Mount Lykaion, for example, it
was said that a youth from the Anthid
clan was chosen every year and taken
out of the city to a pool: “[He] hangs
his clothes on an oak tree, swims across
the pool, goes off into the wilderness, is
transformed into a wolf, and joins a pack
with others of the same kind for nine
years.” If for that entire time he man-
ages to refrain from eating human flesh,
he can return, recover his clothes from
the same tree, and become a man again.
On this, Pliny commented: “The extent
of Greek gullibility is amazing. No lie is
so outrageous as to want witness.”
A ritual expulsion from human com-
pany closely resembles scapegoating, as
Agamben discusses in Homo Sacer, and
Ogden identifies the Anthid custom
with “lad sacrifice,” which condemned
a youth to death each spring in order to
protect his people from harm. But the
expelled young Anthid man wasn’t nec-
essarily killed; his ordeal might instead
be seen as a form of initiation into man-
hood, as takes place in many cultures
worldwide and has inspired countless
imitations, from the Boy Scouts to var-
ious masculinity movements of more
recent times. All this is anthropological
territory, and Ogden shows an impres-
sive command of the material, but its
proliferation can become bewildering,
and the data occasionally overwhelm
the argument. In any case, a prohibition
on eating human flesh, a maturation or-
deal in the wilderness or the forest, and
a cyclical lupine transformation form
a narrative cluster that defines were-
wolf identity and also fulfills a prime
function of myth: to trace the contours
of civilization and provide a hinge be-
tween culture and nature.
For girls as young as five to ten years
old, a corresponding rite of passage
took place in Athens; accounts are
“late and contradictory,” Ogden says,
but the festival staged a propitiation
of Artemis, goddess of the forest and
a fierce guardian of virginity. The chil-
dren dressed up in saffron clothes and
participated by “playing the bear” in
memory of a pet bear who was killed
after he mauled a young woman.^6 In
both the Anthid and Athenian youth
rituals, the animal embodies the wild,
which—while defined as beyond and
different from human society—needs
its beauty to be respected and its power
placated in acts of worship if humanity
is to flourish.
But are ritual performers werewolves
or were- bears? They aren’t themselvesLittle Red Riding Hood;
engraving by Gustave Doré, 1869Bridgeman Images(^4) Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sov-
ereign Power and Bare Life, translated
by Daniel Heller- Roazen (Stanford
University Press, 1998), p. 105.
(^5) For more on mermaids, see my review
in these pages of Vaughn Scribner’s
Merpeople: A Human History (Reak-
tion, 2020), March 25, 2021.
(^6) For more on this ritual, see Edith Hall,
Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: A
Cultural History of Euripides’ Black
Sea Tragedy (Oxford University Press,
2012).
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