28 The New York Reviewtransformed but only playacting, and
so Ogden sets them aside in the mythic
lineage he is compiling. For him, the
true werewolf story requires a complete
metamorphosis: not a rite of passage or
mimesis, but transubstantiation.
The German art historian Aby War-
burg visited Arizona and New Mexico
in l895–1896 and witnessed the Ante-
lope dance of the local Pueblo Indians,
in which scores of participants dressed
up in elaborate masks and costumes
and performed to music mimetic dances
of the deer; in the Serpent Ritual of the
Hopi, which was crucial in forming War-
burg’s understanding of the function of
art and the importance of performance,
the participants handled dozens of ven-
omous snakes. Warburg proposed that
such elaborate masquerades, in Floren-
tine pageants as in Puebloan rites, were
honoring animals that on the one hand
could harm them, and on the other pro-
vided their sustenance, shelter, clothing,
and medicine. The performative art-
istry involved—the combined narrative,
music, costumes, and choreography—
was intended to secure the future for the
whole society.
There was ample reason to placate
wolves and bears in the ancient world,
and tales of wolves harassing sheep and
carrying off children recur in the chron-
icles of Northern Europe. In the early
fifteenth century the diarist known as
the Bourgeois de Paris records frequent
incursions of wolves into the city; their
attacks are seen as not only dreadful
disasters but portents and punishment
for the violence of the Hundred Years’
War: “At that time were the wolves so
hungry... they entered by night the
good towns and...the graveyards...As soon as the bodies had been buried,
they... unearthed them and ate them.”
The incidents the Bourgeois de Paris
reports repeat tropes that Ogden finds
everywhere in the mythology—scav-
enging corpses by night and even ap-
pearing in anthropoid form, as when a
predator is found not to have a tail:The wolves were so desperate to
eat the flesh of men, women or
children, that in the last week of
September they strangled and
ate fourteen people, adults and
little ones, between Montmar-
tre and the Porte Saint- Antoine,
in the vineyards as well as in the
marshes; and if they found a large
flock of animals, they attacked the
shepherd and left the animals. The
eve of Saint Martin’s feast a wolf
was hunted down, such a terrible
and horrible wolf that it was said
that he alone had caused more of
the griefs described before than all
the others. The day he was taken
[it was seen] he had no tail, and so
he was called Courtaut [stump-
tail], and people spoke of him as
[one does] of a wood thief.For the Bourgeois de Paris, the ter-
rible wolf was only like a man, not a
wolf changed into a man. The legends
balance metaphor and fancy without
stepping into assertion of fact, unlike
the stories of Lykaon and of Niceros’s
companion.The strangeness of the belief in were-
wolves inspired speculation early on,
by no less an authority than Augustine,that their change of shape might be al-
together illusory, a derangement of the
senses. In City of God, Augustine at-
tributes the illusion to the work of the
devil, but he isn’t satisfied, and goes on
worrying at the phenomenon, changing
his approach from theology to cogni-
tive psychology. In a startling series of
reflections, his hypothesis foreshadows
the experience of shamanic flight in
the circumpolar regions, the American
Southwest, and Latin America:But when a man’s bodily senses are
asleep or overpowered, a figment
of his imagination [phantasticum],
which changes itself into countless
sorts of things even as he thinks
or dreams and takes on forms that
resemble bodies with remarkable
agility, even though it is not a body
itself, can be brought to the per-
ception of others as if in corporeal
form, in some fashion I am unable
to express. This happens in such
a way that a man’s body may lie
somewhere, quite alive, albeit with
his senses much more strongly and
emphatically confined than during
sleep, whilst the figment of his imag-
ination manifests itself to the senses
of others as if embodied in the form
of some animal, and the man even
seems to himself to be transformed.Links between the night flying of
witches, shapeshifters, and magicians
inspire Ogden to another excited series
of analyses as the delusion—diabolical
or cognitive—occurs across time and
leaps across cultural borders. An exam-
ple of this is “soul projection,” whereby
the subjects “leave their true bodies be-
hind” and travel in another form wher-
ever they wish, as the eleventh- century
bishop Patrick of Dublin described in his
poem “On the Wonders of Ireland.” The
delusion could be very tenacious: at the
last werewolf trial in Western Europe, at
Coutras in France in 1603, Jean Grenier
confessed to being a werewolf and per-
sisted in his self- inculpation even after
he was condemned to death, then re-
prieved and imprisoned in a monastery.
Although the werewolf myth builds
on some of the habits and character-
istics of real wolves, the figure of the
werewolf distorts their nature, since
wolves live in packs and are noticeably
cooperative and social. One of the most
glaring discrepancies arises from the
idea of the “lone wolf,” so close to the
werewolf of legend and the social out-
cast. Yet actual lone wolves are young
males looking for a family of their own,
or older females, abandoned by the
pack as no longer of any use, whereas in
werewolf legends and urban lore a lone
wolf is usually a solitary on the prowl,
inimical to community, whose nature is
wolfish, and who may—who knows!—
be a werewolf in his innermost core.
The Lykaon story dramatizes a rift be-
tween the gods and humanity, “but the
accompanying closeness with the ani-
mal world and its perceived character is
treated as purely malign,” the classics
scholar Emma Aston has commented.
Trimalchio’s guest in the Satyricon
recounts a terrifying episode—in that
case darkly comic—when someone
steps out of civilization into savagery.
The horror of this possibility was still
deeply imprinted in the medieval ex-
perience. But in times of ecological
disaster, attitudes are changing and
nostalgia for a lost connection to the
animal world is growing. For Ogden,the werewolf myth continues because it
is filled with trace memories of a time
when humans had not severed ties with
the forest, the woods, and the wild.
Yet this sense of exile from the wild,
embodied by wolves, is itself very
ancient. It has given stories of wolf
children a long- lasting hold on the
imagination. Romulus and Remus,
the mythical founders of Rome, were
raised by a she- wolf; Mowgli in The
Jungle Book grows up under the tute-
lage of Akela, the wise leader of the
pack (after a word meaning “lone”
in Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu). These
mythic figures reveal a nagging yearn-
ing for reattaching civilization to a vi-
sion of unspoiled nature.
The swerve away from the werewolf’s
repulsiveness and toward his allure be-
comes even more marked in Angela
Carter’s retellings of classic fairy tales,
in her collection The Bloody Chamber
(l979). She dramatizes, in a Freudian
key, her heroines’ repulsion and at-
traction to their ferocious lovers with
matted hair, crawling with lice (“The
Company of Wolves”); she also imag-
ines a girl- werewolf cub (“Wolf- Alice”)
and gives Red Riding Hood a happy
ending by putting her in bed with the
wolf: “See! sweet and sound she sleeps
in granny’s bed, between the paws of
the tender wolf.” The artist Kiki Smith
continued the tale with her sculpture
Daughter, a little girl with a hairy face
and ears, the imagined offspring of
Red Riding Hood and the wolf.
This deep- seated desire to recon-
nect with our animal nature is gaining
ground throughout popular culture,
including in the hugely admired an-
imated film Wolfwalkers, Clarissa
Pinkola Estés’s cult feminist manifesto
Women Who Run with the Wolves, and
young adult novels like Jean Craig-
head George’s Julie of the Wolves and
its sequels, in which a young Inuit girl
lives with a wolf pack and learns to
communicate with them, not in human
language but with sounds, posture, and
gestures of nose and paw and tail. The
yearning can inspire some disturbing
mea su res to ma ke c ont act w ith the w i ld :
in a 2018 dance piece, Ainsi La Nuit, in-
spired by Dante’s Divine Comedy and
created by the choreographers Marilén
Iglesias- Breuker and Luc Petton, the
dancers performed duets with owls, a
vulture, and a real live wolf. The terror
of such close contact between human
performers and wild creatures was pal-
pable, but it is significant that since the
piece was created, dance performances
with animals onstage have been banned
in France, as have animal performances
in traveling circuses. Our values are un-
dergoing transformation, and a separa-
tion needs to be respected—if only for
the sake of the animal.
Environmentalists now advocate wild-
ing and rewilding our natural habitat, and
wolves, whose extermination was once
considered a triumph of civilization, are
being reintroduced in several European
countries, as well as in the western US.
Daniel Ogden reflects this nostalgia for
a lost relation between wolf and human,
and he has transformed his subject, set-
ting aside the loathsome lycanthrope
for the nobility of the animal in the
wild. The book’s frontispiece shows,
in close- up and in color, the face of a
wolf: no slavering jaws or bare- groined
howling to the moon, but instead a very
steady, human look from those dark,
ringed eyes. Or is this an illusion, an
effect of enchantment? QCelebrating our fourteenth anniversary, the Writers’ Institute is
accepting applications from talented writers eager to work with
New York’s finest and most prestigious senior editors. We’re
accepting 12 fiction writers and 12 nonfiction writers for fall 2022.
Workshops are held online.For more information on this unique program please visit
http://www.gc.cuny.edu /thewritersinstitute
AN EXCEPTIONAL
OPPORTUNITY
FOR WRITERS
The Writers’ Institute
at CUNY Graduate Center
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