The Monstrefact: Werewolves, Part 1 - Beginnings

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert begins a series on the werewolf of myth, legend and media..

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamman. This is the Monster Fact,
a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time where
the limit of our campfire's glow licks against the darkness

(00:26):
of the wild's strange forms leap and prowl, sometimes human,
sometimes lupine, often somewhere in between. Huddled around our cultivated flames,
this nighttime sun of burning wood, we invoke the rights
of man, hot, food and drink, dance and song, story

(00:48):
and myth. These acts tell us who we are, and
yet the creatures of the outer night temptest to darker,
wilder orbits places in the wilderness from which our fire
would be but a pinprick of light. They are the
wildness from which we arose and might yet return, dressed
in no furs but their own, naked before no gods

(01:12):
or none, man still remembers. They are our violent hearts,
our erotic blood, flesh, hunger and desire. Suckled by the moon,
the werewolves creep closer, threatening to leap with shredding claw
and ripping teeth, even as their howls urge us to
cast aside our tools, our garments, our language tongues and

(01:34):
join them in the all encompassing night. Here we begin
a multi episode look at the werewolf shape shifters, who
walk the line between human being and the wild wolf
in all manner of horrifying and alluring ways. Broadly, werewolf

(01:57):
traditions and visions overlapp greatly with other shapeshifter traditions. Pretty
Much every culture boasts some version of the human into
animal or animal into human story, as well as some
manner of human animal hybridity. These theoryanthropes are many, serving
as everything from divine avatars to tricksters and tormentors, and

(02:20):
entailing a plethora of animal forms. The werewolf, however, is
a creature that specifically emerges from the nexus of human
beings and the Eurasian wolf. The history of these two
species is long debated, concerning their coevolution and the domestication
of dogs some twenty thousand to forty thousand years ago,

(02:42):
just before or during the last glacial maximum. Suffice to say,
humans and some canids, perhaps cast off wolves or abandoned young,
forged a mutually beneficial relationship. In a sense, each social
animal found a new pack in the company of the other.
It's an interesting bond unlike any other. As neuroscientist John

(03:05):
Allman discusses in his two thousand book Evolving Brains, each
species benefited greatly from the domestication. The wolves gained at
its support for the rearing of their pups, and humans,
now bolstered by the wolf's keen senses, became an even
stronger hunter, able to outcompete their evolutionary rivals and protect

(03:27):
their camps against nocturnal predators. Thus, our ice age ancestors
brought canids closer to the fire of their culture, even
as their wild kin howled and raged in the vast
darkness beyond. Did they even then tell stories of fellow
hunter's lost to those outer orbits of wildness? Do they

(03:48):
imagine humans transformed into wolves, perhaps by the dawning of
a pelt or some act of savagery, We don't know.
They thought enough of wolves to depict one in the
surviving case paintings at Fonde Gamme Cave in modern day France. Elsewhere,
I Sage artists depicted the oldest known human animal hybrid

(04:09):
in the lone Minsh or lion man figure of Hollenstein's
Stadel Cave, so we might reasonably assume such imaginings were possible,
but it would be tens of thousands of years before
specific words for what we think of as werewolves emerged
in human culture. In the nineteen forty eight book Man
into Wolf, Austrian polymath Robert Eisler presented an elaborate take

(04:32):
on humanity's prehistoric past, arguing that traditions of the werewolf
are based in the dual emergence of our ancestors as
two separate strains of early humans, one savage, violent and predatory,
the other peaceful. The conflict between these early peoples, he argues,
continues to resonate in the collective unconscious, as well as

(04:53):
our ongoing human struggles against war, pain, and cruelty. These arguments, however,
depend on now outdated understandings of human evolution as well
as union archetypes, so I don't want to misrepresent his
ideas as modern scientific hypothesis, but rather as a work
of cultural commentary. It's an interesting take on the very

(05:14):
real long history of man and wolf. Turning to contemporary scholarship,
historian Daniel Ogden's excellent twenty twenty one book, The were
Wolf in the Ancient World, stresses that we mustn't be
too quick to view wolves as the mere bestial opposite
of humanity and thus a fitting wild energy to entertain

(05:36):
in our myths and legends of metamorphosis. Certainly, as he
points out, there are plenty of connotations in ancient accounts
throughout the Eurasian Wolfe's historical range that identify the creature
as an embodiment of savagery or trickery, but others still
acknowledge the social, noble, intelligent, cooperative, and tactical nature of

(05:57):
wild wolves. In other words, we didn't just see are
savage id in the wolf, something frequently cited in werewolf tales. No,
we saw much of our nobility in them as well.
Ogden writes, quote werewolves are wolves because there is a
sense in which wolves are in and of themselves were

(06:17):
wolves already insofar, that is, as they combine the qualities
of the wildest and most lawless of animals with those
of civilization and humanity. In twenty seventeen's She Wolf, A
Cultural History of Female Werewolves, editor Hannah Priest also weighs
in on this issue, arguing that while we often do

(06:38):
look to humanity's prehistoric past for the seeds of werewolf legends.
The narratives of werewolves are intrinsically bound to quote historical circumstance, civilization,
and literature. The European roots of the werewolf are perhaps linked,
she suggests, not merely to the threat posed by wolves
to hunter gatherers, or even to the wolf like and

(06:59):
wolf aid nature of the hunter, but also to the
threat posed by wolves to domesticated animals, ultimately a threat
to agriculture and property. As we'll discussed later, this interpretation
reveals much about the gendered nature of male and female
were wolves and the sort of distinct threats they seem
to embody toward male landowners. Suffice to say, specific werewolf

(07:24):
traditions do arise from the relationship between humans and wolves,
but it's a relationship that changes drastically over time and
takes on different forms across cultural lines. Well have much
to explore in the weeks ahead, but for now, as
we sit by our campfire, we gaze out at the
most perplexing shapes in the darkness, Creatures that indeed blur

(07:45):
the line between wilderness and civility, Creatures that embody unnatural
transformation informed, it would seem by the many ways we
transformed the natural world and ourselves through the domestication of
fauna and flora. Tune in for additional episodes of The
Monster Fact, The Artifact, or Animalia Stupendium each week. As always,

(08:09):
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.