Werewolves, Shapeshifters, & Skinwalkers

i
WEREWOLVES
SHAPESHIF TERS
™“SHINWALRERS
’ \byMarika Kiss
FOR THE MILLIONS SERIES

RaymondFf.Sadotveki
fi a
Werewolves,
Shapeshifters,
& Skinwalkers
Raymond AF, Sadowske

by Marika Kriss
Werewolves, Shapeshifters, & Skinwalkers
Witchcraft: Past and Present

Werewolves,
Shapeshifters,
& Skinwalkers
Marika Kriss
eo
For the Millions Series
SHERBOURNE PRESS, INC.

Los Angeles
Copyright © 1972 by Marika Kriss. All rights
reserved including the right to reproduce in
whole or part in any form. Published by Sher-
bourne Press, Inc., 1640 So. La Cienega Blvd.,
Los Angeles, California 90035.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number

75-183883
ISBN 0-8202-0152-9
Designed by Shirley Shipley
Composed, printed, and bound in the United

States of America, by R. R. Donnelley & Sons,
Crawfordsville, Indiana
FIRST PRINTING
Contents
One How Weird Is Were? 1
Two Are Werewolves for Real? 12
Three The Pagan Werewolf 20
Four The Christian Werewolf 4]
Five Transformations: of the Body or the Spirit? 59
Six How They Do It 71
Seven The Cat People 88
Eight Are Werewolves Evil? 108
Nine Can Werewolves Be Domesticated? 127
The For the Millions Series 188

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one
How Weird
Js Were?
Sensing the subtle shift from velvet

black to navy blue, he hurriedly gulped down the last few
good mouthsful of the corpse and began the long journey
home. With each additional star the brightening sky absorbed,
his nerves prickled and his pace increased. He was panting
heavily but he managed to reach his dwelling place before
the worst of the dawn’s brilliance. By the time the rising sun
blazed on his doorway, he was sound asleep. And he kept
sleeping through the daylight hours while normal people
worked and traveled and played. When dust grayed the sun-
set, his eyelids flickered. He stretched and yawned, waiting
impatiently for night to deepen into an exhilarating darkness.
He emerged with the first faint star. For a while he stood in
his doorway studying the land suspiciously. No one must
observe him. If his identity were discovered, he would cer-
tainly be destroyed. At last satisfied, he took up his wolf skin,
pressed it against his body, and lifted his head as he felt the
wonderful power take possession of him.
A werewolf.
The signs are familiar enough: the sudden transformation
from man to beast, the wanton savagery, the cannabalism,
the death hunger. The tale has been told and retold until few
ul
2 WEREWOLVES, SHAPESHIFTERS, & SKINWALKERS
who read or own a television set or go to the movies could

fail to recognize the werewolf’s characteristics. But too often
these elements are all that is told. We know about the were-
wolf only through horror tales in which dungeons, hidden
passages, and screaming maidens are de rigeur, a combina-
tion of repetition and omission that stifles investigation by
creating the illusion that there is nothing more to know. No
one tells us of werewolves who are leaders of their people,
werewolves who were ee patriots, those who were saviors and
heroes, or those who were ordinary rather humdrum citizens.
~
Too much is told of the gore and too little about the actual
power of being a werewolf. The cliché portrays violence as
the motivation and omits completely the joy of metamor-
phizing, the pride in accomplishment, the delight in a secret
life. The cliché shows the werewolf as a guilty, furtive thing,
skulking in the shadows of life. Nothing is written about the
person who is accepted by his community and goes about his
daily chores contentedly with perhaps a trace of a hidden
smile or hint of irony in his gaze because he has seen his
townsmen as no ordinary man can—through wolf eyes. He
has felt the stretch and coordination of four legs loping effort-
lessly. He knows a strange exciting world of odor. He has
experienced the joy of rolling in dust and manure, the ecstacy
of smelling a bitch in season, the solid satisfaction of hunting
in a pack where individuality submerges into coordinated
effort. He is a member of a society in which rage and frustra-
tion can be instantly released in_a flash of fangs. He has
matched his quickness and cunning against the evasiveness
of a rabbit. He has moved silently through the night, hearing
sounds to which human ears are deaf. In part of his life he
can be social without being deceitful, communal without
giving up his individual integrity.
Exactly what are werewolves?
Even a werewolf could not answer that one, assuming
that a man-wolf is sufficiently real to answer at all. We might
better ask: What is man? We can categorize ourselves . . .
, How Weird is Were? 3
according to a system of classification we ourselves devised.

Beyond that, we sink into the quicksand of philosophy. We
cannot even explain why we act as we do. Why does man
war? Or, for that matter, build free clinics or hoard or sacrifice
himself for others or torture or even create? We can only
trace our history, observe our present behavior, and work
like fury in the dark to keep from destroying ourselves. The
whats and whys of life are unfathomable. We are deceiving
ourselves if we think they are not.
Like other men, then, werewolves are inexplicable. They
can be studied from reports and they can be observed.
The problem is to dig out the data, which does not come
neatly labeled and cross-indexed. Findings are widely scat-
tered in anthropological studies; references must be gleaned
from masses of archeological reports; facts must be winnowed
from folk literature. It is necessary to study all histories with
a fish eye for propaganda, because werewolves have long
been controversial in religious, political, and scientific circles.
Finding werewolves in the flesh presents greater diffi-
culties. In Western society, they are»self-effacing to the point
of outright denial, not without reason. If you succeed in
identifying one, proving the identification is a baffling project.
In his human form, the werewolf looks just like the guy next
door. And unfortunately werewolves who compulsively meta-
morphize in public view seem to have been killed off long
ago. The best that can be done is to study live subjects
obliquely and cross-check the findings with written records.
For the last one hundred years it is almost as if there has
been a conspiracy to misrepresent knowledge about were-
wolves; they are pictured as bound to a dead past or, like the
unicorn and the dragon, to have existed only in the nether
regions of human ignorance. We do not hear that archeologists
have uncovered pictorial allusions to werewolves painted in
the days before man had invented writing, Nor is mention
made of thenumerous references to them in the history and
literature of classic Greece, where werewolves were honored
members of society. Nor do we hear about contemporary

werewolves who live openly in societies other than our own.
The facts behind the introductory paragraph of this chapter,
for instance, did not come from a dusty book but from state-
ments taken by anthropologists from citizens in a present-
day, dust-blown mountaintop community in Arizona.
The werewolf has followed man’s trail down through the
ages and across the surfaces of this planet. Reports whose
details vary with time and place, but whose central theme is
awesomely similar, come from the far reaches of the world.
And these reports were not told as tales to amuse children.
Only in cities—-where smoke and blacktops and indiffer-
ence form a barrier between man and nature, where man’s
efforts to exterminate all other life forms have been most
successful—do the current reports of werewolves dwindle and
the retelling of past accounts drift toward light entertainment.
Elsewhere, werewolves have left their spore in the world’s
languages. In the farm villages of Japan, the peasant towns
of France, the mountain communities of Red China, the
Steppes of the USSR, the island worlds of the South Pacific,
the snow deserts of Alaska, the rain forests of Brazil, and in
the flat, dry African veld, the local languages contain com-
binations of sounds that can be translated most understand-
ibly by the English word “werewolf.”
As a word, werewolf existed in the British Isles before
the Normans came conquering. It goes back to an ancient
time when the word “were” was synonymous with man. The
Anglo-Saxons who peopled England adapted it from the
Germanic tongue of their forebears in which the word for
man was wir and that was a kissing-cousin to vir, the word
for man or male used by the Romans.
More than a label, the noun “werewolf” was a one-word
description of the phenomenon. That one-word description
became popular through much of Europe. In France they
say loupgarou (wolfman). The Italian version is lupo
mannaro, the Portugese lobisomem, the Sicilian lupuminaru.
In the Spanish lobombre, the final “o” of the Spanish word
cA
, How Weird is WereP 5
lobo is dropped together with the beginning “h” of their word

for man, hombre. You can find the word “lycanthropy,” the
same formula in Greek, in the dictionary; it is kept alive by
contemporary English and American writers who seem to feel
that a Greek label makes an investigation sound more
scholarly.
The Romans usually called werewolves versipelli or turn-
coats, alluding to a technique for achieving transformation
which will be discussed later in this book. The formula of
calling the phenomenon by the means of achieving it also
became widely popular. The Bulgarians referred to this in
their word vlukodlak, the Russians volkolak, and the Serbians
vulkodlak. The Norse used the word Ulfhedhnar. And across
the ocean to another continent, the Navajo refer to transfor-
mation with their word for werewolf which means literally
skinwalker.
In Iceland, hamfarir (faring or traveling in a form) hints
at another aspect of the phenomenon rarely mentioned by
mass media: self-contradictory as it may seem, not all were-
wolves in the broadest definition of the term choose wolves
as their secondary or bestial form. Long before airplanes were
built, men had wings in bird form. In many countries, it was
possible for “werewolves” to become foxes and cats.
The English, who have practiced these arts well, have a
word that salutes the skilled werewolf’s freedom of choice,
“shapeshifter.” The word almost defines itself. A shapeshifter
is a person who can shift or change his body to the body of
another being; one who transforms or metamorphizes. “En-
chantment,” whose older meaning is today seldom found
outside fairy tales, refers to anything including shapeshifting
that is achieved by means of reciting (or chanting) an incan-
tation. “Ensorcelled” and “bewitched” are also broad terms
referring to ends reached through personal power rather than
through formula. Shapeshifting can be achieved both by in-
cantation and ensorcellment and by certain other means as
well.
Are shapeshifters and werewolves witches and sorcerers?
The answer is entirely a matter of semantics. Some people

call anyone who does anything they cannot explain a witch
or sorcerer—a person whose hunches are apt to be right, a
person who seems to sense what another is thinking, or one
who has a good hand for healing. However, it makes for
better communication to call a person with only one super-
natural talent by the name of that talent: a clairvoyant, a
diviner, a healer, a dowser, and so on. Then, witch and
sorcerer can be reserved for those who are adept at many
supernatural skills.
A further semantic confusion exists in English because of
the unfortunate state of the art of shapeshifting in English-
speaking and most other urbanized countries. Just as a shape-
shifter may or may not be a werewolf in the literal sense, so
shifter, Not all werewolves and shapeshifters possess the same

degree of skill, either. Shapeshifters have always carefully
guarded their knowledge for technical reasons as well as for
the more obvious reason of hoarding power. And today the
isolation in which werewolves find themselves is a further
deterent to uniform practice.
In some families and some regions, the means of becom-
ing only one animal form is all that has been retained. Often
the knowledge is even more circumscribed because it is
effective only at certain times of the year or month. Other
practitioners are not so limited:
they may select among
several shapes and apply their art whenever they wish. Among
some shapeshifters is the custom to choose among a wide
range of animals, but, once having chosen, never use any other
animal form. A master shapeshifter can transform himself
into any shape at will even, some say, into such nonorganic
forms as stones or fire. A master shapeshifter also has the
power to transform another person into any shape he desires.
During the 1400sto the170(
e 1700s in Europe, when anyone possess-
ing supernatural power was being hunted down and killed
as a heretic, many unfortunates were burned at the stake;
7
/ How Weird is Were? 7
they possessed no supernatural knowledge but were the

victims, often, of the abilities of others, their secret enemies.
To further befuddle the subject, certain persons possess
the ability to transform themselves on an unconscious level,
a process that may be triggered by objects, actions,o: or emo-
emt
tignal states. Shapeshifting without conscious :volition, seem-
ingly a horrible jape of n:nature, probably originates from a
mechanism similar to aa post-hypnotic ;suggestion or from an
accident. But to jump ahead in time to the work of Freud
and his theories about the unconscious volition behind many
accidents, and about the entire matter of accident-proneness,
it is safe to conclude that an occasional accidental or uninten-
tional shapeshifting might be left in that unpremeditated
category. But additional shapeshiftings, no matter how seem-
ingly spontaneous, certainly argue for some volition behind
them.
Clumsily enough, English lacks labels for these niceties
of distinguishingcategories and so we must bumble along,
making do with what we have. But I will try, from now on,
to use {werewolf \n a literal sense—a person who transforms
into a wolf—and spell out any other type of werebeing I’m
referring to./Shapeshifter will be applied to those who have
the ability touse
a numbér of forms. But werewolf and shape-
shifter are used interchangeably in conversation and the habit
no doubt will intrude itself into these pages. Some English-
speaking writers delight in using the Greek word “theriaan-
thropism,” which means changing from human toanimal
forms. Well and good for them and for you; persons who use
this kind of terminology are identifying themselves to you
as pedants and bores. Most individuals who have true super-
natural abilities refer to their abilities as a gift or talent;
others, particularly here in America, use the Eliercompocine
word, “power.” In any case, therioanthropism provides no
more information than shapeshifting and is not as instantly
communicative. If I call someone a witch or a sorcerer, it will
be to imply that he possesses other powers as well as those of
metamorphosis. Both titles, witch and sorcerer, will be used

regardless of sex; supernatural talents are not graded accord-
ing to gender.
To confuse the language of shapeshifting even further,
lycanthropy and werewolfism have been applied to certain
sicknesses of the body and personality, rabies and delusions.
It is easy to see why rabies has been connected with were-
wolves. In those parts of the world periodically afflicted with
epidemics of rabies, from time to time man and beast come
nding out of nowhere, bellowing with pain and frothing
at the mouth; if the disease has attacked certain areas of the
brain, they launch themselves violently at anything that
moves within their range of vision. A rabid human looks hor-
ribly like a rabid animal. Werewolf reports suggest that the
rabid w olf was in his human form, while suffering the
last agonies of rabies. Similarly, it is readily understandable
why certain ‘delusions are associated with werewolfism.
Delusional people have been known to believe they were
werebeings when, in fact, they lacked the ability to change
form. The more importance shapeéshifting has within a given
culture, the more likely it is that delusional persons within it
will choose to be shapeshifters rather than opting for political
leadership, industrial tycoonship, or motion picture stardom.
However, these two forms of sickness—rabies and delusions—
have no real bearing on the study of shapeshifting.
There is no outward way to tell what kind of animal a
werebeing may elect to use or, for that matter, how much
power he has. And the individual will xarely tell you himself.
Those who boast are, in almost every instance, fakes.
Fad and tradition play a definite part in ieeclecton of
secondary forms as does the practical necessity of selecting
an inconspicuous shape that will not give the game away.
Bear shapes were fashionable among the Germanic-speaking
peoples of northern Europe as long as their re
regions had thick
forests well stocked with bear. The biunas of the Malay
Peninsula where no lions roar, never adapt a lion’s form
, How Weird is WereP 9
although large numbers of them are known to increase the

local population of tigers from time to time. On the other
hand, the peoples of the African veld do choose lion shapes or
hyena shapes, and the peoples of the jungle metamorphize
into leopards. South America’s jungle denizens become jag-
uars. The Makanga of Central Africa possess neither the desire
nor skill to become alligators, but their shapeshifters, the
Mfiti, can transform themselves into crocodiles. While the
wolf population was plentiful in China, her mountains knew
AW4
=\——as
WY,
NY, Dag
METAMORPHOSIS—The changing of form from human to ani-

mal most likely had its origins in the practices of early religions,
where the actual skins of animals were used in ritual dances or
chants, and in which the individual doing the impersonation gave
great thought and attention to assuming as much of the animal's
characteristics as he could.
———————————————EEEE
the keen of werewolves. The English countryside was tamed

early, forcing her shapeshifters to use the forms of such
smaller animals as the weasel and hare, and I have heard
verbal accounts of shapeshifters who purposely took the form
of foxes for the thrill of the chase when the English country-
side echoed with the tumult and bugle of gentry riding to
hounds. Other English shapeshifters have even chosen the
house cat as a form. In southern Europe, where the large wild
mammals were killed off earlier than those in the north,
wereasses, werehorses, and other were-domestic-animals be-
came common.
There have been times when disguise was unnecessary
and display of skill desirable. English tradition preserves ac-
counts of ancient tourneys among shapeshifters in which
rivals sought to destroy each other in their alter-shapes before
an assembled congregation of their followers. Transformations
were said to have occurred in dizzying rapid-fire order. The
challenging shapeshifter might have opened the hostilities
by changing into a boar charging down upon his enemy. His
opponent could counter by turning into a giant boar-hound,
darting for position in which to break the boar’s neck. The
boar would switch into a horse, hooves plunging down on the
hound’s head. Before the blow could land, the challenger
converted to a snake, striking at the horse’s legs. The horse
promptly disappeared and plummeted from the sky as an
eagle, talons set. And so it would go until one of the opponents
form. The Icelandic and Navajo phrases, traveling-in-a-form

and skinwalking, refer to the-most frequent function: loco-
motion. Even a small dog is capable of running faster and
farther than most humans. Where horses were unknown or
too dear for common folk, animal and bird forms were used
for no more esoteric purpose than providing better, more
comfortable transportation. Cat forms were often used for
» How Weird is WereP 11
climbing, mouse or fly forms for concealment. A hungry man

could metamorphize into a rabbit munching freely on the
wayside shrubbery. Being a crow, able to frisk on gusts of
wind, is marvelous for recreation. A would-be murderer wants
a shape—pun intended—that has some bite to it. . . or killing
paws or crushing coils. A drowning man, if he had the power,
might change himself into a seal or dolphin. The form of the
toad, so the old tales suggest, is something one wished on
one’s enemies.
These few details have been sifted from the wealth of
data that is hidden behind low-budget, poorly acted, even
more poorly written motion pictures and TV horror shows.
The details themselves raise questions like dust.
The first one is the most crucial: Can the existence of
werewolves and shapeshifters be proved in the same way, for
instance, that it can be proved that at sea-level, water will boil
at 212 degrees Fahrenheit? The answer is no. However, no
one can prove that they do not exist, either.
Some of the arguments that studentts of the subject bring
up in a debate are so interesting that the question cannot be
dismissed as meaningless. Reports from many people who
have witnessed werebeings are persuasive. And the confes-
sions and boastings of those who claim to have the power to
change form are worth looking at.
two
Ave Werewolves
for Keal?
There is:no final answer to the question
proposed in the title of this chapter; only a battleground. But
the lines are clearly drawn, the opposing sides easily identi-
fiable.
On the one side, the scientific community finds the very
question an affront to its dignity. Its members take umbrage
at having to deal with any answer at all. If forced to respond,
their answer is a swift, patronizing, unequivocal no. No, of
course there are no werewolves. There have never been
werewolves. There never will be werewolves. The existence
of a werewolf is a biological impossibility.
On the other side are people past and present who swear
that they have seen werewolves and other shapeshifters;
those who, knowing the character of the witnesses, believe
them; those who, having measured the sheer mass of tes-
timony, believe it; and those few who claim to know by virtue
of having accomplished the very feat.
Are the shapeshifters mistaken? Are they pathetic victims
of delusion, hallucination, suggestion, or drug intoxication?
Or is it possible that the scientific community may be reacting
emotionally since scientists have refused to conduct the type
of dispassionate, thoroughgoing investigation they advocate?
12
Are Werewolves for Real? 13
Without question, shapeshifting belongs to the category of

events called supernatural, activities the scientific commu-
nity thoroughly detest and seem to regard as somehow
threatening.
But those interested in shapeshifting are eager for an
orderly study of the data. And those who claim to practice
this talent display more indifference than hostility toward the
scientific approach to shapeshifting. Surely there is nothing
to fear. A comprehensive study might result in the conclusion
that the disbelievers have been correct all the time. But at
least then the disbelief would rest on more solid footing than
prejudice.
To be fair, modern biological knowledge does not negate
the possibility of a biological basis for shapeshifting as com-
pletely and irrevocably as many of the more doctrinaire
scientists would have us believe.
Metamorphosis is common to the life cycle of every
species. No individual comes into this world fully matured
like Athena from the brow of Jupiter. Equally, neither does
he leave it in the same shape in which he entered. Human
beings go through a fairly rapid, striking series of bodily
changes from the fertilized ova to postpartum baby, then
childhood, maturity, and old age. Throughout this process,
our shapes shift in outline and in function.
The shapeshifting found in other species is even more
dramatic: from caterpillar to moth; from water-breathing,
legless tadpole to air-breathing, four-legged frog are trans-
formations no less amazing for their being such familiar
processes to us. And no less impossible to explain despite the
scientific consensus that the changes do take place and that
some headway has been made in describing the progress of
systematic changes concurrent with the transformations.
There probably never will be a satisfactory answer to the
question of why it is possible for metamorphosis to take place.
Tadpoles change into frogs because . . .well, because they do.
No one has been able to argue successfully that life is logical.
The metamorphosis of a frog is a bland one compared to

the changes in form and behavior that take place in the life
cycle of the animal that eventually becomes a sheep liver
fluke, a worm that makes its living by gnawing on the innards
of sheep, often causing fatal epidemics. Mama sheep liver
fluke deposits several hundred thousand fertilized eggs in the
bile ducts of the sheep’s liver, where she lives. The normal
movement of body fluid carries these eggs into the sheep’s
intestine and, later, out of the sheep’s body as a part of its
stool. For some lucky eggs, the carrier stool falls into a pond,
stream, or creek. There, many of the eggs hatch into creatures
called miracidia, tiny larvae that swim or, more accurately,
row through the water by the action of hundreds of slender
hairs known as cilia. Each miracidium rows about in its small
universe until it happens to. bump into a water-breathing
snail. This species of snail is home and larder in one package
for the miracidium. It burrows through the snail’s tough outer
skin and into its soft body, living there, feasting and fattening,
for two weeks. Then, for no apparent reason, its body hardens
into a cocoonlike sporocyst.
Once the outer wall of the sporocyst is hardened, each of
the many germ cells within its body takes on a separate
identity of its own just as if each one had been originally a
fertilized ovum. These new individuals are called redia. In
addition to their new-found independence of motion and
nourishment, they multiply. After the population has ex-
ploded to the capacity of the sporocyst’s volume, each redium
undergoes a transformation and becomes an entirely different
animal, a cercaria.
The cercariae burst the sporocyst’s crust en masse. Aban-
doning the snail as host, they plunge into the pond, using
their newly fashioned tadpolelike tail to swim from feeding
place to feeding place. Each cercaria grazes under water until
it has accumulated a goodly amount of stored energy. Then
it swims to the pond’s bank and fastens onto a likely leaf or
blade of grass. Its body slowly loses its tail and hardens. And
o
there it remains until by chance it is destroyed or by chance

its leaf is eaten by a sheep. The lucky cercaria swallowed by
a sheep splits open its cystic wall, then it burrows through
the sheep’s alimentary tract until it finds the liver where it
lodges in a bile duct and slowly begins to change shape. It
grows a large ventral sucker which it uses to firmly screw
itself to the wall of the bile duct. At the same time it makes
another smaller sucker for nourishing itself on the sheep’s
substance. By the time the process is complete the late
cercaria, née redia, née miracidium, looks like and has become
a worm.
Truly, this is an incredible series of events. No one knows
why it occurs. Life is as fantastic as it is illogical. Its mysteries
cannot be discovered by the process of logical deduction.
Only observation will do the trick. ee ate
Thecycle
life of the sheep liver fluke, a particular mystery.
already observed by biologists, illustrates the extraordinary
capacity of body cells to metamorphize. Those who have
studied the cycle feel that each transformation occurs in re-
sponse to some triggering device. The animal shape remains
constant until the triggering device is set off. The next ques-
tion is, obviously, What sets off the triggering device?
Certain life forms are capable of larger-scale growth of
tissue to replace destroyed tissue than we humans. This
ability to regenerate is a trick we have long observed and
much envied.
Stories have come from around the world, and backward
through time, of individuals who were more capable of re-
generation than their fellows. In this area, instead of rejecting
the possibility as occult nonsense, many biologists have
enthusiastically speculated that the human body is capable
of much more drastic regeneration than occurs normally. All
that is necessary, they hypothesize, is to learn the proper
triggering devices to induce the cells to start the process. In
a very real sense, it is a question of learning how to com-
municate with the body on a cellular level.
In this second half of the twentieth century, biologists

have come to admit for the first time that man-to-cell and
man-to-organ communication can occur. They are increas-
ingly hhopeful about the possibility of developing a complex
sign language. Endocrinological medicine is, in fact, already
using the early development of that language. And scientists
from many different disciplines are working feverishly to
expand this area of knowledge.
Hindu yogis and Zen Buddhists (and practitioners of
metaphysics from all parts of the world) have been claiming
for centuries that they have achieved direct communication
between their minds and their bodies. In the past, the scien-
tific community dismissed such claims as fraudulent and
refused to investigate them claiming that the witnesses who
reported seeing demonstrations of this ability were victims
of hypnosis, trickery, or wishful thinking.
Recently a few of the younger men involved in elec-
troencephalography were persuaded to test a group of yogis
with their equipment. To their surprise the equipment indi-
cated that the yogis could indeed control their brain waves
by conscious effort. In normal subjects the brain’s output of
slow-cycle (8-12 cycles per second) alpha waves can be
blocked altogether by sensory stimuli such as loud noises or
strong odors. The duration of blockages is increased by the
strength of the stimuli. During samadhi meditation the yogis’
production of alpha wave activity was undisturbed by ex-
ternal stimuli, including placing the hand in ice-cold water
for fifty-five minutes.
This evidence stimulated further tests in which the yogis
demonstrated their ability to control their heartbeat, pulse
rate, and pupil dilation and contraction, behavior that science
had believed to be exclusively under the control of the body’s
autonomic neryous system, beyond the reach of the conscious
mind.
Another laboratory selected Zen Buddhists as subjects.
Comparison of these studies with studies of the yogis indicates
7
that the two disciplines produce different types of brain con-

trol. In Zen meditation, external stimuli didblock the alpha
activity but for a far shorter period of time than in normal
subjects despite the strength of the stimulus. The difference
in the type of control reflects the difference in the goals of
the Zen Buddhists and the yogis. In Zen the student wishes
to remain within the world and be aware of it but not : dis-
turbed by it during meditation; the yogi, believing the world
as we know it to be illusory, tries in meditation to withdraw
completely from any contact with the world.
There are those who feel that a similar breakthrough will
occur in the field of shapeshifting. They speculate that, like
the yogis and the students of Zen, shapeshifters and voluntary
werewolves have found means of communicating with the
body on a cellular and organ level. They point out that this
hypothesis would satisfactorily account for the variety of
skills found among shapeshifters. Individuals’ mastery of the
language varies. Some know only the word for wolf. Some
possess a larger vocabulary. Others communicate in a broken
or confused fashion; the latter can metamorphize only with
experimentation staggers the imagination. Following the work

with EEG equipment, which demonstrated that yogis and
Zen students weré able to exert conscious control over body
processes thought to be autonomic, there has been a great
deal of highly successful work in the EEG laboratories assist-
ing layman to achieve similar control.
It turns out that an EEG machine coupled with a device
that produces sine wave tones is more efficient than a guru
in teaching meditation. The sine wave tone signals the sub-
jects when they have been successful in producing alpha
waves in their brain. With this electronic assistance, subjects
have learned to produce alpha waves on request in 75 to 100
percent of trial efforts. They have learned how to slow the
alpha rhythm by as much as two cycles per second as well.
In a similar fashion, after they had accepted the concept that

control over autonomic body systems is possible, doctors have
been quick to use the results in the practice of medicine. They
have taught businessmen, whose only contact with Zen or
Yoga has been a snort of anger, how to slaw down their heart-
beat and reduce their blood pressure consciously, thus re-
ducing the strain on their already weakened Hearts and also
sparing them the dangerous side effects that drug therapy
would have caused.
If shapeshifting is achieved by conscious communication
with the body as some of the students of the subject theorize,
someday it may be possible to adapt this new electronic
teaching process to show non-mystics how to transform them-
selves into other life forms. It would be as revolutionary a
development
as Ianding“on the moon and perhaps both im-
mediately and in terms of long-range development more
beneficial to mankind.
“These theorists have tried to interest biologists in their
hypothesis with, at least at this writing, no success.
Biologists argue that dramatic metamorphosi osis, known to
take place during the life cycle of an individual, fee always
been a one-way transformation. Never, for example, has a
sheep liver fluke changed, back to the cercaria form, then to
a redia, and then to a maratidium. Nor are there reports of
an old man becoming once again a fertilized egg. Whether
the individual is a human or a sheep liver fluke or a water
buffalo, the programming of his form changes are punched
out in his genes by the RNA molecules and, barring disaster,
proceedinan unvarying irreversible manner.
But there have been cases of old women who develop a
sudden flurry of tissue-building in their ovaries that then
produces estrogen that sparks a wide spectrum of changes.
As iets
a the women look, act, and feel twenty years
, we cannot deduce our way toa Weorent conclusion

about the how’s of shapeshifting or the existence of shape-
7
shifting; knowledge about life cannot be gained from deduc-

tion. What we need is more observation, more experimenta-
tion, more investigation. We can, however, remember that
the scientific community has scoffed at the possibility of con-
scious control over the brain and conscious control over
autonomic body processes for more than a century. And we
can remember that blind denial is never a satisfactory answer.
The prospects for a new rash of investigation into shape-
shifting is excellent. We are currently enjoying an intellectual
revolution. People of all ages are realizing that the old an-
swers and the old methods are not necessarily valid by virtue
of their long tenure. Not that we should blindly discard old
methods simply because they are old, but that we should
critically reexamine them with an eye to improving the whole
situation. There seems to be almost universal consensus that
human social systems need improving.
We are beginning to discover that “primitive” does not
necessarily mean inferior. That while we have gained much in
the process of becoming industrialized, we have lost much too.
The value of what we have lost is becoming daily more ap-
parent. We have begun to notice that primitive technology
fits into the life systems in this planet less destructively than
our current and so-called more sophisticated technology. We
are also observing that because science is useful, it does not
follow that metaphysics is not. The two fields can, in fact, be
complementary because, in addition to their divergent means,
each has a different goal. Science is the process of obtaining
knowledge through perception; metaphysics is the process of
obtaining knowledge through being. Each type of education
is valuable. And if the two are coupled, we may achieve a
more workable society than humans ever have enjoyed before.
More to our immediate purpose, it seems likely that be-
cause of these new attitudes and the resurgence of interest in
metaphysics, our knowledge of werewolves and shapeshifting
will grow and become less speculative.
three
Che Pagan
Werewolf
Persons who practice the nature reli-

gions have a different attitude toward werewolves and super-
naturalism in general than do Christians. The same difference
in attitude exists in the nature religions of the pre-Christian
Europeans and in nature religions today.
Followers of nature religions do not believe in the dis-
continuity between God and nature thatis taught in Chris-
tianity. In fact, many of the nature religion gods are abstrac-
tions of the natural world, like the rain, sun, and wind. And,
generally speaking, their supreme God is a symbol of the
creative force out of which the universe and its life forms
came. Again, generally speaking, priests of the nature religions
believe that the supreme God is beyond man’s understanding
and beyond his control. Consequently, the priests devote most
of their attention to those natural processes within their ken.
They worship the gods of weather, sea, and earth, the spirits
of animal and plant life; their worship teaches them and their
people man’s place within nature and how man can influence
nature to yield man’s needs. Often the people of the nature
religion fail to meet their goals. Where they are successful,
we call the results supernatural, but they feel that the results
are entirely natural. We feel there is a vast difference between
20
J
+ The Pagan Werewolf 21
a wound that heals because it has been doused with a dis-

infectant and a wound that heals because someone has prayed
over it. They do)not. Both are of nature. The disinfectant re-
quires certain properties to be effective; so does the person
who prays. Rather than rejecting the Pen on becauseit is
tinusual and frightening, their religion teaches them how to
recognize the marvelous, how to respect it, and how to make
use of it.
One of the most beautiful and most powerful of the nature
religions is that practiced by the Hopi people of northern
Arizona. The Hopis are considered the best dry farmers in
the world today; they bring forth green corn out of hot desert
sand. In order to do this, in order to survive in their beautiful
harsh land, they live in day-to-day intimacy with the spirits
of nature. Notice the unstressed presence of a werebeing in
the following story, which tells how the Hopis came to learn
the ceremony necessary to bring summer rain to grow their
corn.
Long ago, while the Hopis were in the process of discov-
ering how to survive the drought, a chief had a son who was
called Youth. Rather than occupying himself with courting
and beginning his own family, Youth determined to try to
find a way to provide his people with an adequate source of
water. Since the Colorado River had all the water his people
lacked, Youth reasoned he might find an answer to his prob-
lem somewhere along the river.
He journeyed to the Colorado and built a closed boat out
of two hollow halves of a dry cottonwood trunk. Launching
the boat in the river, he sealed himself inside like a kernel in
a nutshell and, because of the power inside him, floated up-
stream toward the river’s headwaters.
During this voyage, Youth met Spider Woman, one of the
Hopi’s wisest earth mothers. He gave her a mesage stick
(called prayer stick by the white men) that he had made
while thinking and feeling deeply about how much he wanted
to save his people from the drought. Spider Woman saw how
beautifully the stick was painted. She noticed with what care
the eagle feathers had been bound to the stick with freshly
spun cotton string. She smelled the fragrance from the smoke
that Youth had used with proper ritual. These things con-
veyed the message of sincerity and depth of purpose. Pleased,
she decided to help him and stepped into his boat. During
the time the boat bobbed its slow way upstream, Spider
Woman whispered wisdom about the earth and its creatures
into Youth’s ear.
At the river’s headwaters the two travelers came upon
Great Snake. His long sinewy body was coiled in a huge
head and a cumulus cloud crowned his head. After much
urging, Spider Woman and Youth persuaded Great Snake to
take them to the kiva of the Snake Clan from which gushed
the waters of the Colorado River.
When the people of the Snake Clan realized that Youth
was industrious and eager to help his people, they initiated
him into their clan and began teaching him the clan’s mys-
teries. Before he left the Snake Clan’s village, they gave him
for his wife a beautiful girl who had the power of becoming
a snake. She was called the Snake Virgin.
When they reached the banks of the Colorado, Spider
Woman had to say good-bye to them. Alone, the young
couple began the long journey to Youth’s home. Winter had
come and with it nights that were long and cold. To keep his
wife warm at the end of each day’s travel, Youth built a
shelter made of small bushes. He called his shelter a kisi.
When at long last they reached Youth’s village, they were
greeted warmly and hopefully for there had been much suf-
fering among the people. Youth began teaching his people
the knowledge of the Antelope and his wife taught them the
wisdom of the Snakes.
The young couple were the ancestors of today’s Snake and
Antelope Clans that to this day, in the heat of August, perform
the Snake Ceremony every other year as Youth and Snake
Virgin had taught.
, The Pagan Werewolf 23
From beginning to end, the ceremony is sixteen days

long. On the last day is performed the ritual in which men
from the Antelope and Snake Clans and the desert snakes
join together to bring rain to the land.
The snakes, rattlesnakes among them, are gathered before-
hand and kept in a brush shelter called a kisi after the shelters
Youth built for his wife. During the ritual the Snake priest
takes the snakes one by one, holding each one by his teeth
and moving rhythmically about as the snake undulates in his
mouth. Bull snake or rattler, it is all the same to the priest and
his helpers who, the night before with the other men of their
clan, meditated in their kiva while the snakes crawled around
their bodies. The clan members say that snakes can feel a
man’s vibrations; for decade after decade, they have watched
the snakes cluster and twine themselves about the person of
the wisest of their elders.
Adding their force to the ritual, men from the Antelope
Clan stand in a line issuing out from the kisi. Moving their
bodies sinuously like snakes, shaking gourds covered with
skin from antelope testicles, they sing about the heavy clouds
that are rolling in from the four directions of the earth and
how the rain is beginning to fall. Their words are true. Within
the memory of living men, the sinking sun radiates a blaze
of color on the masses of clouds that have arrived in response
to the ritual that is the people’s hearts calling out in the proper
way, the way that Youth and the Snake Virgin taught them.
Dusk comes quickly as the clouds darken and let down their
soaking rain.
Not all the followers of nature religions revere werebeings
and wish to live with them. The Navajos, for example, regard
them as homicidal criminals and destroy them if they can
discover the werebeing’s identity. But the Navajos do not
try to rationalize away their existence or regard them as more
amazing than any other part of creation. People of the nature
religions are realists. Their religion is not a simplistic explana-
tion of creation and a glorification of man, but a combination
of techniques for understanding and adapting to nature. As

John Lasa, one of the Hopi leaders, puts it, “It takes a life-
time to learn the Hopi way.”
It follows that the peoples of the nature religion are non-
simplistic in their understanding of morality. A thought-
provoking example of this is the history behind the Navajo
curing ceremony, Where the Two Came to Their Father.
The two in question were the Hero Brothers, known indi-
vidually among the Navajos as Monster Slayer and Born of
Water. Like Christ they were salvation figures. Their efforts
and suffering saved mankind. They had been born to accom-
plish this, the Sun quickening their life inside the Earth
Mother, Changing Woman.
As the twins grew, they saw how the monsters that then
infested the world were harming the people. They wanted to
save the people but knew that, without help, they were too
weak to succeed. One day, while their mother slept, they
sneaked away from home and journeyed up to the sky to seek
assistance from their dangerously powerful father.
The sun questioned them carefully, putting them through
a series of ordeals to assure himself they were indeed his sons
and to establish their integrity. Their request saddened the
Sun. He told the Hero Brothers that Big Giant, whom they
must kill first to gain the power to destroy the other monsters,
also was a son of his and he loved Big Giant.
At length Monster Slayer and Born of Water won the Sun
over to their project. He gave them the assistance they needed
to kill Big Giant. Then with the four lightning arrows they
took from their dead half-brother, the Hero Brothers were
able to cut the mountain fort in half and kill all the monsters
who had been preying on the people.
They had saved humanity but, as a consequence, Monster
Slayer and Born of Water became weak and sick from too
much killing. They would have withered away of the killing-
sickness but the Twelve Holy People came and held a cer-
emony over them to purify them and make them well. So it
ed
/ The Pagan Werewolf 25
was that the people learned this ceremony and they named
it after the Hero Brothers’ sacrifice, calling it Where the Two
Came to Their Father. And to this day when Navajos who
keep the faith return from fighting a war or return from being
involved in bloodshed, they ask to have this ceremony held
for them.
Most of the peoples of the nature religions are aware that
they judge good and evil from a human point of view. They
recognize the fact that the means of corruption corrupt the
doer even when the end is good and the motive well intended.
Consonant with this general attitude toward life and super-
naturalism, they take the werewolf as they find him. If he is
helpful, they use him. If neutral, they tend to ignore him.
And if vicious, they fight Kim. But in this event his crime is
viciousness, not supernaturalism. |
is point is made vividly in a story that comes from
Kenya, East Africa. A poor man and his wife died, leaving
their two sons nothing but two cows. The older son schemed
a way to make them both rich with only this small beginning.
He took his herding stick and drove the cows to the village
of the most powerful witch doctor in Kenya. In return for the
cows, the witch doctor agreed to give him the power to trans-
form himself into any animal he desired.
“When he returned home, he explained his plan to his
younger brother who agreed to help. The next day the older
brother shapeshifted into a fine big bull and the younger
brother drove him to the marketplace and bartered him for
two cows and a half dozen goats.
However on the way home, the big bull suddenly and for
no apparent reason ran away from his new owner. Of course
the new owner chased him, shouting very angrily. The new
owner was very persistent. Finally the elder brother grew
tired of being a bull and being chased so he shapeshifted the
front half of his body into a lion. Now as he ran, he left lion
tracks. When the new Owner, still hot on the trail of his run-
away bull, saw the lion tracks, he became frightened and ran
back home. So the older brother resumed his own form and
returned home to gloat over his two cows and a half-dozen
goats.
The next market day the elder brother again shapeshifted
into the body of a splendid bull. Again his younger brother
bartered him, this time for ten goats. Again the older brother-
bull ran away from the new buyer. But this buyer was dif-
ferent from the first. This new buyer had also gone to the
most powerful witch doctor in Kenya. And he had also bought
power, the same power as had the older brother.
Of course, at first the new buyer did not realize he had
bought a yerebnll. But when the older brother tired and
transformed the front half of his body into a lion, this new
buyer was not the least afraid. He transformed himself into
a very large lion and continued the chase, faster than before.
The elder brother saw a huge lion chasing him and quickly
changed into a bird.
That was when the new buyer discovered he had been
duped. Furious, he turned himself into a kite, darting off
after the bird. He would have caught the bird in the sky, but
the elder brother changed into an antelope and bounded off.
Quickly the new buyer changed to a wolf, streaking after the
antelope. The elder brother wasexhausted. He resumed his
own shape and promised the new buyer to give him back his
ten goats.
After the new buyer left their home, herding his ten goats,
the older brother said to the younger brother. “Don’t be sad.
We still have our two cows and half a dozen goats. And there
is always next time.”
Pre-Christian Europe belonged to the nature gods and
spirits. Their names changed with language and dialect. And
in different districts the different eyes saw differences in their
form and character, but their essence was the same. They
were the gods and goddesses of the land, the sky, and the sea,
of the wind that blows, the seasons, and of all living things.
They were the spirits of human enterprise, of hunting and
herding and farming, of sailing, fishing, trading, of childbirth

and warfare, of food and drink.
Their priests and worshipers lived upon this planet as its
child or its guest and not as an enemy or occupying force. The
Soal of their worship was to keep man in harmony with nature
by carefully instilling in him a day-to-day awareness of the
power of creation and of the natural forces. As time passed,
the people of the nature religions learned that many of these
forces could be used by man if, so to speak, he sailed by their
currents and kept pace with their rhythms.
The price of using nature’s power is vigilance and sensi-
tivity. As a result, religion and_daily life are inseparable.
Through the use of these forces the followers of nature reli-
gions developed many skills which we think of as paranormal...
They saw no difference between the birth of a child, the
growth of a plant, the currents and tides of the ocean, the
ability of one man to carve a canoe that would not sink, the
gift of another for calling down the rain, or the vision of a
third, who saw what was to be in the future. Religion infused
their work and warfare and play; they brought to their wor-
ship their entire selves, filled with laughter and fear and hope
and sensuality—not just a pious face, prim quiet hands, and
restless feet. :
There can be no question that some of their ritualized
behavior had no relationship, even indirectly, with the ends
they obtained. But the ends—obtaining food, winning a war,
healing a sick child—were so vital that they did not endanger
themselves with the cold necessities of experimentation. Thus,
the rituals that successfully produced the sought-for ends
were kept intact. Painstakingly taught, painstakingly learned,
they wére not tampered with as long as they worked. Time
and deliberate malice have destroyed the written and oral
histories of those religions. The little we know of them has
been pieced together by the patient work of archeologists.
Like language, religion began with Homo sapiens, al-
though Neandrethal man had started significant preliminary
efforts with both before his mysterious disappearance from

the face of the earth. We know enough to suspect that were-
wolvery had its roots in the very beginnings of religion. As
early as 25,000 years B. C., Cro-Magnon man was putting on
animal disguises and painting man-animal images of great
beauty on the walls of his sanctuary caves in Europe.
Possibly Cro-Magnon man’s religion spread over the world,
but most likely, the various human cultures scattered over
the earth discovered their own religions independently, each
on its own and with only limited borrowings from anyone else.
This religion gave tremendous advantage to the band that
used it; this source of power, then, would be a precious,
fiercely kept secret. It is doubtful that we will ever be able
to do more than guess the pattern and means of its dispersion.
Its presence is indisputable; cave drawings and masks along
with horned headgear have been found in Europe and Africa,
and at all latitudes. A variation of this most ancient religion
is practiced by contemporary Bushmen of South Africa.
Within living memory, the last of the Bushman cave painters
was killed by white men for game poaching.
Anthropologists believe now that the purpose of cave
paintings and animal disguises was twofold:
As hunters, early men wanted to increase their catch. The
drawings, it was speculated, were part of a ritual to attract
game to a certain location and toward a particular hunter.
Also, the men wore disguises while hunting to enable them
to sneak up on their quarry unnoticed. They may also have
smeared the feces of the quarry over their bodies to keep their
own man-smell from giving them away. And without question,
since many animals, thanks to limitations of eyesight, recog-
nize one another by characteristic mode of movement rather
than form, the hunters had long since learned to imitate the
movements of their prey. The cave drawings indicate that
animal movements were stressed during the dancing. In the
act of stalking, these men did their utmost to look and smell
and move and think like their prey, to the best of their ability
to be their prey. 7
7
THE BEGINNINGS OF WEREWOLVERY—Much. available

source material indicates possible beginnings of werewolvery
when ancient men used actual wolf skins as decoys for hunting,
and engaged in rituals involving wolf-like movements before the
hunt began. Their objective: to put themselves in a wolf “mood,”
the better to outwit their prey. a aay ap
As men—hairless, thin skinned, slow footed, short of fang,
with claws more apt to hurt their owner than the opponent,
comparatively defective in hearing, almost without a sense of
smell, but with good eyesight, clever fingers, and the ability
to recognize superiority when they saw it—our ancestors
imitated animals to acquire or gain the services of their
superior qualities.
In many places and times, among many peoples, that
earliest form of religion developed into totemism. An indi-
vidual, a family, a clan, each of the sexes, or the tribe as a
unit came to feel a definite kinship with a given species of
animal. Most often the totem animal stood in the relationship
of an ancestor or a parent or a brother to his people. In such
cases, the person is born into the relationship. Often the peo-
ple named themselves after the totem animal. Among some
peoples, the individual had to achiéve
his relationship with
his totem animal during young adulthood, usually through

sacrificial efforts which induced the totemic animal to present
himself in a_dream and assume responsibility for the indi-
vidual’s welfare.
The attitudes of the humans toward their totemic animal
range from awe to affection.
Along the White Nile, the Dinka have an intimate family
closeness with their totemic animals. A lion man will sleep in
lion country without building a protective thorn fence, which
others must use; he feasts lions on the day of his wedding and
on other special occasions. A crocodile man will plunge into
crocodile-infested waters secure in the knowledge that his
brothers will not harm him. The Pygmies of Africa’s rain
forest carry amulets containing a bit of their totemic animal's
horn, hair, or bone. Among the Shilluk, whose ancient tribal
totemic animal is the ox, each boy is given his own ox which
serves as a living symbol for the boy’s ancestral spirits, the
totemic animal, and the creative force. The boy plays with
and pets his bull. He develops a deep proprietary love for it,
buying a bell for its neck and making tassels to decorate its
horns. He talks to it, discussing his problems; sings to it, prais-
ing the ox’s beauty. And when he dances, he spreads his arms
in imitation of the bull’s horns.
Totemism pervades the life of its people. The symbol or
form of the totemic animal is painted and carved upon
weapons, tools, houses, and often, especially during important
ceremonies, on their own bodies. To some extent it infiltrates
the social organization of the people. The original Australians
organized their entire life along totemic lines.
If the Australians are the most stridently totemic, the
identification of the individual with the totemic animal exists
even where the pattern is so slight that the people involved
are not classified as totemic at all. Where the emotional ties
between the humans on the one hand and the totemic animals
on the other are stronger, the separation of the two forms is
less absolute. Among the Pygmies, when members of the
leopard clan die, part of the spirit of the departed is said to
return to earth as a leopard. During the circumcision cer-

emony of the Baluba, the religious official who cuts the fore-
skin does so not in his own person but in the person of the
totemic animal.
At some point in the totemic rituals and the mimetic danc-
ing of the ancient pretotemic religions, certain individuals
crossed the borderline from imitating to being. Perhaps they
were men with a powerful capacity to meditate, perhaps they
were the ones with eidetic memories, perhaps those who
deeply loved the totemic animal. There is good reason to be-
lieve it was the same with shapeshifting. The array of potions,
rituals, unguents, paraphernalia, and invocations that effect
shapeshifting is overwhelming. It seems likely that more than
one personality type or combination of character traits could
make the transition.
The moment of transition, when the imitation suddenly
becomes reality, must have occurred thousands and thousands.
of times, the discovery undoubtedly being made and lost and
made again. With some, the moment itself may have gone
unnoticed, so absorbed was the ritualist in trying to be the
animal that he failed_to
led to notice
now when he actually became the
animal. For others, the physical sensation of unexpected
transformation—-the full realization of what had happened to
their bodies—must have been the most powerful sensation in
their lives. How many of those who changed into animal
shapes found themselves locked eee
inside, unable to reverse
——"
the
process? er
It is impossible to tell from the cave drawings of combined
animal and human forms whether the artist was portraying
an idealized disguise or symbolizing a concept implicit in the
word “werewolf.” It is equally impossible to know from his-
tories that have been handed down, mouth to ear, for gen-
erations whether the transformations which they describe
were real or imitation. And no doubt the same ritual practiced
among a people for centuries would, in that time, have been
used both by real shapeshifters and by fakes.
It is only in the contemporary totemic religions peoples
that we catch glimpses of the ancient rites of transformation

as they must have happened.
We know that the|B&shman/cave drawings portray
shapeshifting. Their sorcerérs ractice the art With great
skill. A wide variety of forms are available to them. Those
shapeshifters who become criminal,
— ee
preying on their own
people, frequently choose the lion form because of its strength
and the terror it invokes. There is reason to believe that, at
least among the Naron Bushmen, shapeshifting occurs during
the fertility rites involving young girls. The sorcerers perform
the ritual dancing and sexual intercourse, actual or mimicked,
in their secondary form. The Nyasaland rock paintings clearly
depict sexual intercourse between a human and an eland in
which the drawing isdeliberately blurred to suggest a human
form underriding the eland. RE A
Among the Kpe, who belong to Africa’s Cameroon peo-
ples, men with paranormal talent belong to the Elephant
Society which practices group wereelephantism. This all-male
society's main activity is the practice of sorcery so its mem-
bers can rightfully be called shapeshifters; however, there is
no indication that they know how to transform themselves
into forms other than the elephant. When these men assume
the elephant form, they acquire the common werebeing power
of rapid, effortless locomotion. In addition to renerevannee
thicaisdls et STRICE DSPaTS have elephant disguises that
they wear for ceremonial dancing. The upper torso and head
of the disguise is a rough sacking covered by red-stained palm
fiber. The movable tusks are carved from ironwood. A skirt
of palm fronds reaches to the ankles and the ankles are
adorned with strings of shell husks whose dried nuts give off
a rattling sound when the dancer stamps his foot. The Ele-
phant Society members conduct their public ceremonial func-
tions in their disguises. In their elephant form, they wreak
havoc to demonstrate displeasure, to take private vengance,
and to conduct secret society business.
strange parallel to werebeingism occurs among the
\Yakuts) of northeastern Asia.
/ The Pagan Werewolf 33
The Yakuts have a discipline of healing and fortune-telling

that is practiced by specialists called shamans. Each Yakut
shaman has two or three animal spirits;who watch over him.
One of these Etna frig ae aoe with its protégé
like that frequently seen in pretotemic cultures such as the
Kwakiutl (North American Indian) or the Sioux. The animal
spirit gives his charge specific, unusual powers and advice,
It is a close emotional association, one that creates an ex-
cellent environment for the fostering of shapeshifting.
However, the Yakut /shaman’s relationship with another
of his spirits seems to be in the opposite direction, negating
such a development. This spirit is called gs yua,la generic
name; individual yekyua have personal names. The yekyua
is a composite spirit. Part of its being comes from the associate
shaman himself and part comes from the soul of the living
wild animal that houses their joint spirit. Rather than alter-
nating forms as a werebeing does, the Yakut shaman lives
two lives at once.
This double, concurrent life has peculiar disadvantages
in that, since only half of the yekyua is derived from the
shaman’s essence, the entirety does not reflect his character;
nor does he have conscious awareness or control of the
yekyua’s actions. On the other hand, since part of the shaman’s
indispensable essence is bound up in the yekyua’s being, the
shaman’s welfare*is irrevocably tied to the yekyua’s fate. If
the yekyua fights and comes off badly, the shaman’s ugar
body suffers as does the yekyua’s animal body, even when
great distance separates the two. If the yekyua’s animal body
dies, the shaman dies as well.~
The existence; of elemen
elements that are antagonistic to the
development of shapeshifting in contemporary totemic soci-
eties is rare. The peoples of the Andaman Islands, which lie
between Borneo and, the Celebes in the Pacific, train their
supernatural specialists, the halak, to become weretigers. In
fact the ability of sorcerers to shapeshift—among ae con-
temporary peoples whose oral literature describes gods and
spirits as having these powers—is so universal as to suggest
that, where only the literature remains, it constitutes con-

vincing evidence that the practice of shapeshifting occurred.
The preclassic Greek cult of eas ae immigrated
from Thrace, is replete \
with accounts of the god shifting into
animal form.” Communion occurred when Dionysus trans-
formed himseélf into animal form to permit the maenads, his
priestesses, to eat his rawflesh. A similar ritual may also have
taken place inCrete, where we know there were orgiastic
dances among worshipers disguised in animal masks. That the
Cretans were shapeshifters is all the more likely because much
of classic Greek religion had a Boveuuire Indo-European
ry origin, including their central god\Zeus, and the important
idon who was also symbol of théhorse totem. Zeus as a
S éshifting god will be discussed later. Poseidon was un-
questionably a deo-horse.-One of his titles is Poseidon Hippios
and he is portrayed in Greek literature as mating with
4 paces \while they both wore hoyse forms.
=< e north the Teuton god Odin was also a shapeshifter.
2.
He was the patron God of the bersérkirs, warriors who went
into battle dressed in bearskins and who, some say, in the heat
of battle shifted into bears and fought with savage frenzy.
Odin, in his Germanic form (Woden, fostered werewolfism.
Much of the savagery connected with European werewolfs
may have originated from warrior-priests of warrior-gods lead-
ing cadres of werebeings into battle. A Swedish bronze plate
wrought six hundred years after Christ depicts two such
warriors, semitransformed and armed with sword and spear.
Many of the Egyptian gods and goddesses practiced
shapeshifting. There is some evidence that their kings as
gods-in-the-flesh and priests had some skill in the art. Cer-
tainly, after death, the king was believed to climb to heaven
in animal form:
The king has kissed the sky as a falcon;

The king has reached the sky as a grasshopper which the sun
makes invisible,
a7
ge
rie| y.
7
is
BERSERKIRS—Roaring forth into battle, these fierce warriors

used the concept of totemic animals, and borrowed the skins of
wolves not only for warmth and whatever frightening effects
they might have on enemies but, in plain truth, with hopes that
wolf-like qualities would transfer to them and make them invul-
nerable. Wanting certain powers from animals played a large part
in the development of shapeshifting abilities.
During certain religious festivals some of the kings may have

performed rituals in wolf and crocodile form. Records of
widespread shapeshifting among Egyptian priests is missing,
but the literature abounds with references to its use. Set, the
principle of evil, and Horus, the sun god, fought as hippo-
potamuses. Isis, a mother goddess, was adept at the practice,
easily shifting from animal to bird to human form.
These pagan societies grew complex and sprawled force-
fully across their neighbor’s territory but their interest in
religion grew as their accomplishments in science, mathe-

matics, and engineering grew. Actually, their ceremonialism
grew with their technology and, as in less complex societies,
the entire waking life of the people permeated with religious
goals, beliefs, and rituals. Supernatural skills kept pace with
the rest of their technology.
Shapeshifting flourished.
Thanks to the classicalism that swept through Rennaisance
Europe, sufficient Greek literature and history was carefully
preserved to provide an inkling of shapeshifting’s importance
in Greek ritual. Even so, we see only a fragment of a former
glory. Whatever the Church of Rome classified as sorcery was
censored
and destroyed outright.
As their names suggest, both the Arcadian cults of Pan
Lycaeus and Jupiter Lycaeus were deeply involved in were-
wolfism. We do not know whether all their worshipers had
the ability to transform themselves. Certainly the priests
practiced the skill on themselves. They may have preferred
to keep the secret of metamorphosis a priestly power. Trans-
formations may have been permitted only during certain
seasonal sacrifices. At those times, if the worshipers were
unable to effect their own transformations, the priests quite
likely performed group transformations during one of the
ceremonies.
During the classical period that centered in Athens| shape-
shifting flourished with a splendor that has ra ly, if ever,
been_equaled. The Athenians saw war as an inconclusive,
endless road that led through havoc. They used diplomacy
and sorcery to gain their political goals whenever possible. ~
The history of the actual events and the details of the means
by which they were accomplished is lost to us. But we see
their reflection in Greek mythology.
The Athenian contempt of war was mirrored by the figure
of their PRUE fea eee Ares cast among the
other Olympians was exceedingly small. Zeus despised him.
Of all the goddesses only Aphrodite would willingly bed him.
Shallow, Ares loved battle for destruction’s sake. He played

both sides of a conflict against each other and, for all the
bloodshed and misery he caused, he was pot strong enough
to overcome the wisdom of Athena in a conflict of wills.
The respect that the Athenians had for shapeshifting is
also indicated by the fact that its chief patrons were Zeus and
his most prestigious son, Apollo. As we shall see, from infancy
Zeus warred reluctan sorcery, especially shapeshift-
using tly
an
ing, to save his life or win objective. The story of Zeus’s
ascendancy dramatizes the victory of sorcery over brute
strength in the affections and behavior
of the Athenians. —
In awey a period the Greeks said that time began
when |Eurynome,| the goddess of all things, was formed of
chaos and rosé naked fromswirling
its midst. Reminiscent of
the Hindu goddess Kali, she slowly stretched her limbs in
motion. In response, the sea parted from the sky and Eury-
nome began to dance upon its waves. Her dance grew wilder
and wilder and, in its wake, creation unfolded.
The Athenians were not interested in beginnings beyond
mother earth who took form from chaos and gave birth to a
son, Uranus. Uranus showered upon his mother a life-giving
rain. It filled the valleys with rivers and the hollows of the
land with lakes and seas, and from its surfaces mother earth
gave birth to the beasts that walk, the birds of the sky, and
all green growing things. The seven Titans sprang from the
union of the son and his goddess mother. The youngest,
Cronus, upon a time revolted against his father and won for
himself the sovereignty of the world by castrating his sire.
But Cronus reigned uneasily. As Uranus lay dying of his
wound, he told his son that some day he, too, would know
the fate of being deposed by a son. Cronus married his sister
Rhea. Five times he got her with child. To thwart the proph-
ecy, five times he swallowed the child she bore. Outraged,
Rhea determined that flesh of her flesh would live. When
next she came to term, she journeyed in the cloak of night
to Arcadia’s Mount Lycaeum where she gave birth to Zeus.
She put her son in the arms of his grandmother, mother earth,
who carried him to Crete, hiding him in a cave in the Aegean
hills. There he was nursed by the goat nymph Amalthaea, Io,
and her sister, the ash nymph Adrastea.
When Bhea returned to Cronus, she took a stone, wrapped
it in swaddling clothes, and gave it to him to swallow, saying
“This is the child.” He did so unsuspectingly, but in time dis-
covered he had been deceived. At once Cronus began hunting
his son down. The young godling outwitted his father trans-
forming himself into a snake and his three nurses into bears.
In this snake form Zeus was called by the Athenians Zeus
Ctesius, Zeus the Protector of the Storehouses, because snakes
were used as mousers to keep the food supplies from being
eaten. When Zeus reached maturity, he fulfilled his grand-
father’s prophecy. However, rather than slaying his father as
Cronus had slain Uranus, Zeus banished him and all the Titans
excepting Atlas. Atlas, who had been the Titans’ war hero, was
made to carry the sky on his shoulders as an object lesson to
would-be aggressors.
The rule of Zeus in Olympia was an acting out of the
PpJo, motto, Make love not war.
iat 7
No sooner had hé Gained his sovereignty than he turned
his attention to his sister Hera, courting her ardently. She
refused him again and again. Finally realizing that pleading
was futile, Zeus shifted into the form of an injured cuckoo.
Tender-hearted Hera, taken in by the deception, picked up
the battered bird and held it to the warmth of her breasts.
Quickly Zeus resumed his true form, laid with her, shaming
her into a hasty marriage.
Zeus sired the beautiful Helen, who was to vex two coun-
tries, and her twin Pollux when he came to Leda as a swan.
He fathered Heracles by making love to Alcmene while
taking the form of her husband. He dazzled and kidnapped
Europa by greeting her as a milk-white bull. She climbed
upon his back and, before she could dismount, he swam away,
carrying her to Crete where he shifted into the shape of a
The Pagan Werewolf 39
sea-eagle and got her with Sarpedon, Rhadamanthus, and

Minos. His son Perseus was quickened when Zeus fell upon
Danae as a shower of gold. Callisto, a virgin serving the god-
dess of the hunt, Artemus, was seduced by Zeus who put on
the shape of her patroness to seek out her company.
Interestingly enough, though aside from the point, Cal-
listo’s mother, Lycaon, had been turned into a wolf by the
gods for the impertinence of serving them the flesh of a
young boy at worship. And Artemus, who was facile at shape-
shifting when it suited her, punished Callisto for betraying
her virgin worship by changing her and the son she bore
Zeus into bears.
Hera, though she had married Zeus reluctantly, neverthe-
less wished vainly to retain the exclusive use of his services.
Much of her powers were devoted to thwarting her husband’s
would-be romances and punishing the young adultresses who
secumbed to his wooing.
In order to deceive Hera, Zeus turned himself and Leto
into a pair of nesting quails to consummate their love affair.
But Hera, who had grown keen-eyed with practice, was not
fooled. She ordered Python, the snake, to destroy this latest
mistress, swearing that Leto would not give birth to the child
in any place where the sun shone. Zeus aided Leto’s escape
by transforming her into a wolf. She was adopted by a wolf
pack that acted as her guards and guides. In the ninth day
of her labor, they succeeded in bringing her to the floating
island of Delos. Zeus transfixed the island to do what he could
to ease Leto’s pains. There, still wearing the shape of a wolf,
Leto bore Apollo. One of the god’s titles, quoted by Homer in
the Iliad, was Son of the She-Wolf. The sign of the_wolf
became Apollo’s standard because this shape was his favorite
secondary form. Apollo fought his famous duel with the
wizard Techiries as a wolf. As a wolf, he sired Aristaeus when
he bred with Cyrene.
While shining Apollo was a godwolf and his father shape-
shifted to avoid bloody war, the shapeshifting skill became
40 WrEREWOLVES, SHAPESHIFTERS, & SKINWALKERS
part.of the technology of statecraft and, as is the way with

people, enjoyed the highest of fashion in addition to its
ancient religious function.
The Zeus-Athenian love was conquered by Philip II of
Macedon. Under the reign of his son Alexander, who con-
quered much of the known world, Ares’ shadow stretched
long. The Macedonians came to discover that the Athenians
had seen Ares clearly because the god of war turned his favor
to Rome and shifted into the form of their glorified Mars.
Mars in turn was conquered by Jesus Christ, who took all
of Europe, most of the double continent of the Americas,
and slashed into Asia and Africa. Some say, however, that
early in the Christian era, Ares actually deposed the Christ of
the ancient Jewish sect and the early peace-loving Christians
and then once more shifted, taking over his form and his
name, leading those who followed his banner into strife,
slaughter, and havoc such as mankind had never yet expe-
rienced.
four
Che Christian
Werewolf
From the beginnings of its organiza-
tion, Peter’s church was an enemy of the shapeshifters. But
the church did not forswear sorcery; the church was a jealous
mistress. As their gods, the Christians tolerated a spirit, one
virgin demigoddess, a host of ancestor spirits, and another
host of celestial beings. Sprcery performed in the name of this
company was highly thought of within the church. Skilled
sorcerers earned for themselves in their lifetime the privilege
of becoming ancestor spirits after death, although the Chris-
tians refused to call their paranormal practices sorcery. How-
ever, all others label as sorcery such practices as healing the
sick by nonphysical means, protecting agai d
psychic harm by ritual, extrasensory location of lost objects,
exorcism of evil spirits, and supernatural aid, inspiration, and
guidance.
Although the Christians received a rich heritage of para-
normal skills from their Jewish and Roman beginnings, shape-
shifting was pet among them.
To achieve the elimination of shapeshifting, the church
equated pagan gods with the devil and proclaimed pagan
forms of worship and paranormal expression to be hell-bound
abominations. All witchcraft—except that performed by the
4]
church under a different name—even healing magic, was

denounced as the blackest of sins. Shapeshifting headed the
list. Werewolves were accused of being generally vicious,
murdering cannibals. Every sheep that fell to a wolf pack,
every unsolved brutal killing was attributed to werewolves.
Christianity spread across Europe by sanctioning the con-
quest of pagan territory. The church thought its wealth and
influence, which increased substantially with each new con-
quest, could constantly bribe-suthless men who lacked land
and power or those more ruthless men who never had enough.
The church sold its authority to kings; it declared that
kings ascended to their thrones, ruled over their lands, and
taxed their subjects under God’s law and according to God’s
expressed will. Those who refused to obey God’s appointed
ruler for any provocation whatsoever were guilty before God’s
eyes and deserved punishment on earth and damnation after
death. In return, the kings promised to be the church’s knights,
using their armed strength within and without their kingdoms
to enforce the church’s authority. During coronation cere-
monies, kings were directed to harass the infidel. On April
19, 1080, Pope Gregory VII scolded Harald
King of Denmark
about the number of sorcerer-priests still worshiping Woden
and Freyja; he declared that many sorcerer-priests were imi-
tating the gods by transforming themselves
into cats and
wolves. The Pope directed King Harald to root out those
gruesome practices which dishonored God by giving the ap-
pearance of almost unlimited power to the devils of darkness.
The church and the state thus made a pact to become the
Establishment, each propping the other up. While civil and
religious authority were not centered in one person, they at
least agreed to be one mind where the supremacy of the
Christian religion and the sovereign rights of kings were con-
cerned. Church and monarchy combined to convert, subvert,
or replace the heathen princes of the land. Princes in their
turn used such means as were necessary to fgxce their subjects
through the church doors to the baptismal fonts. Seizure of
The Christian Werewolf 43
lands and goods, torture, kidnapping, and murder often were

necessary and often were insufficient as the pagans fought for
their right to worship astheir hearts and heads directed? It
was a zigzag process. It was slow. But, little by little, behind
a blood-wet sword, the Christians gained ground.
Of course, at times in some
places, the transition from the
old religion to the new was tranquil, thanks to farsighted
priests who made no complaint if the people kept to their old
ways so long as they enteréd church when mass was being
celebrated. Giraldus Cambrensis described an incident in the
life of such a priest whose parish stretched from Ulster toward
Meath in Ireland. Traveling through the forest near Meath
one day, this priest was approached by a wolf who said he
and his wife had been cursed into the form of wolves for a
period of seven years. His wife lay dying. The werewolf
begged the priest to give her the last rites.
The priest followed the wolf to his sick mate, endured
listening to the confession coming out of the strange lupin
mouth. However, he boggled at the point of giving holy com-
munion to a wolf, even when the wolf could speak and claimed
to be human. The male werewolf was able to push aside
enough of his mate’s pelt to show the priest that, under the
fur, there was the body of an old woman. With a shrug and
a prayer of apology, the priest gave the dying werewolf holy
communion. ;
Unfortunately in most of the districts throughout Europe
and across the channel in England, Scotland, and Ireland, the
people experienced great emotional distress, as all parts of
their nature religion were exterminated. Their religious life
was turned topsy-turvy, involving, as we have seen, every
waking hour and their whole being. The people felt that the
ground under their feet had been shattered. They saw their
priests hunted down, their sacred shrines overturned, their
sacraments destroyed, their pleasure in_procreation reviled,
their confidence in their elders weakened, and their respect
for life itself lessened. They were forced to go to Christian
a) tas
churches where they heard all they believed in called evil,

their gods referred to as devils, the traditions of their fathers
condemned as sinful and cruelly punished as illegal. They
watched turncoats and hypocrites enjoy prosperity while
good men starved. aan
Social harmony crumbled. Village life was torn by conflict,
lord and vassal locked in hatred, families split by dissension.
Treachery, resentment, distrust mushroomed up everywhere.
Men caught between two religions learnedcynically to turn
their backs on both and knew guiltily that they had been true
to neither or to‘themselves.
Even the Christians suffered from the reaction, though
they attributed the cause to the devil. In eleventh-century
England, still not certainly Christianized, Wulfstan, bishop
of Worcester, later saint of the church, cried out from the
pulpit, “Beloved men, realize what is true: this world is in
haste and the end approaches; and therefore in the world
things go from bad to worse, and so it must of necessity de-
teriorate greatly on account of the people's sins before the
coming of anti-Christ. . .” He reviled the English Christians’
disloyalty, their willingness to betray even their own families
—parents selling their children, children their parents, and
siblings each other. He contrasts this corruption with the
reverence for their gods, their priests, and one another found
in pagan countries.
In the generation of the change-over most of the people
did little more than make a superficial conversion, the mere
outward gestures, to forestall wrath
the of their leaders and
priests. As late as 1350 the Frenchminstrels were passing
around a tale about a werewolf who was the self-appointed
guardian of a king’sson, William. The king’s brother, plotting
to steal the Carones paid two serving women to kill the boy
whe was the true heir apparent. In the nick of time, the
werewolf rescued William. Holding onto the lad’s clothing»
with his teeth, he swam across the Strait of Messina and
guided him across country to the safety of a forest near Rome.
, The Christian Werewolf 45
There the werewolf looked after William as if he were his

own son, raising him to manhood and even managing to
provide a wedding feast for him and his bride. Finally Wil-
liam regained his rightful place on the throne; out of love and
gratitude to his protector he took as his heraldic device, to be
painted on his coat of arms, a giant werewolf.
During subsequent generations after the Christian take-
over, the new religion gradually gained a hold on people’s
imagination. Still, much of the old nature religion was
secretly retained and secretly practiced. The law of AEthelred
referred to this fact: to “purify the land,” it sought to expel
wizards, sorcerers, magicians, prostitutes,
secret killers, and
perjurers—theorder suggesting the seriousness of the threat
posed by the various criminals in the eyes of the Establish-
ment.
A legend from Ireland compiled in the thirteenth century
and probably first told in the eleventh shows the admixture
of paganism and Christianity. It claimed that St. Patrick
could turn his hand at shapeshifting. The incident happened
during an assembly in which Patrick was exhorting the Irish
to give up their pagan ways and become Christians. Rather
than listen to his message, his audience howled at him like
wolves. The saint lost his temper and cursed them, man,
woman, and child—so that every seventh year they, and
their descendants after them, turned into wolves_and got
their food by claw and fang although their reason remained
human the better to know the horror of their punishment.
King AEthelred’s law was only a weak reflection of the
propaganda crusade launched from bishopric to bishopric,
parish to parish, pulpit to pulpit. The church claimed that
the pagan sorcerers, especially the werewolves and other
shapeshifters, were anti-Christ, receiving their powers from
the devil. Those who practiced the sorcerer’s arts and those
consorting with practitioners were doomed to everlasting
hellfire. War, drought, flood, freezing cold, disease of man
and animal, failure of crop, shipwreck at sea, and disaster
upon the land were claimed to result from God’s wrath upon
the people who harbored these evils. Crimes both large and
small were ascribed to the pagans and no man dared step for-
ward to deny the charges, for the Establishment had declared
sorcery itself a crime.
~Informerswereliberally rewarded. Torture of the accused
and his family plucked confessions out of the mouths of
guilty and innocent alike. Conviction brought execution.
A Prussian duke ordered a well-known sorcerer in his
country to prove he could transform himself by doing so in
court. When the sorcerer obeyed the duke, the sorcerer was
burned at_the stake. In Russia, a nobleman followed the
same procedure except that he set his wolfhounds on the
werewolf as soon as he assumed his secondary shape. In
England, where the fox, hare, and_cat shapes were always
popular among shapeshifters, the lords tried to scourge the
countryside clean of these animals in the hope of killing
witches among them. In Italy, where the lords kept their
peasants in virtual slavery, an old woman was tortured to
death for ensorcelling a young man—who had thrice been
impudent to her—into an ass.
During this period the church expanded the notion that
Satan was hoping to claim men’s souls at the time of their
death to the notion that he desired their bodies during their
lifetime. Satan’s desire was not considered sexual in nature,
although such a coloring was thrown in by the more prurient.
The kind of physical possession that the Christians feared
from Satan was closer to the process by which a virus takes
over a healthy cell, using its substance, its cellular material
for its own purposes. The image is decidedly unpleasant and,
thanks to unceasing activity on the part of the church propa-
gandists, thousands of people woke up and fell asleep with
the corroding conviction that this threat lurked in the dark
corners of their lives. Belief in the parasitical powers of the
devil was confirmed by the priests and Christian physicians
who diagnosed the bizarre behavior of epileptics, schizo-
; The Christian Werewolf 47
phrenics, and brain-damaged persons as symptomatic of

demonic possession.
The church instituted a vigorous campaign to capture the
emotional life of the people. It swept into its folds much of
the crafts and nearly all of the arts—literature, theater, sculp-
ture, painting, music, architecture, dance became church
sponsored and were given explicit propagandistic themes.
The church’s pool of free labor, in the persons of nuns and
monks, enabled it to all but corner the market on education.
With few exceptions those who could write were Establish-
ment men. The effective use monks made of their training
can be seen in this description of hell by an eleventh-century
abbot, John of Fécamp:
In that place of living death, called hell, what else can there
be but undying flames, everlasting tribulation, endless pun-
ishment, and an infinite affliction of total evil, for there is
nothing there beyond a river of fire and a foul swamp.
Angels of wrath live there, with arms like the heads of
dragons, their eyes shooting out fiery arrows, their teeth
projecting like the tusks of elephants; and it is as though
with the tails of scorpions that they goad men to the
tortures. Only to look on them causes trembling, anguish,
death. And would that death could come as a release from
this prison! But horror upon horror, the tortured man still
lives so that he may be directed to other torments. Gnawed
to the bone, he is made whole again so that serpents may
never cease from biting him. Dragons feed on the lips of
blasphemers; a serpent tears at the breasts of the unfor-
tunate with terrible fangs; and all sorts of monsters in
various ways and without rest crucify the souls of the un-
believing. There is always the sound of wailing and lamen-
tation, groans and bellowing, and also everywhere a con-
fused shouting from those oppressed by the engines of
torture or burned by the fire. .. . There is the coldness of
Gehenna, the everlasting ice, the most terrible hunger, im-
mense thirst, perpetual pain and weariness without end,
severe plague and unspeakable disease, dense shades and a
night of fearsome darkness. There is no rest for the suffer-
ers; all things there are evil; and all kinds of torments are
there. In that place is deathless death, unfailing failure, an

end without end. Which of the faithful, hearing of these
things, and understanding them, shall not quake with fear?
Daily the imaginations of the young and old were tweaked

with such dramatizations of hell. In time the average man’s
prickling anxiety saw demons and imps of hell in a strange
look, a peculiar circumstance, an untoward act. It is probable
that even the most stable personalities of the period were
phobic on the subject.
The church prescribed torture as a legitimate means of
driving the devil from the body of the possessed. And if the
victim died during the course of religious therapy, his tor-
mentors could congratulate themselves upon saving his soul
and so sparing him an eternity of torment. The violence had
been an act of mercy. Although the church-fostered belief in
bodily possession by the devil added to the level of terror, it
also provided occasions of orgiastic relief in scenes where the
populace could watch their terrors played out on someone
else.
European life had taken on the quality of a nightmare.
Panic and hysteria infiltrated daily routine. As time passed
and the memories of the real issues in the conflict became
weaker, more and more those people whom the church per-
secuted became lightning rods on which the populace dis-
charged its fears and rage. The mounting executions and
bouts of torture, therapeutic and punitive, became welcome
distractions from the inner torment with which the spectators
lived. Further, the persecution created the false hope that
something positive was being accomplished; someone was
paying for their misery. The pagan werewolves had been
leaders among their people. Immediately following the Chris-
tian conquest, they were the people’s protected, secret priests.
As the church’s tactics took effect, the werewolves became
hunted criminals, uncertain of their safety even in their own
home.
A French peasant, after a day in the forest, stopped by

the castle to report his luck to the lord who owned the hunt-
ing rights to the land. He told the lord he had fought a wolf,
claiming the wolf had attacked him. The animal had escaped
but, in the fight, the hunter had severed one of its paws. The
peasant opened his trophy bag and pulled out, instead of a
paw, the bloody stump of a woman’s hand.
In horror, the lord saw on one of the fingers the gold ring
he had given hiswife. He hurried into the kitchen to ask his
wife what she had done with her ring and found her crouched
over her arm which she had wrapt in her shawl. Over her tear-
ful protestations, he pulled off the covering. Her arm was
without its hand. When the lord showed his wife the hand in
the hunter’s trophy bag, his wife confessed that she was a
werewolf and that it had been she who had fought with the
hunter. Her husband turned her over to the authorities. Later
she was burned for her crime.
In spite of such ugly betrayals, many werewolves refused
to surrender to Christian authority, forming semiorganized,
ongoing bands of guerrillas. Just as Ireland keeps its centuries-
old tradition of resistance to British rule, resistance to the
werewolf was handed down from parent to child, from
teacher to student, from friend to friend.
The shapeshifters used their secondary forms as weapons
and disguises in one. Sometimes they attacked key officials to
disrupt the government and to demonstrate to the populace
that the oldreligion was not dead. More often their attacks
were a form of retaliation for acts of violence, technically
legal, that had been launched against them by the Establish-
ment.
From this distance it is impossible to separate the attacks
made for heroic reasons from those made for other reasons,
especially since the history of the incidents was written by
enemies of the pagans. About some incidents, we can guess
with fair confidence that our guesses are good. The attacks
annually made throughout Europe at Christmas and Easter
time and on various saints’ days were undoubtedly demon-

strations of protest. There is the case of the Comte de Saint-
Pol, Hugues de Camp-d’Avesnes, who attacked the Abbey of
Saint Riquier and burned it to the ground, killing more than
two thousand Christians. He was later captured and, after
various persuasions were applied to his person, he repented
and built the Abbey of Cercamp by way of reparation. How-
ever, his countrymen said of him that, though cowed, he never
gave up practicing werewolfism.
The behavior of Gilles Garnier of Lyons, France, has the
pattern of resistance attacks. His alleged
ged crin
crimes took place
on or near Christian ho
holy da
days, one after the Feast of St.
Michael, another after the Feast of All Saints, and a third
just before the Feast of St. Bartholomew. Further he con-
fessed, upon capture, to having eaten the flesh of one of his
victims on a Friday. Unfortunately for the theory, his victims
were all children. Two were young girls and one a boy barely
in his teens: Further, the method of his murders seemed un-
necessarily messy. With his hands and teeth he tore their
flesh from their bones and later claimed he had consumed
some of the flesh of all three children. He could have been
nothing more than a sorcerer driven mad by the cruelty of
the times. On the other hand, his attacks on the children
could have been directed at their parents for tactical reasons;
however indefensible such attacks were purposive. His boast-
ing about his cannibal acts supports this possibility because,
in those days, Christians believed that a successful resurrec-
tion of the flesh was contingent upon the body’s being buried
intact. Bro;
- The heroic quality of this minority movement, the per-
sistent loyalty of the ancestral religion which these attacks
represented were neatly cut from historical record by those
who had charge of the writing and transcribing of manuscripts
and the housing of the libraries.
When the monks andscholars described the shapeshifters
as vicious and lawless and reported their military tactics as
wanton murder, they did not think of themselves as distorting

history. They could not perceive the rebels’ point of view.
They saw no loyalty or gallantry or touching faith in the
werewolves’ actions. They saw only diabolicplots against the
true church, their only hope of heaven, their one defense
against the tortures of hell.
This English account of the sixteenth-century Dutch
werewolf, Peter Stump, is typical of the Establishment re-
porting:
The Devil who hath a ready ear to listen to the lewd notions
of cursed men, promised to give unto him [Peter Stump]
whatsoever his hart desired during his mortal life. Where-
upon this vile wretch neither desired riches nor promotion,
nor was his fancy satishied with any external or outward
pleasure, but having a tyrannous hart, and a most cruell
bloody mind, he only requested that at his pleasure he
might work his malice on men, women, and children, in the
shape of some beast, whereby he might live without dread
or danger of life, and unknown to be the executor of any
bloody enterprise, which he meant to commit. The Devil
saw him a fit instrument to perform mischief as a wicked
fiend pleased with the desire of wrong and destruction, gave
unto him a girdle which, being put about him, he was
straight transformed into the likeness of a greedy, devouring
wolf, strong and mighty, with eyes great and large, which
in the night sparkled like unto brands of fire, a mouth great
and wide, with the most sharp cruel teeth, a huge body,
and mighty paws. And no sooner should he put off’ the
same girdle, but presently he should appear in his former
shape, according to the proportion of a man, as if he had
never been changed.
Peter Stump’s wolf eyes that “sparkled like unto brands

of fire,” a sure sign to the reporter that the werewolf had
issued howling from the bowels of hell, did no more than the
eyes of any wolf or dog or cat would do at night when light
from a torch or a flashlight catches their inner reflective sur-
faces. Needless to say, Peter Stump was convicted. In pun-
ishment of his crime his executors plucked pieces of his flesh

from his body using red-hot pincers. His arms, legs, and
thighs were broken on a wheel. Lastly, he was burned alive.
Paganism was so deeply rooted in hearts and habits that
the church was never successful in rooting it out completely.
Vestiges of the ancient practices survive to this day. But the
church was successful in attaching the attitude of sinful and
evil to the practice of sorcery. To greater and lesser extents
everyone who engaged in witchcraft felt guilty. Guilt made
many Europeans sick. They became of two minds where sin
was concerned. In one mood, they detested and feared it
and its consequences. In a different mood, they were excited
by it, and craved it. Some responded with a frenzy of repres-
sion, persecuting anyone who engaged in the most innocuous
pagan custom. These latter were the hounds and torturers of
the pagans, drenching Europe in blood and agony for more
than three hundred years. Others, equally sick, developed an
addiction to the exquisite excitement of feeling themselves to
be damned. They reveled in wickedness, plotting further
debasements as former crimes lost their initial thrill.
What they all practiced was no longer a genuine reaction
to paganism but an acting out of the church’s imaginings and
lies about the nature religions. These Christians used sex and
drugs and sacrifice, not in a reverent ritual fashion, but wildly;
desperately to scandalize others and to blot out their own
capacity for thought. They brought hell to reality and living
people took the part of demons and imps. Real pain was
elicited from the ceremonies with whippings, blood lettings,
multiple rapings, human sacrifice, and cannibalism.
Those who had learned or inherited the ability to shape-
shift did so, not for the worship of growing close to nature
and identifying with other animal life, not for the pleasure of
momentarily freeing themselves from the restrictions of social
life, but to terrorize, disfigure, cripple, murder, blackmail,
steal, destroy. They had become the enemy. They were grind-
ing out the dregs of the religion of their ancestors as surely
as the Christians were. They were the gothic werewolves of

fictional fame: living monsters. frie. Tile to.
The Christians had broadcast a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The gothic werewolves were their harvest. To illustrate the
point there is an
uncomfortable number of cases from which
to select. ar hase
In Origines Gauloises, La Tour-d’Auvergne-Corret de-
scribed black masses in which warlocks transformed them-
selves into wolves and, in that form, engaged in orgies.
In 1502 Pierre Burgot, according to his own accounting,
met three horsemen mounted on all-black steeds. The meet-
ing took place in a heavy thunderstorm. Pierre was desperate
because his flock of sheep had scattered and he feared to lose
them in the storm. However, a peasant would never have
dared to refuse the hail of a horseman. He approached the
horsemen and, upon being questioned, told them of his diffi-
culties. Their leader promised Pierre that, if he would swear
to be his liegeman and obey his orders, he would see to it that
not one sheep was lost. Pierre knelt in the mud, kissed the
man’s hand, renounced Christ, his baptism, swore never to
attend mass again nor touch holy water. He kissed the leader's
left hand that felt to him cold as death and looked as black
as the clothes he wore. For a time, all went well; the leader
kept Pierre supplied with money and Pierre continued to
please his new master with committing blasphemy on de-
mand. However, in time he began slipping back into his Chris-
tian habits.
Pierre was ordered to attend a sabbat of warlocks. As
punishment for lapsing, Pierre was forced to strip naked and
he was rubbed with an ointment. No sooner had the ointment
been rubbed into his skin than Pierre metamorphized into a
wolf. One of the warlocks shifted into wolf form also and the
two ran through the forest together.
The warlock-werewolf taught Pierre to mate with wolf
bitches when they were in heat and to run with the pack. He
taught him how to frighten and then kill people. Together,
they murdered a seven-year-old boy, a young matron, and

two girls, one nine years of age and the other four. Pierre
learned to eat his victims while their flesh still palpitated
with life and to lap up blood hot and spurting from the
arteries. The tempo of his destructiveness and killings was
increasing when he was captured.
Obviously Pierre and his teacher were a danger to their
community. Unfortunately, their crime in the public eyes was
sorcery rather than murder. Worse, their savagery was not a
wide deviation from the social norm.
A family of murdering werewolves were captured in 1584.
A man named Pierre Gandillo, his son, and his sister had
joined a satanic coven, attended black masses, and taken up
the hobby of murder and cannabalism. At the time of the
capture, they bore obvious symptoms of heavy drug use:
unkempt appearance, blood-shot eyes, and unsteady gait.
However, at the time it was believed that their habitual shape-
shifting not their drug use was responsible for these char-
acteristics. |
Forty years later the satanic cult was still in full swing
and another trio of bloodthirsty werewolves was discovered
at the site of their latest murder. Only one of the three,
Jacques Roulet, was captured. His brother Jean and a cousin
Julien escaped and were never found.
After his capture, Jacques Roulet told the judge that his
parents had dedicated him to the devil when he was still a
young boy. At that time they had given him the means and
the instruction to turn into a wolf at will. He had lost track
of his parents but had kept in touch with the devil in regular
attendance at his coven’s sabbat.
The devil consulted by Jacques Roulet and Pierre Bur-
got’s three black horsemen were in all likelihood real people...
Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the under-
ground covens of.witches dedicated to satanism were led by
men who dressed in devil’s attire and often assumed his
identity. Sometimes the official warlock costume included a
demonic mask or a horned crown. Some of the more naive

members of the sect may have believed that their leaders
were the devil himself. More likely most of them understood
he was the devil in proxy but pretended to believe otherwise
to confuse and mislead their Christian captors. -
The progression of tactics and countertactics between the
Establishment and the pagans is interesting because, on the
large scale of the centuries-long struggle, there was no overall
plan on either side. Nevertheless, the spontaneous responses
to the pressure each exerted on the other does form a dis-
cernible pattern. The church had begun with a policy of con-
quest. The pagans fought back with underground resistance
in the conquered territories. The church then instituted its
campaign of defamation, torture, and execution. Simple denial
of wrongdoing failed with the mass media that then existed
and with the courts held by the Establishment; pagans were
consigned to the rack and garro. As we have seen, many of
them settled clumsily living up to the Establishment’s worst
accusation, giving themselves over to orgies of violent revenge
upon a society that refused them membership and upon life
itself for its injustices.
The majority employed their considerable talents in the
seduction of the Establishment. It was a task the church was
making easy by its increasing attempts to repress secular joy,
identified as so much of it was with the nature religions.
The pagans launched a counter culture in which all the
pleasures were stressed. The underground air rang with music
and its citizens moved to the rhythms of dance and the drama
of forbidden rites. The occult mysteries are exciting in them-
selves and shapeshifting, one of the most delightful of its
disciplines, was unquestionably an excitement. The fever and
stir and zest for experimentation of the counter culture was
heightened by drugs and an exhilerating sense of wicked
daring. cor
Naturally the Establishment tried to stamp out the illicit
gaiety. But the efforts to do so actually enflamed it. The coun-
ter culture swept over Europe, reaching into the courts of

kings and the palaces of bishops. Of course, not all the new
converts became witches or werewolves, but they participated
in some aspects of the movement and gave it by that partici-
pation another unit of common law status.
Eventually some of the sager heads among the Establish-
ment realized that this was a revolution that could not be
put down with violence. Consciously or not a new workable
tactic was launched. The tactic of derision and disbelief.
As early as 1484 Stephan Lanzkranna, provost of St.
Dorothy’s in Vienna, Austria, declared that the pagan belief
in werewolfery was a deception as well as a sin. In that same
year a German confessional asked the penitent: Have you
done harm to anyone with the devilish art? Have you prac-
ticed magic or witchcraft with the Holy Sacraments? Have
you believed that people can become werewolves?
A hundred years later a confessional still found it neces-
sary to ask: “Have you believed that women change them-
selves into cats, monkeys, and other animals, fly up through
the air, and suck the blood of children?”
In 1597 the son of Mary, queen of Scotland, who as
James I of England was to torment his subjects with his ex-
cessive religionism, announced his conviction that werewolves
were nothing more than a delusion of the mind brought about
by a prolonged attack of melancholia. His opinion was wel-
comed with great relief by the English and Scottish shape-
shifters who were mighty tired of being persecuted. They
made the royal opinion seem true to others by utilizing the
wolf shape less and less.
Abandoning strict werewolfism in favor of other kinds of
shapeshifting was prudent for more reasons than one. The
English passion for wolf hunting, predecessor to their present
passion for fox hunting, had thinned the wolf population on
that island to the point of endangering the species and would
in a few generations exterminate it. Hunters were so accus-
tomed to shapeshifters turning into wolves that they suspected
wolves born in a litter, that had never known the experience
, The Christian Werewolf 57
of walking on two feet, of the crime of werewolvery. The

problem was that shapeshifting was so prevalent and so skill-
fully practiced in England, Scotland, and the Channel Islands,
the tradition having been handed down from both Viking and
Druid ancestors, that any animal selected as a preferred sec-
ondary form in time became known and hunted.
In 1663, Julian Cox was caught in the act by a huntsman,
who testified before the summer assizes that his hounds were
hunting a hare. They had given the animal a good long chase
and a fast one, too. The huntsman could see the hare was
spent and, wishing to save it from the hounds, he ran up on
the hare and seized it. No sooner had he put his hands on the
hare than it shifted forms and became Julian Cox, too out of
breath from running to answer his questions.
In 1711, Anne Thorn accused Jane Wenham of coming
before her in the form of a cat. Judging from the evidence,
Jane Wenham had discovered that a talking cat put the good
souls of her town into a proper fright. She allowed her amuse-
ment over their antics to rob her good judgment and thereby
was caught.
In 1875, Reverend Wentworth Webster noted, “Witches
still appear in the shape of cats, but generally black ones.”
About fifteen years later, Reverend W. Henry Jones was re-
porting accounts of both cat and rabbit transformations. When
cats became too risky as a secondary form, the shapeshifters
of Herefordshire took to using a bat shape.
Eventually the pagans came to realize that, dangerous as
oppression was, disbelief was even more dangerous as a form
of attack because, where the one threatened only individuals,
the other was destroying the faith itself. The realization was
of little use to them, unfortunately. The Establishment had
them neatly caught between a stone and a hard place. If the
pagans openly demonstrated their power, they and/or their
families would be tortured and executed as heretics and crim-
inals. If they continued to practice their arts in secret, they
would be publicly scoffed at.
As the new tactic gained momentum, the demonology cult
lost momentum and gradually became unfashionable and then

was actually considered gauche. The pagans’ ability to attract
followers dwindled. The recruiting of apprentices became
increasingly difficult. As their numbers shrank their knowl-
edge died when an old priest had no young priest to entrust
his secrets to. Their knowledge was distorted because they
often did not recruit the best minds and the strongest per-
sonalities of their times, as had been the case previously.
The pagans had but one tactic left and they used it well.
They survived. They endured. They would not perish. In bits
and drabs, in beliefs that would not die, in superstitions that
hung on despite the mocking, the faith was never completely
lost.
five
Cransformatious:
ofthe Bodyor
ofthe Spirit?
This question bothers students of
shapeshifting, not shapeshifters themselves, just as sexol-
ogists worry about position and rhythm whereas sensual
lovers are too busy enjoying themselves to care which goes
where and does what.
Although the party line of the church from the Ren-
aissance onward leaned toward the position that shapeshift-
ing and other paranormal expressions were aberrations of
the mind, many of her servants had seen too much and heard
too much to believe other than that shapeshifting occurred;
they wondered much about the means of its accomplishment.
How dangerously they were impressed by the pagans’ power
is suggested by the hysterical note in their written reiterations
that such transformations could only be made through the
devil’s intervention and then only with the permission of God.
They argued that only God could create true miracles and
called the transformations “lying wonders.”
But the fact of the transformations so fascinated their
minds that they could not allow the issue to drop. Treatises
59
and tracts and dialogues and essays and letters and man-
uscripts proliferated, asking, answering, arguing the question:
Does the body actually change form or does the devil make
it appear that the body’s shape changes?
Many churchmen put forth the opinion that shapeshifting
was a kind of hypnosis the devil worked upon the werewolf
and all who had contact with him. “Demonical glamour” is
the exact translation of the Latin phrase; while the were-
wolf’s flesh remained the flesh and retained the shape of a
man, he seemed to all who had contact with him, including
himself, to be an animal. Commenting on the accounts of
shapeshifting in Homer’s Odyssey, church philosopher Jean
de Sponde insisted, “The devil can so cheat and deceive men’s
eyes that by his power they take one form which they seem
to see as quite another thing from what it actually is.” In its
implications this argument would seem to be a human effort
to put the devil through hell. When its authors were asked
to account for feats beyond human strength done in the sec-
ondary form, such as a weredonkey carrying a load impossibly
large for a man, they responded that the devil and his imps
“invisibly bore those burdens up when they were too heavy
to be carried.”
Gothic Christianity was certain that mankind was the
apple of the devil’s eye as well as of God’s. Even the poorest
peasant walked abroad smug in his conviction that a host of
angels and demons hovered about him, watching each expres-
sion, brooding over every emotion, trying to reap his soul for
the adornment of their respective abodes. Life was a super-
natural game of hockey with mankind as the puck.
Pierre Mamor, rector of the University at Poitiers, who
had seen a werewolf change from man to beast, agreed whole-
heartedly with this position. He viewed as nothing more than
instances of demonical illusions both his personal experience
and the case of the peasant’s wife who witnessed her husband
vomit up the arm and hand of a child which he had eaten
while he was in his secondary form earlier in the day.
Mamor followed St. Augustine, who went so far as to
Transformations: of the Body or of the SpiritP 61
relegate the shapeshifter to be the most insignificant role pos-

sible in the proceedings. St. Augustine pictured the devil
hypnotizing the werewolf and hiding his sleeping body where
it would not be discovered. Then, acting in his own person
though shaping himself in wolf form, the devil tore around
the werewolf’s neighborhood behaving as wolves then were
believed to behave. Following this carnage, the devil awak-
ened the so-called shapeshifter and provided him with the
pseudomemory of the killing that he, the devil, actually had
done.
The Franciscan theorist Francesco Guazzo agreed with
St. Augustine’s thinking and carried it one step further; he
accounted for those instances in which the shapeshifter was
found to be wounded in exactly the same part of the body
that originally suffered the wound in its secondary shape.
“The devil,” Guazzo said, “wounds her in that part of her
absent body corresponding to the wound which he knows to
have been received by the beast’s body.” It was also Guazzo’s
belief that the “demon,” as he called him, rather than shifting
his own body to that of a wolf, formed a wolf shaped out of
the air and wrapped it around his person.
Those whose sympathies were with the persecuted were-
wolves were quick to point out that, if it were the devil who
did the killing, then the shapeshifter was not guilty of those
crimes and should not be punished. Not so, according to
Father Jacques d’Autun. By deliberately performing a ritual
that the shapeshifter believed would transform him into a
beast, he had in effect underwritten the deeds the devil
wrought in beastly shape and, additionally, participated in
the greater and more detestable sin of making a pact with hell.
Francesco Guazzo was fond of the image of bodies formed
from insubstantial air. He theorized that when the devil was
too busy to wrap himself in a wolf suit of air and go about
tormenting honest folk, he wrapped the shapeshifter, the
witch as he called him, in “an aerial effigy of a beast” and let
him do his own tormenting.
This is much like the later theory of C. W. Leadbeater
who believed that werewolves were the manifestations of

astral beings who took charge of the astral bodies of evil per-
sons and somehow fleshed them out; they used this achieve-
ment for the purpose of killing and rending humans.
Eliphas Levi held that the original form of the werewolf
was human. The wolf form is his sidereal body which he re-
leases during sleep. A bloodthirsty and aggressive man
dreams of being a werewolf, and his sidereal body takes on
the form of a wolf. The man dreams that he is attacking and
killing and the sidereal body attacks and kills. So intimate is
the relationship between the sidereal and the physical body
that when the sidereal body is wounded or fatigued, the
physical body is correspondingly traumatized.
The Hindus and by extension, in the same sense that
Christians are Jews, the Buddhists believe that all humans
are werebeings but that the were aspect, our human body,
is actually the secondary shape, the illusion, reality being
that we are all part of God. As drops of water merge indis-
tinguishably with the ocean so man’s soul merges indistin-
guishably with God. During most of our life, we are caught up
in the illusion of our secondary forms and the illusion of the
world, maya, the Hindus call it. And as long as we allow our-
selves to be deluded, we will be chained to the world life
after life, dream after dream. But when we come completely
to realize the truth, our shape will drop off and our true selves,
the shining godhead, will emerge. In its complete form the
doctrine is a complex and abstract philosophy, but the Hindu
teachers have found that it is often more effective to present
the doctrine in simple allegories. One is a story of the goddess,
Durga, who is herself nothing less than the shining godhead
as seen by human eyes.
One day, the tale goes, Durga on a whim decided to live
for a time as a sow. She put on the body of a sow. As a sow,
she bred with a boar. And in the usual period of time as a
sow she gave birth to a large litter of squirming, healthy
piglets.
Transformations: of the Body or of the Spirit? 63
While the goddess had been playing pig, her devotees

had grown desolate. Her presence was the sun of their lives.
Finally weeping bitterly they went to the god Siva. “Where
is our goddess, oh Siva? Our days have become a misery. We
wake in the morning and pray to her but she does not answer.
We come home from the fields, bathe, and worship her with
flowers and fresh fruits but our offerings are not accepted and
our weariness clings to our bones. We need our goddess.
Please help us.”
Silva took pity on their sorrow and promised to help. “Go
home,” he told the devotees, “and in the morning Durga will
listen to your prayers.”
When they had left, Siva quickly located Durga for he
could see the goddess shining through the body of the sow.
He said to her, “Come, Durga, leave the sow. You have had
enough fun and your devotees need you. They are like chil-
dren without their mother. They cry unceasingly. Come back,
listen to their prayers, and accept their offerings.”
Durga the sow was drowsy with nursing her piglets. “Go
away,” she told Siva sleepily. “Can't you see I have my piglets
around me? They are all I care for.”
Siva saw that as long as Durga was a pig, there was no
reasoning with her. He shattered the sow body with a light-
ning bolt from his eyes and, laughing, Durga rose from the
ashes of the corpse and knew herself to be a goddess.
A more recent writer, Elliot O'Donnell, tries to bridge the
gap between the school of thought that believes the trans-
formation to be of the spirit and those who believe it to be of
the flesh by suggesting it might be a hybrid of the two, a
combination he calls superphysical. He bases his hypothesis
upon the fact that many of the werewolves were not com-
pletely bestial in their secondary form. It is difficult to see
how the facts lead to the hypothesis but certainly there are
sufficient cases of partial or incomplete metamorphosis to
support some theory.
In one case, that of a shapeshifter who lived in Ebouchoux,
France, such an incomplete transformation was responsible

for detection, capture, and subsequent execution. Clauda
Gaillard, the shapeshifter, transformed herself into a giant
wolf for the purpose of robbing an acquaintance of some
coins she knew the acquaintance possessed. Unfortunately,
in her hurry, she forgot to change the toes on her feet. As
she had planned, the acquaintance in terror dropped the
money, but the acquaintance also ran into the village and
THE WEREWOLF —His true appearance makes the were animal

indistinguishable from normal animals, but two generations of
Hollywood makeup men and the illustrators of countless fictions
have perpetrated a minor hoax by characterizing the werewolf as
a combination of human and animal characteristics.
told everyone that they had a werewolf in their midst be-

cause she had seen a wolf with hairless, human-shaped toes.
Benoiste Bidel, a teenager who was fatally injured in a
struggle with a wolf, was able before his death to identify his
assailant as a werewolf rather than an ordinary animal be-
cause the shapeshifter had human hands.
My favorite instance of partial transformation is of the
witch who was so proud of her beautiful breasts that she
retained these in human form and shifted the rest of her body
into the usual shaggy wolf shape.
There were church fathers who maintained that, though
the prime cause of the transformation was demonic, the
metamorphosis itself was physical. Bodin supported his posi-
tion with no less an authority than St. Thomas Aquinas, who
wrote that both good and evil angels belong to the natural
order of existence and both possess the power to transmute
bodies from one form to another.
Those who believe that shapeshifting is an illusion sound
feeble when they try to explain the fact that injury to the
secondary form remains in the corresponding part of the
primary form. Instances of this phenomenon come from
around the world. In Europe alone there were hundreds of
them. During the persecution the favored method of detect-
ing the shapeshifter was to wound a suspected animal and
then search the countryside for a person similarly injured.
This means of identifying a werewolf is at least two thousand
years old.
The experiences of an Italian slave are particularly inter-
esting because they occurred before the persecution of were-
wolves. Notice that the savagery on the part of the wolf form
was not directed toward humans but only toward animals
that are the normal prey of wolves. The slave had taken
advantage of his master’s absence to go to the local inn to
meet his mistress. He was walking through a lonely stretch
of countryside and was pleased to meet a soldier along the
road to keep him company, especially as it was still the dark
of morning. After they had been walking for a mile or so, the
soldier stopped by the edge of the road. Thinking his new-
found friend was only relieving himself, the slave sat down
on the ground to admire the full moon and the stars.
The soldier took so long that the slave grew restive. He
stood up to see what was keeping his companion. To his
horror, he saw that the soldier was mother naked. He had
taken off his clothes and placed them in a pile and was
urinating a circle of wet around them. As soon as the circle
was complete, the soldier turned into a wolf. Howling wildly,
the soldier-wolf bounded off the road into the wood.
The slave, quite bewildered, picked up the soldier’s
clothes. Or rather, he tried to pick them up, but they had
become as heavy as stone and he could not lift them. Finally,
he left the clothes and continued on to his mistress’ home
He found her excited. She told him a huge wolf had broken
into their sheep pen, attacking their sheep and pigs not a
half an hour before. Fortunately, one of the men was nearby.
He grabbed his pike and ran the wolf through with it, driv-
ing the wolf away.
The slave’s curiosity and suspicion was aroused. He ran
back to the place where the soldier had left his clothes.-The
clothes were gone but nearby was a large pool of blood.
Eventually the slave found the soldier at his master’s house.
He was sitting while a doctor bandaged a deep wound in his
neck. Although the slave wanted to have nothing more to do
with the soldier, there was no question of reporting the were-
wolf to the authorities or of punishing him in any way. The
wound in his neck had been given in the process of defending
the livestock, not in retribution for the transformation.
A folktale tells of a woman who by means of a certain
halter had the power to change herself into a horse and run
away to the mountains to live for periods of time without
working. One day, however, she was captured, as chance
would have it, by her husband. Naturally, he had no way of
knowing that the horse he dragged home was his wife. He
Transformations: of the Body or of the SpiritP 67
took her to the village smith and had her shod. When he
arrived home with her, he took her to the barn and put her
in a stall and removed her halter. There standing in front of
him was his wife, naked except for a set of horseshoes nailed
into her hands and feet.
A more convincing story on the face of it was that of a
shapeshifter who angrily transformed himself into a wolf
without bothering to see if such a transformation was in his
best interests at the moment. Again this was in the happy
days before the persecution, so humans were no source of
danger. But a large pack of wolfhounds that belonged to the
nearby castle were romping in the neighborhood. No sooner
had the transformation been complete than the dogs caught
the wolf scent and began a wild chase. The poor wolf was
completely outnumbered and too flustered to think of a re-
transformation. It was not until the pack closed in and began
tearing at him that he finally had the sense to leave his wolf
form. Before he changed one of the dogs tore out his eye.
He was blind in that eye for the rest of his life.
We traced the reasoning and the evidence behind the
natural-physical theory of shapeshifting in the second chap-
ter. On the face of it, this theory seems to be the most be-
lievable. On the other hand we have noted that believability
often has little relationship to what is actually going on in
the world. And there are questions that the natural-physical
theory handles awkwardly.
One such question concerns the issue of the corresponding
wound. Granting a person has the ability to communicate to
the extent that he can change his form from human to animal,
why could he not heal a wound while he was about the process
of returning to human shape? Healing a wound would seem
a much smaller task than an entire rearrangement of body
cells. From this point of view, the corresponding-wound fact
appears to be more on the side of evidence against than evi-
dence supporting the natural-physical theory of shapeshifting.
In all the times I have asked about wound healing, both
in letters and in personal interviews, I have only received two

straightforward answers. The one that impressed me the most
was the one that gave the least information. It came from a
foreman in Arizona’s new cotton fields. He had been identi-
fied as someone skilled in the arts I was interested in. He was
very free with his life history. He had come from Alabama by
way of working a rag-tag carnival and some trucking firms.
Those jobs taught him that he could not get the soil out of
his blood so he went back to farming but on a little better
terms than back home. But he would not admit to knowing
how to shiftshape. On the other hand he would not admit
that he did not know either. He seemed to have lost all in-
terest in the conversation when I asked if he could heal
wounds when returning to the primary form. He thought
about it as though considering it for the first time. Then shook
his head. “I wouldn’t know how to go about healing myself
like that,” he said. “If I was hurt, P'd go to someone who knew
healing. I don’t know healing; leastways not the important
kind.”
The other answer suggested that many shapeshifters did
and do heal themselves by communicating with their body
cells. These wereanimals are never detected through the cor-
respondence of wounds. However, those who knew, for
example, the formula for changing into one kind of animal
and nothing else, quite likely would not know how to heal
themselves and so would be exposed to detection and perma-
nent injury in this manner.
Another serious objection to the natural-physical theory is
that it does not account for the frequent difference in mass
between the primary and the secondary form. A wolf-wolf is
about the length and weight of a human, if one is willing not
to be fussy over a few pounds here and there. But what hap-
pens when a shapeshifter changes himself into a mouse or a
bird? There the difference in mass is too great to be over-
looked. Where does the leftover mass go when the larger
form turns into the smaller? And where is the additional mass
picked up when the smaller form resumes its larger original

shape?
In his recent book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui
Way of Knowledge, its author Carlos Castaneda quotes his
teacher, Don Juan, a werecrow, who says that the flesh of the
human trunk melts away during the transformation. The
crow’s body is formed from the human head. Even so the
student shapeshifter must learn the ritual to shrink the head
until it has reduced in mass sufficiently to weigh no more
than a crow. Crow legs sprout from the human chin; its tail
is formed from the neck; the wings are made from cheek-
bones; mouth and nose merge and shrink to grow into a beak.
According to Don Juan, the process of metamorphizing is ex-
tremely painful, at least for the apprentice. Teaching the
student werecrow to fly is evidently no more difficult than
throwing the newly formed bird into the air. Teaching it to
see coherently took more time. Teaching the apprentice
where the melted flesh went took no time at all because the
master did not think the matter worth mentioning.
Throughout his instruction Don Juan insisted that all
forms of witchcraft were not and should not be subject to
rational thought. Paranormal knowledge, he seems to be say-
ing, can only be gained by participation, by being. It cannot
be argued or reasoned into one’s grasp. One can learn to be-
come a crow. But to try to achieve crowness through verbal
exploration accomplishes nothing but confusion.
Carlos Castaneda coined the term “non-ordinal reality”
for the state in which his teacher sought to bring him so that
he could become a witch and learn the skills and arts of
witchcraft. Don Juan believed that only in the state of non-
ordinal reality can a student put aside the misconceptions of a
lifetime and learn to perceive the world as he saw it. Don
Juan scorned academic questions such as how and why. He
taught his student to concentrate on doing and being. In-
variably those who wish to undertake the discipline of being
and perceiving become mystics. True mystics rarely write
books for they know to what a small extent real knowledge is

transferred by verbal information. The most that can be
hoped is to spark the reader into motion. To start him becom-
ing. To coax him to try to perceive, to want to be.
There are no classrooms or textbooks for this kind of learn-
ing. There is only apprenticeship. A mystic takes a disciple.
True discipleship cannot be bought with money; it is not
that easy or that cheap. A fat wedge of your life is more like
the price your teacher will ask: hours and days, months and
years that are irreplaceable. And even so much is not enough;
the time is wasted unless you give a part of yourself as well
and become changed, a different you, seeing differently, feel-
ing differently, thinking differently, living in a new world.
Nothing will be the same again. A teacher who asks for less,
one who will accept only money, has nothing to sell.
Most of us boggle at such a heroic investment. Those who
resist such a drastic change but still are titillated by the sub-
ject matter become philosophers. They write books.
2
SIX
How Chey
Do It
Even those Christian philosophers

who insist that the devil, one way or another, is the ultimate
cause and prime mover of bodily transformations, agree that
between the cause and the shifting is a triggering device.
When that device is touched off, the shifting begins and not
before.
It is one of the rare points on which the Christians and
the naturalists do agree. The Christians, arguing from the
confines of church dogma, are forced to maintain that the
devil—with God’s consent—has the power simply to will such
transformations, but for reasons of his own, chooses not to.
Naturalists report that their observations and research leads
them to conclude that some shapeshifters have the ability to
transform themselves simply by willing the act, just as we
walk simply by willing ourselves to do so. However, they note
and the Christians agree that the great majority of shape-
shifters and werebeings are forced to rely on intermediary
ritual.
Although there is consensus about the necessity of a trig-
gering device for transformation to occur, there is no cor-
responding consensus about the selection of triggering de-
vices. There is such an embarrassment of diverse, often
. ie
bizarre, devices, variations on devices, and variations on the

variations of devices that a fat book could be written on that
subject alone.
Nothing so clearly indicates the multiple discoveries of
shapeshifting as the variety of immediate means to achieve it.
No doubt, these methods were all, at one time, arranged
within the natural boundaries of their originators. Time and
human migration have altered that, but faint patterns still
exist. In the British Isles, for example, incantation and will
are used more than ointments and paraphernalia. On the
Continent, it is just the other way about. And yet, within the
confines of a single district, all four methods may be in use.
The one single important deviation to this pattern that I
know of is the extraordinary similarity of means that exists
among Navajo werewolves. The land belonging to the Navajo
people lies among the boundaries of three states—Utah, Ari-
zona, and New Mexico—and is large enough to comprise a
state in itself. It seems incredible that only one means of
transformation exists within that large a territory and yet, so
far as Navajos are concerned, this is precisely the case. The
physical appearance of the Navajos does not suggest such
conformity; there is no single type of Navajo face or physique.
As a people they immigrated to the Southwest from Canada
on a centuries-long trek. Their travels and their tolerance
shows in many of their customs. Then as now, they showed
an unusual open-armed acceptance of foreign husbands and
wives. Proportionately more Navajos speak a foreign language
(English or Spanish or both) than do white Americans. The
means for new customs to enter their lives is thus propor-
tionately ample. And new customs are entering. Navajo men
are driving trucks; the young Navajo women are wearing
jeans.
Nevertheless their language remains remarkably pure.
Their spiritual sense of being a people is strikingly alive. And
strangely enough the Navajo skinwalkers, who are their most
and perhaps their only seriously antisocial element, are also
How They DolIt 73
,
their most stubbornly traditional individuals. They refuse any

trace of foreign admixture in their practice of werewolfism.
Although they are hanging onto existence by the claws be-
cause of their overt, aggressive hostility to non-skinwalkers,
they have clung to the ways of their people more tenaciously
than the non-skinwalkers many of whom have become Chris-
tians, peyotists—or, worse, apathetic.
Elsewhere, the variety of triggering devices makes it de-

sirable to sort them into four categories: the use of rituals,
chemicals, incantations, and paraphernalia. If combinations
of the four be ordered into a separate category, there are five
categories.
Using the Skin of the Animals. Let’s take the fourth cate-
gory first; for one reason, it is the one used by the Navajo
werewitches and, for another, it is the most generally popular.
The paraphernalia most generally used by werewolves and
other werebeings to effect their metamorphosis is the skin of
the animal they seek to become. It is an ancient method of
shapeshifting, quite possibly the first known method, going
back, as we have seen, to the paleolithic past when to aid their
hunting, men put on the skins of their quarry and danced
steps that imitated the animal’s movements. Undoubtedly,
the frequency and widespread distribution of its use is related
to its antiquity. The tradition of identification with the char-
acteristics of the secondary form clings to this means of trans-
formation. Those who use it usually cannot or will not shift to
other animal forms. The wearer is emotionally committed,
often pledged, to the form of his skin for life.
Navajo werewolves are said to strip their bodies bare and
paint power symbols on their skin, then adorn themselves
with significant jewelry before placing their animal skins on
their bodies.
Bear in mind that witches are a furtive crew; among them,
werewolves are the most shy and that, among werewolves,
the ones with the most reason and the cleverest at keeping
themselves hidden are the Navajos. Further, the Navajo’s
non-skinwalking neighbors have not the slightest desire to
pry out the skinwalkers’ secrets other than the crucial one of
identification. Skinwalkers are dangerous, often fatally
dangerous. No one with any sense will stand and stare at
them. Reports about skinwalkers are based on quick impres-
sions of those instances when the skinwalker is turning rapidly
with the intent of departing in the opposite direction. Such
circumstances do not make for reliable observations.
A few individuals claim that skinwalkers are different from
other werewolves in that they keep their human form. Their
paraphernalia merely enables them to travel with eerie speed,
one person estimating that a Navajo skinwalker could make
the round trip between the Zuni and Laguna pueblos in a
night. However, all agree that skinwalkers leave footprints of
the animals whose skins they wear so it seems likely that
transformations occur. Or, at least, partial transformations
occur. It may be that a few skinwalkers have been sighted
just as they changed back into human form but were still
clutching their skin in their arms.
Judging from the frequency of sightings, the wolf skin is
chosen by 80 to 90 percent of those who pursue this violent
way of life. However, witnesses agree that the bear skin and
the coyote skin are used. Some informants claim that fox and
owl skins are also in use.
Tradition has it that the Norsemen, like the Greeks,
learned to shapeshift by the use of animal skins from their
gods. Frigga and Freyja owned cloaks of falcon skin and fea-
thers. Red-haired Loki put one on once in the spirit of mischief
and so complete was his metamorphosis that he was able to
fool the gods themselves.
The most famous of the northern pelt-using werebeings
were the berserkirs, who contributed a word to the English
language because of the frenzied headlong attack they made
famous when in battle. In the old pagan days the berserkirs
7
How They Dolt 75
,
were a part of the Establishment, chosen by the warrior-kings

to be their honor guards.
Werewolves were part of the northern scene also. The
Icelandic Volsungasaga tells of Signy, the daughter of King
Volsung, who wed another king, Siggeir. Her husband
treacherously killed his father-in-law and put his wife’s ten
brothers in the stocks so that his mother, a werewolf, could
feed on them at leisure. Unknown to Volsung, his wife Signy
had powers of her own. She used them to free her youngest
brother, Sigmund. By shifting forms Signy escaped her hus-
band and went to live in hiding with Sigmund. They had a
son whom they called Sinfiotli. Father and son became
wanderers.
During their travels they came upon a hut in which two
men lay sleeping. On the wall above them hung two wolf-
skins. Recognizing opportunity, Sigmund and Sinfiotli stole
the skins. They made a pact between themselves to become
werewolves and each go off on his own. However, the first to
kill seven men would how! to the other to join him. Sinfiotli
gave way to the wolf form more deeply than his father. Kill-
ing came to be more and more pleasurable for him. When his
seventh man lay dead at his feet with his throat and bowels
torn out, instead of howling for his father as he had promised,
he ran toward the village in search of another victim. When
his father heard that Sinfiotli had killed eleven men, he
realized that his son had completely given way to the lust to
kill. He knew he had one chance of saving Sinfiotli from a life
of werewolfism. The pelts that had caused their transforma-
tion were peculiar in that, although they could be used as
often as their owners wished, each transformation lasted only
for ten days. If he could reach his son before the period of the
spell was over, he might be able to prevent him from begin-
ning another transformation.
Nose to the ground, he tracked his son until he came upon
him, crouched under the cover of some thick bushes waiting
for the next passer-by. Desperate, the father stopped the kill-
ing rampage by the only means available to him, a savage

wolf fight. The son could fight quickly, but his father was
heavier and his judgment was cooler. Sinfiotli was badly
injured with a throat wound. Fortunately, the wound healed
and when the spell’s power had elapsed, father and son pulled
off their wolfskins and burned them until there was nothing
left but ashes.
A girdle—in medieval days nothing more than a tie belt—
came to be used frequently in place of the entire pelt. This
logical modification of the use of the pelt developed during
the persecution by the Christians when ownership of a wolf
skin invited torture and execution. A mouse or a rabbit skin
usually could be hidden or disguised. But to hide a wolf skin
was extremely difficult and to hide a bear skin impossible,
especially in the tiny huts of the peasantry. So a girdle of
animal skin, which rich and poor alike wore, was a perfect
substitute. And in those days when animal skins were more
easily come by than cloth, girdles made of hide were very
common.
In the cults of demonology, where outrage was prized
more than discretion, it became fashionable to design the
shapeshifting girdles to appear like those worn by the nuns
and monks of various religious orders. After that fad lost its
initial tingle of wickedness, one of the devil-leaders of a witch
coven made a girdle from the flayed skin of a human victim
who had been offered up as a sacrifice during the celebration
of a black mass. This practice also enjoyed a spate of fashion.
The change from pelt to a belt made of pelt is only a small
one; the active ingredient present in the pelt might well re-
main in the belt in sufficient strength to accomplish the de-
sired transformation, but a belt made of human skin that ef-
fects transformation into a wolf is another matter. Its success
suggests that paraphernalia works because of the would-be
werebeing’s emotional response to them, not because of any
sympathetic property per se contained in the materials.
Another instance in which the seemingly wrong material
How They DoIt 77
,
produced the correct results is this one, which comes to us

from northern Europe. Hrolf Kraka was cursed by his step-
mother to become a werebear. To accomplish this, she waved
a glove made from the skin of a wolf in front of his face while
telling him of her intent. From that moment on each day at
sun-up, Hrolf Kraka became a bear. All day long like any
bear, he slept, smelled out honey or fat white grubs, and
hunted, often seizing a sheep when he felt too lazy to go after
wild prey. At sundown his human form was returned to him.
Eventually, the shepherds tired of his plundering and killed
him.
In southern Europe, especially in Italy, the halter was

widely used as a paraphernalia curse. A donkey’s halter was
thrown over the head of the intended victim, instantly trans-
forming him into a donkey. If the shapeshifter wanted to turn
into a horse, a horse’s halter was used. This method may have
grown out of using the pelt. More likely, since no recorded
instance exists of specifying a halter made of horse or donkey
skin, it was first used with a verbal curse, the curse gradually
falling into disuse as it was seen to be unnecessary. The
startling weight of the halter coming down over the victim’s
head was all that was needed.
The halters were often called “magical” halters. I suspect
that for many people, especially for shapeshifters, any halter
would have turned the trick. There are a number of stories
of witches who were caught in their own traps when a crafty
ex-victim, tired of being ridden through the night, managed
to throw the halter over his oppressor’s head. In the telling
and retelling of these stories a nice bit of fancy yarning has
been added to the effect that the witches, in their new animal
shapes, were taken to the blacksmiths to be shod so that when
they finally recovered their human form, they still experi-
enced the pain and humiliation of having horseshoes nailed
to their hands and feet.
Chemical stimulation is the next most popular means of

changing form. As we shall see numerous chemicals applied in
a variety of ways are effective. During gothic and renaissance
Europe the discipline of pharmacology developed rapidly,
providing the same newsworthiness that space research does
now. Hundreds of amateur and professional pharmacologists,
alchemists as they were called then, worked on the problem
of developing an ointment for shapeshifting. Most of their
successful results were based on herbs that had been used
by shamans and priests of the nature religions before the in-
vention of writing.
Hemlock, aconite, deadly nightshade or belladonna,
cinquefoil, and henbane or cowbane: all were used in one
formula or another, all had an ‘ancient tradition behind them,
and all contain alkaloids that have potent effects on the
central nervous system of man. In the raw state, it is hard to
estimate the potency because it varies from plant to plant. As
few as fourteen berries of the nightshade bush have been
known to be fatal. In lesser dosages, nightshade produces in-
toxication followed by short-term amnesia. Hen- or cowbane
has hallucinogenic properties and is the source material for
the medical drug scopolamine. Aconite root slows the heart-
beat; it is a potent herb and unless used cautiously will stop
the heart altogether. Hemlock was the poison Socrates took;
it kills by causing a muscular paralysis, usually of the respira-
tory system. For some persons it is hallucinogenic; for others
it leaves consciousness seemingly untouched. Its effect on the
muscles is unvarying.
Although these drugs affect the body differently, medi-
cally speaking, from the functional point of view, despite the
different combinations and amounts, more often than not they
brought on the desired transformation. Possibly the shock to
the nervous system causes metamorphosis.
The herbs were dried, laboriously ground with pestle and
How They DolIt 79
,
mortar to a superfine powder and carefully mixed with clari-

fied fat. The grease chosen by eight alchemists out of ten was
clarified baby fat. If no babies were at hand, young children
could be substituted. Bat’s blood was a frequent thinning
agent. Soot provided the color of evil.
Sloppy alchemists tossed the unpurified lumps of fat in
with whole leaves and cut-up stems and roots of the herbs,
cooked the mess slowly for several hours, scummed and
cooled it. Either way the result was an ointment or unguent
as it was often called. If a linament was desired, the ointment
was thinned with oil or bat’s blood. If the chemist preferred a
thicker paste, flour was added.
Medieval and renaissance moralists were fond of describ-
ing in tones of outrage the werewolf’s custom of removing his
clothes as though it were the preliminary step to an orgy; in
fact, necessity rather than depravity compelled the gesture.
To provide maximum results, shapeshifters applied the oint-
ment to the entire skin surface. Often werewolves combined
old methods with new by rubbing the unguent thoroughly
into their bare bodies and then putting on their animal skins
or girdles. The satanist who led Peter Stump into werewolfism
used this double-barreled approach. To insure his hold over
Stump, he did not make him an outright gift of the unguent
and the girdle but kept them so that Stump would have to
come to him whenever he wished to undergo transformation.
The leader of a demonic cult in France in the third year of
the seventeenth century followed a strikingly similar pro-
cedure. He called himself, as many of the coven leaders did,
the Lord of the Forest. Dressed typically in black and typi-
cally mounted on a large black horse, he was tall, black haired,
dark eyed, and impressively sinister. He may have been homo-
sexual. His coven was comprised of teen-age boys, orphans,
and runaways, who were looking for affection and the security
of someone to tell them what to do. He told them to murder
and eat little girls. The Lord of the Forest habitually greeted
his young apprentices with a kiss on the mouth (not in itself
a sign of homosexuality; a kiss of greeting was common among

the men of the period. Consider, also, the more modern kiss
among male Mafiosi.) His followers noticed with a shudder of
delight that the lips of the Lord of the Forest were as cold
as death. The lord marked his own followers by cutting the
devil’s sign into their thighs with a ritualistic knife at the time
of their initiation. Not only did he keep the means of trans-
formation in his own possession, he refused to let his charges
out of his sight. When the boys begged to be allowed to be-
come wolves, the lord shifted into the form of a leopard and
led the pack in search of victims.
A refinement of the application of ointments was the de-

velopment of potions. Shapeshifters drank the potion and
absorbed it through miles of kinky intestinal tract. Potions
had a higher response per dosage, were altogether less messy,
and had the advantage of being capable of fast unobtrusive
administration.
All the alkaloid-containing herbs used in ointments were
found to be even more effective in potions. To that list the
alchemists added mandrake (the Eurasian herb Mandragora
officinarum, not the benign American mayapple that is some-
times called mandrake), a pleasantly mood-elevating drug
and alcohol.
The potions were made by the infusion of the herbs into
the alcohol. Obviously, cooking was impossible or the alco-
holic content would be lost to evaporation. Instead, the herbs
were finely powdered and stirred in or, in their coarser states,
left to soak for long periods of time. Originally ale and wine
were used because they were so readily available. Then in the
fourteenth century a Franciscan monk, Raymond Lully, de-
veloped an excellent means of condensing wine into brandy.
Not long after Lully’s epic process was formulated, the Irish
found the means for condensing ale into usquebaugh, a Gallic
term for water of life. The English, better at diplomacy than
How They Dolt 81
,
languages, mispronounced the Gallic and it came out sound-

ing like whiskey. Brandy and whiskey, thought by some to be
capable of some pretty broad transformative powers on their
own, made the more ritualized act of transformation so very
pleasant that ointments were used much less thereafter.
I am inclined to believe that the ointments and potions be-
came popular in Europe because werewolves enjoyed trip-
ping, not because these methods were one more whit effective
than the old-fashioned pelt or girdle. A drug culture had
boiled across Europe hand-in-hand with satanism and there
is no reason to suppose that the werebeings and shapeshifters
were impervious to its seductions. As rebels and criminals
under attack and in continuing danger from the mainstream
of society, they were probably more than a little susceptible
to drug taking.
It is a good bet that, had the ointments and lotions con-
tained placebos instead of drugs, the shifting would have
occurred on schedule, the only difference being that the
wolves—instead of thrashing about the countryside smashed
out of their skulls—would have soberly sought their local
pusher for a long confrontation about the new dope he was
pushing.
There have been at least a dozen, possibly more, tales sur-
viving time and apocrypha to describe the effects of a shape-
shifter who rubbed in the wrong unguent or drank the wrong
potion by mistake and instead of becoming the animal he
wished to transform into, he became brand X instead. Of
course such occurrence is possible; anything is. But such
stories do not greatly impress me.
At any rate, ointments, potions, and herbs chewed raw
are used by many shapeshifting groups around the world.
Discovering which herbs and learning the particulars of the
formula is another matter. Shapeshifters have a vexatious
sense of humor when outsiders nose into their private affairs.
Many of them delight in seeing what horrid concoctions they
can make the outsider toss down his throat. When the prom-
ised transformation does not occur, they are quite capable

of looking the trusting soul in the eyes and murmuring, “You
must not have mixed it quite right. Try again.”
A pretty, unpretentious flower grows in the meadows and

forest woodlands of the Balkans. It has a sweet fragrance, en-
during enough to be carried on the winds from mountainside
to canyon floor. Whether the odor acts as a signal or whether
the chemicals that produce it affect the nervous system, enter-
ing the bloodstream through the mucous membrane in the
nose, one good whiff brings about transformation into the
wolf shape.
The flowers are sought out by those who desire a second
life, but they also have been known to change the life of an
innocent passer-by who desired nothing so much as to arrive
home in roughly the same shape in which he left. People who
delight in being werewolves but live some distance from the
mountain homelands of the flowers, make regular pilgrimages
to collect bagsful of them to dry and later to be brewed in
tea, which releases the fragrance and accomplishes the pur-
pose.
I have been unable to discover other instances of odors
triggering off shapeshifting but I believe that they do, none-
theless, exist.
Eating the flesh and organs of the animal the would-be

werebeing desires to become is practiced in parts of Spain, the
Slovakian countries, and the USSR. Lapping up water from
the paw print made by an owner of the intended form enjoys
wide practice, if not a large numerical following.
An interesting case was reported in Italy in the middle of
the fifteenth century. A young merchant marine metamor-
phized into a donkey as a result of eating some eggs that he
had bought from an old woman. Her motive was practical
enough. She needed a donkey—and for three years she had
: How They Dolt 83
/
one. There is no hint in the story as it comes down to us that

the sailor had any suspicion of the woman’s intent or that the
eggs had been doctored in any way other than by incantation.
The sailor-donkey gained a reprieve after he had given
up all hope. On the way to market one day, a load of vegeta-
bles on his back, he heard a bell ringing through the open
doors of a nearby church. Absentmindedly, he knelt and
pressed his hooves together in prayer. Before the old woman
beat him to his feet with her stick, his action was observed by
two townsmen who had been wondering about her odd ways
for some time. They seized her, hauled her off to the local
magistrate’s office where a confession was forced out of her,
and she restored the sailor’s original form to him in a vain hope
of receiving mercy.
Next to the act of willing the process to occur, incantation

is the most sophisticated means of shapeshifting. Nothing
more is needed than the shapeshifter’s memory and ability to
speak. A faulty memory can be maddening. More than one
werebeing has been permanently stuck in his human form,
the most irritating by-product of aphasia.
The best incantations are in the shapeshifter’s native
language, and are short, direct, and pithy. They are the most
easily remembered, and sound like nursery rhymes. Putting
the incantation into a doggerel verse can be an aid to memory
if the form is not allowed to become too complex. A Pennsyl-
vania Dutch boy around the turn of the century fell into
some trouble when he dug out an old book from a trunk in
the attic and began reading aloud some of the funny-sounding
verses in it. Fortunately for him, they were curses on others.
And fortunately for his uncle and the hired hand, who turned
into horses, there was a verse in the book to reverse the
process; further, the boy’s aunt, though not a shapeshifter
herself, knew what to do, because her mother had been a
shapeshifter.
Incantations became treacherous with time. Each new
line added by someone along the way, each archaic word, is

an additional tongue stumbler and memory obstacle. When,
as often happens, the incantation has been passed generation
after generation from witch to apprentice, filtered across na-
tional boundaries, continents and oceans, and slipped around
tongues that speak many different languages, the result is a
tongue-twisting, memory-boggling breath-stopper.
It is a truism among students of nature religions that in-
cantations or rituals must be performed intonation- and word-
perfect. Like most truisms, this one exaggerates and over-
simplifies reality. Power words must be said properly. Perhaps
it would be more apt to call them power sound-combinations
for they have no meaning other than the inherent power that
speaking them evokes. Inflection and intonation of these
words are critical. In certain mantras—incantations that orig-
inated in India’s Vedic period—numbers of these power words
are linked together, achieving a greater effect in combination
than the individual words could produce separately. Arrange-
ment and timing can be essential. Chants, or long incanta-
tions, are like songs, in that rhythm and tone are two-thirds of
the structure. The words alone cannot achieve the desired
effect.
Too often incantations contain words that lack both power
and meaning, dross picked up during the generations of
transmission. Some of these are mispronounced foreign words
whose meanings are long since forgotten; others are mispro-
nounced power words that become, in their mangled state,
devoid of their intended force. A witch who is a good tech-
nician will attempt to clean up incantations in her possession
before passing them on, carefully checking each word or
sound that lacks content to see if its utterance is necessary
to the end result. However, many sorcerers are careless and
others are sentimental about the “valued” gift from a beloved
teacher or master, reproducing it in exactly the same way they
received it, teaching it, in turn to their apprentices, the same
way. But an experienced shapeshifter with strong native
How They DolIt 85
/
ability, who conscientiously attempts to clean up an incanta-

tion, can unintentionally strip useful power words from it.
Without these words, the incantation may still work, but the
formula will not be as effective and may not work at all for a
novice.
Incantations that convey content usually require some-
thing of the speaker: belief, concentration, or the focusing of
paranormal abilities. Incantations that are only power words
usually require nothing of the speaker except the delivery—
they operate in a manner analagous to flipping a switch or
turning on a faucet. If the system is intact and operated
properly, it will work whether or not the speaker believes in
it. Therefore experts advise amateurs not to experiment with-
out supervision or at least competent assistance. Some in-
cantations are as dangerous as loaded guns.
Incantations that effect shapeshifting require especially
delicate care. As we have seen, the weight of evidence sug-
gests that shapeshifting has definite psychophysiological as-
pects. Emotion, attitude, expectation, and intent contribute
enormously to the ability to transform. With some individuals,
intent is all that is required. Many incantations lack power
words altogether. They work by directing the mind to an idea
or an image or an emotion or some combination of these ele-
ments. The direction can be given in many different ways.
Length, grace, style, language can change without an effect
on the outcome, providing the directions are meaningful.
The best approach for using either ritual or incantation in
shapeshifting is to pass each on exactly as it was received;
don’t meddle with the composition no matter how clumsy,
absurd, or ornamental the pattern may seem. Contrariwise,
when using it, do not be overscrupulous; confidence and verve
are more helpful to the novice than a sense of extreme caution
and anxiety.
Basically rituals are incantations done in sign language.

Some rituals, like power words, are gestures that evoke para-
normal power. In Sanskrit language, these gestures are called
mudras; English has as yet no word for the concept, although
it is my belief that English will take over a variation of the
Sanskrit word. Mudras must be performed exactly in order to
be effective. Rituals which contain long strings of mudras re-
quire enormous efforts of concentration, memory, and
strength to perform. In some rituals, timing is as important
as it is in music.
Fortunately, most shapeshifting rituals are relatively
simple. One ritual, which is pure sign language with no power
gestures, is to remove the clothes and roll naked in the sand at
night. This behavior, done in the manner of a wolf rolling
while the werewolf concentrates on the animal he seeks to be-
come, has been used effectively throughout the world. An-
other of the same sort is to lap water (as a wolf laps) from a
stream or pool at night. Some students maintain that lapping
is effective only at certain streams and pools; they claim that
the properties of the water, not the gesture of lapping, pro-
duce the metamorphosis. One competent informant assures
me that lapping alone is sufficient. Using the framework of
earlier information, it is easy to speculate that both claims
have proved out with different shapeshifters.
Mimetic Dancing. In Africa the people who live near the

Jiundu Swamp, which lies on the border between the Congo
and Rhodesia, become werejackals by performing a ritualistic
mimetic dance to the accompaniment of a special type of
drum and, no doubt, special rhythmic patterns. The mimetic
dance accompanied by drums is probably as old as the wear-
ing of animal skins for the purpose of transformation and the
two are often combined. The mimetic dance died out in
Europe because the ritual is almost impossible to conceal.
Rumors persist that, in a few mountain-fortress caverns, the
custom has survived among the remote villages. And it is
How They DolIt 87
,
likely to be in use in many nooks and crannies of the world

that have escaped the impact of urban civilization.
If shifting by mimetic dancing is the easiest method to

learn, shifting by intent or will power is the most difficult.
Intent and expectation range large in shapeshifting; we have
seen evidence of this again and again. We also have seen that,
at least with some people, the slightest push in the right direc-
tion can produce metamorphosis. It requires skillful teaching,
however, and even then, not everyone is capable of learning,
not everyone can surrender enough of the ego hold necessary
to accomplish the leap into change. Usually this method is
taught within the auspices of an organized priesthood where
it is supported both by preparatory discipline and by the
selection of appropriate personality types. The Greek were-
wolf and the Druidic shapeshifting cults practiced these
methods in the British Isles. Among them shapeshifting was
not a part of the priesthood proper. On the American conti-
nent, the Aztec priesthood was an elite, largely aristocratic
organization with a complex operation devoted to promoting
and maintaining the well-being of a feudal empire. However,
within Aztec society a quasi-legitimate peasant cult of
sorcerers existed who were most sophisticated in the practice
of shapeshifting at will. The priesthood was completely de-
stroyed by the Spaniards during and after the conquest; the
sorcerers, being less conspicuous, survived. It is a known fact
that many of their skills are in use today by Mexican witches
(brujas). It is also common knowledge that many of the
brujas are werebeings. Whether they have been able to pre-
serve the art of shapeshifting by intent is a matter of con-
jecture.
seven
Che Cat
People
Wolves became the patron animal of
shapeshifters principally because of the fact that nothing sets
the human heart bouncing with terror so much. But cats
climbed to the same exalted position with shapeshifters be-
cause of their ability to make the human heart bulge with
affection. In the Western World, cat people are shapeshifters
second and witches first; cat people shapeshift largely for the
fun of it, using their other talents for the task of earning a
living. In Europe, domestic cats and witchcraft came together
during the Middle Ages, but the association goes back far
beyond that time and probably originated in northern Africa.
The religion of ancient Egypt was the old paleolithic
nature religion, grown more complex thanks to the admixture
of its versions by many people and by virtue of being adapted
to the practice of agriculture. The people themselves did not
adopt totemic animals; their gods and goddesses did, many
of them learning to shapeshift into the form of a given totemic
animal. These special, totemic animals became sacred to the
Egyptians in much the same way a temple is sanctified be-
cause it houses a god. Mystic power rubs off on its surround-
ings.
So many of the Egyptian gods and goddesses chose the
88
The Cat People 89
domestic cat as their totem that, in time, the priests of Egypt

came to feel that the cat was a repository of divine qualities.
The head and heart and soles of the feet of the cat belonged
to Ra; the eyes to Uraeus; Thoth ruled the neck and the
breast; Neb-er-tcher owned the ears, Neheb-ka the neck. The
front paws held the qualities of all the gods. The belly was of
Osiris. Meh-urit was manifest in the guts, Menthu in the
thighs. Horus could be seen in the cat’s haunches, Khonsu in
the legs, and Amen-Horus in the hind feet. Effigies of the cat
were buried with the Egyptian dead to give them protection
on their long journey into the unknown.
Each of the mother goddesses—Atet, Isis, Mout—made it
clear that to them the cat represented motherhood at its best.
When the compassionate goddess Bast, another deity who
preferred the cat form, was stung by a scorpion, she recited
an incantation addressed to Ra that she had learned from the
god Thoth. Bast, often represented as cat headed, was a god-
dess of the moon; anyone who has ever seen a cat playing with
moths in the moonlight knows why Bast was also considered
patroness of the dance.
After he had shifted into the form of a cat, the sun god Ra
killed the great serpent of evil. Cats had no difficulty in find-
ing homes; the Egyptians welcomed even a tiny kitten, feeling
its presence was sufficient to ward off evil spirits. People so
unfortunate as to be without a cat of their own, bought amu-
lets of cat figures and prayed to Ra for help.
Both the Egyptian domesticated cat and Egyptian occult

knowledge traveled westward by the same route, at the same
time, and often in the arms and head of the same person. Both
were accepted eagerly by the inheritors of the European
nature religions. Inside the village boundaries or the city
walls, the cat provided the nature worshipers with a link to all
animal life. The cat’s healthy instincts and well-programmed
imprinting acted as instructor, inspiration, and comfort for
those who longed for the freedom of the forests. It is true that
the villagers and even the city people already owned an
abundance of domestic animals, but the cat is the one
domestic animal with a wild heart and an independent spirit.
These characteristics were especially true of the feudal cats
who fed themselves by hunting the huge rats that swarmed
through the fields and peasant communities.
As the sorcerer-priests were diverted by their Christian
lords from nature worship to devil worship, cats lost their
pedestal in the temple of the gods and became witche’s famil-
iar. Their function, especially in Egyptian-oriented sorcery,
was unchanged. While the witch recited the incantations and
performed the rites, the cat-as-familiar played the same role
as had the cat-as-temple to the Egyptian priests. But the dif-
ference in attitude was considerable. The contemporary
meaning of the word “familiar” aptly describes the intimacy
of the relationship, although its exact nature varied according
to the emotional makeup of cat and witch. Some were like
parent and child, others like two cronies; more austere prac-
titioners achieved a comrades-at-arms relationship. And there
were even those who became lovers and mates.
It is true that many witches never transformed themselves
into cat form even though the cat was familiar. More usually,
those who had the ability to undergo transformations and
were able to choose the form they wished, did choose the
shape of their familiar in order to be able to act out the rela-
tionship more deeply and in greater detail. As cats, witch and
familiar played and hunted together, defended their territory
and, in more rare instances, courted, mated, sired or bore off-
spring, nursed or hunted for the nursing mother, and later
taught the young kits to keep themselves clean, to climb, stalk,
pounce, and kill.
In a real sense, the familiar became part of the witch’s
family, often the familiar was the family. Similarly, the
familiars were part of the coven. In Egyptian-based sorcery
the covens could not function mystically without the presence
of at least one familiar. If an old witch died before her famil-
The Cat People 91
,
iar, the cat was taken into the home of one of the novices.
Where the novice required the use of a personal cat before
her teacher was ready to part with his own, the sorcerer would
spend watchful days and months seeking a proper cat with
suitable intelligence and temperament for the job it would
be required to do.
The familiar was a participant in the practice of sorcery. In
some rites, the cat was the stand-in for a nature spirit or god
or, in the latter Middle Ages, the devil. For the procedure to
be successful, the cat was required to sit or stand or lie still,
not twitching a whisker or lifting a paw. Certain very power-
ful rites even called for sophisticated assistance from the
familiar. In conjuring death or sickness, many curses required
the cat to walk into the victim’s sleeping room. Certain rites
were dependent upon the cat’s walking from square to pen-
tacle—at the cue of the ringing of a bell or the lighting of in-
cense or at a similar signal, the cat would rise from a sitting
position, turn 180 degrees and sit down again. Obviously no
butterfly-brained kitten could undertake such tasks.
A witch’s power was limited by her cat’s abilities. Her
knowledge and her skill were useless unless she had a cat
equal to the responsibilities of partnership in sorcery. Not
surprisingly, then, the full dignity of partnership was con-
ferred upon such a cat when it was found. The familiar was
taken and formally introduced to the coven. Often it was
baptized and given a witch name, calculated to intensify the
power already residing within it. Such cats, the brilliant ones,
the ones with power bristling out from the ends of their fur
and whiskertips are rare.
Many a witch has been made wretched by a feline simple-
ton that played chase-my-tail at a crucial moment or tried to
catch the incense trails or pounced playfully on a trailing
sleeve during the making of a mantra. There are ceremonies
that require the sacrifice of such cats and, though not pleas-
ant, some think the rites excellently suited to their qualities
and beneficial to the breed. In some, the sacrificial animal
represents a god who dies only to be reborn. In others, the act
is done by way of extortion: the god’s favorite animal is

harmed to coerce the desired behavior from the god.
Incredibly the citizens of Provence, France, managed to
continue practicing certain Egyptian mysteries until 1757
when the annual June celebration of Horus was held. At that
time the most handsome male cat in the district was carefully
wrapped in swaddling clothes, decked with flowers, and
carried on a litter in a procession. People lined the roads for
the honor of bowing before the cat who was the incarnate
representative of Horus, the savior who gave his life each day
for his worshipers. When the sun crossed the meridian, the
priest of Horus placed the small swaddled figure in a basket
and threw it into the maw of a roaring bonfire. The devotees
sang anthems of praise while the cat burned to death. The
worship of Horus had so infiltrated local practice of Chris-
tianity that the church’s priests and bishops took part in the
singing and later marched with the other worshipers in
solemn procession as the ceremony closed.
In Scotland the sacrifice of a cat was used to raise a storm.
The coven to which Agnes Sampson belonged made an at-
tempt on the lives of King James and Queen Anne by using
this method to create a storm while the royal family was
journeying home from a visit to Denmark.
For those who had a really good familiar, sacrifice was not
necessary to start the waves heaving for a storm. Bast, the cat
goddess, as mistress of the moon, exercised a strong control
over the waves. The tides belonged to her. And through her
experience in letting loose the sea’s force and gathering it
back in, she learned how to call up a storm. The witch whose
familiar possessed the charm and intelligence to honor Bast’s
secondary form, could have a storm for the asking. In a cere-
mony of flattery, before making the request, some witches
shifted into cat form. The gesture was risky, however, because
if the witch were old or ugly or clumsy, Bast was not im-
pressed.
Bast’s love of cats made sailors hate them. Sailors came to
fd
The Cat People 93
see a witch in every cat that prowled the wharfs looking for
rats. The sight of a cat sharpening its claws on the piling sent
shivers down their spines. “Look, it’s raising the wind,” they
would say, and more than one innocent cat was killed for
raising havoc when it only wanted supper.
A werewolf did his killing in his secondary form; a cat
person rarely did, preferring to curse or to poison. Theoret-
ically, of course, a domestic cat could kill. It is possible that
over the centuries a few humans have been killed by the
claws of the cat witches. Killing as a direct frontal assault
was not done by the followers of Bast or Isis but was done by
the worshipers of Ra who used the cat form in which to slay.
However, the worship of Ra never reached the West. Perhaps
Ra worship was not needed there because, in the West, Christ
had become the god of killing.
The cat people were not only employed in warfare but
also in the highly valuable business of spying. Men who had
achieved great power did so after they learned the discipline
of keeping their plans to themselves. Many such lonely men
came to confide aloud in a pet cat while stroking its ears or
scratching beneath its chin or while it lay, paws folded under,
gazing up at its master with great wise eyes. The man spoke.
The cat purred in reply. The harsh rumble and feel of fur on
palm had a disarming, hypnotic effect. Goals and schemes
and stratagems came pouring out. It was a risky business for
the werecat, too. Powerful men have powerful tempers and
powerful notions, as well. A witch, sent to spy on a lord who
thought he had no love of cats, suffered many a lump while
changing the lord’s mind. Even after she had worked her way
into the lord’s affections, there were still jealous servants to
contend with. Witches have died in service and not always
because their human identity was discovered.
There was another risk, an emotional one. Cat witches
have been known to fall passionately in love with the great
man on whom they spied. It was a disaster that reduced the
witch’s usefulness to her employer and to herself; generally
the passion was doomed to be one sided. Not always. It has

been claimed that Cardinal Richelieu gained a mistress and
lost an enemy in the form of a white tabby with topaz eyes
who came to spy on him and stayed to betray her English
king.
Much has been written about how witches metamorphize
to go to sabbats. The concept of the witches’ sabbat has been
so fraught with horror for Christian writers that they tend to
make more hyperbole than sense out of the custom.
Transformation was used more extensively in Greece than
in the ancient Egyptian mysteries. In Egypt, during certain
ceremonies a high priest in his role of representative of the
god, would, if he had achieved the discipline, shift himself
into the god’s favorite animal form; in that form, he accepted
the offerings and adoration of his worshipers. The practice
was continued in those feudal covens steeped in Egyptian
sorcery; no mass transformations occurred as they did in
covens that had Greek or aboriginal European origin. In the
Egyptian covens only the priest or priestess shifted into cat
form, leaped up onto the altar and sat, paw upraised, during
the proceedings. Confessions, in which people spoke of being
received by the devil in the shape of a cat, came from witches
trained in Egyptian sorcery. In the Greek mysteries, the
witches themselves shifted during the sabbat; the priest was
more likely to retain his own shape, costumed as Pan-Satan,
or to shift into wolf shape in honor of Apollo.
On the other hand, transformation to animal on the way to
sabbat had a practical purpose: ease of transportation. The
cat form was used to go to covens, not to the more distant sab-
bats. Domestic cats are swift and silent travelers, but they are
not built for distance. A witch that traveled more than two
miles in cat form would have sore muscles the next day. To
reach the sabbat, witches either transformed themselves into
birds or dogs or foxes or transformed a victim into a horse or
donkey. A few required no transportation other than their
own powers.
The Cat People 95
/
During early phases of the persecution, witches took to

meeting together in cat form to prevent detection, a pre-
caution that had nothing to do with their religious rites. How-
ever as cats and witches became linked in the European mind,
cats like wolves were hunted down and slain for what they
might be, no time having been wasted in an effort to discover
what they were. The Europeans paid a terrible price for this
indiscriminate slaughter. Cats had kept themselves fat deci-
mating the rat population. Without this ceiling on its growth,
the rat population soared crazily, providing a dense breeding
ground for the fleas that carried the plague.
Most often the cat witch used the secondary form for rest
and recreation. As a cat, she could enjoy her familiar sur-
roundings and still not be at home to humans when she
wanted solitude. She could take a leisurely bath and lie, mind
glazed, while her fur soaked up the sun’s heat. In those days
when a hot bath was a rich man’s luxury, she could spend an
hour enjoying a thoroughgoing, sensual washing. In those
days when adventure and excitement were denied women,
she could hunt with the avidity and recklessness of a lord.
And, most important, when women’s sexual behavior was con-
sidered to be everyone’s business but her own, she could be
part of a passionate and undemanding love affair. In other
words, as a cat, the witch could take a holiday from being
human at a time when being human was even more difficult
than it is today.
An altogether different breed of cat people inhabits an

impressive swath of Africa: the dreaded human leopards and
lion men of Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Ivory Coast,
Ghana, Cameroons, the Congos, the Central African Repub-
lic, Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania, Rhodesia, and Mozambique.
While by no means the only werebeings in Africa, these hu-
man leopards and lion men nonetheless are the only African
werebeings who have organized themselves in societies that
are separate, secret, and at cross-purposes with the legitimate

social life around them. Secret though these societies are, they
leave spoor that is easy for even an inexperienced observer to
identify: badly clawed corpses from which the heart, the
sexual organs, or part of the flesh and fat have been torn.
The leopard and lion societies evolved from the religious-
social men’s clubs that dominate village life. Like the men’s
clubs they have their own religious ceremonies and dances,
ceremonial clothes and masks. Urban journalists write about
these societies as if they were a string of operating franchises.
In reality, each society has a separate identity. With each, the
focus of emotional involvement of love or hate or, more likely,
a chaotic mixture of the two is with its own tribe and village.
The cat people speak the language of the people of their birth
and are making no attempt to communicate with each other,
far less to create a central governing agency. The histories of
the various societies are their own. Their customs stem from
those histories. Even the means of transformation vary from
group to group. Loyalties belong not to each other but to a
vanishing past and a way of life which may have been better
than what is, or what will be, but nevertheless is contrary to
the wishes of those who have taken up the reins of national-
istic government.
Today these societies are analogous to the European were-
wolf cults of the seventeenth century. Like them they are
outlaw organizations. Like the werewolves, the cat people
are angry, defensive men slashing blindly at a style of life that
is slowly burying them as inexorably as the ashes that choked
the streets and buildings of Pompeii.
The history of these organizations as groups of outlaws
goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century when
cat people began meeting together to obstruct and subvert
the encroaching white domination and to punish black
Africans who had become white sycophants. From the begin-
ning the struggle was purely local. They were fighting for the
right of the village or the tribe to govern itself and determine
The Cat People 97
THE TIGER—Because of its power, cunning, cat-like mystery, and

great abilities as a preditor, the tiger cut a wide swath of admira-
tion and respect among primitive peoples and became a totemic
animal of some popularity for religions and secret organizations.
It ranked close to the wolf and leopard in the affections of shape-
shifters.
the use of its own land. Little can be said about any one of
these societies that is true of them all. Still, there are too many
to give each its separate history here. Fortunately, the
similarity of their goals and of the talents of their member-
ships allows rough generalizations.
These societies were trying to drive the white foreigner
out of their lands. Usually their best tactics were the surprise,
the secrecy, and the concealed weapons inherent in shape-
shifting. The members were not compulsive about method,
however. They threw all of their abilities, conventional and
paranormal, into the task. The better sorcerers among them
began adapting the power pouches, familiar features of Afri-
can religious life, to the specific task of punishing white men
and protecting the membership of the newly formed societies.
These power pouches are most widely known as borfima. The
borfima came to be a power symbol of the group spirit. To

keep the spirit strong, the members “fed” it, in paranormal
rite, the blood and fat of the whites. It was for this purpose
that the organs and the flesh of their victims were cut out. In
some of the cults the cat people developed the habit of join-
ing the borfima in its ceremonial meal.
The effect this custom had on the white community can
be seen from scanning the headlines of the period. Soon every
white adult in Africa was jumping at shadows, convinced that
a pair of angry eyes was sizing up his plump self as a potential
meal.
Like their seventeenth-century brethren, the cat people
suffered the fate of having their activities chronicled by their
enemies, enemies who had no interest in black African rights,
religion, culture, or history, enemies who were engaged in
occupying their land, suppressing tribal government, stealing
Africa’s natural resources, exploiting black Africa’s economic
activities, and repressing their individual lives. Where the
werewolves were torn by religious persecution carried out
largely by their own rulers, the attack on the cat people was
totally alien, hostile, and exploitative. It drew from them a
totality of response that gradually altered the character of the
secret societies.
While the organizations had been formed originally of cat
people exclusively, as the struggle stretched out across
decades to half and three-quarters of a century, the need for
soldiers became paramount. Hatred of the whites and willing-
ness to devote their lives to the effort became sufficient quali-
fications for membership. The cat people remained in the
societies as leaders and priests. The non-shapeshifters joined
them in fighting and in their ceremonies; although in time
some learned the mysterious skill, others never were able to
take part in the transformations. They relied on the masks and
artificial claws to move about incognito and kill with the
society's trademark.
The whites, whose sin was not stupidity, eventually be-
The Cat People 99
,
came aware that some of the societies’ members were imitat-

ing cats rather than becoming cats. From this undisputed
fact, they leaped into the comforting assumption that all the
societies members were imitators rather than werebeings
and quickly convinced themselves that they had never really
believed in the werebeings to begin with. It was like waking
from a nightmare! The whites were not slow to share the
happy news with the black members of their puppet govern-
ments, who had lost a great deal of their awe of the whites as
a result of the societies’ activities. To the amazement of the
whites, their black sycophants did not regard the news as
happy, were not relieved by it, did not believe the white
interpretation of the facts, and lost even more respect for the
whites because they indulged in such obviously false self-
deception.
In fairness, let it be said that the self-deception was not
that obvious to the whites who had, after all, come from
countries where transformation was occult and not a normal
part of religious life. Still, it was a self-deception whites were
determined to keep, in part because it was a wonderously
soothing salve to the terrors that gnawed at their bowels and
in part because it had become a matter of face: they had to be
right and the blacks had to be wrong because whites are
civilized and blacks are not. Uncomfortably for their
equanimity, the sight of the black Africans blinking disbelief
at their assurances, resurrected their original fears. To steady
themselves they began a propaganda campaign, with them-
selves as the target, to the effect that the black Africans were
of such primitive mentality that they were incapable of rising
above superstition and were prone to invent bogeyman
stories rather than discover the rational explanation behind
the facts.
The campaign worked as long as they listened only to their
own propaganda and resolutely ignored what the black Afri-
cans had to say about cat people. As a result, although these
societies came into being not much more than a hundred
100 WerREWOLVES, SHAPESHIFTERS, & SKINWALKERS
years ago, their history is not recorded and is distorted beyond

value. Almost every white study of the cat people—after a
quick enumeration of artifacts and a long enumeration of acts
of violence, murder, and cannibal orgies—settles down to a
serious, detailed presentation of the case against transforma-
tion with heavy emphasis on the need to ignore what the
black Africans have to say about cat people. The truth about
Africa’s cat people is not to be found in libraries.
The whites were successful in driving a wedge between
the members of the secret societies and the rest of African
society. Their method was to lie about the targets of the cat
people’s vengeance.
Murder is a judgment, not a fact. The fact is killing. So-
ciety decides whether killing is obligatory as in executions
and acts of war or acceptable as in accidents and justifiable
homicide or punishable as in murder. The act, however, re-
mains unchanged by the label.
The secret societies saw their killings as acts of war and
as executions. In the beginning so did most black Africans.
However, some whites whom they killed were spies. Since
their treachery had been secret, it was easy for the British—
who could operate in the open—to create waves of distrust
for the societies, running through the black African communi-
ties. The process was a spiral that intensified itself. The more
distrustful the village communities grew, the more secretive
the societies had to become. There were betrayals by rela-
tives of the cat people’s vengeance and by villains for white
money. The membership grew bitter and more bitter. Eventu-
ally, to protect themselves against turncoats, the societies
instigated the rule that novices must kill before they could be
accepted into the societies. Of course, the rule deepened the
villagers’ suspicions of the societies. And, of course, the whites
made beautiful propaganda use of the new rule, telling the
villagers that the cat people were killing the members of their
own families and committing horrible atrocities, which the
whites invented, that supposedly took place in distant regions.
The Cat People 101
/
In a matter of a couple of generations, the societies’ reputa-

tions shifted from patriots to fiends. And unfortunately, as
more and more they felt themselves to be outsiders, their
behavior toward the village communities grew increasingly
antisocial.
In specific instances, the matter is not that clear-cut. How-
ever, even where the society’s true purposes were recognized,
its invisible membership was feared. When the black Africans
took back the governing of their own territory, their leaders
were white-trained, city men who were, as far as the cat peo-
ple were concerned, white men in black skins. The new
leadership and the societies’ membership were and are im-
placable enemies. This tragic loss to the new Africa of leader-
ship potential might have kept her nations from the head-
long plunge into insane self-destruction that characterizes in-
dustrial nations around the globe. It is the end of a tradition
older than the societies themselves.
Once unquestionably more widespread, now Africa wears
her werepeople like a belt around her waist. Wherever one
travels along this belt, one hears old tales of a time of disaster
when the tribes’ werepeople organized to protect their people
from the danger. It is almost certain that, for the cat people,
the tradition of patriotism and service and killing goes back
beyond the necessities of warfare to the more basic needs of
obtaining food for the hungry mouths of the band and pro-
tecting them from becoming food for roving predators.
Probably from their very beginnings, lion men and were-
leopards were hunters for their people. Beyond that, before
the skills of shapeshifting were known, leopards and lions
were chosen as totems by hunters whose people needed them
to develop the kind of strength that rippled under sleek skin,
ferral quickness, and feline perceptions. And sometime past
human remembering when their grandfather’s ancestors’
grandfathers put on their cat disguises for the rituals that
seemed to develop these abilities, one of the dancers leaping
higher than the bonfire’s flames to the urging of the drum
beat, threw back his head in a roar that suddenly changed

quality and was no longer an imitation.
A new era among his people had begun.
That era is over now.
The cat people still exist in Africa and, despite feverish de-
nials from science-oriented journals, shapeshifting is by no
means a lost skill. But the new Africa wants none of it. The
new Africa wants to turn its back on nature, on communities
of people living together in an ancient drama of give and take.
The new Africa wants man-dominated cities, industry, com-
merce, neat blacktopped streets, citizens cowed by a police-
man’s frown, its big cats declawed, defanged, desexed, and
its elephants bred down to become apartment pets.
Except for one festering hole, the black men drove their
white rulers out of the plush government seats. But it was a
surface victory only. Too many black Africans have become
infected with the disease of white civilization. Today, white
men with black faces plot Africa’s future. Their plans doom
the cat people, the cats whose forms they borrow, and all the
other fauna that Africa nurtured long after the whites had
stripped their own lands bare of the power and freedom of
wild animals and wild talents.
eight
Are Werewolves
Evil?
Defining evil is more difficult than de-

fining werewolves. Werewolves can be described, but evil is a
way of thinking. There are those who say evil is absolute.
They know evil is absolute because the absoluteness of evil is
dogma. But the sad truth is that even their dogma is not abso
lute. It is man-made and subject to human change. It has
changed over the centuries and it will change again. Evil
changes with age and social environment, time and circum-
stance.
In Christianized Western society as practiced in Europe
and the North American continent, death has been considered
an absolute evil’ and this is interesting because, on a be-
havioral level, Christianized Western society is a killer culture.
Nevertheless, from the feudal age downward to our own, even
during those periods when the society’s resources have been
focused on artificially doing away with human life, consider-
able energy has been devoted to artificially prolonging life.
Even the Catholic Church—that great guardian of the pre-
rogatives of God—has given her sanction to the battle with
death.
The nature religions tend to be more acceptant of death.
Sometimes their god of death is demonesque, but never is he
103
104. WEREWOLVES, SHAPESHIFTERS, & SKINWALKERS
the devil that the Christians have made of him. And some of
the nature religions like the Hindu combine the god of death
and the god of life in one person in recognition of the fact that
death is an inseparable part of life.
If death is inseparable from life, then death can be no
more evil than life. By refusing to recognize this relationship,
by insisting that life is good and holy and death evil, Western
man has brought unrestrained numbers of lives into the world
while successfully choking off the death rate.
We are discovering, perhaps too late, that without death
man is a plague upon the earth. We have fought death, but
all the time it has been a good ally that has cleared away room
for our children to use. Now that we have obtained techniques
for staving off death, we are brought face to face with a pain-
ful fact: human life must be limited. Either we must reduce
our births or we must allow death to operate without hin-
drance. We cannot have it both ways. If we refuse the re-
sponsibility of making this choice, we will probably destroy
the capacity of our host, this earth, to support us at all.
We cannot have death unless life exists first. And without
death, life in time becomes unbearable. The two are one
process.
There are always angry people who murder and tear at
the fabric of society using this truth—that death and life are
the same process—as a rationalization of their behavior. They
argue: if nothing is absolutely evil, it’s all right to do anything.
These people destroy out of sickness and frustration. The
truth is that if evil were absolute, they would still destroy, us-
ing another rationalization.
Properly used, the concept of the elasticity of good and
evil frees us to learn from the past and to be more adaptable
in the present. It is easy to insist that evil is absolute and to
construct inflexible rules of behavior upon that basis. It takes
courage and discipline to recognize the relativity of evil and
to try to build a workable, realistic society.
The immediate and eventual consequences of the Black
Are Werewolves Evil? 105
Plague that swept through England in the fourteenth century,

wiping out somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the
population, illustrates the complexity of assessing an event in
terms of good and evil.
Many contemporary historians are of the opinion that the
plague played an important role in democratizing the institu-
tions of English society. The staggering reduction of popula-
tion, which the plague created, helped break up the age-old
system of peonage that bound men to the land on which they
were born. Manpower became so desperately needed that the
peons and peasants were able to exert pressure on the great
landholding lords to gain more rights to the harvest they
worked to produce. And where the lords were obdurate, the
peons could run away and be welcomed elsewhere gratefully
with no awkward questions asked; formerly, they had been
sent back to the land where they legally belonged to face
torture or execution for daring to defy the system.
But try to persuade a child, raised unwanted and badly
fed, that his parents’ death by plague had helped to destroy
the worst aspects of feudalism. Or tell the man who lost first
his children to the plague and then his wife, or the wife who
had lost her husband and her kin and was left alone in a hut
full of little ones to feed—tell them that their suffering was the
vanguard of a great movement.
From the longer point of view, evil is relative. But we are
shortsighted as a species and must operate on a day-to-day
basis in terms of our disability. Imagine a person during the
time of the Black Plague deliberately spreading the disease
from village to village, household to household. Would not
such a person be evil in practical terms? He might have ex-
cused his actions by saying he was trying to break up a deca-
dent, vicious society. But that argument would not justify
his actions because he was operating out of malice. The world
has seen revolutions come and go. And the world has seen
most of the rights, for which the leaders of the revolutions
claimed to have been fighting, dribble down through the
loopholes of postrevolutionary administration. Why? Because

the leaders had really been fighting from malice rather than
for human rights.
We must act in terms of our ability to see ourselves and
others. A good but crude rule of thumb is: whatever causes
suffering is evil. Honesty compels us to realize that by this
definition we are all evil. It is impossible to go through life
without causing pain. Even when we mean well, we can do
harm, and we do not always mean well. To reduce the bicker-
ing and feuds among the causers and feelers of pain, social
groups develop traffic rules governing the suffering we con-
tinually bring to each other. These rules rate and regulate
the degree and kind of calamity we can dump on one another
without being considered a social liability. The rules vary
from group to group. Their existence is constant.
Today in most American communities adults are expected
to tolerate sizable doses of ridicule. If a man who is laughed
at shouts or hits out with his fists, he suffers social disap-
proval; he is considered a bad sport. If he retaliates by killing,
he is considered a murderer. There have been times and
places in this country when and where ridicule was rated so
intolerably painful that the ridiculed person was not only ex-
cused but required to retaliate by attempting to kill his
mocker.
Part of getting along in another culture involves learning
the local rules about inflicting pain. Navajos regulate ridicule
differently from the surrounding white culture. Among the
Navajos, each person has certain relatives whom he must
treat with great dignity. Others he may tease only gently. But
he also has a third order of relatives to poke fun at and play
pranks on without restraint. There is no such “safe” class of
relatives among the Japanese. However, conservative Japa-
nese men, who can be stung to respectable suicide by ridi-
cule, go to “safe” parties in which they may let down their
inhibitions and joke and tease without causing harm.
Implicit in any power role are both the ability to harm and
,
the ability to help. Therefore, people react to power in the

hands of others, with understandable ambivalence. More
than a little hatred is mixed in with gratitude for the giving;
more than a little fear is mixed into the hatred for the hurting.
Usually the ambivalence is sorted out and channeled, like
the impulses from an amplifier, into outlets that society con-
siders appropriate; so people react differently to different
power roles. Some people in power become scapegoats; others
are held sacrosanct. However the emotions are intense
enough and the ambivalence is great enough so that every
power role is potentially unstable. Lords lose favor to kings,
kings to presidents, presidents to lawyers. Policemen, tycoons,
priests, and revolutionaries may be shot at and acclaimed in
the same day.
And the men who do the shooting and the men who do the
acclaiming do so not in the name of their own ambivalence
but in the name of the pure harm or pure help these leaders
supposedly embody. Today, complex, industrial nations are
still playing Robin Hood, Prince John, and King Richard in
their politics; or Henry the Fifth and the Pope, or the Saracens
and the Christians, with their religion. For the last twenty
years our own national government has played the Hun at the
city gate so passionately and obsessively that many of our
citizens have come to wonder if its governmental leaders are
not a greater national threat than the Hun-objects they have
been opposing.
It is not only the games people play that should concern
us, it is the games society plays. Such games cannot be dis-
covered by application of logic, only careful observation in
each separate society will determine which power roles are
regarded as villainous, which are heroic, and which are par-
ticularly tricky.
And werewolf is a game that society plays just as much as
it does soldier or union leader or bureaucrat. Today our so-
ciety plays that werewolves do not exist; yesterday it played
that they reeked with hell stench; the day before yesterday
European society played that they were holy. Unquestion-

ably, werebeings harm as well as help the people among
whom they live. The proportion of help-to-harm swings back
and forth like a lazy teeter-totter in response to many social
pressures. The momentary social attitude is only one factor
that determines the attitude of the people toward their were-
beings; conversely, the people’s attitude is one of the pressures
that creates swings on the teeter-totter.
So the question, Are werebeings evil?, breaks down into

two answerable questions: How are werebeings regarded by
their society? and What social services and disservices are
the werebeings performing? The variety of answers in even a
scanty cross-cultural survey is surprising.
Off the coast of New Guinea lies the Trobriand Islands

inhabited by people who farm and trade and share the same
culture. Their shapeshifters are also witches, called Yoyova,
who are all female. The Yoyova are of the opinion that their
transformations take place in the spirit rather than in the
body. They have special chants that keep their bodies safe
while their shapeshifting spirit, which they call mulukwausi,
flies through the air in the form of a flying fox, a night bird,
or a firefly. The most powerful Yoyova have little use for their
mulukwausi because they can fly in their primary form.
The Yoyova are required by their society to be adept in
paranormal skills. They must learn to become invisible, to be
able to see in the dark, to see and hear and smell from great
distances, to shapeshift, and if possible to fly in their primary
form. Each of these abilities is the end product of elaborate
incantations which must be learned syllable and tone perfect.
Only the daughter of a Yoyova has the innate fundamentals to
become a Yoyova and the daughter’s training begins at birth.
The babe’s mother uses a special stone knife to cut the
umbilical cord that attached them; chanting the appropriate
power incantation, the mother carefully buries the cord in her

house. Because the Yoyova will become as much a sea witch
as a land witch, her mother takes her in the first days of her
life to the ocean. To another incantation, she touches her
baby’s lips to sea water that she scoops up in a coconut shell.
Then she dunks her daughter in the ocean and washes her
thoroughly. This ritual prepares her for formal presentation
at the Yoyova’s meeting place after dark.
The Yoyova’s life is austere. The babe and her mother sleep
out in the cold rather than before a warm fire indoors as do
others in the village. While attending to her rituals, her
mother holds her by the feet, with head dangling. The babe
is not allowed to sleep undisturbed at night; her mother takes
her to all of her witchly activities. Preliminary to teaching the
babe to fly, her mother throws her over the roof of their hut
and, hurrying to the other side, catches her just before she
falls to the ground. By the time the young one is given her
first grass skirt along with the other girls her age in the village,
it is hoped that she will have developed the power and skill to
fly solo.
The Yoyova are dangerous, uncouth women. They enjoy
eating human flesh, and consider the entrails, eyes, tongues,
and lungs of their victims to be special delicacies. They
scavange corpses. When forced to eat the flesh of animals,
they prefer it raw, They murder for pique as well as hunger.
On land they kill people by kicking them or hitting them and
tearing out the life force of their insides. But they are most
feared for their attacks on those who go to sea in canoes.
The Yoyova eat a certain type of coral which makes them
hunger for flesh in the same way that peanuts or pretzels make
others thirst for beer. Returning from their meeting place
where she and her sister witches have been munching coral
and gossiping, the mother—with her baby daughter bound in
her clothing—searches the sea lanes for a canoe that looks as
though it may be heading into trouble. Salivating, she flies
overhead, waiting and hoping for it to overturn. Once a sailor
110 WrEREWOLVES, SHAPESHIFTERS, & SKINWALKERS
is in the water, he is hers. She swoops down, drowns him and

eats him, pushing bits of the flesh into her baby’s mouth. Even
when the Yoyova is at home, a sailor in the water is not safe
from her. Her paranormal hearing enables her to hear the
sound of a canoe sinking and a man struggling in the water
and sends her into the air, hurrying to the disaster.
Judging even from these few details, one could easily con-
clude that the Trobriand Islanders would be engaged in a full-
scale, desperate campaign to rid their villages of these human
vultures, these sea-going harpies. And one would be mistaken.
Like most witches the Yoyova never speak of their profession
to anyone who is not a witch; the Yoyova’s fathers, sons, and
husbands are never told of their identity. However, their love
of raw meat and blood and a certain aura of crude power and
insolence betray them—even the young children of the villages
can name the witches. .
Since everyone is in on the open secret, it would be im-
possible to marry a Yoyova accidentally. So it is highly sig-
nificant that all the Yoyova of marriageable age are married.
In point of fact, they are deliberately, eagerly, competitively
sought after. The men consider them to be the prize catches,
preferred over all the sweet young things who shudder at the
thought of bloodshed.
The Yoyova’s sordid and violent behavior may be re-
gretted, but not half so much as their income-bringing ways
are admired. The Yoyova bride is her husband’s little money-
maker. She is a professional in a culture which has few pro-
fessions for women. She earns a fat income undoing the mis-
chief that her sister-witches cause. Some say that lawyers in
our own culture do the same. The Yoyova enjoys a profes-
sional’s high social status. She is respected for her skills and
self-discipline. And if she is loathed for being a murderess and
cannibal, she is also loved for being a healer and champion of
those in distress. The Yoyova are felt to do their husbands
and their home villages proud. The Yoyova’s enthusiastic ac-
ceptance by those they prey upon seems extraordinary only
as long as one persists in regarding them as alien to Trobriand
society. The Yoyovas belong to their society and they are

among its most successful citizens.
Politically, before white men imposed their foreign au-
thority over local structures, the Trobrianders had formed
nascent kingdoms. Their central leaders were able to exert
fully as much authority as did the Anglo-Saxon kings in
England. The Anglo-Saxon kings’ authority rested on force
and so did the authority of the Trobriand leaders. But rather
than maintaining a large, expensive, and potentially danger-
ous band of retainers to enforce the royal will, the Trobriand
leaders accomplished the same end by keeping for their own
use the most powerful sorcerer in the land. The Trobrianders
specialized in metaphysical force rather than physical force.
Metaphysical force worked so well for them that their central
leaders rarely had to execute one of their followers for treason.
Fear of royal punishment in the form of malevolent sorcery
kept their followers submissive. Trobriand leaders were no
more altruistic than any other authoritarian figure. While
they did supply law and order and organization, they also took
advantage of their position to lord it over their subjects in
ways painful to individual dignity.
One of the most galling ways in which the Trobriand
leaders exercised their prerogatives unfairly was related to
farming. Farming to the Trobrianders was more than a means
of obtaining food to stoke the stomach; it was a great and
glorious outdoor sport. Men pitted their agricultural skills
against each other with zest and cool calculation. Being called
a good farmer was more than a compliment, it was a title that
carried high status and was fiercely pursued. After harvest
time the crops of yam, taro, and sugarcane were displayed
attractively on the land that grew them. Each farmer walked
from garden to garden inspecting the results and a man’s
reputation grew or shrank with the year’s success. But woe
to him who dared set out fatter, heavier yams than were
heaped on the Trobriand leader’s lands. He could expect to
suffer a most painful and prolonged curse.
Like the Yayova, at times the central leaders exercised
their power for purely private satisfaction. After making due

allowances for individual differences, it is doubtful that the
average Trobriander considered the Yoyova more oppressive
than his leaders—less legitimate perhaps, but no more trouble-
some or capricious.
The relationship between the Trobriander and the Yoyova
is like that between the Anglo-Saxon English and the merce-
nary. The destruction implicit in the mercenary’s profession
was feared and avoided when possible, but regarded as usual
rather than immoral. The mercenaries were the king’s re-
tainers, the Yoyova were professionals operating among
talented amateurs. Every Trobriander was deeply committed
to the study and application of paranormal control over all
aspects of living: farming, sailing, building, health, happi-
ness, life and death. Everyone knew some magic and used it
daily. The Yoyova and the sorcerer knew more. Certainly they
were hired merely to counteract the threat of others of their
kind. But their kind had permeated the fabric of society. The
professionals were needed and sought after and admired
and imitated with the same intensity that the Anglo-Saxon
farmer sought the help and admired and imitated the skills of
the professional swordsmen.
A society whose main power sources are paranormal does
not necessarily have to yield itself up so completely to an
individualistic scramble after the use of more powerful
sorcerers; it can keep careful limits on the exercise of even the
most powerful metaphysical skills, reserving them for social
rather than private ends.
The Hopis of the southwestern desert in the United States
have done precisely this. They regard a private witch’s attack
on society as evil and illegal not because it is witchcraft but
because it has been used by an individual rather than used
jointly by its legal guardians, the elders of the clan to whom
it has been entrusted for the good of the entire village.
Shapeshifters, and those skilled in other supernatural
powers, do not need to be carefully watched. It is their power
that is potentially dangerous. Whether that power is con-

sidered supernatural or commonplace depends on the point
of view. What to us is Hopi supernaturalism, to them is merely
the technology of their people.
Although the Hopis are enterprising and courageous, they
are noncompetitive, their lack of individual competition a
deliberate achievement of social planning. They have dis-
covered from past experience that running after wealth and
glory invariably ends in killing, unhappiness, and separation
from the gods and spirits that collectively comprise nature
and whose companionship is life’s true blessing. After many
bitter lessons in which the Hopi people became caught up in
wealth, power, and its dark consequences, the clan leaders
in ancient times decided to take the Hopi people to live in the
desert where they would have to sublimate competitiveness
and aggression to the task of wresting a living from the bleak
environment.
This plan worked as the elders had hoped. Hard work and
cooperation kept the Hopis in close harmony with the world
of spirits and gods, so close in fact that for half the year the
spirits, the katcinas, leave their own abode and come down
and live and dance among the Hopi people. From this inti-
macy with katcinas, the Hopis gain an impressive knowledge
of paranormal power. They control the temptation for indi-
viduals to misuse this power for selfish ends by entrusting its
possession to the Hopi clans. The Hopis control the tempta-
tion to exploit land and water in the same way.
Each clan has certain specific knowledge and power
wielded only by the elders when they meet in convocation
within their sacred kivas, which have been dug out of the
recesses of mother earth. Some of the Hopi’s most powerful
feats, such as forcing the rain to fall from the skies, requires
the cooperation of two clans, each contributing an essential
part, but only a part, to the whole ritual.
The Hopis have refused to meet the materialism of the
United States on its own terms. Consequently, their popula-
tion has declined seriously since the 1870s. Clans have ceased
to exist for lack of living members and with them has disap-
peared the knowledge and power entrusted to their care.
Within the Hopi system, such power and knowledge is non-
transferable. The Hopis regret but they do not fear annihila-
tion by white technocracy. They believe that this world is one
of many, and that if it is destroyed by the forces of its own
corruption, new worlds will come. They prefer to preserve
their intimacy with the gods and spirits to preserving mere
existence.
Even those clans which have survived, have suffered
crippling losses of paranormal ability because blundering,
officious white men ignorantly but no less irrevocably de-
stroyed crucial elements in Hopi rituals by desecrating them.
Nevertheless, in our own time, people who live close to the
Hopis are awed by their supernatural abilities. Before the
coming of the Americans, when the Navajos first contacted
them, Hopi paranormal skills were so extraordinary that the
Navajos believed them to be spirits themselves.
One of their stories about those earlier days contains a
rare, comprehensive picture of how the Hopis deal with the
misuse of supernatural power.
The crisis brewed up, as has been known to happen in
other places and other times, over one girl and two suitors.
The girl was industrious, sweet tempered, and beautiful, a
joy to all her relatives. Many boys had come to talk to her as
she ground dried corn in her mother’s house. One by one, she
had sent them all away until only two remained, the one from
the Coyote Clan to whose home she had taken an indication
of her willingness for the marriage and the other from the
Swallow Clan who would not go away.
Swallow Boy refused to accept the girl’s decision. He went
to the elders of his clan for help. And they went to the elders
of the Coyote Clan demanding that a race be run between the
two claimants to settle the dispute. In vain did the elders of
the Coyote Clan point out that there was no dispute; the girl
knew her mind. The Swallow Clan was adamant. Finally, to

keep the peace, the Coyote Clan agreed.
The race was to be long and hazardous; to prevent further
dispute, the winner was obliged to sever the head of the loser.
The boundaries were set at the four compass points: east to
the Rio Grande, north to the San Juan River, west to the
Colorado River, south to the Salt River, back to the Rio
Grande and finally home.
So when Swallow Boy drew ahead of Coyote Boy shortly
after they had begun, Coyote Boy did not worry at first. He
knew his worth when it came to running and he had chosen a
steady, tireless jog that would serve him better than foolish
sprinting. He was content to follow his rival’s footprints, cer-
tain that after a while Swallow Boy would tire. However,
Coyote Boy began worrying and was puzzled when suddenly
the footprints stopped. The ground was soft enough to have
taken a runner’ impression and the wind was not blowing
strongly enough to erase them. Coyote Boy cast about from
side to side, searching for Swallow Boy’s tracks, but there
were none to be found. Nevertheless when he reached the Rio
Grande he found the mark of the Swallow Clan scratched
into its banks to show that Swallow Boy had reached that
boundary.
Frightened and sad, Coyote Boy remembered that he had
been instructed by the elders of his clan to call them if he
seemed to be losing the race. His barking coyote cry traveled
by secret power all the way to the sacred kiva where his elders
waited, smoking and praying for his success.
The elders were angry when they heard the call for they
too knew the worth of Coyote Boy’s running and they had
suspected from the beginning that, as the Swallow Clan had
wrongfully insisted on the race, so too they would try to win it
wrongfully. Accordingly they had made certain preparations,
including their instructions to Coyote Boy. Before proceed-
ing, they sent a runner to the next boundary to determine if
their suspicions were well founded.
The runner returned with the report that, as he had

crouched in a clump of acacia waiting for the runners, a swal-
low flew to the banks of the San Juan, drew the Swallow Clan
mark on the banks with its beak, and took flight again, wing-
ing west toward the Colorado. The elders of the Coyote Clan
sorrowed that their brother clan used its power to transform
themselves into swallows in this illegitimate and aggressive
fashion. They determined to use their own clan power to put
an end to it.
The Coyote Clan elders filled their pipes with the proper
mixture of tobacco and puffed smoke upward and out the
kiva’s entrance. As they puffed, the smoke gathered, grew in
strength, and formed into great, beautiful thunderheads that
rolled fast and faster along the course of the race until they
caught up with Swallow Boy and poured their contents of
rain and hailstones on him. ©
His feathers drenched, his body bruised, Swallow Boy took
refuge under a clump of cottonwoods. Before long Coyote
Boy had caught up with him and was surging ahead. Un-
fortunately, the ground was now muddy from the rain. Even
the unflagging Coyote Boy was bogged down to a slow, ef-
fortful trudge. Soon Swallow Boy, who had taken to the air
again, overtook him.
The Coyote Clan elders had prepared in advance for just
such a contingency. And in his desperation Coyote Boy finally
remembered their instructions. He took a string made of cot-
ton and a rope of sinew and a dried gourd, placing them on the
ground in the proper relationship to each other and turned
away to await for the necessary period of time. When he faced
around again, he found that the gourd had turned into a magic
platform.
Coyote Boy climbed into the cup of the gourd platform
and discovered that, by twisting the sinew between his palms,
he could guide the platform. Coyote Boy guided his gourd
platform in pursuit of Swallow Boy. Soon he was skimming
over the ground so fast that the trees and bushes seemed to be
running the other way in dread. Overhead, even faster than

he, rolled another formation of billowing thunderheads, the
mighty products of his elder’s smoking.
Not long after, looking downward toward the ground,
Coyote Boy saw a swallow perched on the ground hurriedly
trying to dry freshly drenched feathers. And so it went: when
the sun dried the swallow’s feathers, he soared high and
quickly darted ahead of Coyote Boy in his gourd platform.
Then smoke rose from the Coyote Clan kiva and soon a heavy
storm grounded Swallow, permitting Coyote Boy to gain the
lead.
The elders had hoped that Swallow Boy and his clan
would take the hint that their unlawful behavior had been
observed and would not be tolerated. But no, no matter how
often their thunderheads soaked the swallow’s feathers, Swal-
low Boy would not abandon his bird form. He only dried him-
self off in the sun and tried again. Finally, they sent runners
to inform the contestants that, if Swallow Boy continued in
his bird shape, Coyote Boy must take his bow and arrow and
shoot him down. The runners caught up with the two boys as
they were facing homeward from the Rio Grande, having al-
ready touched the boundaries of the four points of the
compass. The swallow was on the ground recovering from
another storm. Coyote Boy saw his clan’s runners and stopped
for instructions. As soon as the runners repeated the message,
the swallow disappeared and a shamefaced Swallow Boy
stood in his place. The runners then told Coyote Boy that he
must now destroy his gourd platform so that the race be
finished on foot as was proper.
The last lap was made without benefit of magic. It was a
glorious sight, the two strong young bodies taut, straining for-
ward, muscles pushed to their utmost, eyes glazed with ef-
fort. As they neared their home village, Coyote Boy concen-
trated on the young girl he hoped to marry, using his desire
to flood his legs with new energy. He surged ahead, almost
throwing his body over the finish line. He reached down and
grabbed the obsidian knife of his clan just before Swallow Boy
dashed up. Catching hold of Swallow’s hair, Coyote Boy
made one clean stroke with his knife hand, severing Swallow
Boy’s head.
Coyote Boy gravely returned the head to the Swallow
Clan. Then his elders stepped forward and with stern looks
at the elders of the Swallow Clan announced, “You were the
ones who insisted upon this unnecessary race. You were the
ones who first used your power illegitimately. It is because
of your wrongful actions that Swallow Boy is dead and the
whole village mourns. Now you must leave this village before
you cause more trouble.”
So all the members of the Swallow Clan had to go out into
the desert and make a place for themselves elsewhere. After-
ward, there was a marriage in the Coyote Clan and everyone
in the village was pleased. It was a good marriage that
brought forth good children. To this day in the village of
Oraibi are to be found the children of the children of the
children of the children of Coyote Boy and the industrious,
beautiful young girl.
Just as occasionally men, powerful in more ordinary ways,
use their power mainly to help others, so some shapeshifters
use their power for the well-being of their people, not for the
private benefit they could get from their talent. Again, the
determinants are the personality and disposition of the people
rather than the type of power they control.
The Navajos have very different personality profiles than

do the Hopi, people of the older and more saintly culture. Al-
though the Navajos have preyed and still prey upon the
Hopis, with the two-handedness so characteristic of people
everywhere, they also hold the Hopis in great reverence and
are much influenced by them.
Although Navajo society is also based upon clan structure
and is strongly oriented toward the family there are strong
biel 1)
aS
BUFFALO DANCERS—These American Indians are dancing out

a part of a ritual that is not actual shapeshifting, but closely related.
The essence of the dance is to invoke buffalo spirits and power to
insure the presence of more buffalo—a prime source of meat—and
to offer thanks, apology, and respect to those already killed in the
hunt.
individuals and opportunists. The society cannot contro]

power struggles within itself as the Hopis can. The Navajo
love of family tends to take care of the problems that undue
wealth can bring. A rich man has poorer relatives living with
him, and usually has a ready hand to fold an orphan into his
family. And the rich man sponsors the religious ceremonies
that benefit all.
But against mavericks in the family system, the Navajos
have no defense. And only mavericks can become were-
wolves because they are strictly forbidden and detested. In
fact among the members of the werewolf’s family, even the
wife rarely knows his identity as a werewolf. Often it is
against these people particularly that the werewolf works his
malice. A necessary part of a witch’s initiation is to kill some-
one in his family, preferable his brother or sister.
Navajos do not fear supernatualism as we would define it.
Their religion is rich in mysticism and metaphysics. Their
holy men, called singers by the whites because of the long
chants they say during their religious ceremonies, have many
paranormal talents. And other specialists among them also
have extraordinary skills, clairvoyance and divination among
them. The best possible way to prevent harm from witchcraft
is to own benevolent mystic rituals, chants, and ceremonial
equipment, just as a curing ceremony is used to help a person
already harmed by a witch.
But supernaturalism directed against the family or the
clan, supernaturalism that deliberately indulges in incest,
that makes use of the evil forces which cling to corpses—these
kinds of supernaturalism strike at the heart of everything
Navajos hold sacred. Within this detested library of oral
knowledge lies quite a few shapeshifting skills. Living men
and women are known to have metamorphized themselves
into wolves, coyotes, and bears. Some say there are those who
can become owls, crows, and foxes.
Their tradition tells of the days when shapeshifting was
more common and better understood. Then witches were
Are’ Werewolves EvilP 121
/
powerful enough to transform others into animals. But this

skill disappeared at some time during the ongoing war of
extermination against witches. The Navajos have no ambiva-
lence about werewolves; they hate and dread them and will
destroy them whenever they can discover their identity.
Werewolves who have been discovered have been known to
offer their jewelry as payment for silence. But even when the
discoverer is desperately poor, the bribe rarely works because
the Navajos have greater loathing for witches than for starva-
tion.
There is another tradition that once a holy man made a
poison that selectively killed werewolves and was harmless
to good people. Then he held a religious ceremony for the
area that was, as usual, followed by a feast. Just before the
feast, the holy man carefully sprinkled all the meat with the
ground powder.
After the feast the people reacted just as he expected. The
really good people were not in the least affected by the
powder. Those with a slight leaning toward witchiness de-
veloped an itchy rash. The witches and werewolves broke out
in terrible hives and later they died.
Unfortunately several very old witches had stayed away
from the ceremony. But even so the area was much freer of
witchcraft than it had been in a long time.
Two words in Navajo refer to werewolves. One is their
word for wolf and it can be used for those witches who meta-
morphize into bears or coyotes as well as those who cling to
the more customary form. The second word means, as literally
as Navajo can be translated into English, “going about on all
fours in (animal) skin,” or as it is more simply translated,
skinwalker. As we have seen the word refers to the one re-
maining method known to Navajo witches of shifting shape:
tying to their persons the skins of the animals whose forms
they desire to assume.
Navajo witchcraft is indigenous to this country and has
been little contaminated by witchcraft of European origin,
even that coming from Spain by way of Mexico. But the sim-
ilarity between Navajo and gothic European witchcraft is
frightening. Navajo descriptions of skinwalkers and their atti-
tudes toward them could have been taken from a sermon by a
twelfth-century country priest. Navajo witches, having shifted
themselves into animal form, meet in the dark of night to join
in some malignant plan. They use rituals to murder from far
away. They engage in sexual activity with corpses or they
eat the dead human flesh. Navajos report having discovered
in witch caves haunches of corpses hanging from ropes as if
they were mutton haunches. Skinwalkers enjoy the evil aura
of corpses and they lounge about on heaps of dead bodies.
Only the skinwalkers kill for vengeance or to steal sheep.
One of their favorite and most dreaded methods is to pour
corpse poison through the smoke holes of their victim’s hogan.
The poison is made from the finger whorls, the brains, and the
genitals of humans—dried and then ground to a fine powder.
Skinwalkers rob graves. And occasionally in a spasm of com-
munity hatred use their power to prevent the rain from fall-
ing. In dessicated farm country where a light shower can
mean the difference between hunger and harvest, preventing
rainfall is a heinous crime. To give an idea of the horror in
which corpses are held by the Navajos, drying up the skies is
not considered as vile as the skinwalkers’ involvement with
the dead.
Navajos believe all people have split personalities in the
sense that they contain within them the spirit of good and the
spirit of evil, both of which struggle to control the actions of
their hosts. At death the good spirit leaves the body. How-
ever, the spirit of evil remains with the corpse. And it is un-
restrained by the spirit of good. It is pure unrestrained evil.
Werewolves who spend their leisure lallygagging on corpses
become infected by this evil. Everyone they touch, especially
those they sprinkle with corpse poison, is in danger of being
contaminated by it.
The Navajos are not interested in saving a witch’s soul.
Aré Werewolves EvilP 123
They would think it a hopeless task; they are amused by the

Christian concept of hell and its punishments. But they do be-
lieve a witch’s confession helps his victim to recover. Conse-
quently, energy and even torture have been applied to the task
of inducing a suspected witch to admit to his activities.
Early in their dealings with United States law, before they
discovered the need for guile, a chronic source of conflict be-
tween the alien government and the Navajos was their method
of dealing with known witches. The heart of the problem lies
with the adjective known. Although the Navajos know the
suspects to be skinwalkers, they have learned that the whites
not only do not know it, they are determined not to know it
and refuse to study seriously evidence regarding the matter.
Consequently, the whites regard Navajo executions of
skinwalkers as murder to be punished duly by law. On the
other hand the Navajos know that if these corpse-lovers are
not executed, innocent people in their community will con-
tinue to be injured and killed. Men are forced to risk prison
and death to protect their community. It is another demon-
stration of the fact that people from one culture cannot justly
administer the lives of those belonging to another culture.
In the Navajo world picture, evil is as objective as a stove.
There is nothing relative about it. It can be pointed to and its
consequences are sickness and death. The manner in which
Navajos experience witches, skinwalkers, and corpses to be
evil is as clear-cut a working definition of evil as can be found
among healthy people. Their revulsion and their behavior
spells out their verbalizations. There is no place in the Navajo
community for a person who wants to shapeshift and who
also wants to be a kind, dependable citizen. He has to choose
one or the other; he cannot be both.
The community has been deprived of the power, and the
knowledge and the joy to be had from shapeshifting. No
doubt along the way it has also lost a few individuals who
might have become strong leaders if they had not preferred
shapeshifting.
Here is what the Navajos may be saying with their were-

wolf game: surrounded by aliens as we are, forced to abide by
the rules of an alien culture as we are, peopled by strong indi-
vidualists as we are, our social organization cannot survive
persons who would be willing to sacrifice family and all other
social ties to their personal pleasure.
The price they have to pay to achieve their delicate bal-
ance of personal independence, in a social framework that re-
quires a great deal of cooperation, cuts off and separates the
extreme individualists from the rest of the community. It is
interesting to note that, despite the intensity with which the
skinwalkers are hunted and executed, each generation pro-
duces enough to carry on the tradition. Navajo genetics and
Navajo training may produce a tiny but stable frequency of
extreme individualists who by their very nature would tear
apart the fabric of their society were they allowed to bed
down in it.
If the Navajo community insists that its members refrain
from the excesses of individualism represented by shapeshift-
ing and corpse association, it encourages a wider range of
individual differences within that framework than does the
surrounding white culture. The choice between being a
private person or a carver of empires can be preferred with
little social pressure. A Navajo does not have to be rich or
powerful or talented or poor or meek or humble to be valued.
Doing a fair share of the work needed to support life, nurtur-
ing the family, enjoying life is considered an achievement
worthy of honor.
And though the culture has chosen to scapegoat shape-
shifting, it has by no means cut itself off from mysticism. The
Navajo religon is a nature religion which pervades the daily
life of its followers. Its priesthood is open to anyone who is
prepared to undergo the discipline. And for those who do not
wish to make such a commitment, there is a ready use for a
wide variety of paranormal skills.
An awareness that skinwalkers are not inherently evil is
Aré Werewolves EvilP 125
relevant for the student of shapeshifting. But it is more valu-

able to the Navajos as a people to have a culture that is at once
flexible and stable—as the Navajo culture has proven itself to
be during centuries of extraordinary stress and change—than
it is to be objective about skinwalkers.
The Navajos do not lessen the value received for the price
they pay by equivocating about the choice. There is no flirt-
ing with evil as became popular during the gothic period and
has remained characteristic of Western society ever since.
There is no double standard of ideal and actual.
The Navajo attitude toward witches, skinwalkers, and
corpses is a clear-cut, easily understood working definition
of evil as can be found among healthy people, and their be-
havior spells out their verbalizations. For them this evil is
anti-family, anti-clan, anti-community, anti-Navajo-way-of
life, and, to use the best translation of the Navajo word, it is
anti-beauty. This evil negates all that is meant by the chants
in the Blessing Way Ceremony. However, having accepted
this one condition of Navajo life, which symbolizes a commit-
ment to life as a Navajo, the individual truly can say:
Therefore I became long life, therefore I grew in beauty.

May there be beauty before me, may there be beauty behind
me,
May there be beauty below me, may there be beauty above
me,
May there be beauty all around me, may speech from me
show beauty,
May all my surroundings have beauty. In beauty it is
finished.
In beauty it is finished. In beauty it is finished. In beauty it
is finished.
The price they pay buys an awful lot.
In this chapter, we have examined three cultural answers

to the question, Are werebeings evil? The Trobriander
Islanders have said yes and no, The Hopis have said no, and
their immediate neighbors and close associates the Navajos
have said an emphatic yes.
At first consideration, it would seem that there are no more
answers to the question. But there are. Each culture has its
own answer. Regional differences conflict with the cultural
pattern. The regions contain, uncomfortably, families whose
attitudes and traditions clash strongly with the social beliefs
that impinge upon them. And each family has its own hot-
headed defiants determined to push off on a tangential course
of their own.
Ultimately in every culture the individual answers the
question. He must undergo the necessary discipline; he takes
the risks; he is shaken by its joys and agonies. Or he must
wonder what it would have been like to have lived another
life. He must assess whether’ being a werebeing would most
harm or help him. And he alone can decide whether he will
try to be a force for evil or a force for good among his people.
nine
Can Werewolves
Be Domesticated?
Werewolves can be domesticated only with great diffi-

culty. No question about it, cross-culturally, werebeings are
among the world’s roaring individualists. If they were con-
formists before they learned to shapeshift—if they submitted
to the werewolf discipline in meek compliance with social de-
mands—the shapeshifting experience itself would in time turn
them bold, make them skeptical of pat answers, and weaken
their ties with normal society.
For the novice shapeshifter, his new body brings new in-
formation perceived through strange sense spectrums. He
sees differently, hears differently, scents differently, tastes
differently, moves differently. He has a new range and in-
tensity of emotions. He discovers different mental processes.
In short, shapeshifting puts him into the animal world with
its own peculiar rules. These memories, when he resumes his
‘primary form, begin to change his attitudes. And the knowl-
edge that there is a ready alternative to the vexations of the
normal world makes him impatient if not actively rebellious.
However, werebeing power can be harnessed to com-
munal ends. The Hopis have demonstrated that werebeings
can be important social assets. Nevertheless, their achieve-
ment also points up the magnitude of the effort involved.
127
Their culture evokes a deeper commitment to their collective

goals at the sacrifice of personal whim than do most cultures.
Certainly our own culture has no such collective commitment.
The large frequency of commune failures in this country re-
flects the difficulty our citizens have in sublimating their indi-
viduality to communal life. If from time to time, as the story
of Swallow Boy suggests, Hopi werebeings slip through the
fine mesh of their social training to pursue their own desires,
other cultures should expect to have larger evasions more
often.
It is not always, however, large-scale crises that erupt
when werebeings are integrated into normal society. Often
personal tragedy occurs. Occasionally, the werewolf is the
victim.
The Lay of Bisclavaret tells the story of a werewolf who was
quite content to live by the rules of his society. He was his
king’s loyal subject and close personal friend. He was his
wife’s faithful and trusting husband. Unfortunately for him,
his wife had a lover. When the werewolf had scampered off
on all fours for an evening’s romp one pivotal evening, the
wife and her lover hid his clothes, imprisoning her husband
in his wolf body. In time the adulterous wife was able to pur-
suade the king that, as her husband had disappeared and
failed to return, she must be a widow. The king granted her
permission to marry her lover.
The story might have ended here. However, one day while
hunting, the king’s hounds caught and worried almost to
death his old friend still trapped in his secondary form. Their
friendship evidently transcended form because the king, no
lover of wolves but forced by a compelling impulse, called off
the hounds, had his men carry the tattered wolf back to his
castle, and tended to the wolf's wounds himself. When the
animal had recovered, the king kept him by his side as his
constant companion.
One day, as was inevitable, the werewolf’s betrayers came
to court. To the king’s amazement his usually gentle pet at-
Can Werewolves Be DomesticatedP 129
/
tacked them both. The attack was repeated each time the
widow of his friend and her new husband came near the wolf.
His suspicions aroused, the king forced the truth out of the
woman, in ways that kings used. The truth contained the
remedy for his friend’s plight. The king summoned his ser-
vants to fetch clothes that would fit his friend and without
much delay his old friend had regained his human shape and
the adulterous pair were banished from the kingdom.
More than one wereanimal has been injured or killed by

hunters who, like the king, had no homicidal intentions. And
many stories exist of werehounds and rabbits and birds who
were accidentally shot and eaten by their own family.
Perhaps a greater tragedy occurred to one shapeshifting
young lady who tried to play tricks on the wrong man.
Whether the young lady had been married against her inten-
tions or whether she was merely painfully shy, has been
lost in the winds of time. She was married by proxy as was
often necessary in the Middle Ages. Then like a package she
was delivered to her husband’s house.
When the welcoming festivities were over and she was
sent up with her serving women to prepare to bed down with
the stranger, the bride either panicked or lost her temper and
shifted into a mouse. Needless to say, her bridegroom was less
than pleased. Lonely night followed lonely night and beyond
catching sight of a scurrying streak of motion, he might well
have remained a bachelor. In desperation he sent word of his
problem to his mother-in-law. Undoubtedly a weremouse her-
self, she sent him back a plan of action.
Following her advice, the bridegroom placed the raw ma-
terials of an excellent supper in the kitchen and pretended
to leave the room. The little weremouse, who dearly loved to
cook, peeked around the kitchen and believing herself to be
safe shifted back into her human form. Before going to the
sink, she placed her tiny mouse skin that was essential for her
transformations carefully on the kitchen chair. As soon as he1

back was turned, the bridegroom ran from his hiding place,
seized the mouse skin and threw it in the fire. Trapped in her
human form, the bride was as helpless against feudal con-
ventions as any other woman.
Swan Lake dances another werebeing tragedy. In this tale,
as is usually true, the normal people are hurt most because
they have fewer assets. The Swan Maidens, beautiful in both
their primary and secondary form, were innocent traps for
men who yearned to catch and hold their wild fancies. Like
the weremouse, the Swan Maidens shifted form by the use
of a skin, usually tailored into a trailing cloak of swan feathers.
They guarded their cloaks with a cunning drilled into them
by their mothers. Occasionally where cunning failed, their
beauty saved them. The cloak was their point of weakness;
without it their access to the skies was gone.
It was so with a man in another story who stole his love’s
swan cloak but could not bear to burn it because it was so
much a part of his woman. Hiding it, he lied, telling his love
that it had been destroyed. With no hope of returning to the
skies, finally she agreed to marry her abductor. They had chil-
dren and she seemed to be happy about the house. One day
in a fit of housecleaning, the wife found her feather cloak in
the bottom of an old trunk. With a cry of gladness, she rushed
outside, gathered her cloak about her, and flew away. Her
family never saw her again.
That cry of gladness hints at the shapeshifter’s side of the
dilemma. She had known the rush of wind underneath her
pinions. She had seen the top side of clouds, the curve of the
earth, the sweep of miles passing beneath effortlessly to the
slow beat of her wings. It is easy to believe that she had come
to love her husband, that she had responded with warmth to
the quickening within her belly that meant the birth of her
babes, to their pulling at her breasts, and to the sight of their
growing up. It is just as easy to believe that she ached for the
freedom of the air.
Can Werewolves Be Domesticated? 131
Perhaps, if her husband had trusted her more ... If he had

returned her cloak to her keeping with the birth of their first
child, she would have sailed up into the blue sky to frolic for a
time and then returned to nurse the young one? Or was there
waiting for her somewhere a male swan who searched the sky
paths and yearly retraced the route they had flown together?
They say that swans mate for life. Had she seen during the
years of her human marriage a white speck in the sky and
heard the trumpet of a grieving cry?
The great problem in integrating shapeshifters into mun-

dane society is pursuading them to abide by mundane rules.
It is true that the rules were not designed for them and they
squeeze into their proscriptions only with difficulty. Still, the
problems that confront a normal person who tries to jump
into shapeshifting proscriptions are more hazardous.
This lesson was learned by another young man who was
foolish enough to woo a known witch. He was warned, more
often than he wished, to call his courtship quits before he
found himself in deeper trouble than he could handle, but he
had the confidence that came with youth and health. In the
beginning, his confidence seemed well placed. His sweetheart
responded to his courtship eagerly. Her mother took a liking
to him and welcomed him into her house. The two young
people became engaged.
As luck would have it, on the afternoon of the witch’s sab-
bath, the young man had been working hard in his future
mother-in-law’s vegetable garden. After supper, he fell sound
asleep and did not awaken at the time when he usually left
to return home. As the hour for their departure neared, the
two women decided not to wake him and try to hustle him
out of the house, but to let him sleep. They planned to invent
some likely lie if he should happen to wake on his own before
they returned from worship.
There was, however, a third possibility that the shape-
shifters had not considered. The young man woke while they
were making their preparations for travel. When he first
opened his eyes, they were stripped bare of clothes. Being
well brought up, and sneaky to boot, he pretended to sleep,
expecting them to put on night clothes. To his surprise, in-
stead they covered their bodies with ointment which they
rubbed into their skin. As they rubbed in the ointment, they
muttered, “Sopra fueillo,” which means “above the foliage.”
Almost before the sound of their words died away, mother
and daughter had become a pair of owls. They hopped to the
chimney, flying up and out into the night with soft trium-
phant hoots.
The witch’s fiancé was not the least put off by what he had
seen. He thought being an owl must be great fun. He de-
cided not to delay by a day in following the custom of his new
family. Hastily, he stripped off his clothes and began rubbing
the witch’s ointment into his skin. Unfortunately, he had mis-
heard the words. What he said as he rubbed his skin was,
“Supra fueillo,” which means “under the foliage.”
As he had wanted, the young man metamorphized into an
owl. But when he flew expectantly to the hearth, instead of
soaring up the chimney as his prospective bride and mother-
in-law had, he seemed to be pushed by an invisible hand into
the green branches that lay smoldering in the ashes. Burned
and shaken, he crawled painfully up the flue by his claws and
launched himself into the air from the top of the house. Over
the ploughed fields surrounding the village, he flew as hand-
somely as he could wish. But when he came to the forest, he
flew into trouble. At the first tree, that same invisible force
pushed him through its branches rather than letting him soar
over its top. It was as bad as being beaten with a staff. But the
brambles and thickets were worse; they tore instead of bruis-
ing. Each new clash lost him feathers, and flesh and blood,
too. By the time he:had gone a mile, he was in pitiful shape.
He tried to turn back, but could not. He tried to stop fly-
ing and walk on the ground or roost in a tree, but could not.
Can WerewolvesBe Domesticated? 133
,
It was lurch into the air and fly into the next obstacle until he
thought he would be mauled to death. If he had started earlier
in the evening, he might have so died. But finally a faint
lightening of the sky and a cock crowing sent him plummeting
to earth with a thud: featherless, breathless, torn, but human
again and still alive.
His rashness belonged to the day before. As soon as he had
healed enough to travel, he packed his things and left the vil-
lage. He did not marry his lovely shapeshifter and never saw
her again.
It follows that a werewolf’s most intimate friend is another
werewolf. Only one who shares his power can be his peer.
Only another werewolf can know his frustration . . . and
amusement in his dealings with ordinaries. A coven or a guild,
if you prefer, is actually a necessity for the emotional health
of the shapeshifter.
In societies where shapeshifting is stigmatized with the

trappings of evil and where repression is tight enough to
prevent a successful underground movement, there is evi-
dence that many shapeshifters suffer from personality detach-
ment. The Italian philosopher and physician Donato Antonio
Altomari first recognized this aspect of werewolfism in 1560
when he discovered a werewolf who had no memory of his
transformation or of what he had done in his secondary form,
and felt horror and disgust when he heard of his actions.
So there is the problem of housebreaking a werewolf. It is
a study of tactics in individual and group dynamics. The were-
wolf’s special powers make him a tough bit of gristle for so-
ciety to digest. In the company of his peers, his differences
from normal people become accentuated in his mind and his
loyalties are anchored in the peer group. Isolated from
normals and werewolves, he sickens and becomes dangerously
antisocial.
What to do?
The first step is to recognize that society’s problem with

werebeings is no different from society's problem with any
specially talented, specially powered individual. Take presi-
dents and other politicians, scientists, soldiers, industrialists,
and movie stars—we have alarming evidence that none of
them are as housebroken as we would wish. Novices entering
each group develop special interests and attitudes at odds
with the general direction of our society. Peer group loyalties
can become deeper than their loyalty to society at large. So-
ciety lives with the threat that these individuals will use their
power to divert and obstruct the common social will. On the
other hand, repress them, isolate them, and their own vitality
begins to work against itself. More important, society loses the
use of their considerable talents.
There is reason to believe that urban society already is

suffering from the loss of the talents of the werewolves and
their ilk. We are not like the Navajos, whose rich mystical
heritage permits them to deprive themselves of one outlet
without feeling a serious loss. Further, by denying ourselves
the benefits of shapeshifting we have not been compensated
by a concomitant gain in social stability. Excess individualism
flourishes in our environment, but all aspects of mysticism are
dangerously close to disappearing. Clustered in our peer
group, we have forgotten our deeper loyalties to nature. We
are so absorbed in our special needs and our special interests
that we have come unwittingly to threaten the normal func-
tioning of the world and its other life forms which, whether
we face the issue or not, comprise mankind’s larger society.
In our wholesale exploitation of this planet, we have already
destroyed species after species of our cocitizens and we are
dangerously close to fouling our air and water supplies be-
yond their capacity to sustain life as we know it. We have
become sick from too much killing. Truly we need a Blessing-
way held over us because the killing-sickness is making us
Can Werewolves Be DomesticatedP 135
evil. Not sinful in the Christian sense that we merit punish-

ment, but evil in the Navajo sense that we are a danger to
ourselves, a contagion to our fellow citizens, a force that is
operating against life.
The historical record shows that as long as mankind’s first
loyalty was to nature, there was no difficulty in integrating the
supernaturalists into human society; they were our leaders.
They threw themselves into the business of helping us achieve
our goals. It was only as mankind drew more and more apart
from nature and became lost in the games of its peer group,
flouting the laws of nature that the supernaturalists drew
apart from the rest of us. Then they became a problem to hu-
man society because they refused to concern themselves with
strictly man-oriented problems. Their goals remain the same:
it is we who have changed.
And it is we who must change again.
It would be foolish to attempt to reverse time, backtrack-
ing along the path we came in senseless destruction of cities
and machinery and the technology that created them. We
must start where we are, using what we are now and what we
have built to realign ourselves with nature. We need to assess
and evaluate—not to plunge down a strange track just be-
cause it is different, not to follow blindly our present freeway
to catastrophe. Until we find new leaders to help us achieve a
new balance with the other communities of life on this planet,
we must lead ourselves. It can be done. We can learn to listen
to our own heartbeat. We can feel our way back toward
health. We can discover how to work with life rather than
against it.
This movement is already happening. New ways of living,
new orientations are springing up, sometimes in the strangest
places. One couple who belong to this new type of naturalist
is presently living in Los Angeles, the third largest city in the
United States. They have learned to make use of the urban
areas without being contaminated by them. They scrimp on
less important items to live in a canyon where the air is sweet.
Their house is old, with slow plumbing and wavering elec-

tricity, but it nests in a tangle of plant and animal life. They
let the laundromat’s machines wash their clothes and they
own a car to navigate the freeways. However, they shape the
car to their lives. Its back seat is a play pen for their infant
and her cuddle mate, a baby lamb they found abandoned by
its mother.
The lamb was adopted out of compassion but, as chains of
events work, it is changing their lives. The young mother has
become excited about the possibility of growing her own wool
for her handcrafts. She is learning to carve and spin. They are
planning to buy enough land to support a flock. Her husband
is tranquil about his present lack of cash. “You do what you
want to,” he says. “If you want something enough, you find
a way to do it.”
He refuses to argue with people who think a new car
would be better than an old house in the canyon or who scold
him for allowing his baby to play with a dirty animal. “We
use words too much,” he says. “We substitute words for feel-
ings.”
And he is right. We cannot be argued into a new way of
life. But we can see happiness and want it for ourselves. We
can feel out those people who have escaped from the killing-
sickness. We discover the people who have beauty all around
them.
Whether the young couple with the baby and the lamb
have developed specific paranormal talents is unimportant
for the task of realigning ourselves to nature. They are were-
animals in a more significant way. They feel their citizenship
in the society of other life forms and they are living within
the larger community and learning to abide by its rules.
Perhaps as we go about the process of changing our
priorities—not nature for man but man for nature—we will
find that the problem of identifying and socializing the were-
beings among us no longer exists. Perhaps we will find that
there is a little bit of the werewolf in each of us.
Che “For the Millions”
SEMES
Che “For the Millons”’
SEMES
AtcHEMY by William Leo—A modern look at what was probably

the first hard science the world has ever known, beginning as a
cross between chemistry and philosophy, with a goal of changing
base metals into gold, developing universal cures for disease, and
establishing ways to prolong human life indefinitely.
AMERICAN INDIAN Reticions by John Major Hurdy—An inform-

ative, accurate focus on the use of mysticism, the development of
supernatural talents, and the means by which peoples of influential
tribes integrate their religion into everyday living.
An AsTroLocy PrrMeR by Carl Payne Tobey—One of America’s

great experts on astrology presents a fascinating introduction to
the subject. “A rich collection of knowledge.” Phoenix, Arizona
Gazette.
BorDERLINE OppitiEs edited by Shelly Lowenkopf—An anthology

of accounts of people with strange abilities, beliefs, and ways of
138
The “For the Millions” Series 139
communications. A good high school, junior college, adult educa-

tion supplement to spur reading interest.
Crarms, SPELLS, AND Curses by Victor Banis—A treasure trove

of witchery, villainy, and black and white magic. Ancient names
for roots and other ingredients are modernized.
CompLeTe Hanp Reanpinc by Edith Niles—An illustrated, up-to-

date study showing how to use the entire human hand in person-
ality and character readings.
ComPLeETE I Cuinc by Edward Albertson—Has all the necessary

data to launch a basic understanding of the world’s most famous
oracle. Featured in TV Guide.
Devetopinc ESP by Patrick Somerset—A successful introduction

to the techniques for developing and testing various ESP abilities.
Dowsinc, Drvintnc Rops, AND WATER WircHes by Howard V.

Chambers—The first important book in ten years to show how
dowsing works, how it began, who has the ability to dowse, and
what tools they use.
ESP by Susy Smith—America’s favorite psychic researcher opens

the door to the world of ESP abilities and phenomena. “Should
intrigue skeptic and believer.” San Diego, CA Union
Famous Guosts, PHANTOMS, AND POLTERGEIsts by Andrew

Tackaberry—Exciting accounts of beings from other worlds who
return to earth to seek revenge and... occasionally just fun.
“An excellent primer.” The Spirit Quarterly
Hanpwaitinc ANALYsis by Dorothy Sara—A noted specialist gives

tips on how to judge character, psyche from handwriting. Profusely
illustrated.
Havuntep Houses by Susy Smith—A guided tour through modern

haunted houses. “Scary but good.” Bill Wolff, CBS radio
Hypnotism by Clayton Matthews—How hypnotism works, how

it can be used in connection with strengthening ESP abilities.
Lost Continents by Marilyn S. Pierce—Amazing stories, valid

theories, and shrewd, cautious appraisals of the former continents
of Mu, Lemuria, and Atlantis. Complete with maps and new
findings.
MENTAL TELEPATHY AND ESP Powers by Max Holbourne—A

definitive introduction to the kinds of telepathic powers now on
record. “Quite valuable for the lay person.” Christian Research
Instituté
Miracte Cures by G. Victor Levesque—Stories of modern day

individuals who experienced cures of illness after medical author-
ities gave up hope on them.
More ESP by Susy Smith—New stories of ESP sent Miss Smith

by readers of her first book.
More Tarot Secrets by Joanne Sydney Bennet—Additional

methods for quick readings with the 78-card tarot deck, prepared
by the author of the introductory tarot book in this series.
Mysticism by Norman Winski—A popular, easy-to-digest book

showing how today’s living is enhanced through use of mystical
thought and mystical techniques of communication.
An Occur Dictionary compiled by Howard V. Chambers.—

Hundreds of terms, names, definitions. “A big seller... a basic
guide to the occult.” McCall's
Ovut-Or-Bopy ExPreriENceEs by Susy Smith—Actual stories of indi-

viduals who can detach from their bodies and move about at will.
PurRENOLOGY by Howard V. Chambers—The first modern work in

years on the famous “science” of head reading. Entertaining, in-
formative, amazingly useful and provocative.
PropHecy by Edward Albertson—Actual accounts of past and

present individuals
who can forecast the events of the future.
Psycuic SELF-IMPROVEMENT by William Wolff—The famous Con-

cept Therapy story that shows how to heal with ideas.
The “For-the Millions” Series 141
Psycuic TALENts by Clayton Matthews—Eye-opening accounts of

people who have found strange, effective ways to make ESP work
special wonders for them.
REINCARNATION by Susy Smith—America’s most popular psychical

researcher takes on the most controversial occult subject of all
and draws some conclusions, offers some information you won’t
want to miss.
ScIENCE OF Minp by Doris Heather Buckley—A dynamic approach

to living and believing in the world of today. Makes the mind
draw in power like a strong radio, tuned in on The Source.
ScIENTOLOcY by Walter Braddeson—A step-by-step introduction

to the new and personal emotional discipline that may help you
join those who have expanded their abilities.
SEANCES AND SENSITIVEs by Edward Albertson—Accounts of world-

famous mediums past and present; case histories involving some
of the greatest trance mediums of all time.
SECRET PsycHic ORGANIZATIONS by Clayton Matthews—Inside

secrets that have been kept for years, sometimes even centuries,
by psychic organizations and religions throughout the world.
Secrets OF Ecypr by Marilyn S. Pierce—Delves into Egyptian

mysteries of the past and shows how to develop the same myste-
rious abilities as Egyptian royalty. Also shows you how to write
your name, other items, in hieroglyphics.
Sprrir COMMUNICATION by Doris Heather Buckley—Accounts of

dealings with recently dead beings and their adjustments to the
spirit world.
SprriruaL Yoca by Edward Albertson—A complete introduction

to spiritual and contemplative yoga, showing how each path can
be used for results.
A SUPERNATURAL PRIMER by Susy Smith—An exciting, case history-

illustrated introduction to the world of spirits, strange beings, and
mysterious activities.
Tarot by Joanne Sydney Bennett—An introduction to the 78-card

fortune telling deck that is one of the most ancient and accurate
sources of divination known to man. Complete instructions. Also
shows how to case readings from regular bridge deck.
UFO’s by Howard V. Chambers—The ideal introduction to the

lore of unidentified flying objects. Hundreds of case histories,
details of sightings, etc. “A familiarization manual for new fans,”
Hartford, Conn. Courant
UNDERSTANDING Dreams by James Bellaugh—Hundreds of listings

and modern dream subjects, all with clear, up-to-date interpreta-
tions. Especially good in symbolism, fantasy, and ESP tendencies.
UNDERSTANDING JuNG by Norman Winski—A simplified introduc-

tion to the main writings and occult ideas of the most original and
penetrating psychiatric thinker of modern years. Nothing like this
guide available anywhere at any cost.
UNDERSTANDING ZEN by Edward Albertson—A unique, all-new text

that shows how this, the most popular of Eastern religions, can
be learned and used effectively by persons of all ages.
Unity by Kam Lytton—An introduction to one of the most power-

ful and popular modern religions. Shows how to attract success,
health, self-confidence. A SELECTION OF THE UNITY BOOK
CLUB.
VEDANTA by Edward Albertson—Written by an actual follower of

this modern offshoot of the Hindu faith, this introduction is geared
to the Western reader who wishes to follow in the footsteps of
the great gurus and learn the revelations that attracted such
famous 20th-century minds as Huxley, Isherwood, Heard, etc.
Voopoo by Jacques D’Argent—Based on information given the

author by actual informants who practice and believe in the effec-
tiveness of this eclectic religion. Details of voodoo personages,
charms, spells, cures, etc.
Wircucrart
Cn
by r Marika
ee
Kriss—One of the most unique approaches
The “For.the Millions” Series 143
to witchcraft in print, this introduction takes an anthropological

and functional look at one of the most misunderstood subjects in
history and makes some of the most sensible conclusions in print.
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WEREWOLVES,
SHAPESHIFTERS,
AND SKINWALKERS
by Marika Kriss
instead of concentrating on the well-known

source materials set in Central Europe, Miss
Kriss enters the lair of the werewolf throughout
the world, from the shadowy days of pre-history
up to the present, detailing accounts of people
who change their forms, why they change, and
how.
Closely allied te witchcraft, but different
enough to deserve a study of its own, lycan-
thropy—-werewolvery—is brought to new light
in these exciting pages that read like a novel,
have the ring of truth, and the measure of reason.
Miss Kriss leads a well-lit path through the
domain of the shapeshifters—beings who can
change their shape to that of several animais
besides wolves—and skinwaikers, an Indian
term suggesting beings who are temporarily
trapped inside the bodies of animals.
Are they good or evil? Can they be con-
trolled by mere mortals? Is werewolvery con-
tagious? Is it a matter of choice? Here is the
book with the answers.

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i

FOR THE MILLIONS SERIES

Raymond AF, Sadowske

Witchcraft: Past and Present

SHERBOURNE PRESS, INC.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number

Designed by Shirley Shipley

Composed, printed, and bound in the United

One How Weird Is Were? 1

Two Are Werewolves for Real? 12

Three The Pagan Werewolf 20

Four The Christian Werewolf 4]

Five Transformations: of the Body or the Spirit? 59

Six How They Do It 71

Seven The Cat People 88

Eight Are Werewolves Evil? 108

Nine Can Werewolves Be Domesticated? 127

The For the Millions Series 188

Sensing the subtle shift from velvet

who read or own a television set or go to the movies could

according to a system of classification we ourselves devised.

members of society. Nor do we hear about contemporary

, How Weird is WereP 5

lobo is dropped together with the beginning “h” of their word

The answer is entirely a matter of semantics. Some people

shifter, Not all werewolves and shapeshifters possess the same

/ How Weird is Were? 7

they possessed no supernatural knowledge but were the

metamorphosis. Both titles, witch and sorcerer, will be used

although large numbers of them are known to increase the

METAMORPHOSIS—The changing of form from human to ani-

the keen of werewolves. The English countryside was tamed

form. The Icelandic and Navajo phrases, traveling-in-a-form

climbing, mouse or fly forms for concealment. A hungry man

Without question, shapeshifting belongs to the category of

The metamorphosis of a frog is a bland one compared to

Are Werewolves for Real? 15

there it remains until by chance it is destroyed or by chance

In this second half of the twentieth century, biologists

Are Werewolves for Real? 17

that the two disciplines produce different types of brain con-

experimentation staggers the imagination. Following the work

In a similar fashion, after they had accepted the concept that

, we cannot deduce our way toa Weorent conclusion

Are Werewolves for Real? 19

shifting; knowledge about life cannot be gained from deduc-

Persons who practice the nature reli-

+ The Pagan Werewolf 21

a wound that heals because it has been doused with a dis-

From beginning to end, the ceremony is sixteen days

of techniques for understanding and adapting to nature. As

/ The Pagan Werewolf 25

herding and farming, of sailing, fishing, trading, of childbirth

efforts with both before his mysterious disappearance from

, The Pagan Werewolf 29

THE BEGINNINGS OF WEREWOLVERY—Much. available

his totem animal during young adulthood, usually through

return to earth as a leopard. During the circumcision cer-

that we catch glimpses of the ancient rites of transformation

The Yakuts have a discipline of healing and fortune-telling

that, where only the literature remains, it constitutes con-

The king has kissed the sky as a falcon;