Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Robert Lamman. This is the Monster Fact,
Speaker 2: a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 2: focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time where
Speaker 2: the limit of our campfire's glow licks against the darkness
Speaker 2: of the wild's strange forms leap and prowl, sometimes human,
Speaker 2: sometimes lupine, often somewhere in between. Huddled around our cultivated flames,
Speaker 2: this nighttime sun of burning wood, we invoke the rights
Speaker 2: of man, hot, food and drink, dance and song, story
Speaker 2: and myth. These acts tell us who we are, and
Speaker 2: yet the creatures of the outer night temptest to darker,
Speaker 2: wilder orbits places in the wilderness from which our fire
Speaker 2: would be but a pinprick of light. They are the
Speaker 2: wildness from which we arose and might yet return, dressed
Speaker 2: in no furs but their own, naked before no gods
Speaker 2: or none, man still remembers. They are our violent hearts,
Speaker 2: our erotic blood, flesh, hunger and desire. Suckled by the moon,
Speaker 2: the werewolves creep closer, threatening to leap with shredding claw
Speaker 2: and ripping teeth, even as their howls urge us to
Speaker 2: cast aside our tools, our garments, our language tongues and
Speaker 2: join them in the all encompassing night. Here we begin
Speaker 2: a multi episode look at the werewolf shape shifters, who
Speaker 2: walk the line between human being and the wild wolf
Speaker 2: in all manner of horrifying and alluring ways. Broadly, werewolf
Speaker 2: traditions and visions overlapp greatly with other shapeshifter traditions. Pretty
Speaker 2: Much every culture boasts some version of the human into
Speaker 2: animal or animal into human story, as well as some
Speaker 2: manner of human animal hybridity. These theoryanthropes are many, serving
Speaker 2: as everything from divine avatars to tricksters and tormentors, and
Speaker 2: entailing a plethora of animal forms. The werewolf, however, is
Speaker 2: a creature that specifically emerges from the nexus of human
Speaker 2: beings and the Eurasian wolf. The history of these two
Speaker 2: species is long debated, concerning their coevolution and the domestication
Speaker 2: of dogs some twenty thousand to forty thousand years ago,
Speaker 2: just before or during the last glacial maximum. Suffice to say,
Speaker 2: humans and some canids, perhaps cast off wolves or abandoned young,
Speaker 2: forged a mutually beneficial relationship. In a sense, each social
Speaker 2: animal found a new pack in the company of the other.
Speaker 2: It's an interesting bond unlike any other. As neuroscientist John
Speaker 2: Allman discusses in his two thousand book Evolving Brains, each
Speaker 2: species benefited greatly from the domestication. The wolves gained at
Speaker 2: its support for the rearing of their pups, and humans,
Speaker 2: now bolstered by the wolf's keen senses, became an even
Speaker 2: stronger hunter, able to outcompete their evolutionary rivals and protect
Speaker 2: their camps against nocturnal predators. Thus, our ice age ancestors
Speaker 2: brought canids closer to the fire of their culture, even
Speaker 2: as their wild kin howled and raged in the vast
Speaker 2: darkness beyond. Did they even then tell stories of fellow
Speaker 2: hunter's lost to those outer orbits of wildness? Do they
Speaker 2: imagine humans transformed into wolves, perhaps by the dawning of
Speaker 2: a pelt or some act of savagery, We don't know.
Speaker 2: They thought enough of wolves to depict one in the
Speaker 2: surviving case paintings at Fonde Gamme Cave in modern day France. Elsewhere,
Speaker 2: I Sage artists depicted the oldest known human animal hybrid
Speaker 2: in the lone Minsh or lion man figure of Hollenstein's
Speaker 2: Stadel Cave, so we might reasonably assume such imaginings were possible,
Speaker 2: but it would be tens of thousands of years before
Speaker 2: specific words for what we think of as werewolves emerged
Speaker 2: in human culture. In the nineteen forty eight book Man
Speaker 2: into Wolf, Austrian polymath Robert Eisler presented an elaborate take
Speaker 2: on humanity's prehistoric past, arguing that traditions of the werewolf
Speaker 2: are based in the dual emergence of our ancestors as
Speaker 2: two separate strains of early humans, one savage, violent and predatory,
Speaker 2: the other peaceful. The conflict between these early peoples, he argues,
Speaker 2: continues to resonate in the collective unconscious, as well as
Speaker 2: our ongoing human struggles against war, pain, and cruelty. These arguments, however,
Speaker 2: depend on now outdated understandings of human evolution as well
Speaker 2: as union archetypes, so I don't want to misrepresent his
Speaker 2: ideas as modern scientific hypothesis, but rather as a work
Speaker 2: of cultural commentary. It's an interesting take on the very
Speaker 2: real long history of man and wolf. Turning to contemporary scholarship,
Speaker 2: historian Daniel Ogden's excellent twenty twenty one book, The were
Speaker 2: Wolf in the Ancient World, stresses that we mustn't be
Speaker 2: too quick to view wolves as the mere bestial opposite
Speaker 2: of humanity and thus a fitting wild energy to entertain
Speaker 2: in our myths and legends of metamorphosis. Certainly, as he
Speaker 2: points out, there are plenty of connotations in ancient accounts
Speaker 2: throughout the Eurasian Wolfe's historical range that identify the creature
Speaker 2: as an embodiment of savagery or trickery, but others still
Speaker 2: acknowledge the social, noble, intelligent, cooperative, and tactical nature of
Speaker 2: wild wolves. In other words, we didn't just see are
Speaker 2: savage id in the wolf, something frequently cited in werewolf tales. No,
Speaker 2: we saw much of our nobility in them as well.
Speaker 2: Ogden writes, quote werewolves are wolves because there is a
Speaker 2: sense in which wolves are in and of themselves were
Speaker 2: wolves already insofar, that is, as they combine the qualities
Speaker 2: of the wildest and most lawless of animals with those
Speaker 2: of civilization and humanity. In twenty seventeen's She Wolf, A
Speaker 2: Cultural History of Female Werewolves, editor Hannah Priest also weighs
Speaker 2: in on this issue, arguing that while we often do
Speaker 2: look to humanity's prehistoric past for the seeds of werewolf legends.
Speaker 2: The narratives of werewolves are intrinsically bound to quote historical circumstance, civilization,
Speaker 2: and literature. The European roots of the werewolf are perhaps linked,
Speaker 2: she suggests, not merely to the threat posed by wolves
Speaker 2: to hunter gatherers, or even to the wolf like and
Speaker 2: wolf aid nature of the hunter, but also to the
Speaker 2: threat posed by wolves to domesticated animals, ultimately a threat
Speaker 2: to agriculture and property. As we'll discussed later, this interpretation
Speaker 2: reveals much about the gendered nature of male and female
Speaker 2: were wolves and the sort of distinct threats they seem
Speaker 2: to embody toward male landowners. Suffice to say, specific werewolf
Speaker 2: traditions do arise from the relationship between humans and wolves,
Speaker 2: but it's a relationship that changes drastically over time and
Speaker 2: takes on different forms across cultural lines. Well have much
Speaker 2: to explore in the weeks ahead, but for now, as
Speaker 2: we sit by our campfire, we gaze out at the
Speaker 2: most perplexing shapes in the darkness, Creatures that indeed blur
Speaker 2: the line between wilderness and civility, Creatures that embody unnatural
Speaker 2: transformation informed, it would seem by the many ways we
Speaker 2: transformed the natural world and ourselves through the domestication of
Speaker 2: fauna and flora. Tune in for additional episodes of The
Speaker 2: Monster Fact, The Artifact, or Animalia Stupendium each week. As always,
Speaker 2: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 2: your Mind dot com.
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