“That Hairy Heart
Inside of Us” – Some thoughts on Daniel Ogden’s new book and wolves.
“To be rigorous about
wolves—you might as well expect rigor of clouds.”
– Barry Lopez Of Wolves and
Men
Daniel Ogden’s new book The Werewolf in the Ancient World
is a survey of primarily classical Greece stories of werewolves, wherein he
develops new theories based on new ways of reading and interpreting texts and
discovering new information. Along with the folkloric element of werewolf tales,
he emphasizes how some particular entities like ghosts and witches appear in
the stories or are indirectly connected to werewolves, or at least wolves. He
begins, with touches of humor, by explaining that traditional classical studies
of the werewolf consider only one story to be a true werewolf tale: written by
Petronius in Satyricon, it is about two men in a graveyard where one of
them removes his clothes, pees around the clothes in a circle, turns into a
wolf, and disappears into the woods. His friend tries to retrieve the abandoned
clothes but they have turned to stone. Ogden revives two other tales, insisting
they are worthy of consideration alongside this classic werewolf story,
although before he brings our attention to them, he provides information in
meticulously researched detail about the ancient folkloric origins of the
werewolf.
Both stories he seeks to revive are connected to the rites
of the Arcadian Lykaia festival, the first one consisting of multiple
variations of a story about how Zeus is given human flesh to eat during a
sacrificial rite. Angered, Zeus turns the trickster into a wolf. In the other
story, a historical figure who later becomes an Olympic hero consumes human
flesh during a Lykaian ritual sacrifice, whether on purpose or unbeknownst to
him is unclear. He removes his clothes, hangs
them on a tree, then swims across a pool where he turns into a wolf. The man-turned-wolf
disappears into the forest for nine years, then returns and does astonishing
acts in the Olympic games.
Ogden flanks his exploration with two questions pertaining
to the nature of werewolf stories themselves. First, in the introduction, he
asks why the ancient classical peoples had werewolf stories in the first place:
“Why develop a tradition of men transforming into wolves in particular, as
opposed to other animals?” (p. 14). He acknowledges other human-animal
interests, such as the Norse were-bear, but recognizes that the wolf is “the
ultimate icon of wildness,” that the wolf embodies the idea of uncultivated wilderness,
of a way of being human’s opposite (p. 15). The wolf, however, can encompass
not just the idea of wilderness, but also of civilization, of “human-style
intelligence,” and provides a direct link to humans via the dog (p. 15). He
believes the wolf “already embodies in itself a straddling of the divide between
savagery and civilization” (p. 17). By telling tales of humans turning into
wolves, we can acknowledge that divide, a separation that continues to haunt
us.
Ogden concludes with the following question: “how did the
people of the ancient world know what a werewolf was?” (p. 206). He explains
that it’s not by any literary endeavor like the book I hold in my hand now as I
read, but instead “by being surrounded by good stories about them” (p. 206). His
answer relates thematically to the rest of his emphasis on folkloric tales, that
they weren’t necessarily stories kept by the well-off or the rich, but instead
by every-day people, soldiers, and slaves. Places, he believes, harbor the
tales; stories bubble up from significant places, and it was, for example,
“[t]emple wardens (for it was surely they, the standing staff of the ancient
sanctuaries, rather than the priests that came and went) [who] must have been
practised raconteurs” (p. 210). It was travelers who exchanged stories in inns
and taverns. Certainly werewolf stories were told by professional storytellers
at “dinner parties and symposia,” (p. 208) but we cannot forget how the
werewolf was, in reality, a “traditional folkloric object” (p. 210).
The werewolf bridges the city and the country, civilization
and wilderness, in the way they travel across their own tales. If wolves embody
both wildness and human intelligence, they also become significant in both
stories of gods and stories of lowly humans. They are both mythic and folkloric,
which, I think, brings us to Ogden’s final point: classical studies tend to
emphasize the mythic qualities of the werewolf, failing to acknowledge or take
seriously the werewolf’s folkloric origins, which, he says, sustained “more meaningful”
werewolf imagery (p. 210).
Ogden briefly acknowledges how humans have historically misunderstood
the wolf. He references Barry Lopez (Of Wolves and Men) who explains
that wolves don’t actually howl at the moon, but they are nocturnal creatures,
so it’s easy to associate one with the other. But the very idea of the werewolf
as being someone ostracized by society suggests the common belief of wolves
living in solitude, of all wolves being the lone wolf, which is also
inaccurate. Wolves are highly social creatures who live in packs with a
hierarchy and it’s only in specific situations that a wolf lives alone: the
pack has grown too large and they don’t want to interbreed, so young adult
wolves are removed from the pack and wander alone, seeking a new one. With the
vantage point of understanding wolf behavior a little better, how can we read
these folkloric werewolf tales now? I wish to understand wolves, ourselves, and
our relationship with wolves and with the wilderness in light of this new way
of knowing wolves. Wolves, Ogden says, in some ways are already werewolves
because they bridge the wild and the civilized. If the werewolf transformation
represents something that is not true, what should it mean? To become
werewolf means to become something that already bridges humanity and vulgarity.
Does becoming a werewolf really mean we are bridging into
that wild? We are accepting that wildness in us? Or does it mean we are
accepting ourselves? We feared the wolf and we continue to fear the wolf. But what
are we afraid of? Are we really, actually, afraid of our humanity, a humanity
that is so easily corrupted?
I wish to take a brief detour away from Ogden and explore a
poet, Linda Hogan, and a fiction author, Angela Carter.
Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw poet, says in her poem “Deer Dance”:
“Of all those who were transformed into animals,/the travelers Circe turned
into pigs,/the woman who became the bear,/the girl who always remained the
child of wolves,/none of them wanted to go back/to being human” (p 70 Rounding
the Human Corners). The poetic truth of what Hogan says here is not a
mainstream idea, for usually the human-turned-animal is meant to evoke horror
and tragedy, while she explores tenderness and love. Men who are turned into
wolves always seek to come back, and women who turn into wolves or associate with
wolves are evil and have sold their souls to wicked purposes. These campfire
stories, these ghost stories, reveal something about our culture, about our
fear of anything not human. But in Hogan’s poem, she wishes to
become animal, she desires to be who “slept outside my door last night.” In the
poem’s second stanza, Hogan describes a ritual deer dance where a young man, “the
chosen,” becomes the deer, he becomes “more than human” through a dance. Hogan
yearns for transformation as she finds shed antlers near her home, as she hears
them breathing by the river. She walks in the forest and she knows “they are
not quite sure” of her presence among them, but they watch her, they watch the
distance between them, and she wants to be closer, to be accepted.
Similarly, Angela Carter creates a surprising twist at the
end of her short story “The Company of Wolves,” a contemporary rendition of the
Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, when Little Red, who has taken off all her
clothes and tossed them in the fire at Granny’s house, begins to undress the werewolf
who has just eaten her grandmother. Rather than being afraid of the wolf,
rather than allowing the werewolf to steal her innocence, for she knows he cannot
really steal it and rather it is hers to give, for she knows “she was nobody’s
meat,” Little Red chooses to step out of her own childish innocence and proactively
participates in loving the wolf (152). She sleeps between his tender paws as snow
falls on howling wolves outside. Carter’s book The Bloody Chamber, where
“The Company of Wolves” is collected, contains many retellings of fairy tale
stories that bring to question the fearsome animality the original stories
convey, often suggesting it is instead the humanity that is frightful rather
than the animal. Or it is humanity that makes non-human animals horrific or
monstrous.
While I don’t think Ogden was attempting to take a stand one
way or another about the morality of the werewolf tale (and the fact that he
refers to werewolves as “objects” of tales maintains his scholarly distance),
his emphasis on werewolf stories being largely folkloric, not just mythic, points
to what was important to the people who kept these stories alive and suggests an
alternative understanding of the wolf as always evil. Why do some cultures fear
or hate the wolf and others love the wolf? What might we learn about ourselves
if we recognized the wolf, that hairy heart, already inside of us, like Hogan
and Carter do?
Works Cited:
Carter, Angela. “The Bloody Chamber.” The Bloody Chamber. 1979.
New York: Penguin Books, 2015.
Hogan, Linda. Rounding the Human Corners.
Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2008.
Ogden, Daniel. The Werewolf in the Ancient World.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021.