Lycanthropy: a psychological as well as a moral and geopolitical category

Horror: A Very Short Introduction (2021) by Darryl Jones

Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror by Darryl Jones (OUP, 2018) is a brief but meaty overview of Horror fiction and film since about 1800. Jones is erudite and clever, insightful without being glib. He takes a global comparative view of his materials, stressing themes and motifs. Happily for the reader, he does not recapitulate the already chewed-over work of earlier scholars like Praz, Punter, and Bloom. Sleeping with the Lights On is also an excellent survey of academic thinking on issues raised by works of horror.

I first read Sleeping with the Lights On two years ago. At that time I wrote:

....For most of the very brief book, Jones addresses the market-driven historical vicissitudes of horror film and TV work. As a teacher he's probably learned that students are willing to discuss "True Detective" or "Buffy," but  not Melmoth the Wanderer or "Laura Silver Bell." (Sorry to be wearing my Sneering S. T. Joshi hat today.)

I was surprised that the most recognized and influential contemporary stylists of horror prose today get little mention.  Stephen King is discussed, as are Victor LaValle and Michelle Paver, but not Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell, or Reggie Oliver. Perhaps that's just me, though. Jones is clearly aiming at a short, popular outline, employing sexy tops like "body horror" and "torture porn." His discussions of these topics are sober and thoughtful, and do point readers at the best examples.

This past week I read the latest, expanded edition of Sleeping with the Lights On, which OUP has recruited to its long-running series A Very Short Introduction.

Jones has added an updated final chapter survey of the field circa 2020, which begins:

Where is horror today? Throughout this book, I have tried to stress the cultural proliferation of horror, and its plurality. Horror is tentacular, spreading everywhere. It is Protean, taking many forms. It manifests multiple personalities and has been put to many uses, made to suggest or articulate a variety of positions, ideologies, arguments, and worldviews, not all of them consistent and some of them downright contradictory. While some, including myself, would argue that horror is at its most powerful when it is at its most confrontational—violating taboos, flowing over boundaries, antagonizing respectability—there is no doubt that some of the finest horror shores up traditional worldviews.

Horror: A Very Short Introduction (2021) is a book worthy of your time and attention. I will be posting some excerpts in the coming days.

Jay

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From Chapter 3: Horror and the body:

[….]It is difficult to think of a body of mythology or folklore that does not contain narratives of lycanthropy or other forms of beast transformation, and contemporary popular culture is suffused with such narratives. These may originally have emerged from widespread beliefs in types of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from one bodily form to another, and might be said to reflect the unity of humanity and nature in a polytheistic order, or even a sense of innate pantheism, in which all living things are divine spirits. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is in essence an enormous catalogue of such narratives.

     Beast transformations of this kind are rarer in monotheistic mythology and theology, much of which emerged from the necessities of harsh desert survival, and thus stresses an essential separation of humanity and nature, which is a force which needs to be mastered and controlled, governed by a series of laws and interdicts, from the Abominations of Leviticus (many of which are dietary) to the Ten Commandments (which emerge out of a period of national survival in the wilderness). One of the few such narratives in the Bible is that of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, ‘deposed from his kingly throne’ for his pride and reduced to a life of feral madness: ‘And he was driven from the sons of men, and his heart was made like the beasts, and his dwelling was with the wild asses; they fed him with grass like oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven’ (Daniel 5:20–1). (This is the subject of a famous painting by William Blake, and it has been suggested that Blake drew for this on an illustration of a cannibalistic werewolf by Lucas Cranach; see Figure 5.)

Sometimes lycanthropy is, as Pliny maintained, a straightforward curse, a misfortune brought upon an innocent through sheer bad luck, or as a result of a family history over which they have no control. This remains a significant impetus for modern cinematic lycanthropy, in Werewolf of London (1935), The Wolf Man (1941), The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), or An American Werewolf in London (1981). Modern beast transformations have also found a powerful explanatory narrative in Darwinism, a major source of anxiety ever since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, as we shall see in Chapter 5. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) are both explicitly post-Darwinian narratives of beast transformation, and all subsequent tales of lycanthropy are in their different ways necessarily informed by the implication of natural selection that there is no existential division between man and beast.

     In many cases, as with Lycaon himself, lycanthropy is both a punishment and a metaphor for savagery. In serving up human flesh (the flesh of a baby; the flesh of his own child) to Zeus, Lycaon violates numerous taboos against blasphemy, unclean eating, familial ties, and the obligations of a host. He transforms into a wolf as an externalization of his own inhumanity. This is very much the interpretation for lycanthropy which the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould offered in his influential 1865 treatise, The Book of Were-Wolves.

     Baring-Gould was a kind of super-Victorian, an Anglican clergyman who was also an astoundingly prolific man of letters—a novelist, an antiquary (he wrote A Book of Dartmoor, one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s sources for The Hound of the Baskervilles), a folklorist, a hymnist (‘Onward Christian Soldiers’), and much else besides. Baring-Gould’s interest in lycanthropy dates, he maintains, from a walking tour in a remote part of Brittany, where he is warned against setting out after dark, for fear of the loup-garou, ‘a fiend, a worse than fiend, a man-fiend—a worse than man-fiend, a man-wolf-fiend’.

     For Baring-Gould, lycanthropy is a moral category. As well as Lycaon himself, Baring-Gould identifies as lycanthropes a number of moral monsters—notorious serial killers and cannibals such as Elizabeth Báthory and Gilles de Rais. He also associates the Berserkers with lycanthropy. These were terrifyingly savage Scandinavian warriors, apparently impervious to pain and injury, who dressed in the skins of beasts for battle: ‘The berserkir were said to work themselves into a state of frenzy, in which a demoniacal power came over them, impelling them to acts from which their sober senses would have recoiled…and as they rushed into conflict they yelped as dogs or howled as wolves.’ Berserker (or ‘Bersicker’) is the name Bram Stoker chose for the giant wolf that escapes from London Zoo at the Count’s bidding in Dracula. Dracula commands wolves (‘Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!’), and is himself a lycanthrope, referred to by the locals as ‘“Ordog”—Satan, “pokol”—hell, “stregoica”—witch, “vrolok” and “vlkoslak”—both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian [sic] for something that is either werewolf or vampire’. When the Count disembarks the ship he has commandeered, on English soil, he does so in the guise of ‘an immense dog’, or wolf.

     In part because of its association with cannibalism, lycanthropy is also a directly political category, a means of subhumanizing aliens and Others by rendering them as bestial. As we have seen, the further we get from the polis, from metropolitan centres of population and civilization—to Colchis, Castle Dracula, the Yorkshire Moors, the Asiatic steppes, Prospero’s island, the Island of Doctor Moreau—the closer we get to monstrosity and savagery, as though we are travelling back in time. For Herodotus, the lycanthropic Neuri and their neighbours, the Anthropophagi, lived in remote Eastern Europe and Central Asia. For Pliny, beast-men lived in unexplored Africa:

     Then come regions which are purely imaginary: towards the west are the Nigroi, whose king is said to have only one eye, in his forehead; the Wild-beast-eaters [Agriophagi], who live chiefly on the flesh of panthers and lions; the Eatalls [Pamphagi], who devour everything; the Man-eaters [Anthropophagi], whose diet is human flesh; the Dog-milkers [Cymanolgi], who have dogs’ heads; the Arbatitae, who have four legs and rove about like wild animals.

     You will notice that Pliny’s primary method of taxonomy here is dietary; beast-men are monstrous because they violate food taboos.

     Baring-Gould also recognized that lycanthropy was a psychological as well as a moral and geopolitical category. Lycanthropes, he speculated, ‘may still prowl in Abyssinian forests, range still over Asiatic steppes, and be found howling dismally in some padded room of a Hanwell or a Bedlam.’ The ‘zoophagous’ R. N. Renfield in Dracula was one such lunatic. Another was a patient of Sigmund Freud, Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man. Pankejeff suffered from a variety of physical and psychological conditions, and under analysis recounted to Freud a particularly terrifying childhood dream of white wolves sitting in the walnut tree outside his bedroom. Freud interprets this as a displaced rendition of a traumatic episode in which the infant Pankejeff, sleeping in a cot in his parents’ bedroom, witnesses a ‘Primal Scene’, an act of ‘coitus a tergo, more ferrarum’ (‘sex from behind, like the animals’), allowing him simultaneously to see both parents’ genitals, and to interpret his mother’s vagina as lack, a castrated bleeding wound. Pankejeff grew into a ‘savage’ child; for the Wolf Man, Freud concludes, ‘the sexual aim could only be cannibalism—devouring’.

     The anxious relationship between humanity and wolves is also a recurring trope in folklore, and particularly in the European fairy tale, in which the Big Bad Wolf is a recurring figure. The tale of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is especially ripe for interpretation and adaptation. One of the most widely circulated folktales, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ has direct analogues and antecedents that can be traced back to medieval Europe, and was collected by both Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers. The tale, with its pubescent heroine and her grandmother, its red cloak, and its rapacious antagonist, is ripe with psychoanalytic suggestion. For the Freudian theorist Bruno Bettelheim in his influential study of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, the wolf is ‘the male seducer’, who ‘represents all the asocial, animalistic tendencies within ourselves’. The devouring wolf-grandmother (‘What big teeth you have!’) who lives in a cottage in the woods has clear links to the cannibalistic witch of the related tale of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (also collected by the Grimms). In her feminist study of fairy tales, From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner draws together the wolf, the grandmother, and the adolescent girl, as figures linked by their liminality:

     The wolf is kin to the forest-dwelling witch, or crone; he offers us a male counterpart, a werewolf, who swallows up grandmother and then granddaughter. In the witch-hunting fantasies of early modern Europe they are the kind of beings associated with marginal knowledge, who possess pagan secrets and are in turn possessed by them....

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Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror by Darryl Jones (OUP, 2018)

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