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THE NEW IMPROVED BEAST

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Jean
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« on: December 28, 2008, 03:47:55 am »

THE MODERN VIEW: Scholars today look for a convincing origin of the werewolf legend. Some torture victims said they had become werewolves by rubbing an ointment, a witch's salve, on their body. This leads some writers to speculate that the salve was hallucinogenic, like the Devil's Weed, a paste of datura root that Carlos Castaneda discusses in Chapter 6 of The Teachings of Don Juan (1968). But the salve figures in only a small portion of werewolf accounts.

Medical doctors with too much time on their hands have tried to blame werewolf legends on the old standby, porphyria. This metabolic disease can cause anemia, sensitivity to light, mental disorders, and other symptoms that lead some writers to propose it as the source of vampire legends. Porphyria may also turn the victim's skin brown and physically disfigure him. In 1964 British neurologist L. Illis wrote in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, "These features fit well with the description, in older literature, of werewolves."

The trouble is, the man-beast is a universal legend. In regions where the wolf is unknown, the biggest predator around takes its place, so that in India and western Asia they have a weretiger; in Japan, a werefox; and in Africa, werelions, hyenas, leopards, and crocodiles. Just try to blame a were-crocodile on porphyria! The true explanation for werewolves seems obvious: Wherever ancient societies lived in fear of some animal, they fantasized about becoming that animal.

Some people still fantasize. The werewolf curse was also known as "lycanthropy," and today psychiatrists use this term for a rare mental disorder, "a severe type of depersonalization" that causes the sufferer to believe he can become an animal. "The origin of 'lycanthropy' cannot be traced to a point in historic time or to particular civilizations," writes psychologist Nandor Fodor. "It is in the human psyche, in human experience, that the 'lycanthropic' fantasy is born.... the transformation represents self-denunciation for secret deeds or desires."


"The boy cried 'Wolf, wolf!' and the villagers came out to help him."
-- Aesop
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