Werewolves, Carnal Lust & the Full Moon - Original

[Jean Starling]

Author  Topic: Werewolves, Carnal Lust & the Full Moon 
Jean Starling

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   posted 07-17-2005 12:32 AM                       
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Hi gang, this is my first attempt at a topic, so I hope it meets with your approval. Werewolves have always been my thing, I've been interested in them since I was a kid, and, since I haven't seen anything done on them here, I thought I might give them a whirl. Hope you like what I found and find some things to add to it yourselves:
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Posts: 110 | From: Chicago, IL | Registered: May 2005   
 

[Jean Starling]

 
Jean Starling

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   posted 07-17-2005 12:35 AM                       
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There are many theories trying to explain lycantropy wether it is a psychiatric disease or a real curse.

Lycanthropy occurs internationally and always follows the same course. An apparently normal human, usually quite inoffensive in everyday life, changes at sunset into some kind of wild animal. During the night the were-person indulges a taste for human flesh or for the raw flesh and blood of other animals. Were-persons are appallingly dangerous in their own bestial form and may even eat their own human children or other relations.

Man is a beast
Lycanthropy is closely related to cannibalism. The nightly activities of a werewolf were believed to be hunt, murder, and eat their victims. Some werewolf stories tell that their purpose was to kill and devour entire herds of sheep or similar animals. Even though these beasts did not possess a particular diet, they were believed to prefer tender flesh, as of children (The original version of Little Red Riding Hood is a good example to understand the relation between cannibalism and lycanthropy).

Man, naturally, in common with other carnivora, is actuated by an impulse to kill, and by a love of destroying life. This tendency is widely diffused; it exists in children and adults, in the gross-minded and the refined, the well-educated and the ignorant, in those who have never had the opportunity of gratifying it, and those who gratify it habitually, in spite of morality, religion, laws, so that it can only depend on constitutional causes. Moreover, this taste for blood can also coexists with more civilized feelings. This tendency, however, exists in different degrees. In some it is manifest simply as indifference to suffering, in others it appears as simple pleasure in seeing killed, and in others again it is dominant as an irresistible desire to torture and destroy. Bloody tyrants like Nero and Caligula, Alexander Borgia, Louis XI of France, and Robespierre, whose highest enjoyment consisted in witnessing the agonies of their fellow-men, were full of delicate sensibilities and great refinement of taste and manner. The cases in which bloodthirstiness and cannibalism are united with insanity are those which properly fall under the head of Lycanthropy. A disordered condition of mind or body may produce hallucination in a form depending on the character and instincts of the individual.

The british writer Robert Eisler created an complex theory about sadomasochism and lycanthropy. It presents proof that before the last Ice Age (25000 years ago), the human being was vegetarian and not violent. During this glacial time he had to adapt himself to survive in the new environment, and this included eating meat, hunting in groups and covering himself with animal skins to cope with the intense cold. The result of these gradual changes left "deep marks within the human collective unconscious mind producing several sadistic and masochistic emotions, the guilt and myth of the werewolf.

Eisler's theories offer interesting explanations of many of the werewolf's characteristics. For instance, emphasizing the sexual connotations: primitive men wearing wolfskin outfits often had the initiative of fighting their leaders to obtain the desired woman, or of kidnapping her out of a more peaceful tribe. Because of this, werewolves are also believed to be kidnappers. Regarding cannibalism, the ancestral tribes ate whatever they could find when the ice destroyed their northern huts and were forced to emigrate south where they found still fruit-eating, pacific people. If you inhabited one of these southern communities, and suddenly the village was pillaged and burned down, your wives raped by men in wolfskins, and the next day what was left of it was attacked by a real wolf pack, wouldn't you think there was similarity between man and wolf?

The doctor and psychoanalist Nandor Fador explains:

"The old and savage beliefs about lycanthropy have been banished to our dream life, where there still are active conditions that are exploited by the presentation of criminal motivations, while the transformation is used only symbolically as a self denunciation of our secrets, fantasies and repressed desires".

http://werewolves.monstrous.com/werewolf_origins.htm
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Posts: 110 | From: Chicago, IL | Registered: May 2005   
 

[Jean Starling]

Jean Starling

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   posted 07-17-2005 12:37 AM                       
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Porphyria
In 1964, in an article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, L. Illis proposed that porphyria might be an explanation for werewolf legends. More than 20 years later, in 1985, David Dolphin presented a paper at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, proposing that porphyria might be also an explanation for vampire legends.

Porphyria is actually a group of diseases, all pertaining to the metabolism of porphyrin rings that, along with iron, are responsible for the oxygen-carrying properties of emoglobin, the red ingredient in blood. Porphyria is a very rare genetic disorder and is in no way contagious. It may have developed among the European nobility due to interbreeding. One of the varieties of porphyria,congenital erythropoietic porphyria, is characterized by yellow and hairy skin that is extremely sensitive to light, forcing the sufferers to go out only at night or risk tissue damage. Ulcers may also cause their hands to become deformed and paw-like and mutilate the nose, ears, eyelids, and fingers. Even their behaviour becomes erratic and red pigments appear in their teeth and urine. In addition, some kinds of porphyria are associated with epilepsy.

In 1982, an American geneticist called Frank Greenberg of the Baylor College of Medicine discovered a Mexican family with a disease that make them look like werewolves: their bodies are covered with hair like the classic werewolf film of Hollywood "The Wolfman" (1945). The family was segregated from Mexican society, they were forced to hide in their home in Loreto's town, and can only obtain work in the circus.

http://werewolves.monstrous.com/werewolf_origins.htm
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Posts: 110 | From: Chicago, IL | Registered: May 2005

[Jean Starling]

Jean Starling

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   posted 07-17-2005 12:38 AM                       
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Lycanthropy as a mental disease
There are medical cases of dementia in which the victim believes he or she is a werewolf. The hallucinations under which lycanthropists suffered may have arisen from various causes. The older writers, as Forestus and Burton, regard the werewolf mania as a species of melancholy madness, and some do not deem it necessary for the patient to believe in his transformation for them to regard him as a lycanthropist.

Examples of lycanthropy are only now being linked to schizophrenia having very few cases to study in our present institutions makes this disease difficult to study in-depth.

http://werewolves.monstrous.com/werewolf_origins.htm
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Posts: 110 | From: Chicago, IL | Registered: May 2005   

[Jean Starling]

Jean Starling

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   posted 07-17-2005 12:39 AM                       
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The Wolf as the most feared animal
Our purpose is to analyse the reason for the wolf to be the creature of choice for metamorphosis. Usually, a person is deemed to take the form of the most dangerous beast of prey of the region: the wolf or bear in Europe and northern Asia, the hyena or leopard in Africa, and the tiger in India, China, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia; but other animals are mentioned too. Both the superstition and the psychiatric disorder are linked to the belief in animal guardian spirits, vampires, totemism, witches, and werewolves.

In Europe, the degree of terror and obsession the werewolf tends to inspire in the human mind may be caused by several fundamental reasons that relate with the real wolf: The wolf frightens the humans because of its howling, its glow-in-the-dark yellow eyes, its hunting ability, its silent walking, and its nocturnal activity. These characteristics are easily related and explained through supernatural and/or demonic phaenomena. Medieval and later chronicles describe wolf attacks on humans during hard winters and wartime. The development of the concept of werewolves may also be attributed to the vicious warriors in northern Europe, known as wolfmen or berserkers. These notoriously murderous and feared men clad themselves in suits made from wolf pelts.

Ever since prehistorical times man and wolf have been hunting rivals. Because of technological advancements, the man has managed to surpass the wolf's hunting prowess; nevertheless, this rivalry unconsciously persists in the man's mind.

The man has sought the wolf's extermination because of superstition, and justified it with the purpose of saving other animal species from the wolf's predation. The truth is the wolf is an integral part of its environment, since the animals it hunts are, in general, the weak, old or sick.

Due to the man's devastation of the natural ecosystems, the wolf must look after a new way of providing itself food and shelter. If the native species are substituted with farm animals, the wolf will hunt them instead. The deaths of farm animals by wolves are, almost in their entirety, caused by urbanization.

The vast literature about wolves has given them a bad reputation since ancestral times. The wolf has many human-like social ways to behave (hierarchy, monogamy, pack protection, etc.) which are always obscured by the image of the ruthless, blood-thirsty beast.

http://werewolves.monstrous.com/werewolf_origins.htm
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Posts: 110 | From: Chicago, IL | Registered: May 2005   

[Jean Starling]

Jean Starling

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   posted 07-17-2005 12:40 AM                       
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Lycanthropy and magic practices

During the Middle Age, lycanthropy was thought to be practiced by witches. The witches were believed to morph themselves into wolves that roamed throughout the european countryside frightening people, killing and devouring the travelers, according to the wishes of their satanic master. Lycanthropes were even believed to be minor demons. A few werewolves whose killer instincts were exceptionally strong were thought to be the Devil himself.

Even if the werewolf was not a morphed witch, it was still related to witchcraft: tales were told about witches who arrived at Sabbats mounting these creatures. The evil and wicked aquired, according to Paracelsus, a 16th century alchemist, the shape of a wolf upon death, or could become such creatures if they were cursed by a priest, remaining morphed for seven years. French writer Claude Seignolle confirms that this folklore is based upon stories of criminals cursed by priests, causing them to become werewolves. Other writers assure that the werewolf stories are originated in cases dealing with demonic possession. To many sixteenth and seventeenth century experts, a witch could become a werewolf only by the means of dealing with the Devil. These "witches" were usually believed to have no other supernatural ability. Many contemporary werewolf legends are originated in that obscure era. All these popular beliefs are so rooted into our culture that it is difficult to tell where the boundary between myth and reality is.

However and as highlighted before, It is possible to find many ways to become a werewolf that do not require to deal with the Devil. In Italy, the common belief is that anybody who is born on a full moon friday, or who sleeps outdoors during one of those days, is prone to become a werewolf. In the Balcanic Peninsula, where the famous Transylvania is located, grows a flower that, people say, if eaten, causes the eater to aquire Lycanthropy. To drink from the water filling a wolf track or from where a wolf pack has drunk, or to eat the brains of a real wolf are other popular ways still believed in Europe to become, accidentally or intentionally, a werewolf.

http://werewolves.monstrous.com/werewolf_origins.htm
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Posts: 110 | From: Chicago, IL | Registered: May 2005   

[Jean Starling]

Jean Starling

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   posted 07-17-2005 12:42 AM                       
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The Ergot Theory

Some lycanthropes (according to tales from the 17th century) assured people that they really were wolves and that their fur grew inside their body. If we remember the drugs used by witches as "metamorphosing ointments" and self-suggestion, it is very possible that this induced, in the ones who took them, hallucinations of being werewolves, without really being affected by lycanthropy, only by the effects of such drugs combined with suggestion.

During the period from 1520 to 1630 there were over 30,000 werewolf trials in France alone. Most of the people who were tried as being werewolves were poor, and came from lowlands with elevations less than 500 feet above sea level. Rye bread was a staple for the poorer people of France, and after cold winters the rye developed the Ergot fungus, a widespread parasite of cereal grains. A recent theory explains that people would hallucinate due to eating bread made from ergot infected rye, and therefore behave like werewolves as being.

There was a significant outbreak of ergot-poisoning in France in the early 1950's. Symptoms of ergot poisoning include hallucinations. The 1950's French victims reported 'being chased or attacked by horrible beasts', 'terror of the dark', and 'feeling that my body was not mine' together with tingling/burning sensations in the extremities and the scalp. Another man with ergot poisoning reportedly escaped from seven straight jackets, lost all his teeth biting through a leather strap, and bent two iron bars on the hospital window while trying to flee from a tiger he believed to be chasing him.

Rye grass is by far the most widespread species parasitized, though wheat and barley are also commonly affected. The 'ergots' appear as a blackish-purple club, shaped growth on the tops of the rye where the seeds are, and are referred to as "heads of ergot". From these heads sprout the Claviceps purpurea fungal fruiting bodies which has long stems with bulbous heads when seen under a strong glass or microscope. Ergot naturally produces a wide range of chemical compounds, the ones of relevance here are collectively known as the "Ergot Alkaloids", and include ergotamine, ergosine and beta-ergosine, ergonine, ergovaline, ergostine, ergotine and beta-ergotine, ergocornine, ergocristine, ergocryptine and beta-ergocryptine. These compounds all have some degree of psychoactivity. Lysergic Acid Diethylmide (LSD) was first synthesized from ergot compounds. The psychoactive components of ergot are not broken down by heat, so it is fair to assume that they would be present in bread baked from flour milled and ergotized grains.

But Ergot Fungi is essentially poisonous before being hallucinogenic and the transformation into LSD is a complex chemistry procedure that cannot occurs « naturally ».


Effects of ergotamine
Acute effects:May be fatal if inhaled, swallowed, or absorbed through the skin.

Exposure can cause: Nausea, dizziness and headache, stomach pains, vomiting, diarrhea. Other symptoms include: Thirst, changes in blood pressure and heart rate, tingling in the extremities and confusion. Chronic effects: may result in abortion or fetal harm in pregnant women. Can cause menstrual dysfunction and sterility.

Other effects include peripheral circulatory disturbances and gangrene. Possible mutagen.

http://werewolves.monstrous.com/werewolf_origins.htm
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Posts: 110 | From: Chicago, IL | Registered: May 2005 

[Jean Starling]

Jean Starling

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   posted 07-17-2005 12:45 AM                       
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Therianthropy

Physical Therianthropy has been defined as the ability to shift from human to animal form and back again. Spiritual Therianthropy, then, is the ability to mentally transform from the normal human mode of thinking and reacting to an animal one. Even if humans are animals, it has been a constant effort of humanity, however, to deny this fact. Humanity has sought to remove all aspects of animalistic traits from its behavior; to the point that being called an animal is considered an insult. It evokes images of uncivilized, impulsive, hedonistic behavior; acting completely without thought or restraint.

All humans are animals, but very few these days can look into themselves and find the animal remnants. Those who believe in Spiritual Therianthropy feel those animal remnants very strongly us and identify themselves with an animal whose characteristics reflect their own. It contacts them through totems, dreams and meditation.

One theory, presented by Issac Boneits in "Real Magic" (1971), explains that sympathetic wounding actually is a cellular psychokinesis brought on by an extreme telepathic rapport between the human and the animal. In such case the human identifies with the animal so much that he actually takes over the animal's body. So any wounding the person receives while controlling the werewolf will carry over through cellular psychokinesis to the human body.

http://werewolves.monstrous.com/werewolf_origins.htm
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Posts: 110 | From: Chicago, IL | Registered: May 2005

[Jean Starling]

Stacy Dohm

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   posted 07-17-2005 08:28 PM                       
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"Even a man who is pure in heart,
And says his prayers by night,
May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the Autumn moon is bright."
- Old Ancient Poem used in The Wolf Man (1941)

[ 07-17-2005, 08:29 PM: Message edited by: Stacy Dohm ]

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"All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream." - Edgar Allen Poe

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Posts: 341 | From: Wisconsin | Registered: Nov 2004   

[Jean Starling]

Stacy Dohm

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   posted 07-17-2005 08:45 PM                       
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Personally, I always thought it would be rather fun to be a werewolf myself.

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"All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream." - Edgar Allen Poe

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Posts: 341 | From: Wisconsin | Registered: Nov 2004   

[Jean Starling]

Trent

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   posted 07-17-2005 09:15 PM                       
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That poem was actually written for the movie, Stacy, it's not anymore ancient than the year 1941.

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"That which does not kill us, makes us stronger."

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Posts: 387 | From: DeKalb, IL | Registered: Oct 2004   

[Jean Starling]

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   posted 07-17-2005 09:21 PM                       
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Stacy, you seem to think that being a werewolf would be fun. Well, let me tell you, I used to be a werewolf and it wasn't any fun at all. Not only do you wake up in strange places, wearing God knows what, you have this awful case of indigestion and you never quite remember what you ate last night. All sorts of strange things can be found in your stool.

Yep, definitely not as glamorous as the movies make it out to be. 
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Posts: 260 | From: the Netherworld | Registered: Nov 2004

[Jean Starling]

Carolyn Silver

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   posted 07-17-2005 09:32 PM                       
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So I see where werwolves and the full moon go together, can't have one without the other! At what point can we start discussing "carnal lust" baby? Cause that's what I want to talk about!!
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[Jean Starling]

Trent

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   posted 07-17-2005 09:35 PM                       
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quote:
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THE WOLF MAN

(1941)

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Notes: Universal Pictures
Larry Talbot: Lon Chaney, Jr.
Gwen Conliffe: Evelyn Ankers
Sir John Talbot: Claude Rains
Maleva: Maria Ouspenskaya
Bela: Bela Lugosi
Doctor Lloyd: Warren William
Colonel Paul Montford: Ralph Bellamy
Frank Andrews: Patric Knowles
Jenny Williams: Fay Helm

Screenplay: Curt Siodmak
Produced and Directed: George Waggner



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Summary: A book opens to a definition of Lycanthropy which includes a reference to Talbot Castle. Larry Talbot returns to his father's estate in Wales. No mention is made of a mother, and older brother John Jr. recently died in a hunting accident. Sir John presumes Larry left 18 years ago because of resentment over favoritism, although Larry doesn't confirm this.


Sir John is modest about his award for "research" and has Larry--a hands-on man, not a theorician--tinker with his new telescope. With a touch of the "wolf," he spies on a young woman in an antique shop and into her room above the store. He visits this shop, smirks about knowing of her earrings in her room, turns down a cane with a little dog handle and instead purchases one with a wolf's head and star, or pentagram. Gwen Conliffe, the young woman and daughter of the shop owner (again, no mother is in the picture), says that the symbolism involves werewolves: "Even the man who's pure of heart and says his prayers at night / May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright." She also reports that the werewolf can see the pentagram on the hand of his next victim. Larry wants to stroll with Gwen that evening; she says no, but he smirks and says he'll be by.


Larry buttonholes Gwen, but she has asked her friend Jenny to accompany her, so all three go to the gypsy fair. Jenny prepares to have her fortune told by Bela, wondering when she'll be married, but his horror makes her ask, "What do you see? Something evil?" [Yes. Marriage and perpetual stupidity, you breeder.] He has seen the pentagram on her hand. Bela transforms (into a German shepherd) and kills Jenny later. Larry attacks and beats the animal to death with his cane, but is also bitten.


The ubiquitous pile of pompous men discover a barefoot Bela where a wolf should be, and Larry's wound has disappeared. Larry later witnesses the pagan prayer Maleva recites over her son's coffin: "The way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own. But as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end. Your suffering is over, Bela my son. Now you will find peace."


Jenny's mother and other old biddies **** to Charles Conliffe about Gwen's responsibility in not guarding Jenny, implying Gwen is slutty. Larry visits Gwen, but her fiancé Frank Andrews, the Talbots' gamekeeper, also visits with his dog. When Larry leaves, Frank says, "couldn't take my eyes away from that walking stick of his. Be careful, Gwen." Later, at the gypsy fair, Frank invites Larry: "Let's have fun. Two guns, please." At a shooting gallery, Larry freaks when faced with a wolf target. Maleva gives Larry a pentagram pendant, "the sign of the wolf." Larry then stupidly gives this to Gwen to protect her.


At home Larry takes off his shoes and shirt and we see the transformation of his feet. Outside he is dressed differently and kills Richardson the gravedigger. The next morning he wipes up muddy tracks in his room and on his sill. Entering church he and Sir John (in a dark hat) encounter Gwen and her father (in a white hat), and Larry can't remain for service. The Doctor tells Sir John that Larry's distress is a case of mass hysteria, mind over body, like stigmata. Colonel Montford and Andrews set traps for the wolf.


Larry as wolfman is trapped, but Maleva comes by on her buckboard and releases him, saying, "The way you walk is thorny. . . . Find peace for a moment, my son." Back to being human, Larry warns Gwen that he must run away. She announces to her father, "I'm going with Larry," and Charles is horror-stricken. Larry then sees the pentagram on her hand and flees.


Sir John wants Larry out of his "mental quagmire" and deduces that Maleva the gypsy has been involved: "she's been filling you mind with this gibberish. . . . You're not a child!" Dad is to lock Larry up this night and takes Larry's silver cane. We get an electric scene between a cool Maleva on her buckboard and a nervous Sir John. "You're not frightened, are you, Sir John?" He accuses her of telling "witch's tales" to Larry. "But you fixed him, Sir John. . . . Hurry, Sir John, hurry." Maleva tries to save Gwen, but she runs into the woods. The wolfman attacks Gwen, but drops her when he sees Sir John approaching and attacks him instead. Daddy bludgeons his son to death with the stick.


The wolfman transforms back into Larry in death. Sir John backs away in horror while Maleva approaches. "The way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own. But as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end. Your suffering is over. Now you will find peace for eternity." A story circulates that the wolf attacked Gwen and Larry came to the rescue, but Sir John is aware, and Gwen says "Larry" ambiguously.


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Commentary: James B. Twitchell's psychoanalytic reading of this film in Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (NY: Oxford University Press, 1985) "transforms" one's enjoyment of The Wolf Man. He traces in this and other films encoded family dynamics and incest taboos. In this case, the Talbot "family" consists of father and son, and has lost mother and brother. Maleva and Bela (mother and son) supply and function in these roles and all the parallels (and the weirdness between Sir John and the gypsy), suggest displaced symbolic relationships. Gwen lives with her father and no mention of a mother arises. The two fathers function as doubles. So symbolically, Larry seeks a relationship with his "sister" (who has no interest in him and is engaged to the gamekeeper). This is the buried taboo behind this monstrous transformation.


The saturation of the film with subtle dog references and appearances also is gratifying. Larry is called "Master Talbot": "Master" is an interesting term in light of dog training; and Talbot was a generic and typical name for a dog in medieval England, like Rover or Spot.
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http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/wolfman41.html

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"That which does not kill us, makes us stronger."

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Posts: 387 | From: DeKalb, IL | Registered: Oct 2004   

[Jean Starling]

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   posted 07-17-2005 09:40 PM                       
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Well, you know, Carolyn, the "carnal lust" part was probably added for commercial effect. You know the forum these days, sex, sex, sex, not that I'm complaining, mind you, it is one of humanity's greatest mysteries, one of the few that actually matter to most of us.   
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Posts: 260 | From: the Netherworld | Registered: Nov 2004