‘Call of the Werewolf’

Sigh.

Sorry to those of you still reading this page – it’s been ages I know. Over the Christmas period I’ve had some time to come back and revisit a documentary on the werewolf that I was involved with. This was the series ‘Mythical Beasts’, produced by Windfall Films for the Discovery Science channel in 2018 (still available in the UK via Sky or presumably NowTV). Normally if I appear in something it’s directly working with the presenter, but in this case there was no presenter, just a series of talking heads and a voiceover. I appeared briefly in the ‘Call of the Werewolf’ episode (episode 9) effectively at the behest of one of these experts, social anthropologist Garry Marvin. Garry was brought in to cover the inevitable Beast of Gevaudan segment. At the time I thought the episode was exclusively about La Bête, and wrote this article on that story and how silver bullets DO figure in the story but did not seem to stop the beast. I believe I did pass that information on to Garry or the producers but if so they did not include it. This is, in fact, the only piece of evidence tying the Beast to the traditional werewolf. It is likely (as author Jay Smith believes) that at least some peasants believed that the Beast was a werewolf i.e. a man in wolf form, but there is absolutely no period evidence of that beyond the attempt to kill it with silver. Even then, that attempt was shown to have failed, and no historical werewolf was able to wreak such havoc without being caught or killed. There is also no direct link between werewolves and silver at this time. It was a perceived remedy for basically any supernatural entity or charmed human. So even its usage doesn’t necessarily mean that the user thought they were fighting a werewolf. The vast majority of the evidence is in favour of a special supernatural animal of some kind (mostly thought to be a monstrous wolf or hyena, today all but certain to have been several wolves). So in the scheme of things the Beast is only adjacent to the story of the werewolf and, by rights, I shouldn’t even have appeared!

This blog does a decent job of recapping the episode, although they have misunderstood the point about silver bullets – it’s not that they were unlikely to kill, it’s that they’re less likely to kill than a lead bullet, being lighter and thus less penetrative and less likely to smash bone. They also include the point that people often report something or someone apparently being unaffected by gunshots when in fact they’ve just missed. They over-egg how inaccurate period firearms were, unfortunately, and they use a clip of me to do it. To be clear, smoothbore muzzle-loading firearms are nowhere near as ineffective as people think, but in a high-stress situation like this, it would be far harder to hit and kill a large animal with one of those than with a modern rifled repeating arm, which was my intended point. The dangers of simplifying nuanced points for a general audience, unfortunately. The segment also goes astray slightly in implying that ordinary musket shot would not kill a man-eating wolf. The real point was that it might not immediately kill one, such that the hunters might, along with ongoing deaths, assume that they had hit but not killed it. 

As an amateur werewolf historian of sorts myself, the rest of the episode was… lacking, sadly. We have Brian Regal, an actual historian, commenting on the mythology of silver bullets, which was fine. I see he has a (by his own admission) “not to be taken too seriously” theory that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection led to a downturn in werewolf belief because he showed hybrid animal humans can’t exist. This definitely shouldn’t be taken seriously, I’m afraid. Belief in the werewolf was already significantly subdued by 1859, and humans are quite capable of sustaining belief in magical things regardless of their buy-in on scientific theories. More importantly Regal has, like so many, misunderstood what the true historical/folkloric werewolf really was. It wasn’t a hybrid of man and wolf like the Hollywood beast – it was a man (or demon) in the shape of a wolf. No belief in hybrid man-animals required. Thankfully this idea wasn’t included in the episode, but unfortunately it repeatedly missed the same point – not everything wolf-related is werewolf-related. 

I have skipped again. The actual narrative here begins with that of King Lycaeon, introduced by an actual Classicist. Now, some werewolf scholars suggest that Lycaeon is unrelated to the medieval/early modern northern European werewolf, and I see their point. But the basic trappings of a man (men, actually, since there’s a wider myth of the men of Lycaea turning into wolves periodically) effectively cursed to into a wolf are there. I personally think it’s a valid touchstone, even if direct continuity from this to the ‘golden age’ of werewolfery isn’t evidenced. However, things quickly go off the rails as they bring in archaeologist Miles Russell, who explains his (very valid but irrelevant) research into animal and animal-human hybrids that we’re told are “disturbingly similar” to the werewolf. Except they’re not. Even King Lycaeon, who is famously depicted as a man with a wolf’s head, was not originally described as such – he merely, like all later historical werewolves, turned into a full wolf. The documentary goes on to make this very point via “mythologist” Winnie M Li is not a folklorist or historian, rather an author of fiction, but she’s absolutely right. However, this completely undermines the programme-makers’ own initial proposal that werewolves were physical hybrids of man and wolf (only fictional werewolves are). Confusingly, Li also, elsewhere in the same programme (backed up by Pluskowski), suggests that the entirely separate medieval concept of the hirsute wildman “probably contributes to a nation of what the werewolf would have been”. 

We then go back in time to the famous Upper Palaeolithic ‘Sorceror’ artwork from the cave of Les Tres Freres in France. The link here is supposedly the hybrid creature’s “wolf’s tail”. Even if that WAS supposed to be a wolf’s tail, the rest of the beast isn’t a great match for any kind of wolf – it has antlers for goodness’ sake. Another archaeologist, Aleks Pluskowski, then introduces the idea of Viking wolf-warriors. This is more relevant but as Christa Agnes Tuczay explains in her chapter in ‘Werewolf Histories’ (ed. De Blecourt, p.76), there were actually three ways in which a warrior might be wolflike, only one of which is akin to the Germanic (in origin) werewolf i.e. men who physically become wolves. The programme doesn’t actually explain any of this, choosing to focus entirely upon the famous berserker who merely behaves like a savage wolf (wearing a pelt), complete with a rather misleading animated scene of warriors in wolfskins physically transforming into Hollywood wolf-men. Nor does it mention the third wolf-warrior aspect, which is psychic projection of a spectral wolf-form while the body lies in torpor. This isn’t physical werewolfery but it’s closer than the warrior who merely channels (imagines) the strength of an animal in combat. Onyeka Nubia briefly mentions the same trope in an African context, merely serving to underline how un-werewolf-like this idea really is. By this point we’ve spent a lot of screentime covering things that are mere backstory to the ‘true’ werewolf of northern European folklore. 

Pluskowski mentions the description of accused werewolf Peter Stumpp, whose eyes “in the night sparkled like fire” – the programme suggests that this was a way to tell a werewolf from an ordinary wolf. Indeed, the eyes of a werewolf are sometimes mentioned as somehow noteworthy, but this is usually because they are red or sometimes human-like. Stumpp’s eyes may allude to red werewolf eyes or to normal shining wolf eyes, it’s not entirely clear. In any case the programme’s anatomist Joy Reidenberg then redundantly explains how ordinary wolf eyes work, claiming that people would have mistaken the reflective shine for something demonic. Of course, all wolves have this feature, and it’s a huge reach to suggest that all wolves spotted at night under some sort of light were automatically thought werewolves, especially since domestic dog eyes do the same thing and people had been living with them for thousands of years.

Pluskowski shows us a church mural depicting a man-eating wolf in hell – as he points out, the only animal shown to exist there. The narrator explains that the Christian church changed the popular view of wolves from something powerful and positive to something evil. All of this is good stuff, and is at least relevant background to the actual werewolf as a concept. Unfortunately he then brings in the ‘roggenwolf’ or rye-wolf, a ghostly wolf believed to inhabit farmer’s fields. The documentary narration (not Pluskowski, notably) claims that someone bitten by the rye-wolf would themselves be “cursed to transform into a wolf” and then mentions darkening skin, ravenous hunger and violent convulsions. This leads them (and Aleks) into claiming that this was the result of ergot poisoning. They mention the same theory as applied to the Salem witch trials, a theory that has been thoroughly debunked. I’m skeptical of it here too, since as plausible as it sounds (assuming these symptoms really do appear there really is no need to invoke a medicalised explanation for folklore – people are very capable of coming up with what now seem like crazy ideas without any external stimulus beyond something like failing crops or ill health. They expand it to a general explanation of at least some accused werewolves, a claim for which we have no evidence. More importantly, the rye-wolf and the werewolf are NOT the same thing. Wikipedia makes the connection, pointing to Mannhardt (‘Roggenwolf und Roggenhund’, 1865, pp.31-32) who says that the rye-wolf was sometimes, in his time, referred to using the word ‘werwolf’, i.e. the two myths were conflated in contemporary folklore sources. However, Mannhardt himself emphasises that this is a confusion of two traditionally distinct ideas (well after the era of the werewolf trials), and points out that there is nothing in werewolf folklore to support the idea that rye-wolves were werewolves (a good example of Wikipedia editors not researching beyond the first source they find). 

Worse still, Reidenberg reappears, backed up by “mythological consultant” Richard Schwab, bringing in the old werewolf medicalisation chestnuts of Hypertrichosis (excess hair) and Porphyria (a disfiguring sensitivity to light). No folklorist or historian of werewolf belief takes these theories seriously as the werewolves of folklore were not hairy men who hid from daylight as the movies depict (other perhaps than those suffering from Lycanthropy, the mere belief that one is a wolf). Reidenberg also references the full moon, suggesting that this explains why werewolves were thought to appear at full moon. Now, contrary to common academic claim today, there is an association between humans changing into wolves and the moon. The only Roman instance of a werewolf, Petronius’s Satyricon (which is mentioned in the programme), a 9th century source in the French Bibliothèque Nationale and the early 13th century Otia Imperalia by Gervase of Tilbury all mention the moon albeit none specify the full moon. We can’t really speculate what phases the other writers thought were significant, but Petronius did mention that the moon was shining brightly (“like high noon”), which sure as heck sounds like the full moon to me. Still, even if we accept that there was a common belief that werewolves came out on the full moon, there’s no link here with these medical conditions. 

Overall, the documentary isn’t a total waste of time but, like most of its ilk, is far too keen to paint the werewolf as a universal trope rather than focus upon the beast for which the werewolf was named – the northern European person (usually a man) who becomes an actual wolf by means of pelt, belt, or ointment. There is precious little of this in the episode and so much rich history of ‘real’ werewolf belief that could have been included. Pluskowski in particular makes good contributions but is clearly pursuing his actual research interests of notions of human and animal in general, not the werewolf as a discrete historical or folkloric concept. Although most of the participants had actual credentials, few of them knew much about the werewolf of folklore, and not one actual folklorist was interviewed. Unfortunately this is par for the course with this kind of subject matter, which is invariably sensationalised since most viewers approach it solely from a popular culture background. There were far too many of them as well, resulting in precious little screentime for them or the ideas presented. It’s also unfortunate that the show was clearly made on a very low budget, featuring simple digital artwork and very crude and repetitive CGI. I’m not sure that I dare attempt the vampire episode… 

Angles on Mons

‘The Angel of Mons’ by R. Crowhurst (UK National Army Museum)

I’ve been catching up on the BBC’s latest First World War documentary series, as the centenary approaches (that fact is not coincidental to my sporadic posting – day job and all). It’s actually pretty good, though I did catch a dodgy claim in the first episode. The redoubtable Mr Paxman, explaining the ‘defeat’ of the Battle of Mons and the famous story of angelic salvation, told us that;

“There was one simple explanation for the Angels of Mons: exhaustion”.

This is indeed a simple and plausible explanation for a bizarre story of angelic apparitions rushing to the aid of British Tommies. But it’s wholly unnecessary. The origins of the story as a piece of fiction turned folklore are well documented. Arthur Machen’s ‘The Bowmen’, written in faux documentary style, was modified to be more Protestant Christian (angels not unquiet dead), and embraced as genuine by Spiritualists, who then went hunting for/fabricated ‘evidence’. The rest is history.

If you’d like the real story, I recommend this article by the excellent David Clarke in the equally great Fortean Times, and, if you can access it, another of his from the journal Folklore. He went on to write a book on the subject. You can also check out this Skeptoid podcast. Another article by Steve MacGregor supports Clarke’s thesis, and focuses on the propaganda and recruitment value to the British government of this kind of story.

It does surprise me in the Age of Google, that no-one researching this series bothered to even read the Wikipedia page on the subject. I suspect, given the description of Mons as a ‘defeat’, that they chose to twist the tale to suit the narrative of exhausted, beaten troops. I don’t think they’ve entirely shed the ‘lions led by donkeys’ theme. In fact, as dire as casualties appeared at the time to a naive public, Mons was actually a very successful fighting retreat.

It’s a shame in another way too, because Clarke’s interpretations of the story are far more interesting. He casts the construction of the story as myth-making for the industrial era, and as a psychological coping mechanism for people on the home front to deal with the horror of modern war and mass casualties amongst their loved ones. To this I can perhaps add something to bring things full circle to the many soldiers who survived Mons. There actually is a direct relevance here that doesn’t rely on hallucination. Whether or not there were/are ‘no atheists in foxholes’, as the war progressed and the remaining soldiers of the professional army were joined by civilians, it appears that the number of believers in the supernatural also increased. Every soldier was issued a set of identity disks (later nicknamed ‘dog tags’), to be recovered in the event of their death. On these tags, alongside abbreviations like ‘CE’ for Church of England’ and ‘JEW’ for Jewish, was also stamped ‘SPIRI’, for ‘Spiritualist’. This reflects a booming recruitment period for that faith as people struggled to deal with the loss of sons, fathers, and partners. These soldiers and perhaps non-Spiritualists also, must have brought this civilian tale of an incident that never happened with them to the front, and carried that belief with them into battle. I may not believe it myself, sitting in the comfort of home, surrounded by my loved ones; but I cannot help hoping that it provided them some comfort.