Read e-book online The White Devil: The Werewolf in European Culture PDF

By Matthew Beresford

ISBN-10: 1780231881

ISBN-13: 9781780231884

From Ovid’s Lycaon to Professor Lupin, from Teen Wolf to An American Werewolf in Paris, the lycanthrope, or werewolf, involves us usually at the web page and the silver reveal. those interpretations usually reveal lycanthropy as a curse, with the individual changing into an uncontrollable, feral beast in the course of each complete moon. yet this can be only one model of the werewolf—its origins should be traced again hundreds of thousands of years to early prehistory, and every thing from Iron Age lavatory our bodies and Roman gods to humans similar to Joan of Arc, Adolf Hitler, and Sigmund Freud characteristic in its tale. Exploring the position of this atypical collection of rules and other people within the fable, The White Devil tracks the advance of the werewolf from its delivery to the current day, looking to comprehend why the wolf curse maintains to carry a company grip at the sleek imagination.

Combining early demise and burial rites, mythology, folklore, archaeological facts, and native superstitions, Matthew Beresford explains that the werewolf has lengthy been found in the ideals and mythology of the numerous cultures of Europe. He examines prehistoric wolf cults, using the wolf as an emblem of historic Rome, medieval werewolf executions, and the eradication of wolves via specialists in England through the Anglo-Saxon interval. He additionally surveys werewolf trials, clinical factors, and alleged sightings, in addition to the cases within which lycanthropes seem in literature and movie. With sixty illustrations of those frequently terrifying—but occasionally noble—beasts, The White Deviloffers a brand new figuring out of the survival of the werewolf in ecu culture.

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Extra resources for The White Devil: The Werewolf in European Culture

Example text

I saw at once he was a werewolf and I could never afterwards eat bread with him, no! not if you’d killed me. 26 Another classical account of a werewolf comes from the Mesopotamian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest surviving pieces of literature. Today there are twelve clay tablets bearing cuneiforms that once belonged to the seventh-century bc king, Ashurbanipal of Assyria. The tablets were written sometime between 1300–1000 bc, but the subject-matter was possibly inﬂuenced by earlier works dating from as early as 2000 bc.

Those rumours were even milder than the truth. I had crossed Maenala, those mountains bristling with wild beasts’ lairs, Cyllene, and the pinewoods of chill Lycaeus. Then, as the last shadows gave way to night, 46 Lycaon in wolf form. A 16th-century engraving by Agostino de Musi. Pa r t i : The Cul t o f the Wo l f I entered the inhospitable house of the Arcadian king. I gave them signs that a god had come, and the people began to worship me. At ﬁrst Lycaon ridiculed their piety, then exclaimed ‘I will prove by a straightforward test whether he is a god or a mortal.

Foaming at the mouth, and greedy as ever for killing, he turned against the sheep, still delighting in blood. His clothes became bristling hair, his arms became legs. He was a wolf, but kept some vestige of his former shape. 18 There are several other accounts like this, where a man is turned into what we would recognize as a werewolf, and it is worth considering these now. Apollas, otherwise known as ‘Agriopas’, was the Greek writer of an account of Olympic victors mentioned by Pliny in his book Naturalis Historia (Natural History).

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