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Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show, Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why open AI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHotRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts.
Why is a soap opera Western like Yellowstone so wildly successful? The American West with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network. So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th, where we'll delve into stories of the West and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today.
Listen to The American West with Dan Flores on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What happens when we come face to face with death? My truck was blown up by a 20-pound anti-tank mine. My parachute did not deploy. I was kidnapped by a drug cartel.
When we step beyond the edge of what we know. I clinically died. The heart stopped beating. Which I was dead for 11.5 minutes. In return. It's a miracle I was brought back. Alive Again, a podcast about the strength of the human spirit. Listen to Alive Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey everyone, Robert Lamb here in this special omnibus edition of The Monster Facts.
We've put together all five episodes of our recent look at the werewolf in myth, legend, and media. From prehistoric wolf interactions and the ancient world to modern media incarnations of lycanthropy. So let's dig right in. Draw blood. Where the limit of our campfires glow licks against the darkness of the wilds, strange forms leap and prowl.
sometimes human, sometimes lupine, often somewhere in between. Huddled around our cultivated flames, this nighttime sun of burning wood, we invoke the rites of man: hot food and drink, dance and song, story and myth. These acts tell us who we are,
And yet the creatures of the outer night tempt us to darker, wilder orbits. Places in the wilderness from which our fire would be but a pinprick of light. They are the wildness from which we arose and might yet return. Dressed in no furs but their own, naked before no gods or none man still remembers.
They are our violent hearts, our erotic blood, flesh, hunger, and desire. Suckled by the moon, the werewolves creep closer, threatening to leap with shredding claw and ripping teeth, even as their howls urge us to cast aside our tools, our garments, our language, tongues, and join them in the all-encompassing night.
Here we begin a multi-episode look at the werewolf, shapeshifters who walk the line between human being and the wild wolf in all manner of horrifying and alluring ways.
Broadly, werewolf traditions and visions overlap greatly with other shapeshifter traditions. Pretty much every culture boasts some version of the human into animal or animal into human story, as well as some manner of human-animal hybridity. These therianthropes are many, serving as everything from divine avatars to tricksters and tormentors and entailing a plethora of animal forms.
The werewolf, however, is a creature that specifically emerges from the nexus of human beings and the Eurasian wolf. The history of these two species is long debated concerning their coevolution and the domestication of dogs some 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, just before or during the last glacial maxima.
Suffice to say, humans and some canids, perhaps cast-off wolves or abandoned young, forged a mutually beneficial relationship. In a sense, each social animal found a new pack in the company of the other. It's an interesting bond unlike any other.
As neuroscientist John Allman discusses in his 2000 book, Evolving Brains, each species benefited greatly from the domestication. The wolves gained added support for the rearing of their pups, and humans, now bolstered by the wolf's keen senses, became an even stronger hunter, able to out-compete their evolutionary rivals and protect their camps against nocturnal predators.
Thus, our Ice Age ancestors brought Canids closer to the fire of their culture, even as their wild kin howled and raged in the vast darkness beyond. Did they even then tell stories of fellow hunters lost to those outer orbits of wildness? Did they imagine humans transformed into wolves, perhaps by the donning of a pelt or some act of savagery? We don't know.
They thought enough of wolves to depict one in the surviving cave paintings at Fond de Gomme cave in modern-day France. Elsewhere, Ice Age artists depicted the oldest known human-animal hybrid in the Loewenmensch or Lion Man figure of Hohenstein's Stadel cave. So we might reasonably assume such imaginings were possible, but it would be tens of thousands of years before specific words for what we think of as werewolves emerged in human culture.
In the 1948 book Man and the Wolf, Austrian polymath Robert Eisler presented an elaborate take on humanity's prehistoric past, arguing that traditions of the werewolf are based in the dual emergence of our ancestors as two separate strains of early humans, one savage, violent, and predatory, the other peaceful.
The conflict between these early peoples, he argues, continues to resonate in the collective unconscious, as well as our ongoing human struggles against war, pain, and cruelty.
These arguments, however, depend on now outdated understandings of human evolution as well as Jungian archetypes. So I don't want to misrepresent his ideas as modern scientific hypothesis, but rather as a work of cultural commentary. It's an interesting take on the very real long history of man and wolf.
Turning to contemporary scholarship, historian Daniel Ogden's excellent 2021 book, The Werewolf in the Ancient World, stresses that we mustn't be too quick to view wolves as the mere bestial opposite of humanity, and thus a fitting wild energy to entertain in our myths and legends of metamorphosis.
Certainly, as he points out, there are plenty of connotations in ancient accounts throughout the Eurasian wolf's historical range that identify the creature as an embodiment of savagery or trickery. But others still acknowledge the social, noble, intelligent, cooperative, and tactical nature of wild wolves. In other words, we didn't just see our savage id in the wolf.
something frequently cited in werewolf tales. No, we saw much of our nobility in them as well. Ogden writes, "...werewolves are wolves because there is a sense in which wolves are in and of themselves werewolves already, insofar, that is, as they combine the qualities of the wildest and most lawless of animals with those of civilization and humanity."
In 2017's She- A Cultural History of Female Werewolves, editor Hannah Priest also weighs in on this issue, arguing that while we often do look to humanity's prehistoric past for the seeds of werewolf legends, the narratives of werewolves are intrinsically bound to "historical circumstance, civilization, and literature."
The European roots of the werewolf are perhaps linked, she suggests, not merely to the threat posed by wolves to hunter-gatherers or even to the wolf-like and wolf-aided nature of the hunter, but also to the threat posed by wolves to domesticated animals, ultimately a threat to agriculture and property.
As we'll discuss later, this interpretation reveals much about the gendered nature of male and female werewolves and the sort of distinct threats they seem to embody toward male landowners. Suffice to say, specific werewolf traditions do arise from the relationship between humans and wolves. But it's a relationship that changes drastically over time and takes on different forms across cultural lines.
Well, much to explore in the weeks ahead, but for now, as we sit by our campfire, we gaze out at the most perplexing shapes in the darkness. Creatures that indeed blur the line between wilderness and civility. Creatures that embody unnatural transformation, informed, it would seem, by the many ways we transformed the natural world and ourselves through the domestication of fauna and flora.
As we discussed last time, the origins of werewolf traditions may trace back to our prehistoric ancestors and the gradual domestication of the wild wolf, an act that may have made us better hunters and better watchers of the dark. At different points in human history, we saw shades of the wolf in our own animal nature, just as we also saw shades of human intelligence, cunning, and society in the ways of the wild wolf.
This is not, however, to say that the werewolf specifically is a universal concept. Shapeshifters and animal-human hybrids exist in virtually all human cultures, but the werewolf, naturally, requires some familiarity with the species Canis lupus, particularly the Eurasian wolf.
Now, I want to stress that yes, the wolf's range includes North America, and they certainly do factor into the rich traditions of various indigenous North American tribes. But these traditions, including the off-sited skinwalkers, are rather distinct from the werewolf concept as we know it today. We may come back to discussion on this topic later on, though. Let's start with the term werewolf, or the Germanic Werwolf.
This we can trace back to the writings of English Benedictine monk Bishop Wollstan, and this would have been very early in the second millennium CE.
While most famous for being the last pre-conquest English bishop, his service began a mere four years prior to the Norman conquest of 1066, Wulfstan did in fact warn the English of the threat posed by the, quote, Wudfraco Werwulf, this being a threat to the church's flock. As Daniel Ogden explains in The Werewolf in the Ancient World, the usage here is broad and don't get excited, but it certainly doesn't refer to actual werewolves.
Now, as Ogden explains, the traditional interpretation of the word werewolf saw it as a combination of the Latin vir, or man, with wolf, a man-wolf. But he stresses in his book that the commonly accepted theory today is that were derives from the Anglo-Saxon warg, meaning stranger or outsider.
The werewolf is an outsider wolf, and this might too, he argues, connect to Norse ideas of wolf and outlaw. In fact, he cites a 13th century Danish tradition that saw convicted thieves hanged beside the corpse of a wolf to fully convey the dead man's criminal nature to common citizens passing by.
Of course, these ideas line up with the way werewolves have often been presented. Dangerous outsiders, threats to law and ruling landowners. And if we think seriously about the animal itself, a lone wolf that is not part of a social pack.
Male lone wolves in reality are generally only temporarily alone, moving from one social group to another or back into the same group they just left. But in some cases, this may also constitute an individual infected with rabies, a most dangerous creature indeed.
The term lycanthropy, however, is much older, first employed by the second century CE physician Marcellus of Siddhe, who employed the term lycanthropia to describe medical conditions that we would now, Ogden describes, define as different forms of mental illness.
Marcellus' description continued to echo through ancient medical writings. And as Nadine Metzger summarizes in 2014's Battling Demons with Medical Authority, published in the journal History of Psychiatry, these lycanthropes were described as otherwise harmless, melancholic individuals who suffer from extreme dryness, hang out at cemeteries, and mimic the behaviors of wolves and dogs.
Modern interpretations have considered a number of actual ailments that might have underlined this broad diagnosis: rabies, porphyria, neurological dysfunction, and epilepsy. Some additionally make a case for some manner of true clinical lycanthropy. For ancient physicians, however, it was nothing but a little fasting or the consumption of a wolf's heart wouldn't cure.
The term lycanthropy would remain a purely medical term, while other Latin words more specifically described shape-shifting beings. That is, until 9th century CE historian Theophanes the Confessor described agents of the Byzantine emperor as lycanthropes, a manner of wordplay here to invoke the Greek myth of Lycaon, wordplay that would be repeated by George Hamartolos, a.k.a. George the Monk, later that same century.
And this, Ogden contends, sets the word werewolf on the trajectory that we enjoy today. It's interesting that we've long seen this duality of magic and medicine, of the rational and the superstitious in our werewolf media.
As Matt Shemkowitz explores in a 2025 AV Club article titled Film Trivia Fact Check, original The Wolfman script kept the werewolf at bay, the 1941 universal horror classic film was originally intended to leave it ambiguous as to whether the film's Lawrence Talbot suffered from a monstrous curse or a distortion of the mind.
The 1946 film She-Wolf of London, as well as the 1976 Italian grindhouse favorite Werewolf Woman, both employ the idea of werewolf delusion rather than literal transformation.
Finally, I want to come back to Bishop Wulfstern here. His name has nothing to do with werewolves, being rather a family name that meant wolfstone in the sense of strength and resilience. But as Brad Steiger points out in 1999's The Werewolf Book, a much later German tradition, recorded, I believe, in the 19th century, told of a wolfstone erected over the grave of a slain werewolf.
keeping the monster at rest, but also becoming a focal point for the paranormal. We continue this week with our look at werewolves, having previously discussed purported prehistoric origins of the werewolf and the experiences and observations of early humans, as well as the earliest known usages of the words werewolf and lycanthropy.
The former, werewolf, emerges in the early second millennium CE, while the latter, lycanthropy, has an older but complex history as a second century CE catch-all for various mental illnesses, which came to be conflated with the Greek myth of Lycaon. Lycaon was the legendary king of Arcadia who dared to try and trick the high god Zeus into eating human flesh.
His ploy was unsuccessful, however, and Zeus inflicted a fitting divine punishment for one so savage, which Ovid describes as following in The Metamorphosis, Henry Thomas Riley translation.
Alarmed, he himself takes to flight, and having reached the solitude of the country, he howls aloud and in vain attempts to speak. His mouth gathers rage from himself, and through its usual desire for slaughter it is directed against the sheep, and even still delights in blood. His garments are changed into hair, his arms into legs. He becomes a wolf, and he still retains vestiges of his ancient form.
His hoariness is still the same. The same violence appears in his features. His eyes are bright as before. He is still the same image of ferocity. And just to be sure all responsible parties are punished, Zeus follows this up with a great flood. But Lycaon himself is indeed transformed into a wolf. And like the biblical Cain, as Riley points out in his notes, he is forced to live as a cast-off outsider, a lone wolf.
In some tellings, his sons are transformed as well. While the myth of Lycaon is sometimes held up as an ancient key to understanding subsequent werewolf tales, Daniel Ogden in 2021's Werewolves in the Ancient World maintains that the tale is a quote, metaphorical derivative of the ancient folkloric traditions that are indeed the key.
He devotes an entire later chapter in the book to Lycaon and the complex interplay there of three key categories.
1. Historic evidence for a lupine transformation rite of passage for young men of the Anthid clan. 2. Various related myths of lupine transformation and sacrilegious acts of human sacrifice and cannibalism. 3. A supposedly historical tale of an individual changing into a wolf after eating part of a human sacrifice at the Lycaea Festival on the slopes of Mount Lycaon, aka Wolf Mountain.
I won't attempt to summarize the entirety of his analysis, but Ogden does contend that the story is more werewolf-adjacent than anything. Lycaon is a man punished with transformation into a wolf, a transformation that occurs only once outside of his control, making him no more a true werewolf than Arachne, another victim of divine transformation, punishment, and Greek myth, is a were-spider.
So, an unsatisfying werewolf and by no means the key trendsetter that some make him out to be, but still an important and influential myth in the grand tradition of werewolves. As discussed in the last episode, he's not key to the understanding of the word "lechanthropy," but his myth eventually becomes conflated with the term to some degree.
Now one of the tales interwoven in the Arcadian myth is that of the Olympic athlete Demarcus, a boxer who is said to have been transformed into a wolf for a period of nine to ten years at the festival of Lycaea, possibly due to ritual consumption of human flesh, thus, as is common in all Lycaean myths, blurring the line between man and beast.
But Ogden stresses that the quote-unquote werewolfism of DeMarcus, if we may call it that, is more directly related to his status as a superb athlete, in keeping with various other supernatural stories of the time about athletes, including other accounts of lupine transformation. This would seem a tale as old as time. Multiple contemporary MMA fighters, for example, and professional sports stars have been nicknamed werewolves.
The Batman villain known as Werewolf was also an Olympic athlete. And let us not forget Teen Wolf cousins Scott and Todd Howard, known for their lycanthropic basketball abilities. This brings us back to a continuing point of contemplation in werewolf traditions. There is a certain bit of the beast that we admire and crave to manifest in our strength and speed or even in our savagery.
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Terms apply. Are there any pictures of you online? I'm not just talking about Google. I'm talking anywhere. Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts. That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos. And sometimes it makes mistakes.
So in this one case, two of the search results that I think were in the top 10 of the search results were Michael Jordan. It's a picture of Michael Jordan. But cops are still using it to make arrests. Police, they are trusting the software to lead them to the right suspect. But you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works. This is not Minority Report.
This is happening right now. People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kill Switch, where every Wednesday we explain the right now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off. Listen to Kill Switch in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. OpenAI is a financial abomination.
A thing that should not be. An aberration. A symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show, Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why open AI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts.
We've been discussing the roots of werewolf traditions, both in prehistoric human history and in ancient mythology and literature. Based on my readings, I think it's safe to say that werewolf traditions emerge from various elements in human history and the human psyche, taking on different forms depending on time and location, and most importantly, influencing later traditions, legends, folktales, and of course fictional takes as well.
When we look for specific examples of early or even the earliest literary examples of werewolves, it really depends on how narrowly or widely we refine our search. For instance, the oldest surviving work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, features the wild man and possible beast man Enkidu. And there's certainly some crossover from here into later werewolf traditions, but to be clear, Enkidu, not a werewolf.
More interesting, as Daniel Ogden brings up in The Werewolf in the Ancient World, the Epic of Gilgamesh does feature reference to the goddess Ishtar having turned humans into various beasts, including a wolf. Much later, though still ancient to us, Homer's The Odyssey from the 8th century BCE refers to the witch Circe, transforming humans not only into pigs, her specialty, but into wolves as well.
These are both cases of transformative witchcraft, and while Ogden contends that stories like this certainly feed into werewolf traditions, we'd be going overboard to single either out as a true case zero for literary or mythic lycanthropy.
Focusing on the importance of temporary and even deliberate transformation with connection between the two forms, Ogden points to a tale that is often singled out as the most obvious werewolf story from the ancient world, one appearing in the satiricon of Gaius Petronius Arbiter from the late 1st century CE. The Latin satire contains a story told by the character Nicaros at a banquet, and it roughly goes as follows.
Back when the freedman Nicaros was still a slave, he fell in love with the wife of an innkeeper and would sneak off to her whenever he could. One night when the master of the house was away, Nicaros persuaded the current house guest, quote, a soldier as brave as Orcus, to accompany him on the midnight journey. Shortly afterwards, they found themselves in a necropolis amongst the tombs where the moon shone down on them like the midday sun.
And then Nicaros observed the soldier in a most shocking and remarkable act. He took off all his clothes, neatly piled them up, urinated in a circle around them, and then transformed into a wolf.
The wolf howled and ran away, and when Nikros tried to touch the clothes that the soldier had left within the circle of urine, he found that the clothing had turned to stone. In fear, he hurried on to see the innkeeper's wife, whose name was Melissa, and she told him that if he'd arrived earlier, he could have helped them, for a wild wolf had attacked their livestock, draining their blood before they were able to drive the beast away with a spear to the neck.
Nicaros began his way home after that, passing where the clothing had been stacked but finding only splashes of blood there, and when he finally reached his master's house, he found a doctor attending to the soldier who had suffered a grievous neck wound.
Now, we can easily identify the key attributes of temporary, deliberate transformation with connection between the two forms, as well as various flourishes that would remain popular in werewolf fiction up through modern times. Thus, it's pretty definitive. Furthermore, Ogden contends that this one is, quote, "...one really good corking story," which is key because the tale first and foremost serves as entertainment,
with humorous wrinkles concerning the storyteller, while also somewhat reflecting popular beliefs and the contemporary appetite for fantastic tales infused with the supernatural. In short, it's a werewolf story doing what werewolf stories have always done, and that is entertain. Visual depictions are less definitive, as we often lack the full context of what we're looking at. Is it a mere wolf?
a human disguised as a wolf, or merely wearing a wolf's pelt, there are various stopping points before we arrive at full werewolf, even as we contend with images tied to known tales such as the Satyricon or the myth of Lycaon. Therianthropic figures can likewise mean various things. Still, acknowledging all of this, some images do read strongly as werewolf, at least to us modern viewers across the gulf of time.
Consider the 6th century Etruscan Pontic plate, which seems to depict a furry bipedal humanoid with a wolf's head. The context is unclear, though probably linked in some way to Hercules and the centaur depicted elsewhere on the plate.
The theory-anthropic figure here may represent death, or the wolf-man combination here may reference the god Phonis, who in Ovid's Metamorphoses attempts to rape Hercules while Hercules is dressed in his lover Ampheles' clothing.
We're reminded in all of this that the werewolf is a monster. It is a thing, a form, that illustrates various ideas, observations, and comparisons. And any of these ideas, observations, or comparisons may essentially summon an image comparable to the werewolf completely on their own.
detached in whole or in part from any particular werewolf tradition. That's it for now, but next week we will continue our journey and we will turn our attention to the female werewolf. As we continue our look at the werewolf in myth, legend, and media, we now turn to the female werewolf.
a gendered take on the monster that might at first glance seem to be mere titillation, but the roots of the concept weave their way through a variety of contemplations about femininity and the wild in all their forms.
I want to return to 2017's She- A Cultural History of Female Werewolves, which features multiple chapters by different authors that examine female werewolves in myth, legend, and media. Everything from centuries-old legends to modern cartoons. As previously mentioned, the book's editor, Hannah Priest, argues that European werewolf narratives revolve around the threat posed by wolves to domesticated animals, ultimately a threat to male-owned agriculture and property.
When the werewolf is male, the threat comes from outside the male landowner's domain, the outlaw wolf wanderer, who might seek to tear through the defenses and kill livestock or family members. Meanwhile, female werewolves tend to emerge from within the male landowner's domain, often endangering children and serving as an overall threat to domesticity.
Of note, the first Mexican werewolf movie, La Loba, or The She-Wolf from 1965, features both a female and a male werewolf, and they correspond to this form quite perfectly. The female werewolf, the daughter of a well-to-do Mexican landowner and scientist, and the male werewolf, her suitor from afar.
In this gothic slice of Golden Age Mexican cinema, the werewolf seems to represent the wild and uncontrollable elements of someone within the family unit and someone from beyond it. For more on La Loba, see our recent episode of Weird House Cinema on the film.
It's interesting that both the first Mexican werewolf movie and the first werewolf motion picture period, a now lost 1913 short titled The Werewolf, feature female lycanthropes. But the vast majority of werewolf tales lean heavily toward male, often hyper-masculine visions of wolf-human hybridity.
Likewise, while the wolfman is often presented as a lone wolf, the female wolf woman is often connected to a social group or part of a mated pair. This is interesting in how it connects to previous discussions of what our ancestors saw of themselves in wolves and vice versa.
As highly social animals, wild wolves reflect aspects of human family and society, and it's only rational for these elements to influence our conceptions of human-wolf hybridity as well.
In fact, as author J. Kate mentions later on in the She-Wolf book, quote, "...aside from a brief fashion for presenting female werewolves as lonely night stalkers in Victorian literature, the dominant presentation of female werewolves from the Middle Ages onwards has been as part of a social unit comprising other werewolves or other humans."
I won't attempt to summarize everything explored in the book. Definitely pick a copy up for yourself if you're interested in this topic, as I am. There's an entire chapter concerning females in the RPG Werewolf the Apocalypse game, for example. But it explores the various ways in which
in which female werewolf treatments explore societal ideas concerning female connectedness to nature and societal norms related to body hair, menstruation, sexuality, aging, and other topics. And in some cases, certainly the female werewolf can be yet another example of the monstrous feminine, in which some aspect of female bodies or female experience is othered from the standpoint of patriarchal anxiety.
Overall, however, a good monster tale can reveal and convey much more. The werewolf stands as a nexus between the wild and the civilized, between freedom and taboo, between liberty and control, and takes on so many additional meanings when applied specifically to women.
In Daniel Ogden's excellent 2021 book, The Werewolf in the Ancient World, he of course highlights the difficulty in deciding what exactly constitutes a werewolf versus other modes of hybrid monsters and various cultures that had no precise word for werewolf.
And this applies to both masculine werewolves and feminine werewolves, of course. He does mention an account that Priest singles out as the entry point of the female werewolf into literature. That is Gerald of Wales, 12th century CE, Topographia Hiberniae.
Gerald recounts a priest's travels in post-Norman invasion Ireland, and specifically his encounter with natives of Ossory, who spoke of how a man and a woman of their people were picked to undergo a seven-year transformation into wolf. The locals end up bringing the priest to visit the dying she-wolf and give her last rites.
In this moment, the male counterpart peels away the wolf's hide from her body, revealing the form of an old woman within. It's a perplexing story. As Priest points out, it's a tale told by an invader. Gerald of Wales was half Norman and half Welsh, and certainly not Irish. And the story concerns the traditions and customs of a conquered people.
Furthermore, as Ogden points out, the story is all the weirder when you consider that the people of Ossory have to contend with all of this lycanthropy because they were cursed by a priest and in later tellings of the same story by St. Patrick himself, all for the crime of being disruptive when he tried to convert them to Christianity. So driving out snakes is one thing, but cursing locals to become werewolves, surely quite another.
In She-Wolf, historian Marilee Metzahy explores Estonian werewolves, specifically accounts from the Isle of Saaremaa, where tales of female werewolves are more common than tales of male werewolves, apparently. Estonia is rich in werewolf traditions, which survive in the form of various fairy tales, legends, and also some historic accounts of witch trials.
Metzli explores the topic from a number of different angles, but the overall argument that I found most remarkable was that the predominance of female werewolf tales in Estonian traditions may connect to greater levels of gender equality in pre-Christian Estonia and a definite loss of those rights as Christian influences permeated Estonian society.
Furthermore, we may refer back to older connections between the wolf and fertility magic, traditional observations of lupine motherhood, and the link between maternity and sexuality that was subsequently eradicated under the influence of Christian culture.
In other words, while laws and top-down societal norms might have subjugated women, their traditional power in Estonia was not so easily erased, and we see it remain as protest, as recognition, and so forth, in the tales of women with the secret might of wolves.
One Estonian story shared in Metzavi's chapter encapsulates several of these ideas. The wife also has wolf pups. There are different versions, but it essentially tells the story of a woman who goes into the woods to hunt and secure meat for the family, while her husband seems to stay at home at the cabin and seemingly just complain about how chilly it is, citing the fact that their child is too cold.
The wife tells him that their child is better off than those who sleep in the straw behind the house. And when the husband goes out to investigate, he finds several wolf pups, which he promptly kills. The next night, while the man lounges in the sauna, a great wolf bursts in through the door and attacks him. He manages to defend himself. He burns the wolf with a pair of tongs, scaring the creature off, and later, via the old identifying wound trope,
he learns that the wolf was in fact his own wife, seeking vengeance for his killing of her wild wolf children.
Female werewolf stories continue to entertain us, while also retaining their ability to intentionally or unintentionally reveal much about the times and places they emerge from, revealing both negative societal ideas about women, as well as more celebratory and even subversive ideas about feminine power.
Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The Artifact, or Adam Alias Dependium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
In this episode, we dive into how cops are using AI and facial recognition and sometimes getting it wrong and
putting innocent people behind bars. So if your accuser is this algorithm, but you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works. Listen to Kill Switch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show, Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why open AI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHotRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts.
Why is a soap opera Western like Yellowstone so wildly successful? The American West with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network. So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th, where we'll delve into stories of the West and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today.
Listen to The American West with Dan Flores on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What happens when we come face to face with death? My truck was blown up by a 20-pound anti-tank mine. My parachute did not deploy. I was kidnapped by a drug cartel.
This is an iHeart Podcast.