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Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.
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 lycanthropy, 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 werewolf.
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.
We'll have more to explore concerning ancient lycanthropy in the next episode, including the best cases for the earliest written and visual depictions of werewolves. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The Artifact, or Animalius 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.
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