Werewolves just chilling by a wall in “Les Lupins” by Maurice Sands, 1858

(14) LYCANTHROPY

“You hear him howling around your kitchen door.

You better not let him in.

Little old lady got mutilated late last night.

Werewolves of London again.

Ah-hoo, werewolves of London!”

Not just London, as werewolves are a widespread concept in European folklore.

And not just werewolves either, as I’m opening up this special mention entry to the concept of werebeasts throughout the world. Technically that would be therianthropy, as the better-known term lycanthropy is specifically for werewolves (literally from the Greek for wolf and man). Although werewolfism and werebeastliness would be more amusing to use.

You all know the basic concept – a human with the ability to shapeshift into a wolf, or some sort of wolf-human hybrid, either on purpose or involuntarily by some sort of curse or affliction (often spread by the bite or scratch of a werewolf), with such transformations typically (but not always) by the light of the full moon.

The concept has a long history. Personally, I think it has one of the longest in human history – or prehistory – originating with animal powers, totemism or transformation in shamanism.

As the use of the Greek term lycanthropy might signify, the more recognizable predecessors of the concept originated in classical history, with references to men transforming or being transformed into wolves in Greek literature or mythology. One of the most famous was the myth of Lycaon, whom Zeus – styled as Zeus Lycaeus, translated by Robert Graves as Zeus of the she-wolf – transformed into a wolf (as divine punishment).

However, while the term lycanthropy itself was used by the Greeks in classical literature, it was apparently only in later classical history, used rarely, and in a clinical sense for a particular form of insanity rather than transformation.

The term werewolf was more recognizably used for the concept. And as that term might signify, the even more recognizable predecessors of the concept originated with the role and totemism of the wolf in pre-Christian or Iron Age Germanic paganism, itself often traced further back to proto-Indo-European mythology – where lycanthropy is apparently reconstructed as an aspect of the initiation of the warrior class.

This heady mix clashed head on with Christianity, leading to the concept of the werewolf in medieval Europe – although that concept reached its definitive height in the early modern period, hopelessly intertwined with the overlapping concepts of vampires and witchcraft, so much so for the latter that there were werewolf trials among witch trials.

And like vampires, the elements of werewolves in folklore are also worthy of their own top ten, from the underlying causes of lycanthropy, the nature of their transformation, and other characteristics – including, most crucially for those European peasants up to their necks in fangs, their weaknesses or possible cures.

And as for wider therianthropy or werebeasts – “Until the 20th century, wolf attacks on humans were an occasional, but still widespread feature of life in Europe. Some scholars have suggested that it was inevitable that wolves, being the most feared predators in Europe, were projected into the folklore of evil shapeshifters. This is said to be corroborated by the fact that areas devoid of wolves typically use different kinds of predator to fill the niche; werehyenas in Africa, weretigers in India, as well as werepumas (“runa uturuncu”) and werejaguars (“yaguaraté-abá” or “tigre-capiango”) in southern South America.”

Although I think that overlooks bears in Europe. There’s also the plethora of werebeasts in the modern fantasy genre, most notably in Dungeons and Dragons, where basically were-anything goes.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Santanico Pandemonium poster art Season 2, From Dusk Till Dawn TV series – one of my favorite female vampires. Yes – it’s not Salma Hayek from that scene in the film but Eiza Gonzalez is more vamped up in the poster here

(13) VAMPIRES &VAMPIRISM

And now we get to the hungrier folklore of the dead, albeit not so much in archetypal ghostly incorporeal form, but back from the dead as revenants. They came back wrong. Not much good comes out of coming back from the dead as a rule. It usually involves preying upon life to sustain one’s unnatural, undead being – treading water, but in blood, as it were.

There is a whole host of vampiric or ‘vampire adjacent’ beings or creatures in folklore and mythology, worthy of their own top ten, going all around the world and back to the dawn of history or beyond.

But when it comes to vampire folklore, despite all the vampiric predecessors and variants, we’re talking “the folklore for the entity known today as the vampire” that “originates almost exclusively from early 18th-century southeastern Europe” – and its progeny in modern fantasy or horror, mostly from the archetype of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which arguably overshadow their precessors in folklore.

And the elements of vampires in folklore are also worthy of their own top ten. There are many variants, lacking a single definitive type, although there are a elements common to a number of European vampire folklore legends. Like witchcraft, which to some degree it overlaps and resembles, vampirism evolved into a mythos with remarkable complexity and depth – even down to a similar frenzy of vampire sightings (and stakings) in the eighteenth century.

There are the various attributes or traits of vampires, although a surprising number of those identified with vampires in modern popular culture originate not from traditional folklore but modern fantasy – as they do for the creation or origin of vampires, which tends to be more haphazard in folklore (such as by a cat jumping over a corpse) than the viral version of vampirism in modern fantasy.

There’s also the various means of preventing vampires (as in the various means of preventing a corpse from becoming a vampire, or at least causing too much trouble as one), identifying vampire, and most importantly of all, protecting against or destroying them. A personal favorite from folklore you don’t see too much (if at all) in modern fantasy is their weird obsessive-compulsion – if you left a bag or sack of grain or seeds in its path, it had to count every single grain or seed, usually detaining it all night. Except perhaps the Count in Sesame Street, which I’d like to think is an esoteric survival of this element of folklore.

And then there are the historical explanations for vampires and vampirism – anomalies in the natural process of decomposition (for elements identifying corpses as vampires), premature burial or grave robbery, various diseases (with porphyria and rabies being the most notable), and psychological or political explanations.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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The bedsheet ghost – that common visual representation of ghosts in Western popular culture. And what better illustration for one than a Scooby Doo villain – Phantom from “Hassle in the Castle”, Season 1 episode 3 “Scooby Doo, Where Are You?”

(12) GHOSTS & GHOST LORE

Boo!

Ghosts – shades, shadows, apparitions, haunts, phantoms or phantasms, poltergeists, spectres, spooks and wraiths – the stuff of folklore, as belief in ancestral spirits or spirits of the dead is nearly universal in world folklore or mythology. I aways recall Pascal Boyer in his Religion Explained proposing the origin of such beliefs (and in part religion itself) to the persistence of dead people in our dreams. In which case I am haunted by the ghosts of people who are still alive – not to mention haunting the world as a ghost in turn.

Although there are many more rational explanations for ghosts and haunts, essentially most involving brain states or phenomena conducive to ghost-like hallucinations – once again including toxic and hallucinogenic plants or substances, some of which associated with necromancy and the underworld. Ah yes, hallucinogenic plants – is there nothing they can’t do?

And yes – ghost lore is the term used by Wikipedia for ghost foklore, albeit perhaps more in its modern context.
“Ghostlore is still widespread and popular… It might be expected that a rational age of science would destroy belief in the ability of the dead to return. I think it works the other way: in an age of scientific miracles anything seems possible”

Although I’ve always wondered that ghosts seem remarkably narrow-minded, apparently moping around where they died or other familiar haunts, when they are literally without any corporeal limitation, and could be anywhere or do anything. I’d at least want to haunt the space station for a bit. Not that it stops me, like most other people, being fascinated by ghosts and ghost stories.

Not all ghosts are equal. There’s nice or benign ghosts – something you might expect for your own ancestral or familial spirits. And some ghosts are just a**holes. I guess being dead can do that to you. Japanese ghosts – those stringy-haired ghost girls – are particularly nasty, attacking people for no particular reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And then you have the weirder, otherwordly “ghosts”, that aren’t even people but things – haunted houses or locations (which are ghostly entities of themselves, apart from any individual ghosts that may be hanging around), ghost ships, ghost trains, and phantom vehicles.

I mean – how do objects have ghosts, or be ghosts? For that matter, how do ghosts have clothing or any other objects? Shouldn’t all ghosts be naked? Although that starts to get towards spectrophilia. And yes – that is an actual thing, an attraction to or arousal by ghosts. Hello, White Ladies and Ladies in Red…

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Aww – adorable! Illustration of a winged, fire-breathing dragon by Friedrich Justin Bertuch from 1806 – public domain image used in the Wikipedia article “Dragon”

(11) DRAGONS

Here be dragons!

Dragons, drakes, worms or wyrms. Serpents – feathered, horned, winged. Amphipteres, lindworms and wyverns. Basilisk, cockatrice, hydra or ouroboros – and of course the tarrasque.

Dragons or draconic creatures are nearly universal in myth and folklore

“Nearly every culture has myths about something called a ‘dragon’, despite the fact none of them can agree on exactly what dragons are. How big are they? What do they look like? How many heads do they have? Do they breathe fire? Or ice?” (Or something else altogether?)”

“Do they fly (and if so, with or without wings)? How many legs do they have? Are they dumb as planks, or superintelligent? Are they low scaly pests, or ultra-rare Uber-serpents ancient and powerful as the Earth itself? Are they benevolent? Malevolent or even outright demonic? Are they divine entities or spirits, or just really cool animals?”

As such, dragons in myth or folklore could well be the subject of their own top ten list, including their various elements, tropes and types – not to mention the elements, tropes and types of that most important human interaction with them, dragon-slaying and dragon-slayers.

Very broadly speaking, there are two predominant traditions of dragons (in Eurasia) – ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ dragons, with the former tending towards malevolence or demonic entities, and the latter towards benevolence or divine entities. It is of course more complex than that – with many other distinctions between them (and variations within them).

Even their theories for their origin and ubiquitous presence in myth and folklore are fascinating and diverse.

The most obvious source is of analogous reptilian creatures, whether extant or extinct – crocodiles and Komodo dragons being examples of the former, dinosaurs of the latter. Of course, the dinosaurs themselves can’t have influenced human myths or folklore of dragons, but their fossils could have – apparently some attribute Chinese dragon worship to the prevalence of dinosaur fossils in China. There could even be a combination of extant or extinct reptiles, with some scholars believing “huge extinct or migrating crocodiles bear the closest resemblance, especially when encountered in forested or swampy areas, and are most likely the template of modern Oriental dragon imagery”.

Of course, it’s not just reptilian features – dragons “are often a hybridization of feline, avian and reptilian features”, as noted by anthropologist David E. Jones in his book “An Instinct for Dragons” where he suggested humans, like monkeys, have inherited instinctive reactions to large cats, snakes and birds of prey.

A less obvious source is of the symbolism of natural or elemental forces, as in Robert Blust’s The Origin of Dragons – with particular attention paid to the phenomenon of the rainbow.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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