Table of Contents
The wolf runs through myths on both sides of the Atlantic: as the punishment of a cruel king, as the child of Loki, as the beast that chases the moon, and as the threat at the door in a children’s tale. These are the pages where I followed it.
Lycaon and the wolf rite
The oldest wolf story on this site is set on an Arcadian mountain. What Is Mount Lycaeus? covers King Lycaon, who founded the worship of Zeus Lykaios there. The versions differ by author, but they share one spine: a human victim mixed into a sacrifice, then death or transformation into a wolf as the answer of Zeus.
Ovid tells the transformation in Book 1 of the Metamorphoses. On Ovid’s Four Ages Jupiter describes what became of Lycaon:
He was a wolf, but kept some vestige of his former shape. There were the same grey hairs, the same violent face, the same glittering eyes, the same savage image.
Ovid, Metamorphoses Bk I:209-243, translated by A. S. Kline
Men-wolves in the Old World and the New
Ignatius Donnelly saw lycanthropy as one more shared belief between Europe and America. On The Indentity of the Civilizations of the Old World and the New he writes:
Among both the Germans and the American Indians lycanthropy, or the metamorphosis of men into wolves, was believed in. In British Columbia the men-wolves have often been seen seated around a fire, with their wolf-hides hung upon sticks to dry!
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
The Norse wolves
On The Serpent the Norse story casts Loki out from the table of the gods together with his offspring, the wolf and the serpent. The wolf is bound, Thor holds the serpent, and Loki is chained under the mountains. On Moon I note that Mani, the Norse moon, is chased across the sky by the wolf Hati.
Wolves as symbol and as image
Animals & Materials quotes Atlantis and the new consciousness, where seven animals stand for seven principles and the wolf represents the mind. In Frederick S. Oliver’s account on No Good Thing Can Ever Perish (6-1), the Poseidi mountaineers swept down “like the wolf” on the pastoral people of the plains.
The wolf at the door
The video The Three Little Pigs’ 3,000-Year-Old Secret argues that the children’s story is far older than it looks: the pigs were once offerings on stone altars, and the wolf was what people feared would come if the sacrifice failed. Self-Domestication of Homo sapiens: Evidence from Comparative Biology and Human Evolution takes the wolf in another direction: the same process that turned wolves into dogs, it argues, turned aggressive hominins into cooperative Homo sapiens.
Related pages
- What Is Mount Lycaeus?
- Ovid’s Four Ages
- The Indentity of the Civilizations of the Old World and the New
- The Serpent
- Moon
- Animals & Materials
- No Good Thing Can Ever Perish (6-1)
- The Three Little Pigs’ 3,000-Year-Old Secret
- Self-Domestication of Homo sapiens: Evidence from Comparative Biology and Human Evolution
For every page I tagged with Wolf, see the Wolf tag archive.
