So I’ve got this idea for a movie. There’s this teenager, right, and he starts feeling funny. Not because of puberty, but because whenever there’s a full moon he turns into a pug. When our trusty satellite glows he howls in pain and begins to shrink and sprouts fur and grows a curly tail and his face compacts like it got hit with a two-by-four. And when the transformation is complete he stumbles around with breathing problems, making funny noises and looking generally uncomfortable because, quite frankly, evolution never meant to produce the pug.

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It turns out that we molded the pug—and this is always quite hard to believe—from the astoundingly majestic wolf, an imposing animal that’s one of the planet’s greatest predators. We humans have long revered its voraciousness, leading to much mythologization, not to mention savage persecution, of the critter. And for thousands of years, all over the world it’s been the subject of one of humanity’s most pervasive tales: the werewolf, a beast far more menacing than the lowly werepug. So could there be a common inspiration across all of these cultures?

Name a culture somewhere on Planet Earth and more than likely the werewolf stalks its folklore, from African and Asian tribes all the way up to the classic (and confusing) Altered Beast of Sega Genesis. Even if there are no wolves on the continent, the culture just substitutes the most ferocious mammalian carnivore they’ve got, according to Caroline Taylor Stewart in her essay “The Origin of the Werewolf Superstition.” So while the Germans and Brits and Native Americans have the werewolf we know so well, in east Africa men transform into lions (in west Africa it’s leopards), while the Arawak people of South America do their best to avoid turning into jaguars.

The details of the werewolf or were-animal-of-your-choosing story vary from culture to culture, be it a deliberate transformation of a shaman or the uncontrollable murderous rage that suddenly befalls a victim. The Armenian werewolf, for example, is particularly creepy: Always a sinful woman condemned to spend the nights over seven years as a wolf, she first eats her own children, then stalks other villages, where doors and locks spontaneously open as she approaches. In many traditions, though, if you want to transform into a werewolf you can simply wear wolf pelts, though in Germany wearing the skin of a hanged man will also do the trick. You know, like ya do.

Perhaps the earliest written werewolf tale in the West comes from the mythical Greek king Lycaon, who is said to have tested Zeus’ divinity by feeding him a child (yeah, you know where this is headed). Zeus was of course rather unamused by this, striking down 50 of Lycaon’s sons with lightning bolts and turning the king into a wolf. But it’s just one of hundreds upon hundreds of werewolf tales the world over.

So the question becomes: Why is this so widespread? Do we humans just innately fear turning into beasts? Not quite, but in her essay Stewart proposes a fascinating theory to explain where this all came from. And like so many great stories, it all began with a little bit of interspecies cross-dressing.

When humans started developing sophisticated hunting techniques, she argues, many peoples would kill a large predator, stuff it, and use it as a decoy. The idea was to lure more of its kind to investigate, though “of course the hunter would soon hit upon the plan of himself putting on the animal skin … that is, an individual dressed for example in a wolf’s skin could approach near enough to a solitary wolf to attack it with his club, stone or other weapon, without exciting the wolf’s suspicion of the nearness of a dangerous foe.”

And with that, many thousands of years ago the werewolf legend was born. Back at camp, the wolf-man would participate in ceremonies, dancing and crying and further assuming the demeanor of the wolf. And among the Native Americans at least, that getup came in handy when you wanted to mess with another tribe. The Pawnee people were called “wolves” by neighboring tribes for their spies’ habit of wearing a hide and sneaking around like the famously cunning predator. Thus, argues Stewart, “the idea of the harmfulness to other men of a man in animal disguise became deeply seated now.”

In Africa, the supposed transformations were rather more complete. One legend went that a man was able to transform himself into a lion, living for months at a time in a sacred hut in the forest. His wife would bring him food and beer (lions are not known for the brewing skills, after all), in addition to the medicine required for him to turn back into a man. Other shape-shiftings were far more sinister. In what is now Ethiopia, the lowest caste of laborers was said to transform into hyenas and other creatures to plunder graves. “They were reported to act like other folk by the day,” Stewart writes, but at night would “assume the ways of wolves,” killing their foes and sucking their blood and “roaming about with other wolves till morning.”

Such frenzies are reminiscent, of course, of the ravages of rabies. Indeed, Stewart cites the accounts of the America’s Blackfoot people: “It is said that wolves, which in former days were extremely numerous, sometimes went crazy, and bit every animal they met with, sometimes even coming into camps and biting dogs, horses, and people. Persons bitten by a mad wolf generally went mad too. They trembled and their limbs jerked, they made their jaws work and foamed at the mouth, often trying to bite other people.”

It’s a devastating and powerful image, and ripe for mythologization. Such tales could well have also pervaded ancient European thought, so that “later, in the Middle Ages, when the nature of the real disease came to be better understood, the werewolf superstition had become too firmly fixed to be easily uprooted.”

In 1963, L. Illis proposed an alternative origin story in a paper called “On Porphyria and the Aetiology of Werwolves.” Porphyria is a group of rare genetic disorders that manifest as severe lesions brought on by exposure to light: The teeth turn red or brown, and as the years go by, structures like the nose and ears rot away. The affected go manic-depressive and hysterical and delirious. Might people suffering from porphyria be the source of the legend? It does, after all, cover the physical transformation, whereas rabies is more behavioral.

Regardless of the inspiration, or inspirations, for the werewolf, it’s clear that something has united humans the world over in their fear of transforming into beasts. Save for Teen Wolf, of course. That wasn’t so scary. He just got sick basketball skills and stuff.

References:

Leach, M. and Fried, J. (1949) Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. Harper and Row

Stewart, C. (1909) The Origin of the Werewolf Superstition. The University of Missouri Studies. Vol. 2, no. 3.