By Walter Lazo
What modern audiences, living sheltered lives,
preoccupied with escapist entertainment, and only
capable of relieving boredom through sexuality and
the grotesque, fail to understand about the origins of
both the werewolf and vampire myths is that these
were never projections of desire but of fear. When
werewolves and vampires were truly believed in, there
was nothing seductive about them. They were seen as
monsters, plain and simple. And this went unabated
for centuries. It has only been recently--due to both
cultural changes and the advent of science--that the
old fears that these monsters represented have
diminished. Take the werewolf, for example; in the
earliest myths--before the devil got involved--they
represented three powerful fears that have plagued
humanity from the very beginning: cannibalism,
losing control and hurting loved ones, and possession
by demonic forces. These fears are what gave birth to
the werewolf legend.
By the time human beings had become civilized-organized in a socially complex way, with a uniformed
belief system and value system, and a sustainable way
of life--cannibalism had become something
abhorrent, something that could no longer be
understood save by positing that a human being had
become an animal. It is interesting to note that the
oldest werewolf story we have--by the Roman poet,
Ovid--is about a cannibal king--Lycaon, from whom
we get the word Lyncanthrope--punished by Jupiter
into becoming a wolf for his abominable appetites. It
is also interesting to note that were-people are always
dangerous animals and not bunny rabbits.
Now, as to the fear of losing control, an argument can
be made that the werewolf myth--or any shape
shifting myth that involved a dangerous animal--is a
primitive explanation for rabies and madness. Losing
control and hurting the people you love can be quite a
traumatic experience, and in primitive times, where
people ate moldy food or questionable mushrooms
that could have triggered a hallucinogenic episode
that left its victim behaving like a wild animal, a very
real fear.
Finally, possession by demonic forces was a very real
fear in the ancient--and not so ancient--world. While
this notion may seem laughable to many today, it was
in the past feared more than death. Demons were
used to explain famine, disease, plague, and disaster;
they were also used to explain unusually wicked
behavior. A demon possessing a man, even if he were
a good man, would turn him into an unspeakable
fiend capable only of causing suffering and misery.
Before I end this, allow me to touch upon the
vampire myth. Vampire myths are not as complex as
werewolf myths. While the evolution of the werewolf
myth passed through many varied stages (it was used
to explain cannibalism, what we would today call
serial killers, madness, rabies, and particularly
ferocious enemies that happened to dress in animal
skins, e.g., Berserkers) the vampire myth has always
been about death.
In its earliest manifestation--the Lamatsu myth--the
vampire is used to explain the deaths of infants. Later,
also in different cultures, the vampire became
associated with other types of deaths--stillborn
infants, victims of bubonic plague, etc. The fear of
vampires grew so great at times that the recently dead
were sometimes pulled out of their graves,
decapitated, and had their mouths stuffed with garlic
before being reburied. Fear of death was manifested
as fear of the dead, fear that the dead, still craving life,
would rise and drain life from the living.
In conclusion, the modern phenomenon of the sexy
vampire and the sexy werewolf (necrophilia and
bestiality) is something completely modern, a product
mostly of Hollywood and of escapist literature,
bearing no relation to what people actually believed
when they thought these monsters real.
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