One of the most compelling matters our species contemplates is the organisation of the universe: where is our position in the hierarchy and where is the division between beasts and men. For some peoples, for whom an animal could be the present incarnation of an ancestor, the corporeal world is a continuum of life - souls contained within discreet but equally valid forms. The ancient Europeans went as far as to accord such objects as trees and geographical features with their own identities and agendas, though later under the influence of the Church, the descendants of the same people doubted that animals had souls.
But in every context, the natural world and the beasts within it have been a fertile source of parallels for myth and analogy: animals were attributed personality traits based on their observed behaviours which came to serve as archetypes for people. And the corporeal transformation of men? That has a long and well documented history too. These man-creatures are usually denoted in English by the prefix "wer", from the Old English word for "man". The first use of the Greek derived word lycanthrope, still used in psychiatric diagnosis today, was brought to the English language by Reginald Scot in 1584, although it (and the related lycanthropy) had been used by learned souls on the continent years before then.
Europe and its cultural descendants are most familiar with the werewolf (and secondarily the werebear), but there are a myriad of related creatures whose nature varies according to their geographical location. There were weresnakes in South America and werefoxes in China. Weretigers were plentiful in India, Malaysia, Java, Sumatra and New Guinea. The Kands of Orissa in East India believed the condition to be a privilege rather than a curse, bestowed by the tiger spirits on an hereditary human line.
As this section of Unatural Predators will show, the process of tranformation to beast and back inadvertently reveals some of the darkest aspects of human experience. Feared or unacceptable traits can be sublimated and considered - whether on a personal level such as in a mental breakdown, or at a societal level such as in the Witch Hunts.
Natural animals have been of great use in the creation of myth and in that process they have often been unfairly stigmatised. Little Red Riding Hood feared the wolf and Beauty feared the Beast. But converse models exist too. In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the brutish Yahoos were people and the gentle Whinnim were creatures. The story of Gulliver was an allegory of a man who, in a state of so-called mental confusion, had paradoxically the clearest view of the corrupt and corrupting human world. As the only animals with the capacity for self-criticism (with its potential of the ability to change), perhaps we would do better to chastise ourselves for behaving as people rather than as beasts.
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