 everyone to season two of We Are Being Transformed. Here we explore liminal spaces and contours of reality. The myriad of ways people interact with their world through the vehicles of cult, ritual, and lore. Our guest this episode, returning again, is Dr. Daniel Ogden. Dr. Ogden is a professor of classics at the University of Exeter. He is also an authority on all things dragon, which dragons, witchcraft, magic, and the supernatural and antiquity. He's authored a number of seminal books, including the source book, magic, witchcraft, and the ghosts in the Greek and Roman worlds, the dragon in the west, and the topic of our discussion this morning, the werewolf in the ancient world. Dr. Ogden, thank you for joining me once again. How are you doing? Hello, good to be back. I'm fine, how are you? I am great, very excited for today's topic. Very excited about this book. I was just going through all the sources and I was like a kid in a candy store. I thought that there was very sparse sources for this stuff, but you make a very good case in your book that by look, well, we'll get to it, but we're discussing without further ado, as many of you people know by looking at the title, we're discussing fascinating rich topic, the werewolf and antiquity and beyond actually, because Dr. Ogden uses a lot of the medieval sources to kind of tie the back together and the folklore elements. But it's very important to define the term first because we have preconceptions about a werewolf is. So could you define what a werewolf is for the audience and especially in relation to your folklore first methodology in the book? Well, in terms of looking at werewolves in the ancient world, I just, I take a very broad view. I'm happy to classify it as a werewolf. Any entity that is at some point a human or humanoid and at some point a wolf or a lupine. And I don't make any rules beyond that. I mean, for example, one of the famous figures in ancient werewolfism is Lycaeon. And he's a bad man who attempts similarly attempts cannibalism or tries to con the gods into eating human beings and he's punished by being transformed into a wolf. Now, a very distinguished French scholar has said, well, no, he's not a werewolf because first of all, he's just a man and then the God strikes him and then he's a wolf. But that's not a werewolf. Well, maybe, but it's actually quite difficult in the end to know what sort of, to develop a sort of criteria for distinguishing Lycaeon from our other werewolves. So I don't make any rules about whether you're a man to start with or a wolf to start with about how often you transform, about whether you transform back. Anybody who basically displays both those elements or indeed both human and lupine elements at the same time for that matter, I'm happy to bring into the mix and to consider. Now, as far as my methodology is concerned, well, I'm not sure it is a methodology. In fact, I dislike the word methodology. When people ask me to explain what my methodology is, I have to say, the heart sinks, frankly. I don't have a methodology, I have a belief. And that belief is that the overriding determinant of werewolfism in the ancient world is folklore, is stories. And I should say that the evidence for werewolves is very diverse, centrifugal and very hard to put together into anything coherent. But it seems to me that that's the one, that's our one chance of doing it if we start with folklore. So I think every other manifestation of werewolfism in the ancient world is basically derivative of the traditional storytelling. So that's where the werewolf starts. So for example, I mean, most people who've talked about the werewolf in the ancient world have fixated on this rite of passage, on rite of maturation associated with Mount Likaon. So again, we're back at Mount Likaon is where again, Likaon himself lived. This is rite of passage, whereby some young men hang their clothes on a tree and then swim across a pond, emerge on the other side of the pond as a wolf, live as a wolf for a couple of years. And if they've managed to abstain from eating human beings during that time, they can come back and then it can recover their clothes and their human form. Now, that's a rite that's described in a number of ancient sources. And goodness knows what that actually relates to in terms of the real world of what actually happened, that dreadful question. But a lot of people have taken that as the starting point and they think that everything about werewolves in the ancient world is to do with maturation, rite of maturation. And I think that's back to front. So I mean, I think we start with stories and the werewolf of the story is then used in metaphorical ways, I would say, for various purposes. So one of those metaphorical ways is indeed to describe a brief period of ritual wildness to separate these Arcadian young men from their childhood, to separate their childhood, their pre-warrior status, from their adulthood, their post-warrior status. Another metaphorical use of werewolfism is etiological. Again, there's all sorts of etiologies associated with the figure of the Kion himself. Another use of the metaphorical use of werewolfism is in terms of medicine and disease. So again, Like in Galen. Yes, indeed, like in a series of ancient medical writers, actually, they had this notion that you could develop something called lycanthropy. Of course, we use that Greek word now as just a mean werewolfism. But for them, it wasn't werewolfism, it was specifically the disease of people that imagine themselves to be wolves. But again, the whole concept of that disease is sort of metaphorically dependent upon a knowledge of werewolves to start with and where does that knowledge gain from? It's from the story world. So here I am, I'm arguing hard for that. But I expect actually, with most of your viewers, I'm probably pushing an open door because if I ask your viewers, where do werewolves live, they're going to say, well, in stories, of course, in great stories, whether it's in Pulp Fiction or in movies, that's where they live. And the ancients didn't exactly have Pulp Fiction. They didn't have movies, but they did have good stories of just the same sort. And that, in my view, is where ancient werewolves lived. That's fascinating. Just kind of an off topic, but an ancient world didn't have Pulp Fiction. I kind of imagined something like Flagon of Kaili's Book of Miracles is kind of like the weird tales of the time. Or maybe it was a bit more up there than that. But yeah, it's a good question. But they did have fora or places in which weird tales were told. And again, those are the sorts of places where we can imagine, I think, werewolves tales being rehearsed. So, for example, I mean, the best, I'm sure you'll want to ask about this in an upcoming question. But our best werewolf tale, for example, is told in the course of Petronius' novel, Sotericum, and it's told by a character at a dinner party. And it's told as a pair of sort of competing tales. So two people at the dinner party are telling... So it's like Tremolchio and Nicarose. Yeah, so Nicarose is the character who's telling the werewolf tale. And then Tremolchio tells a tale about Strixwitches, both very lurid, very interesting, very entertaining tales. And onto the competing with each other. Okay, so that's a little pair. You can imagine at a sort of real dinner party, 10 people, you know, you go around the circle and everybody tells a story like... I think the analogy of campfire horror stories is a really good one here for us. So, yeah, and also we do know from various illusions in ancient texts that in the Roman Empire, at any rate, including, I suppose, the Greek world of the Roman Empire, there was this phenomenon of the Aratologus. And he was basically a professional storyteller, a professional, I think we can say, a professional weird storyteller. And they would be paid to come into dinner parties and tell these stories. And it's often thought, for example, you mentioned Flagan of Trollies, it's often thought that those stories may originate or at least have been propagated in that sort of context as well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, another sort of just sort of branching out from dinner parties. Dinner parties sounds a bit glamorous and a bit middle-class, doesn't it? I think any form of social gathering, really, I should say convivial gathering. And again, I think another place where these stories would really have thrived in being told would have been in pubs, you know, bars, the bars of the ancient world, the taverni, because it's amazing how many weird stories, but well, stories under the weird, I say weird supernatural stories include an innkeeper somewhere, I don't know why should that be, you know, I don't think that... Right, they're either the protagonists or they're taking part in some way. Like the Aesop story, right, with the guy who's pretending to be a werewolf. That's a great story. Yeah, sure. So why should that be? I don't think somebody's sat down to sort of collect one day or create a nice group of weird stories all linked together by the theme of an innkeeper. I think it's just that, you know, these stories are told in pubs and you're trying to act as make them real and relate them to your immediate environment. And so, my host is often gonna turn up in the story you're telling, you know? Or, you know, or there was an innkeeper very much like this one who, you know, so. Yeah, and that opens up another can of worms just in terms of like the strict switch, which will, or the bod witch, which we'll get to a little bit later, perhaps, because like you point out in the source book, werewolves, yeah, their function ultimately is to serve the purposes of a good story. They're also found in association with like a myriad of different supernatural entities like witches and ghosts and the dead in general. So it's very fascinating. We'll get to that. That's a good question. Dragon Queen of Little Earth, we will actually get to that in terms of the wearing the wolf skin and transforming it into a wolf. There's lots of stories that Dr. Ogden goes over in the book that touch upon that. That's another aspect, especially in the medieval stories and we'll talk about those. I was gonna ask, but I suppose I wanna get into it because I always love to talk about the centuricon whenever I can. So you're at this dinner party, being this lavish kind of banquet being thrown by the nouveau riche, very bawdy Tremolchio and he has this friend, Nicarose, tell this story about the wolf and I love like when he tells this story kind of reminds me of the part, you create his house and suit up, fill up suit days where they say the same thing. They're like, if I'm lying, no amount of money could make me lie about something like this. And it reminds me of like Lucian when he's on the moon and he goes down to look at the mirror and he's like, if you don't believe me, go up yourself. It's to say, I know he's making fun of things like that but it's great. So they're telling these stories and like you said, there wasn't technically a word for werewolf and the word that they're using for the transformation is not like anything related to werewolves and it's since it's in Latin obviously, but also the word is like skin changer, right? Very, very, very, so what, and it's very interesting, like I said, you talk about how these two stories, the story that Nicarose tells and then Tremolchio tells the story about the boy who dies, the slave boy, the favorite slave boy who dies and then the witches are outside and then the slave guy goes out and he like stabs one of them, but then they go back after they've gone and then they find that the child's body's been pretty much like replaced, well, I mean the body's there, but they took, I guess they took out the organs and then just put in straw or whatever. So it's very interesting that even back at these earliest sources, the werewolf and the Strigi, I don't know if you could define that because I know a lot of people don't know what that means. I know you wrote an entire source book on the Strix Witch, I don't know if you could touch upon that. Well, yeah, it was a little monograph actually, well, I mean, I did incorporate all the main sources within it, but it's not the source book is such a, just about a 66 page discussion or something like that. Yeah, so the Strix Witch is, perhaps I should begin by saying that although they're kind of associated with witches, they probably weren't, well, it's hard to say, on the whole considered to be mortal women. Maybe sometimes they were, often they were I think conceived of rather as demons. So in many ways. Like Elamia or in Gilgamesh, yeah. Yeah, I was about to say, in many ways, they're the equivalent of the Greek Lamia, if again, if your viewers know about her. And so they're basically child stealers, especially baby stealers. They're considered as old women in form, but they can also transfer them, transform themselves into some sort of raptor bird or a creature that has the affinities of a raptor bird. And the propensity- The Screech Owl, right? The Screech Owl. Well, yes, Strix can, yes, Strix means, yeah, Strix is thought to mean Screech Owl as well. Yeah. And so they, and then this form, they penetrate domestic houses and steal babies and young children. Either they steal them away or they eat them or they gut them, or more sinisterly still, they have the ability to penetrate their bodies imperceptibly and remove key organs. Again, no doubt to eat. But then the child is left to sort of die slowly or sort of wither away. Again, nothing about the Strix is sort of fixed. I mean, there's also a notion that they can seemingly sort of penetrate houses in a sort of, in the form of a, maybe in sort of soul-projected form or reduce themselves to a spirit and they can get through a little crack or a keyhole or something. So that's a sort of, that's a sort of parallel to a sort of, I suppose, penetrating a child's body imperceptibly. You can also penetrate the house as it were imperceptibly. So there we go. And the, there's, they're very vague and I have to say they are very vague hints and maybe I over-egged it in the book, to be honest. There are very vague suggestions that these creatures can also transform themselves into wolves. So there is perhaps a slight thematic link there between the two Petronius stories on that basis. Although there's certainly no mention of a wolf in the, in Petronius's Strix story. Yeah. Right, yeah. I mean, it's very, it's very titillating speculation though. Like I love like how you tie the folklore from, you know, throughout the centuries and like you make these observations that, yeah, I mean, at the very least these things are shape-shifting into some kind of like creature and all that's associated in the ancient mind with, you know, civility, you know, in the city versus running into the wild as a, you know, a creature. So, yeah, yeah, that's, it's very, and that goes back to my kind of point earlier about how the werewolf is associated with these figures and I'm just thinking about like, though folks, we really are being transformed literally in this episode, unfortunately into werewolves and screech owls and all sorts of things. But, you know, it just speaks to the function of the wolf and the Strix witch. But I also wanted to touch upon, before we kind of move on, the werewolf is also associated, not just with the Strix, but also with ghosts and dragons as well, correct, depending on the lore. I'm not sure what you're thinking about when you mentioned dragons. I mean, I mean, well, I thought about that comparative chart you had, comparative chart you had about the... Ah, I think, ah, I mean, maybe you're thinking about the hero of Tumessa. The one, that's the one. He's also, yeah, he's a sort of a curious werewolf figure. You have like, Paesonius A and Paesonius B because Paesonius describes this picture versus the actual story he narrates about the hero of Tumessa. Yeah, I mean, I have to say that is a very, very complex set of evidence. But the point is that, yeah, I mean, according to some ancient sources or the implications of some ancient sources, a girl is sort of annually given, sort of pinned out or laid out or left out for the hero of Tumessa, this seemingly demonic werewolf figure described as a sort of ghost in a wolf skin or a demon in a wolf skin to come and get and presumably kill. And so the reason I was sort of drawing comparisons with dragons and sea monsters is that that, it's just that story type of the virgin girl being pinned out for the sea monster or the dragon to come and eat, you know? And so just the way that phenomenon is described just aligns with that sort of story type. That was the point I was making there. Yes, I wouldn't want to say that the werewolves had particular affinities with dragons beyond that. It's just that sort of coincidence in a pair of story types. But yeah, but yes, but we often find the werewolves associated with witches, so I mean, I'll give you the very first witch of Greek literature. If you allow her to be a witch, Cersei is turning people into wolves. I mean, her house is surrounded by tame wolves and lions, which Odysseus's crewman, not Homer in his own voice, but it is one of the characters to whom he gives voice clearly presumed to have been transformed from other sailors, human sailors by Cersei. So again, so those are like werewolves get, I mean, Virgil's moir is the sorcerer, can turn himself into a wolf. Some of these board, we mentioned board witches, some of those apparently can turn themselves into wolves. So I'm jumping around a bit here. Also, yes, so Herodius, of course, talks about the Nuri who are a racist sorcerer, very obscure, but he calls them racist sorcerers. And the main thing that it seemed to do actually is turn themselves into wolves for a period and then turn themselves back again. So there's a clearly, there's a strong association between witches and sorcerers and wolves there. And then all sorts of associations also between wolves and the dead and ghosts. So in Petronius' famous story, we have the guy in Nicarose who's just seen a man turn himself into a wolf in a cemetery, by the way. Then sort of escape, lashing out with his sword, all the ghosts he then imagines to be attacking him. And I mentioned medical lycanthropy, the disease of lycanthropy before I know what do these people do when they catch it? Well, apparently they roll around in cemeteries. They roll around in graveyards. Why? I don't know. But nonetheless, there are these thematic associations are there, you see. So, but why witches, why wizards, why ghosts? Well, actually, I'm going to come back once again to the place which I started, which is that these guys all live together in the world of the weird traditional story that you tell at your dinner party or in your pub. And it's just like the ancient equivalent of the Hammer horror movie. I don't know if your American viewers are familiar with those British horror movies of the 60s and 70s. Classics to us. Yeah, a big fan. Okay, classics to me. But again, you just think of the sort of mix you get in there, the vampires, the werewolves, the ghosts, different movies. But you know the sort of monster you're going to get featured in them. And so there's a sense in which they, even if the vampire isn't meeting the werewolf in the same story, nonetheless, there's a sense in which they all inhabit the same world, if you don't know what I mean. It's a bit like that. Yeah, it's like a shared, the early equivalent of the shared cinematic universe in a way. Literary. The shared cinematic universe. Yes, that's a very good way for me. Kaleidoscopic, and I like the metaphor you use of kaleidoscopic kind of layers sometimes how these stories are so dynamic and signify different things, but at the same time, very familiar, even as times change. So we mentioned the dinner party, we mentioned the campfire stories. Another thing I'm reminded of is Apolaus's Golden Ass where the narrator is on the road and he meets the sky. Oh yeah. I think his name's Aristaeus, or I can't remember what his name is. Aristomanias. Aristomanias, and he tells the story of Socrates and his Meroe and Panthea. I always, and speaking just getting back to horror films, like I love like that entire scene, it needs to be directed by Sam Raimi. Evil Dead 2 era, I just imagine like those jump cuts and everything, like that would be so amazing. But yeah, he tells the story. So that's another... Yeah, so that's the story of the road. And a locus. That's the story told on the road, so between travelers, I mean, people, I guess, typically had to walk between cities in the ancient world. Occasionally they would ride if they were lucky, I suppose, on a horse. But yeah, lots of time for meeting strangers and then talking stories with them. But that again brings us back to where I was before because the star of that story, the horrible witch Meroe, is an innkeeper. See? And even as far as Augustine, right? Like Augustine, when he talks about the innkeeper witches who are getting back to changing people into like animals, they give this drugged cheese to their... Yeah, like that. Or yeah, they're just... And they turn into a piece of burden and make them work for them, yes. But Galen has something better than that. I suppose he's making the point of the similarity of structure, I guess, between human flesh and pig flesh. And he says the proof of this is, as we all know, from time to time, innkeepers are caught murdering some of their guests and then feeding them as pork to the rest of their guests. It's a wonderful economy, isn't it, really? But, you know, and that's the proof that human flesh and pig flesh are actually rather similar. But again, I mean, that strikes me as being a wonderful ancient example of what you might call an urban legend. Right, like the guy with the hook for a hand or whatever, the guy with the hook or whatever. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, sure. And even, like you were just talking about how these things were associated together in the mind, you have even something like, I think it was Tibulus in one of his works where he's like, yeah, Tibulus, sorry, my pronunciation's atrocious, but Tibulus is like doing this like home about, is he the one who, he got like the herbs and the spells from the witch? Or is he the one who's hoping that the lady who's keeping his girlfriend slash prostitute away? Yes. Because that's okay, yeah. So he's like, may she be howling and naked and roll around in tombs? Sure, exactly. It's fantastic. Yeah, but then again, you see, you get the association between the werewolf and the dead, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And I guess this is gonna bring us back around to a question that I wanted to get to before, but you know, once anybody mentions satiricon or Lucian, I kind of lose track, so I'm gonna circle back around to it. So we've mentioned a few, obviously, Patronius and Tibulus and the medical texts. And you also mentioned briefly the Lecheon myth. I'm reminded of that beautiful section in Ovid's Metamorphosis, where he feeds Joe, who is the Roman equivalent of Zeus, the flesh, right? And Zeus overturns the tables and he like, in some of the stories, he'll kill them with lightning bolts, but in others, in this particular one, he turns them into the wolf. And Joe was like, yeah, this is a very fitting punishment for him, you know, for what he's done. So Lecheon basically turns into a wolf and he can't speak. This is very fascinating, but what are some of the other sources we have? I know Patronius and Paesonius, especially, feature heavily in your book. Yes, so sources in terms of actually ancient authors, you mean? Well, you've mentioned Esop. Again, Esop is a bit like Homer and he didn't exist. He's a tradition rather than a person. But there's a wonderful sort of jokey tale, which is only attested quite lately in this whole tradition. You can never know really how ancient these things are. It might be much older. And it's actually, well, it's a tale that uses the idea of a werewolf who's actually featuring a werewolf. So basically a thief is sitting with an innkeeper and he starts to yawn and he tells the innkeeper that he's afflicted with werewolfism. It's because on account of some curse, some sin or whatever, which is an interesting phrase, which again, you know, so the curse of the werewolf, no sort of real indication of where that curse might have been got from or how he might have got it. But no doubt that is evidence for the notion that werewolves could be created by curses. And he says, so he has this curse on what? If I yawn three times, I transform into a money-eating wolf. And he says, and I need you to hold my clothes whilst I do it and keep them safe. So this is the notion that we also find in a slightly different way in the Petronius story, the werewolf needing to keep his clothes safe if he's going to be able to recover them and return to his humanity. So he's begging the innkeeper to keep them safe because the innkeeper is terrified. He's hanging onto the innkeeper's cloak and the innkeeper himself just runs off and that's the scam, of course, the way to score a cloak. But it's curious, isn't it, that the innkeeper loses a cloak as it were rather than the supposed werewolf figure. And also it's interesting, isn't it, that there's another innkeeper in this story and I can't help wondering whether there might lurk behind that rather simple tale that we have, a rather more interesting tale in which the innkeeper turned out to be a real wolf. Deprived of his human clothing, he becomes a wolf and then eats the thief. That would be a rather nice ending, it seems to me. Yeah, I like the case you laid out in the book there. Yeah, that is a bit speculative, but there we go. Yes, that would be poetic justice, wouldn't it? Other sources, well, there's this dog demon, Ephesus, which Philosopher's talks about, of course. Yeah, and especially for the viewers that are watching, that story that the dog demon of Ephesus is in Philostratus' life of Apollonius of Tiana, which I'm sure many of you watching are familiar with, especially those of you on the more religious study side who watched the show and are interested in that comparative mythos. It's very interesting, yeah, yeah. The story there is very fascinating, isn't it? Like Apollonius says, this is the guy causing the plague, but it's very strange, like when he gets stoned, right, not Apollonius, but the guy who's causing the plague, the werewolf kind of, he doesn't transform how you would think in terms of our modern conception. So I don't know if you could expound upon that story. Well, they stoned him and they piled up the stones on him completely, so he's completely buried. And then when they presume he's dead, they pick off the stones one by one and they find not the body of this beggar with fiery eyes that they thought they were gonna find, but a huge dog. So yes, that's a weird thing. I mean, that story, you might think, implies that the dog, the big dog is the default form and the humanoid, I mean, do supernatural creatures revert to base form in death or not, I don't know. Or in fact, the human form, not unless the base form, but he had the power to turn himself into a, well, let's say a big dog, rather than a wolf in this case, and that he was just killed in the process of that transformation, I suppose. I mean, you could read it either way, I suppose. Yeah. So, I mean, he said to have had a beggar's wallet with a bit of bread, it's bread, isn't it, rather than cheese in this case, a bit of bread in it. I mean, it's a strange detail. I mean, you wonder why, I mean, is it just a bit of color to the story? It's a fast-paced story. You sort of expect details to have a function. And I wonder whether that was the mechanism by which he was transforming himself, therefore. Yeah, that's a good point, the bread. The bread really stood out to me. And what also stood out to me was, as you mentioned, as opposed to our modern preconceptions of werewolves and their transformative aspects in antiquity, and especially in the Petronius story, right? The apparatus seems to be, and especially with the right of Arcadia, right? The apparatus for going back to being a human is the clothes themselves. Oh, yes, yeah. You know, and you raise a very interesting point about how the ancients viewed these creatures as whether it's a wolf with a human carapace and a wolf core or vice versa. And it's very fascinating how you go about those. Sure, yes, well, so with them in the Petronius story, you get the idea that, again, if the clothes come off and the guy becomes a wolf, you have to do a bit of a sort of slight of hand thinking here, but you sort of identify the clothes, I suppose, with the outer form, the civilized form of the human. So kind of like maybe you think sort of, so the clothes and human skin, somewhere on the go together, you take those off and then there's the wolf exposed from inside. And then the guy puts his clothes back on and again, the human form comes back. And likewise, with the thinking behind the center, the Arcadian right that we mentioned, and of course, also the thinking behind the esophory we were just talking about. So in those cases, yes, the wolf is something inside, which again, stripping off the human out of carapace releases or reveals. So it's possible that other werewolves were regarded as having the human bit inside and the wolf on the outside by default. I mean, you could read the transformation of the Kay on that way. Again, that's his skin, suddenly, you know, his clothes over in his wolf skin. And the concept of the hairy heart as well, right? Yes, exactly. Yes, I was just saying that. Yes, I mean, but again, perhaps a clear example is, well, no, if we're talking about the wolf on the outside, the hero of Tamesa is an example of that, isn't it? Because he's destroying the demon in a wolf skin. So the demon is presumably humanoid and the wolf's skin is on the outside. But yes, but the hairy heart, that belongs rather to the wolf inside, human outside, side, doesn't it? Because, yeah, because I mean, we mentioned the name Aris Dominis, he's another Aris Dominis, not related, I don't think, but Aris Dominis of Messini. That's right, who was the bane of ancient Sparta. He was the leader of the legendary, he's a wonderful figure actually. He's the legendary leader of Messinian, Messinian's search revolts against the Spartan oppressors. And he has a wonderful suite of legends associated with him. He's a sort of combination of King Arthur and Robin Hood. Anyway, when the Spartans finally catch him, they cut him open for reasons unexplained, but discover that he has a hairy heart. And it's not explained in context what that means, but he is associated with wolf imagery in some of his stories in various ways, and in particular, most gloriously with fox imagery. I mean, his best story is when he's repeatedly captured before they actually end up killing him, he repeatedly captures him and he escapes. So on one occasion, they throw him down to the Chayadas ravine, which is where they throw their criminals. This is somewhere over on Mount Tegetas. And so he's gonna fall down this huge crevasse into certain death, but what seems to have happened, again, if we reconstruct the stories properly, he was thrown in his armor, thrown down in his armor, and that would include his shield with his distinctive eagle blazon on it. That seems to have come to life, become a real giant eagle, and then to have borne him gently down to the bottom so that he survived on reaching the bottom. But he was still trapped there, and so there he was lying around, lying in the midst of all these mouldering bodies, all the other people with his bottoms had chucked down there, thinking, well, there's no way out, is there? But then he notices that a fox has come in and he's nosing around for a meal amongst all the dead bodies. He thinks, well, if it knows a way in, it knows a way out. So he grabs hold of its tail, and even though it's turning around to bite him all the time, he just holds on tight, and eventually it runs off through its secret little passageways, and that's how he escaped. So there's this wonderful, wonderful sort of association in that particular story with between Aristomanes and another canid, a fox. So, yes, as your viewers will read, I'm quite happy to bring in big dogs and foxes into my mix, into my werewolf mix as well. Yeah, no, I love that, please do, because it really enriched everything, especially when you did the whole recounting of the three haunted house kind of folktales that are recounted by Lucien and Philopsudes, and then you have plenty of the younger, right, recounting the same kind of story. And I can't remember who the third one was. So it's implicitly flawless, it's implicitly flawless in most of the area, yeah. So yeah, I just, I think it really enriches it, because you really, like I said, I look at the book very much as like a companion to your source book, it can be read in conjunction with that book very easily, and it really points out some of the importance of this multiverse literary world, imaginative kaleidoscopic world at the time. So, I just wanna say thank you for that. Before we move on, just talking about ancient sources before I forget, I'm also reminded again of Avid Metamorphosis, I believe it's Metamorphosis eight where Medea, when she's creating the spell, or the cauldron mix of drugs, concoction for Asin to restore his health and his youth. You know, one of those things is the werewolf parts. It's very, you just mentions it off hand, it's insane. Yeah, so we have all the ingredients, exactly, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I love it. And that's the only other association between werewolves and witches, of course. You know, the OGs, Medea and Cersei, those are the top two. I'll throw in Meraway too, those are all pretty great, which is, let's see here. So, we talked a lot, and we've been skipping around a lot because there's so much rich stuff in the book, but I wanted to get back to this concept. We talked about the clothes as the way the wolf can change back into a human, but you also make a great point in the book about the relationship of werewolves or these transformative creatures and soul projection to what we would, for lack of a better term, and this is a highly debated term in scholarship, but for lack of a better term, shamanic, Pythagorean traditions. You just mentioned Aristaeus' soul projecting out is out of a raven like Pliny was talking about. So I didn't know if you could talk about the soul projection a little bit. Sure, it is a difficult argument. It may be best to actually start with medieval material. Again, from the 12th century, there are dead centuries for the werewolf. I mean, after Augustine, there's virtually nothing on the werewolf as far as I'm aware in the surviving literature until the 12th century, and it all explodes again. Very richly. And I do think that these stories that are told in the 12th century can be very helpful in reconstructing what was going on behind our really quite fragmentary and elusive sources on the ancient side. I do believe there's this deep continuity of werewolf lore as we're throughout those dark ages. So one of the things that we hear about in these 12th century sources is precisely the notion that it's sort of Christianized, you can see what's going on behind it. This notion that the way werewolfism works is that the human werewolf chap goes into a coma, into a trance, and projects his soul out of him in the form of a tangible and terrible wolf. And it goes off under this marauding. And that's how you get, that's how the transformation happens, that's how it works. It's very interesting. And that does seem to be parallel to these traditions of, again, these people called the Greek shamans. And again, as Jason said, I'm not really trying to imply anything by using that term, it's, but it is a word we use to group together a series of about five or six ancient figures who seem to be doing some interesting things which resemble each other. So Aristides, as you mentioned, Aristides and Prokinesis could go into a trance and then project his soul in the form of a raven, which would fly around and go on voyages of discovery. The best of all here is Hermitimus of Clansomani. He did the same, basically he went into a trance, into the coma, and his soul would project out and go wandering around. And we're told in this rather nice little story about him that his enemies, who wanted to do away with him, prevailed upon his wife to let them in the house whilst he was off on one of his travels. And then they claimed having found the body that he was dead and burnt it so that his soul would have nowhere to return to, which indeed proved to be the case, apparently. So we have quite a similar model of action there. And what's interesting there, we have this, again, we have the cheating wife, not necessarily sexually cheating or whatever, the unfaithful, shall I say, wife, who sort of abets in sort of depriving her husband of his opportunity to return to his normal form in that way. And then if I can leap forward to the 12th century again, and again, one of the very best medieval, the earliest actually, but also the best medieval well-stories, the story of Bisclaveret in a wonderful short lay of Marie de France, Anglo-Norman. And that tells the story of Bisclaveret, who is a werewolf, and so a couple of days a week, I think it is, he goes off into the woods. As Jameson mentioned before, there's always this going off into the woods, there's always this sort of distinction between the city, the place of civilization and humans and the woods, the place of the wildness and wolves and things like that. And he goes off into the wolves, takes off his clothes, hides them under a stone, becomes a wolf, and then a couple of days later recovers his clothes and his humanity and goes back to his wife, which is, again, very aligns quite nicely really with the Petronius motif of the clothes. Anyway, one day his wife insists he tell her what's going on and he does and she's horrified by this notion that he's a werewolf and decides to unburden herself of him. And so she follows him into the forest and when he's hidden his clothes, she runs off with them so that he's trapped as a wolf for many years. Eventually, of course, he does recover his form and punishes his wife. But you see, there's a really striking parallel between Hermitima's story and that story seems to me, the discovery story. And so it does seem to actually put this all together and also with the way Augustine, the way Augustine talks about animal transformation, he, again, talks about animal transformation in terms of soul projection, he's sort of indirectly associated with werewolves, but his focus is more on those landlady's and the beast of burden, which we mentioned before. We put that all together. It has to be said, it's not a decisive case. I'll be the first to say that, it's not a decisive case, but there's just so many sort of similarities, so many overlaps in patterns of thought, it seems to me, that that does begin to build a case that at least one strand of werewolf thinking in the ancient world was precisely in terms of, you know, the wolf comes out as the projected soul made tangible, that that was what was going on with werewolves. Yeah, those are all great points. I think, you know, even if you think, yeah, it's very strange, like the body has to be protected, and if it's not protected, I think in some stories, like they find the body and then they burn it and then the guy, you know, can't return or, you know, and then there's another story, I guess we'll just get to it because you really, it really ties the book together in terms of the medieval sources you use. So like I mentioned before, it's a great, the werewolf book is a great companion to the magic witchcraft and ghost book, right? Source book. The Camparanda you pull from medieval tales, you mentioned Bisclaverie by Marie de France. Then there's the William of Palermo story that really is the wolf named Alfons. I can't remember. Yes, this one, yes. He spends years as a wolf, doesn't he? He like protects this kid, like from, you know, youth until like he's like courting, and it's quite fascinating. So let's just touch upon that. I know we're running a long time. So could you touch upon a little bit more upon some of the other medieval sources and how we kind of tie those into the evidence from antiquity? Well, I'm not sure there's much point in going into detail about them because they are, well, I mean, we've talked about two examples there with Bisclaverie and Alfons. Yeah, and Alfons is very interesting because as you say, he spends many, many years as a wolf, but also doing sort of doing good to humans in his wolf form and his sort of superhero form. So that is a good, it's a long, a long story. It's a good long story. I mean, there are other stories like Arthur and Gaulegan, things like that. But they're all quite samey. You know, I mean, once you've read Bisclaverie and read Alfons, you've got the gist of what's going on in these early medieval sources. One that is worth mentioning separately is the Werewolves of Osary, of course, which is a wonderful Irish story. And that is of a priest who, is wandering in a forest and a chap prevails upon him to give the last rights to a wolf, which of course is not permitted in animals in Catholic thought. But he takes the chap along to where this wolf is dying and he shows him that it's his wife. His wife has been transformed into a wolf by the curse of another priest. Again, what if he's priest getting up to really cursing people in Catholic Werewolves? And interestingly, he proves that it's really a human being, a woman inside, by pulling back, you can pull back the wolfkin to some extent. And yeah, that was wild. Yeah, and reveal the woman underneath it to something. Just, and so the priest goes ahead and delivers the last rights. And so the guy, the guy who was also a Werewolf, but clearly not in wolf form at this point, he was his wife, shows him out of the forest, he's lost his way. So that's a good story. And again, that story is good for thinking about the issue of human inside, wolf outside. Again, the skin is very much definitely on the outside there. And then another medieval story we might bring in if we go over to the Northlands. This is a wonderful story of Siegfried and Cynthia Ply, who again are wandering in the forest and find a deserted house with two wolfskins hanging up and for no particular reason put them on and find themselves trapped in them. So, again, that's a, they have to live of wolves for a certain time as a result of that. So that's, again, that story also belongs to the notion that Werewolf is the human inside and wolf outside, I guess. Yeah, these are all great stories. I recommend the book. Everyone, I put the link in the chat, the book's on the screen. I highly recommend this text. You're interested in these stories. Dr. Ogden, I know we're running low on time. Do you have time for one more question? Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, perfect. And before we move on, actually, just another kind of discussion about soul projection, just a modern analogy that I kind of think of is like, I don't know if you've ever seen the Insidious movies. No, I haven't. Insidious one. Well, there's a lot of soul projection, astral projection going on, you know, they go to sleep and then they project themselves into these worlds. It's very interesting. But yeah, it's like these are all like just the wolf, the Werewolf and the witch, the strict witch and these ghosts as like the locus of a good story. Like, yeah, it's very much like, these are like the horror films of the day, you know, the campfire stories. And again, as you pointed out. So yes, Carl, Bjorn means bear and Dr. Ogden does talk about that in his book. I don't know if you're an Aberfan. Is it Carl, is it? I don't know if you're an Aberfan, but Bjornal Veys, his name, in Swedish terms, his name means bear, Wolfie. So how about that? That's a great name to have, isn't it? It's a fantastic name. So changed my name to that. So one of the things I really loved in this book was the chapter you had of recounting all the famous athletes and the relationship to werewolfism, you know, Demarcus, Theogenes, Euthymus, found these all wild. I'd be like if like 100 years from now, Brock Lesnar had these religions, grow up around them about like wrestling a bear, saving a virgin or something. So I didn't know if you could just talk about these a little bit, it's just wild. Well, it is a strange phenomenon. And it seems quite limited in time as well, because the athletes' concern all seem to have been historical figures, by the way. And most of them seem to have lived around 500 BC. That seems to be the era which these people lived. So they were all distinguished Olympic victors in one sport or another. And all these weird stories we're told about them. Now they're all involved wolves, but some do. So Euthymus of Lockery, he's the hero. I shouldn't use the word hero, he's confusing. He is the champion of the story of the hero of Tumessa, the hero of Tumessa being the bad guy. Yeah, don't get us wrong, the hero of Tumessa is not the good guy. Hero in the sense of dead man, powerful dead man, that's it, so he's the ghost, the demon in the wolf skin that demands the virgins. And Euthymus comes along and chases him into the sea and that's the end of him. Then well, yeah, so Milo of Croton, he's quite a favorite of mine. He's involved, well, not with werewolves, but with just good old wolves. It was a good story though. So I mean, apart from all the other sort of strange feats he's involved with, he's wandering in the forest one day, of course, just by the way, we expect to find the wolves. And he finds somebody trying to split a tree open by the technique of having sort of made a sort of cut in the side and then gradually driving wedges in. And he thinks, oh, I can finish this job myself. So he just sticks his hand in the crack and begins to pull. The wedges fall out, of course, as he loosens the crack, but then the tree snaps back on him and he's stuck. So he stepped there permanently and then that night the wolves come along and eat him and that's the end of Milo. But then the most interesting of these stories for us is the story of Demarcus. And again, this story has to be reconstructed a bit because the sources are confused and they mix it up in a strange way with that archaic in right we were talking about. But anyway, as I reconstructed it, so Demarcus was tricked into eating human flesh. It's a long story, isn't it? At a sacrifice to Zeus Lycaeus. Now, interesting here, of course, is the comparison with the Thrivelecheon who is also involved with cannibalism and trying to feed human flesh to people. But having eaten that human flesh, I suppose, as a wolf would, he becomes a wolf. He's transformed into a wolf for nine years. We're not told how he got back into human form, but somehow he did. Maybe it was a nine-year sentence or maybe he found some sort of solution, I don't know. But after that, he became a brilliant and successful athlete. And of course, it's not clear. Did his period as a wolf sort of build up his agility? Is that why he became a great athlete? Or is it just that, as a great athlete, retrospectively, we have to find a weird story for him? Yeah, he got that wolfryz from being a wolf for so long. He helped him with his... I should say many of these stories associated with that. I mean, Euthymus comes out of it well and Milo comes out of it looking like a fool, I suppose. Often they come out of these stories looking, you know, not good at all. I mean, Cleomedes of Astipalaya, his story is rather strange. I mean, he becomes mad when on a technical decision he's deprived of a prize. I can't remember, I think it's in boxing, isn't it, rather wrestling, in boxing, I think. And he goes mad and runs off into a schoolhouse, interesting evidence, supposedly for a schoolhouse in 500 BC, which is held up by a central pillar, and he pulls it down, killing himself. I'm sorry, no, I'm sorry, no, he doesn't kill himself. Killing all the children inside it. Yeah, like 64 kids. Yeah, and then he's pursued by, you know, by the angry townspeople, and he hides himself in a chest, and when they open the chest, he's disappeared. So again, all these weird stories about these athletes are around 500 BC. What is it? Why do you tell weird stories about, why do you invent weird stories about these guys? It's strange, isn't it? It's clearly a way of marking them out as special, as memorable, but the seeming negativity of the stories is curious, it really is. I must admit, if I was writing that bit of the book again today, I would probably include a couple of other things. And that is also a couple of Spartan kings, sort of kings at any rate, of about the same time. Cleomenes, the mad Cleomenes, supposedly mad Cleomenes, so he was a brilliant Spartan king who basically put together the Pelton Eastern League. So, but again, the story is that he went mad, he was put in stocks and he managed to get hold of a knife and killed himself by cutting his legs into strips. And then on the other side of the Persian invasion, you have, again, these weird stories about Paesanias, Paesanias the regent, again, so not quite a king, but almost. And so he was the brilliant, the brilliant, the guy who saved Greece from the Persians at the Battle of Katia, without Paesanias, no classical period. I mean, the greatest of all the Greeks, really. And yet this weird story is about his end, about him raping a virgin Byzantium being pursued by her ghost. I mean, eventually being ripped up by the Spartans inside the Temple of Athenian Calculioi crossing, starved to death there. So for some reason, there was clearly a fashion. I assume around about that 500 BC time, the end of the 6th century, beginning of the 5th century, clearly a fashion for conveying greatness by attaching weird and often strangely negative stories to these great men. It's a, you know, it's, it's a weird sort of thought, a weird way of thinking, but it's just there. And it's a bit, I find it hard to explain, but, you know, but all these great men with these manifestly fictional, in most cases, stories attached to them. What's going on? I just don't know. I just don't know. Yeah, I really love it. I kind of see these stories as like these hero stories and the, about the athletes during that period of time as like kind of like the first draft of like what later became like hagiography. They got it right with hagiography. And then, you know, it's got it better, even better with the Neoplatonic Saint stuff with his lives with the philosophers. But yeah, it's great. Interesting ways of marking people out is exceptional. Like, you know, I just imagine like, yeah, Macho Man Randy Savage was, you know, have these like, like, or Brock led or like I mentioned earlier, have these insane stories about him, like stopping a Kraken or wrestling a Kraken with his bare hands or just fascinating. Love it. Like every time I read one of your books, like I always have a great time and discussing these topics. With you, like leads to an open door of, you know, endless points of discussion. So Dr. Ogden, this has been a pleasure. Anything you want to plug before we go? Not, not, not really. I mean, in terms of, I mean, in terms of your, what your viewers might be interested in, I think you've mentioned the main things to say. Actually, there's a book on the werewolves with the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the book on the werewolves, the source book you mentioned behind that. And the werewolf book did actually grow very directly out of the source book in a way. In the first edition of that source book, I had just a couple of passages. I think it was about werewolves and not really sure that they, I wasn't really sure they belonged, you know, in a book on witches, which is, witchcraft magic and ghosts. But the student, my students really loved those. And so I built up the werewolf passages and sort of started to think about them more. And yes, they do sort of belong in the world of witches. They do belong in the world of ghosts, don't they? That's, that's where it all came from, you see. And so, yeah. So then as a result of, of the student demand really, that's, that's what, that's where we ended up with the, that's how we ended up with the werewolf book. Yeah. Perfect. It's always, always a pleasure to have you on Dr. Ogden. The book is the werewolf in the ancient world, everyone, highly recommended. You will get so much out of it. I just went over an hour and I still had so many questions that I couldn't put in there for lack of time. So, you know, pick it up. You will not be disappointed. Dr. Ogden has also a kind of a companion book to this called The Dragon in the West, don't you? Yes. Well, it's a, it was producing us in the format by OUP. And I suppose it's a companion also in, in so far as it also embraces medieval material and including yours material. So, yeah. Beyond that, there's not a whole lot of overlap, but yeah. Well, pick it up. You can never go wrong with Dr. Ogden's books. Dr. Ogden, thank you so much. This has been an honor as always. Had lots of fun. And so you get sick of me asking you. I'd love to have you on again sometime. But until next time, everyone will, we will say goodbye. Don't forget to tune in next week. We have another interesting topic. We're talking to Dr. David Bracky. Dr. Bracky knows the thing or two, not only about gnosticism, if you didn't know, but also monasticism. So we're going to talk about the demon, spiritual warfare in the making of the monk and late antiquity. So if you're interested in that, everybody, please tune in. That'll be next week. But until then, Dr. Ogden, everyone, I appreciate all of you. Thanks for watching.