Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  Most of the scholars at work here in quiet rooms have come to read original sources, often in dead languages. They turn, or have turned for them, the leaves of manuscripts in one of the most extraordinary collections in the Western world. Among the many treasures are a twelfth-century bestiary; a life of an obscure English saint, Saint Edmund; a copy of Dante’s Divina commedia, published on August 30, 1481, in Florence; and a fifteenth-century edition of Pliny’s Historia naturalis.

  I chose these books out of the thousands carefully preserved here because there are wolves in all of them, and because the Middle Ages, during which these very manuscripts were being either written or eagerly read, was a time when the wolf was distinctly present in folklore, in Church matters, and in the literature of the educated classes.

  As one’s fingers brush the crinkled vellum and parchment of the oversized folios, there is a stunning, almost electric sense of immediate communication with another age. The people who wrote or printed these texts were people who sat down to dinner like you and me, who marveled at the universe, who stood up and stretched at the end of the day. These people have long since turned to dust, but what they wrote remains behind, complete with grammatical errors and notes in Latin in the margin, made by some unknown Renaissance readers. Here, too, is the sense that even we in a more modern age are bound to this heritage.

  In bestiaries like the one mentioned you will frequently find a woodcut of the wolf with his foot in his mouth—an allusion to the belief that if the wolf broke a twig and thereby alerted the shepherd’s dogs to his presence, he would turn around and snap at his own foot to punish it.

  In the history of Saint Edmund, a ninth-century king of England, appears the story of his murder and decapitation by invading Danes, and the statement that his head was guarded against further desecration by a great gray wolf, until it was retrieved by his friends a year later and properly buried.

  In the first canto of Dante’s Inferno in the Commedia the wolf appears in one of the oldest and most durable associations in its history, as a symbol of greed and fraud. In the eighth circle of Hell, Dante finds those condemned for “the sins of the wolf”: seducers and hypocrites, magicians, thieves, and liars.

  And in Pliny’s Historia naturalis there is an account of werewolfry, one of the earliest, which Pliny himself passes on with skepticism. About a family called Anthus in Arcadia, Greece, one of whose members is chosen by lot every nine years “abire in deserta transfigurarique in lupum”—to go away into a deserted place and be transformed into a wolf.

  You cannot examine any of these books without sensing that you have hardly touched in them the body of human ideas concerning the wolf. The wolf seems to move just beneath the pages of these volumes, loping along with that bicycling gait, through all of human history, appraised by all sorts of men but uttering itself not a word. Contact with this mystery seems as tenuous as the delicate movement of one’s fingers over the vellum pages. Also in this library are copies of the story of Little Red Riding Hood hundreds of years old; the Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of Witches, the authority used by the Inquisition to condemn hundreds of alleged werewolves to burn at the stake; and fourteenth-century encyclopedias with their collections of folk beliefs about wolves.

  There is a record in this library of men’s wolf thoughts, from the time of Aesop and before, from the age of Fenris and the other giant wolves of Teutonic myth, through the years of the werewolf trials, to the time of belief in wolf children in the modern era. There is no proper name for all this. It is one long haunting story of the human psyche wrestling with the wolf, alternately attracted to it and repelled by it. It is a story preserved with an almost eerie aura in a collection of medieval volumes like those at the Morgan.

  All these ideas came to the fore at a particular time in history, in the Middle Ages—a time of growing enlightenment and of crushing ignorance and superstition. The medieval mind, more than any other mind in history, was obsessed with images of wolves. A belief in werewolves was widespread and strong. Pagan festivals in which wild men, mythic relatives of wolves, played the central roles were popular. Peasants were in revolt against their feudal lords, and the hated nobles were represented by wolves in the proletarian literature. Medieval peasants called famine “the wolf.” Avaricious landlords were “wolves.” Anything that threatened a peasant’s precarious existence was “the wolf.”

  The wolf who stood guard over Saint Edmund’s head.

  Fear of real wolves occasionally bordered on hysteria. Wolves did kill travelers and they did occasionally transmit a terrible disease, always fatal, for which there was no cure: rabies. The wolf threatened a peasant’s spiritual world by exhuming bodies, and hungry wolves standing in stark tableaus on piles of the dead during the Black Plague were a chilling reminder of what little separated peasants from a life of scavenging. A family’s goats, sheep, cows, pigs, and poultry represented both sustenance and income to them—and it could all be wiped out in a single night by a pack of wolves.

  The Roman Church, which dominated medieval life in Europe, exploited the sinister image of wolves in order to create a sense of real devils prowling in a real world. During the years of the Inquisition, the Church sought to smother social and political unrest and to maintain secular control by flushing out “werewolves” in the community and putting them to death. In so doing it deepened fears about the wolf, in whatever form.

  In the dim woods that lay beyond the plowed fields of medieval villages there grew a sun spurge called wolf’s milk (Euphorbia helioscopia), and wolf’s fist (Lycoperdon bovista), and wolf’s claw (Lycopodium sp.) and wolf’s thistle (Carlina acaulis), and the small yellow flowers of the poisonous wolf’s bane (Aconitum lycoctonum). On the perilous roads of these same dark woods travelers feared being waylaid by either highwaymen or wolves, and the two often fused in the medieval mind: the wolf and the outlaw were one, creatures who lived beyond the laws of human propriety. To call for “the wolf’s head” was to pronounce death on a man accused of wrongdoing. He could then be killed by anyone without fear of legal recrimination. A belief in the transmigration of souls held that the soul of a highway robber would be enclosed after death in the body of a wolf. Edgar, the tenth-century English king, accepted in lieu of incarceration a set number of wolves’ tongues from a convicted criminal according to the crime, as though one were turning state’s evidence.

  The medieval mind was one caught between the ignorance of the Dark Ages and the illumination of the Renaissance. In terms of the most potent architectural metaphor of the age, it was moving from a dimly lit Roman cathedral into a soaring Gothic church filled with windows and light.

  Among the animals named for their wolfish ways are the predatory wolf spiders (Lycosidae is the family) and wolf fish (in the genus Anarrachichas), and the wolf moth (Tinea granella), whose larvae used to destroy the contents of granaries. Pike fishes in the genus Esox are called freshwater wolves and the killer whale, Orcinus orca, has been called a sea wolf by both Indians and whites. There are also an African wolf snake (Cryptolycus nanus) and a wolf wasp (Philanthus triangulum).

  It is perhaps not an accident that the wolf, a creature of the twilight hours, came and went so frequently in the expressions of a people emerging from the Dark Ages. From classical times he had been a symbol of things in transit. He was a twilight hunter, seen at dawn and dusk. From the common perception that his way of life bore some resemblance to that of primitive man came the idea that wolves themselves had taken form halfway between man and the other animals.

  The link between the wolf and a period of halflight—either dawn or dusk, though dawn is more widely known as the hour of the wolf—suggests two apparently contradictory images. The first is the wolf as a creature of dawn, representing an emergence from darkness into enlightenment, intelligence, civilization. The second is a creature of dusk, representing a return to ignorance and bestiality, a passage back into the world of dark forces. Thus, in the Middle Ages, the wolf was companion to saints and t
he Devil alike. His howl in the morning elevated the spirit. Like the crow of the cock it signaled the dawn, the end of night and the hours of the wolf. His howl at night terrified the soul: the hours of the wolf (famine, witchery, carnage) were coming on.

  The association is old enough to have been the basis for the Latin idiom for dawn, inter lupum et canem, between the wolf and the dog. Darkness and savagery are symbolized in the wolf, while enlightenment and civilization are symbolized in the tame wolf, the dog. Another Latin idiom expresses it a bit more abstractly: Hac urget lupus, hac canis, literally, “The wolf presses here, the dog (light) there,” a reference to the dimly lit area between two fires in a Roman military camp.

  The Greek for wolf, lukos, is so close to the word for light, leukos, that the one was sometimes mistaken for the other in translation. Some scholars have argued that Apollo only came down to us as both the god of dawn and a god associated with wolves because of this etymological confusion. But the association between wolf and twilight is found among too many of the world’s cultures to be so simply dismissed. One can turn, for example, to the Icelandic Eddas or the Pawnee legend of the Wolf Star and find the association among two vastly different peoples. In Latin, again, the word for wolf, lupus, and that for light, lucis, are as close and suggest a third association: that with the Devil. Lucifer (a contraction of lucent ferre, literally, “to bear light”) was called the Son of the Morning by both the poet John Milton and the prophet Isaiah, and the wolf of the Middle Ages was, of course, “the devil devourer of man’s soul.” Loki, the Teutonic god of dawn, provides a second example of the link between wolves, light, and the Devil, for the Christians recast him as the Evil One when they proselytized among the Saxons. Long before this, however, Loki fathered Fenris, the huge wolf of Teutonic myth whose progeny would devour the sun at the end of the world and precipitate Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods. There is a German folk rhyme invented to help children learn the hours of the day that preserves this fourth association between wolves and a return to darkness. It ends: “um elfe kommen die wolfe, um zwolfe bricht das gewölbe”—at eleven come the wolves, at twelve the tombs of the dead open.

  If twilight is the time of the wolf, it is interesting to note that Mars, before he became the Roman god of war, was the agricultural god of the lands that separated cultivated fields from wild woods. The twilight image of the wolf begins to resonate here with the sort of truth the mind both generates and delights in, because Mars’ special animal was no other than the wolf.

  The wolf as a symbol of war and lust, two very common associations throughout Western history (and psychoanalysis), became an appropriate metaphor for Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida. There the parallel themes of violence and sex end in self-annihilation. The wolf is dead; the beast in man is dead. There is promise in a fresh dawn.

  The medieval mind was straining toward this dawn, toward dead beasts, but it adhered to a prejudice against wolves at every level. Indeed, it fixed that prejudice in the human imagination so solidly that it was not until the twentieth century that the human imagination could produce a new wolf, one that was no longer a projection of the confusion, superstition, depression, and anger that characterized the Middle Ages. In considering the roots of wolf imagery—from which all the wolves we know today spring—that age is pivotal. The chapters that follow, therefore, are loosely anchored in those years.

  Eleven

  THE REACH OF SCIENCE

  THERE IS AN OLD story about a wolf in Gubbio, Italy, involving Saint Francis. The wolf had been threatening the villagers and Saint Francis was trying to get the animal to desist. He and the wolf met one day outside the city walls and made the following agreement, witnessed by a notary: the residents of Gubbio would feed the wolf and let him wander at will through the town and the wolf, for his part, would never harm man nor beast there.

  Beneath the popular, anecdotal appeal of this story is a common allegory: the bestial, uncontrolled nature of the wolf is transformed by sanctity, and by extension those identified with the wolf—thieves, heretics, and outlaws—are redeemed by Saint Francis’s all-embracing compassion and courtesy.

  Medieval men believed that they saw in wolves a reflection of their own bestial nature; man’s longing to make peace with the beast in himself is what makes this tale of the Wolf of Gubbio one of the more poignant stories of the Middle Ages. To have compassion for the wolf, whom man saw as enslaved by the same base drives as himself, was to yearn for self-forgiveness.

  Men came to such philosophical points chiefly through dialogue with the doctrines of the Roman Church, which preached both compassion and hatred for sinners, for the bestial, for the wolf in man. And yet when laymen came to ask, in effect, “What is this animal, alone, and how does he get on in the universe?” the Church responded less than compassionately. When laymen said, “Let’s consider the wolf as a biological entity, quite apart from the Devil and pagan worship and evil and the symbolism of man’s bestial nature,” the Church, the seat of appeal for such inquiries in the Middle Ages, replied, “No, it would be inappropriate even to consider such a thing.”

  It was, in fact, an idea that only a handful of people in the long climb from Aristotle to Francis Bacon could have been expected to formulate.

  If, at the moment when Saint Francis was accepting the wolf’s promise outside the walls of Gubbio you had entered the shop of the local apothecary, you would have found many of that wolf’s relatives laid up in jars and boxes. There would be wolf dung to treat colic and cataract, powdered wolf’s liver to ease birth pains, and the right front paws of wolves to treat swelling in the throat. You’d find wolf teeth for teething, and, if the proprietor were open-minded and had had a visitor from the East, there might even be dried wolf’s flesh stored away, after a Bedouin belief that it was good for aches in the shins.

  Had you stepped into the street and gone to inquire of local learned men the contents of their library, they would likely have eagerly shown you, along with copies of the Psalter and the Apocalypse, a Physiologus, for these were the most popular illuminated books of the time. The Physiologus was a moralizing, didactic work in which elements of natural history—animals, vegetables, and minerals—were allegorically presented as reflections of the moral order in God’s universe. A naturalist’s curiosity about animals hardly existed. Animals were worth thinking on only as food and clothing, as a source of economic gain, as beasts of burden, or as symbols. There was little concern for separating fact from folklore. Since the animal was an object, like a stone, there seemed no point in it.

  The wolf of Gubbio, with Saint Francis.

  The imaginative, often fabulous, entry on each animal in the Physiologus was preceded by a quote from Scripture and followed by a moral lesson. Accompanying illustrations, which had little to do with the natural world, were fanciful interpretations of the entry, which itself was contrived to fit the Scripture and produce a moral lesson as needed.

  You might have asked yourself, standing in some library in Gubbio with a Physiologus in your hand, why human inquiry was stalled in such a curious place as this, a thousand years after Aristotle. The entry on wolves, staring up at you in Latin, would bear as accurately on the natural history of the wolf as his paw would compare with penicillin as treatment for goiter in a modern hospital.

  I hesitate to single out the Church as the lone culprit to bear responsibility for such ignorance. Clearly, this was not so. But it is inescapable that the Church, because it largely controlled both the publication of books and the institutions of learning, profoundly affected the progress of natural history by subjecting it to theological constraint, by making it conform to preconceived ideas. What the Church supported, survived. What it regarded as in error—and a secular interest in animals smacked of paganism—did not.

  Books like the Physiologus, in which zoology had been reduced to a search for edifying symbols, where wolves were important because they were the Devil’s hounds, was almost the best a learned man could offer
you in the way of natural history in the twelfth century.

  To return to the apothecary’s shop, here would be not only powdered wolf’s liver but the gonads, entrails, excrement, and saliva of hundreds of other animals. The medical authority of record would be Galen, a second-century Greek physician. The science—as opposed to magic—of healing the human body began with Hippocrates and entered a limbo with Galen, through no fault of Galen’s. He was taking monkeys and pigs apart and extrapolating from their anatomy to make statements about human anatomy. (Neither the Church nor the state at the time looked favorably on human dissection.) Galen was a Christian and the enormous encyclopedia of medical knowledge he wrote endorses a God-ordained balance between illness and its treatment by a physician, a mirror image of the treatment of the sinful soul by a priest. Because of its Christian bias, the book found favor with the Church and superseded the knowledge of other men for nearly a thousand years.

  Galen and his errors (he endorsed many folk treatments involving the use of animal parts) were perpetuated, incredibly, until the sixteenth century, when Andreas Vesalius, William Harvey, and Anton van Leeuwenhoek reintroduced the use of reason, observation, and experiment as means to furthering medical knowledge. The fate of natural history in the Middle Ages was closely tied to what physicians thought of animals. Animals were a source of medicaments and useful as anatomical analogs, but how they lived was of little interest.