Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Werewolves: The Occult Truth. Jul 28, Steve Cran added it. It's a full moon and the night is crystal clear.
You are alone out in the woods and your getting that funny feeling as though you are being watched. Suddenly a loud howl reverberates through the cloudless night. You see a huge lupine shape darting here and there. You think to yourself is this a real lfe werewolf? Time to get out the silver bullets oops but you do not even have a gun. You are convinced you are about to enter the realm of the dead.
Of course if you survive this encounter with only It's a full moon and the night is crystal clear. Of course if you survive this encounter with only a bite then by the nhext full moon you will become one of those Well not quite. Don't go believing all that Hollywood non sense. You do not need a silver bullet to kill a were wolf. Then again what exactly are were wolves. It ain't what you think. Author, Konstantinos, describes 4 types of were wolves. The first two types are voluntery and involuntery.
Involuntery are those born on Christmas Eve, concieved of on a full moon or those cursed by a witch or warlock. Were wolf bite is not one of the causes. The second type are vountery types or those who choose to become werewolvesof their own accord via an occult ritual. Over teh years there have been sighting of werewolves even in modern times but none of these constitute proof. Even humans captured and accused as werewolves, no one has seen them change.
Why would anyone admit to being a werewolf? Insanity, hallucinations or plain delusion. Some of the occult rituals call for teh use of hallucinogenic drugs. Konstantinos does not put too much credence into these stories. In his mind they do not offer solid proof. There are some diseases which cause people to look hairy and their are diseases that cause people to look rather canine. Porphyria makes one look pale and have fangs. Multiple Personality can give someone an identity or alter ego of a were wolf and some people have different parts of their brain activate into thinking tehey are a wolf.
Many shamanistic culture like those of the Native Americans have their shamans shape shift into different animals and this is the direction the author takes his work. THrough a ritual when the shaman enter another world he can either shape shift into his totemic animal which may be a wolf or other animal.
This could be on the astral level and spiritual level. Through ritual and various substances people have entered into different realms and encountered diffrent beings. Some of these these interdimensional being look like a hybrid betwen a wolf and a human.
Of course wolves are not the only animals depicted. This marks the third type of were were wolf. The last type is an astral were wolf. This can be done by shape shifting the astral body intro the shape of a wolf and going out there into the world. Sometimes people see these wolves and sometimes you may even se the astral body of a freind who has been rendered unconsious after an accident.
You see there disembodied spirit. Some magicians have created servitors or other being with astral energy. Tibetan monks do it and the spirit is called a tongpa.
Dion Fortune did it with wolves. The author blieves that most of the werewolf citing that were witnessed involved astral were wolves. I enjoy Konstantino's work. He has the right amount of skeptisim and the right amount of open mindedness to really explore topics such as this. I have read other works and they also concur that werewolves are an astral phenomena that involves shape shifting. See any were wolves lately? Dec 26, Donna rated it liked it Shelves: horror , non-fiction.
The tone is the same, which I really liked. Konstantinos approaches the subject as a skeptic and isn't ashamed about it. He brushes aside the more frivolous, Hollywood aspects of werewolf lore and delves pretty deeply the hardcore legends from a bunch of different cultures, including European, Native American and some Asian cultures.
It was interesting reading about werewolf aspects that I didn't know much, if anything at all, about before. He has a definite sway as to which werewolf mythos he believes in which is fine. In reality it's the one that makes the most sense but it's a point that he brings home, however subtly, from the beginning.
That might also be because there wasn't too much technical to delve into since werewolves are even more mythical than vampires.
They really only lent further credit to Konstantinos's theory that werewolf experiences are more psychological than anything. That got really grating. It just seemed. The aurhor has not mentioned a way a person could become a vampire with the use of the occult via black magick, satanism, such as people like Gilles De Rais or possibly Elizabeth Bathory. The author brings us anecdotal and actual evidence of four types of vampires — immortal blood drinkers, mortal blood drinkers, unintentional psychic vampires, and intentional psychic vampires.
The ligght should eventually engulf in your circular area. There are, however, several distinctions between vamppires vampires described in those texts and the beings portrayed in popular fiction and movies. Account Options Sign in. And if I can give a plus for that, I can take it away for searching vampires in graveyards, figuratively speaking. Thankfully I was wrong although I have to say that while it was refreshing getting away from the camp, Konstantinos was, at times, a little dry in the execution of his point and it was sometimes hard for me to get through.
They really exist, and this book rips away the myth to expose their habits and lifestyles. And I have discovered, on my own, much of what is expressed in this book, to be true.
I am currently reading this book and I really like it. I enjoyed that the author did not stray into areas that needed not be written about or discussed. Mortal Blood Drinkers of the Vxmpires Day. These are the energy drainers who either intentionally or unintentionally suck you dry emotionally and mentally. I must admit that I was disappointed somewhat in this book. We get explanations of what vampires there could be, are they mortal or immortal, are they physical or spiritual, do they drink blood or drain energy.
Doing away with preconceived notions is one of the hardest things that an investigator of the paranormal has to do. Over all this is a great introduction to such a konstanyinos topic. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website.
Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are as essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. Her wiles have the desired effect. After a marathon seven nights of lovemaking including the six daylight periods in between , Enkidu finds that the wild animals no longer approach or interact with him.
His beast nature has been diminished. If Enkidu was ever described as specifically dog- or wolflike, it was lost in one of the various broken tablet sections.
That Enkidu is the first literary beast man is certain, however, making him another first for Sumer. Later in the epic, another wolf man is clearly identified as such, but he is mentioned only in an anecdote by Gilgamesh.
One of the reasons portrays the idea of man into wolf clearly: You loved the shepherd. Who was always heaping up the glowing ashes for you. But you hit him and turned him into a wolf, His own herd-boys hunt him down And his dogs tear at his haunches. These evil beings were described in a chant that survives to this day. Of particular interest is the section where the Maskim Xul are listed one at a time, providing us with this line: The fifth is a furious Wolf, who knoweth not to flee.
Later on, when we delve into the idea that some supernatural beings may have first appeared to humans in drug-induced visions, it will bear reiterating that wolf men and women were among the beings that appeared to many of our early ancestors. This one hails from the great city of Babylon and appears in the Bible, of all sources! In the third chapter of the Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon builds a golden statue of a deity.
He orders all who are near the statue to kneel and worship it whenever they hear the sound of trumpets, flutes, and other assorted instruments. Three Jewish businessmen of some type—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—refuse to bow down before the statue when they hear the official music.
This insolence enrages Nebuchadnezzar, and he orders the three men thrown into a fire. As the three predict, their true God saves them from the flames, even though the blaze consumed the guards who brought the Jewish prisoners to the furnace.
This changes Nebuchadnezzar, and he accepts God as the true deity. His religious awakening seems too little too late, however. In Daniel 4, the next chapter, Nebuchadnezzar has a disturbing and baffling dream that none of his astrologers and wise people could interpret. The supposed author of the book, Daniel, who was also known as.
Belteshazzar, is the only one who can interpret the dream in the court. This does come to pass in Daniel , with Nebuchadnezzar taking on the following form:. Thick hairs and claws? Sounds like quite a beast, and possibly a wolflike one.
Biblical scholars have found strong evidence suggesting that the Old Testament was heavily influenced by, and partially written and assembled during, the time that the Jews were in captivity in Babylon. This was hundreds of years after the alleged time of Moses scholars have found no evidence to support his existence, and the first five books are believed to have been written by multiple authors.
The tale of Nebuchadnezzar could be related either to something that the author of Daniel actually witnessed, or it could just be a wonderful catharsis. Nothing like getting a little literary revenge on the city that enslaved you by turning its leader into a monster. Before we delve into the tale, note that the ancient Greeks believed their gods to be among them all the time, in various forms and dis-. You never knew who was knocking at your door asking for food; that helpless old lady could be a vengeful goddess testing you!
Yes, vengeful. Or jealous, or any human trait you can imagine. Along with the belief that deities were close to humans often came the belief that the gods were very humanlike as well, complete with both positive and negative human traits. The goddess ended up turning her into a spider, the ultimate weaver, as a sort of ironic punishment.
The first werewolf, Lycaon, was guilty of much more than boasting. According to mythology, in the earliest days some humans chose not to worship Zeus and the gods of Mount Olympus. This fire is often interpreted to be wisdom, making Prometheus arguably the prototypical fallen angel in legend, similar to the later concept of Lucifer the light bearer. Following a fallen Titan in ancient Greece was sort of like living in the Bible Belt today and publicly proclaiming that you love Lucifer.
According to one telling of the myth, Lycaon was just such an outsider who chose to follow the fallen ones. The difference is Lycaon had a little more clout than a typical villager would enjoy. As king of Arcadia, Lycaon had the mortal power to spout his views comfortably and. Either way, recall that a visit from a god would not be an uncommon event for a character in Greek mythology.
The king received Zeus and invited him to dinner. Myths are often retold in different ways, so the motives behind what Lycaon did next are unclear.
Others telling the tale just point out that Lycaon was truly diabolical. Either way, what he did that night was not wise. Lycaon ordered the execution of one of the prisoners in his dungeon.
In a rage he destroyed the banquet table. Zeus turned Lycaon into a true eater of flesh: a wolf. For some, the mythic figure became a figure worth following. The fabled king is the only werewolf to have an entire cult devoted to him and his interaction with the god Zeus. A Greek geographer and explorer from the second century CE, Pausanias, re-.
Keep in mind that the version of the Lycaon myth I have shared here is only one interpretation of why the king was involved with Zeus, but it is the one most closely related to lycanthropy. Over the years, having such a heritage in the area led to other werewolf-related beliefs.
One is the idea that if a person becomes a werewolf, he or she can be cured by abstaining from eating humans for a set period of time often nine years. The selected man was brought to a lake in Arcadia and made to hang his clothing on the branch of an ash tree.
After that he would swim across the lake and emerge as a wolf at the other side. If his clothes had managed to survive the nine years, I guess he could then put them back on.
Pausanias shared an interesting anecdote about one such Arcadian man who came back after nine years as a werewolf. Not leaving all his animal ferocity behind, the once-again-human Damarchus became an unbeatable boxer and won a gold medal in the Olympics sometime around BCE. The only kind of scandal you could have in sports pre-steroids? Whatever its origin, this colorful tale predates Michael J. Even if it was based on some kind of real event, this myth would have been based on an event that was passed down orally for years before being written down.
As with the New Testament of the Bible, which was also passed down orally for far too long before being recorded and then subjected to poor translation , this type of passed-down history makes it impossible to guess what the original events inspiring the tales may have been. The state of the art in recording history did eventually evolve, however. What do you think happened when lycanthropy legends started to appear in a time and place where recorded history had a way to actually be recorded and quickly shared?
Enter Europe, after Gutenberg changed the world with his invention of the printing press and things get a whole lot weirder and, arguably, more reliable. It is because of the printing press that a great number of werewolf legends from Europe have survived. The most notable of these will be used as the primary examples in the following chapters. For the purposes of this look at general regional beliefs, we will instead examine the more general forms werewolves were thought to take on in the various countries of Europe.
This is not so unusual, considering that most of the continent was in the grips of religious mania and fear from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, courtesy of that darling phase of historical irrationality: the Inquisition. According to Saint Augustine, in his City of God: But it is to be most firmly believed that Almighty God can do whatever He pleases, whether in punishing or favouring, and that the demons can accomplish nothing by their natural power for their created being.
As far as the Europeans of the Middle Ages were concerned, witches worshiped the devil, and the devil allowed witches to turn into werewolves and other creatures. The seeming epicenter of lycanthropy is just a short hop across the Channel. No region in Europe was more inundated with werewolf beliefs than France, the prowling grounds of the loup-garou. So prevalent were the beasts in France that we have more complete surviving cases or legends from this region than from anywhere else.
However, diversity abounds with case density here. And the how does vary. Loups-garous were cursed into being as often as they were voluntarily created. Loups-garous were as likely to be phantom beings as they were hallucinations in the mind of the all-too-human beast committing heinous acts. The vast majority of accounts all agree in one way, though: religious hysteria permeates the tales. Expect to see this word pop up numerous times in.
Not surprisingly, the power of religious mania seemed to have affected the beliefs of other European countries as well. Well to the east we come upon the land more commonly thought of for vampires. Some sources have them as more ghost-like creatures, some as vampiric. A more specific type of werewolf from the region is the bitang, which is believed to be the seventh son born out of wedlock—a type of cursed or involuntary werewolf. The belief in werewolves was so common in Germany that the creatures permeated even popular fiction.
A common folk belief was that pacts with the devil would result in lycanthropy. In Germany, most of these seem to focus on farmers and their wives, being true tales of the folk. And nice folk at that, since in most of these legends if a husband becomes a werewolf, despite all his savagery he always manages to protect his wife. Touching, really. Wolves have special significance in Norwegian mythology. One of the trio of fiercest monsters in these tales is Fenris the wolf.
Norse warriors believed that they could obtain the characteristics of animals in battle by wearing their skins. These warriors would most commonly select skins of bears for their frenzied battle preparations, and were called berserkers, as they wore the serks, or shirts, of a bear. Forget Saint Michael slaying a dragon in some mythical battle in the heavens.
These saints tangoed with the furry side right in the green grass of Ireland. While Saint Patrick is most well-known for his metaphorical driving out the serpents from the countryside serpents may have represented Pagans , there is also a legend that he turned Welsh king Vereticus into a wolf.
Some versions of the legend may have mixed with another from the region, positing that Saint Patrick cursed an entire clan to turn into wolves every seven years as a punishment for their lack of faith.
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