Howl
A lunatic compendium
I am a proud Radical Left Lunatic but also just your garden variety lunatic in the truest, most original sense of the term, one who gets all loony over the moon.
Will Dowd, cartoonist for The Boston Globe who writes a monthly moonStack called The Lunar Dispatch, kindly referred to me once as a fellow lunatic.
This bit from Moonstruck sets the mood I’m always going for in life—surely one of the greatest movies of all time, glowing and giddy with impossible romance and full-moon-magic.
After a supermoon and a Harvest moon coincided in one giant ball of October orange, the next full moon is the Beaver Moon of Nov. 5, because beavers are busy building their dams and prepping for winter, dammit, and not because of whatever your dirty mind might conjure. This also happens to be a supermoon, when the moon appears largest and brightest in closest proximity to earth, and the second in a trilogy of supermoons as December’s “Cold” full moon is also a supermoon on Dec. 4. Each complete moon, as Dowd writes about, has a title related to its time in its natural season as I catalogued in a previous Moon-pulled post that enjoyed spanning the lunar and “going tidal” to werewolves.
There were a few matters I left for another cycle. Important questions such as, are there WEREWOMEN out there besides a wolf crossdressing as a grandma in Little Red Hiding Hood?
Usually these werewolves are depicted in images and popular representations as men—manly, if hairy, men. Historically the word “were” derives from the word for man.
From Etymonline:
were(n.) Middle English wer, “a man, husband, male person, masculine member of a pair of sexually differentiated species;” from wer “man, male person” (from PIE root *wi-ro- “man”). Obsolete except in compounds.
What happens when the women have at it?
The feral Nightbitch novel plays with this idea with its heroine transforming into a hirsute predator roaming her suburban streets when her young boy is sleeping. The Yellowjackets series had the stranded teens toying with were-ing. But women are more often the victim not the predator in such stories.
WEREMYTH
The mythology of the were is not exclusively male, argues this essay on Medium, in fact it may have started more female. Which makes perfect sense, since women seem to be the ones more often moon-moved in real life.
At the crossroads of myth and science I cannot forget to mention the legacy of lunacy and old school lycanthropy, which ancient Greeks used as a clinical term for when a person believes they are a wolf or will become one (or another animal). Lunacy is a belief beginning in the 1300’s that moonstruck humans are prone to odd behavior. When I was younger, I worked as a behavioral health technician at an inpatient psychiatric unit deep in the Appalachian mountains. It did seem that around the week of the full moon, that there was an influx of patients in our ward and in the emergency room, and erratic behavior all around, especially since I worked the night shift. The belief in lunacy was echoed ominously by the nurses and staff around me. Whether there is illusory correlation here or not, our modern myth of the moonstruck lunatic lives on.
One of the first mentions in mythology of people turning into wolves is in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh rejects the goddess Ishtar after discovering she had turned a previous man into a wolf, along with several other men into animals. The tradition of attributing such transformative powers to women is as old as human memory, not only in transforming other people but also themselves. Some other feminine characters who have been portrayed as shapeshifting or having direct association with wolves are Artemis, and her mother Leto, who could turn into a wolf. We can look across the Mediterranean Sea to their Roman counterparts Diana and subsequently Lupa, the she-wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus who would rule over Rome. Similarly, the Turkish Asena, who is said to be the mother of the great Khans, a she-wolf having given birth to them as half wolf half man. The Netherlands bore Nehalennia, and the giantess of ancient Scandinavia, Skadi. Most of them had some association with hunting, warfare and death, the moon, and the realm of untouched wild land as well as transfiguration, but most relevantly, wolves. It seems that the ancestors of shapeshifters who favored the wild canine form, were of seemingly divine feminine ancestry.
Werewolves being linked with the full moon places them directly in the feminine realm, giving them a monthly cycle and attributing their complete shift in nature and form to this celestial trigger. It’s not hard to draw a correlation between the folklore and the biology of the feminine.
The author, whose pen name is “Midnight Harpy,” by the way, goes on to say that while the female aligns with the lupine in a way that fits our biology and our hormones (you know, how we are called, at least monthly, “crazy bitches,” that is, female dogs), the male counterparts more often get played in our pop culture for their strength, sex appeal, aggression, power, violence.
WEREWATCH
Even the Movie Monster Wiki on Werewolves leans far male in their description:
Werewolves/Lycanthropes have been featured in movies from 1913 to present day.
The process of transmogrification is portrayed in such films and works of literature to be painful. The resulting wolf is typically cunning but merciless, and prone to killing and eating people without compunction, regardless of the moral character of the person when human.
Even a man who is pure of heart
And says his prayers by night
May become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright.
Whereas a male with the traits of teeth and excessive hair might be construed as attractive (even that beast wins the girl in Beauty and the Beast), a women with such qualities would be considered grotesque. Not for our author Harpy. She gets positively poetic when it comes to this merger in a female:
In the feminine werewolf, we see a divorce from the conventional romanticized feminine role in horror. Damsel becomes beast, and she fucking loves it. Allowing women to become wolves through storytelling and metaphor is an invocation of the instinctual memory of something that IS innately feminine. Something reminiscent of hot copper stinging the air, lingering on the tongue, conjuring petrichor and images of the ripest moon. In the archetype of the she-wolf we find a desire path back to wild parts of ourselves that live in exile, and an opportunity to enjoy the freedom afforded to us by a salient reunion of instinct and self awareness. She becomes both “masculine fantasy and feminine horror”, and allows the feminine to be fully witnessed in its sublime truth and to regain power by owning desire, fear, and rage. For me, this monster has its beginnings in both ancient divinity and the feral throws of girlhood. A sapphic marriage of folklore and biological horror invokes the werewolf as a vessel for a rite of passage, and ultimately a becoming.
The author leaves us with a playlist of lycanthropic movies that play with gender or feature women, in no particular order:
Blood Moon, 2014
Ginger Snaps, 2000–2003
Cursed, 2005
The Cursed, 2022
The Howling, 1981
The Company of Wolves, 1984
Angel, 2003
The Beast Must Die, 1974
Being Human, 2009
Blood and Chocolate, 2007
Plus a few more I found:
She-Wolf of London, 1946: A classic Universal horror film where the female lead believes she is transforming into a werewolf and committing murder.
Full Eclipse, 1993: A made-for-TV action-horror film where a detective joins an elite squad of police officers who can turn into werewolves. Female lycanthropes are part of this pack.
Bloodthirsty, 2020: An indie horror film about an indie singer who starts transforming into a wolf-like creature after being invited to work with an eccentric producer.
Wolf Like Me, TV series, 2022: A romantic-comedy series where the female protagonist is a werewolf and struggles to hide her secret from her new partner.
WERETUNES
How about some songs so we can round out the full multi-sensory wolf experience with a good howl?
The great TV on the Radio’s “Wolf Like Me”:
Now that we got gone for good
Writhing under your riding hood
Tell your gra’ma and your mama too
It’s true, true, true, true
We’re howling forever, oh, oh
We’re howling forever, oh, oh
We’re howling forever, oh, oh
We’re howling forever, oh, oh
We’re howling forever, oh, oh
The more female Phantogram’s “Howling at the Moon”
And if I ever fall asleep I’ll turn around and face the sea
And if I crucified my dreams to be on your side
To see you alive, to see you alive
At night I cry and howl at the moon
At night I cry and howl at the moon
Along with “Howl” by Florence and the Machine:
If you could only see the beast you’ve made of me
I held it in but now it seems you’ve set it running free
Screaming in the dark, I howl when we’re apart
Drag my teeth across your chest to taste your beating heart
My fingers claw your skin, try to tear my way in
You are the moon that breaks the night for which I have to howl
My fingers claw your skin, try to tear my way in
You are the moon that breaks the night for which I have to
Howl, howl
Howl, howl
And, can’t overlook “Wolf” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,
starring a wife who runs amuck in the pursuit of her animal urges, soiling her white dress while chasing wildlife and playing in the mud.
I’m hungry like a wolf
I bleed like a wolf
[Pre-Chorus]
I’m lost and I’m lonely
I hunger for you only
Don’t leave me now, don’t break the spell
In heaven, lost my taste for hell
[Chorus]
Taste for hell
Taste for hell
WERERIVER
Finally, to put this thing that doesn’t want to sleep to bed, a nice image, akin to that moment in Moonstruck, encapsulated by yet another of those great foreign words that says so much in a few syllables.
Among the list of “most beautiful words” we don’t have in English such as the Japanese light filtering through the trees, there is the soothing concept of a “moon river.” Rocket Languages lists a moody nighttime version of this in Swedish:
Mångata describes the reflection of the moon on water. It refers to the wavy, road-like shape that appears across the water when the moon is shining on it. It consists of the prefixes “Måne” meaning “moon,” and “gata” meaning “street/road.” So it is sometimes indirectly translated as “moon-path,” “moon-river,” or “moon-track.”
And another person having a moment when she wonders what life was like before she discovered this perfect word. From Victoria Restrop’s travel journal:
Ah! I am sure that we have all seen it and have been delighted to see it shine on the sea, a lake, a river, or even the shiny surface of ice. But why didn’t we need to give it a name? Naming something and giving a name is a symbol of power; it is capturing it and making it real. It takes a poet’s soul to create a word to designate something so beautiful and intangible, but from now on, I will incorporate it into my life.
A wild and wonderful Beaver Moon to you all!
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Good one, Krista! I leased RadicalLeftLunatic.net and RadicalRightLunatic.net a few weeks ago. Just pointing to my sparse personal site for now. But, ya never know...