MYSTERIES AND MAYHEM

Navtive Americans were not the only people to seek power through ritual transformation into animals. In the seventh century A.D., a counsil of the Christian church found it necessary to denounce people who put on the heads of beasts or "make themselves into wild animals." Some scolars contend that the European belief in werewolves (literally "man wolves") originated in just such practices. In classical Rome, for example, there were serval active wolf cults. One of them centred on a god called Dis Pater, the Roman lord of death, who was often represented with a wolf's head. His priests, the "wolves of Soracte," attempted to please the gods by acting like wolves and living as predators. Another community of wolf priests was linked to the cave of Lupercal (from lupus, or wolf), where Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, had been suckled by the She-wolf. Every year, on February 15, these priests celebrated the festival of Lupercalia. Marked with the blood of a sacrificed goat, howling with ritual larughter, they paraded naked through the city, scouring any woman they met with sanctified goat hair to ensure her fertility. This outpouring of wolf magic was so importnat to the Roman state that the cult was reorganized and restored by Augustus.

Bizarre as this practice now seems, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider it's meaning. The ritual invokes predation and death with the blood of a goat, sexuality with the nude dancing. And through those forces of bloos and nakedness, the participants receive the promise of fertility, new life. This rransformation is possible through the agency of the wolf, the killer, born in the cave-womb of the Earth. The festival of Lupermysteries that link birth with death, beauty with violence.

Some scholars believe that the wolf who nutured Romulus and Remus (and thereby served as foster mother to Roman civilization) was the Etruscan goddess Lupa. In their view, the story represents both the historic antecedents of the patriarchal gods. Suggestively, the Great Goddess in her various manifestations-as Artemis, as Cerridwen-seems often to have been accompanied by wolves or dogs. Just as the deiry herself was both the giver and the destroyer of life, so too were her canine attendants.

Rome was not the only great culture to claim descent from the society of wolves. The Persian seer Zoroaster, the German hero Siegfried and the Turkish leader Tu Kueh are all said to have been reared by wolf mothers. Even in modern times, the concept of wolf children has retained a surprising vitality. In the 1020's, for example, an orphanage keeper in India, the Reverend Mr. Singh, claimed to have discovered two young girls in a wolf den. He found them, he said, curled up with two wolf pups and cared for by three adult wolves. The children could not walk. They preferred darkness and raw meat; they bit and howled. Had they indeed been reared by animals? Perhaps so, but two scientists who went to India in the 1950's to investigate discovered that the Reverend Mr. Singh had a disappointing reputation for untruth. A more plausible explanation has been put foreward by psycholiogist Bruno Bettelheim, who observed that the behaviou reported for these youngsters and other so-called feral children coincides with the symptoms of severe autism. If Singh's little girls were disturbed children who had been abondoned at his orphanage, perhaps he allowed himself a small flight of fancy in accounting for their plight. After all, wolves do enjoy an intimate, playful family life, not unlike our own, so the notion that they might suckle human young is remotely plausible.