The Element Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Complete A–Z for the Entire Magical World. Judika Illes

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СКАЧАТЬ belief, any fox that attains fifty years of age can shape-shift into a standard human. If the fox can make it to a hundred, he’ll be a skilled sorcerer, too. There are various beliefs regarding abilities earned through longevity. An alternative view is that foxes and wolves that survive eighty years can transform into humans. If these animals can achieve one thousand years, they’ll be divine. (And how does a fox or anyone live to be a thousand years old? Through alchemy.) Older people are likewise able to develop the ability to shape-shift.

      A classic example from Japan: a samurai walking home one night spots a fox and shoots an arrow at it. The fox is wounded but doesn’t fall. It keeps going. The samurai follows it but is unable to catch up. Even wounded, this fox is too fast. He keeps following and eventually the samurai discovers that the fox has led him home. Suddenly, the fox transforms into a man and sets the samurai’s house on fire. Before the dazed and confused samurai can react, the fox transforms back into its original shape and escapes into the forest.

       Victims of Transformation

      Among witches’ notorious “crimes” is the transformation of human victims into animal form. The most famous example is Circe, the witch goddess of Homer’s Odyssey who transforms men into apes, pigs, and lions. Of course, one could say, as Circe does, that she isn’t transforming them, she’s revealing their true essence. (She regrets the prevalence of pigs and the paucity of lions, suggesting that Odysseus would have been a lion.) And of course, Circe doesn’t come looking for these men; she lives on a rock in the middle of the sea—they come to her. The motivation of fairy-tale witches who transform victims into animals isn’t always clear, but the witch is almost always depicted as the aggressor.

      Victims are transformed into animals, most frequently horses. The victim isn’t treated gently but ridden hard, saddled, bridled or struck with the bridle.

      What’s the evidence of transformation? There’ll be wounds on or in the mouth, traces of the bit. Another indication is when tack or riding equipment is missing. The victim may wake up suffering from dizziness, fatigue, covered in cold sweat or black and blue marks—“blue in the face”: all evidence of having been “ridden.”

      Another fear is that animals may be indistinguishable from all the others. This may date from guilt about the treatment of formerly sacred animals. Once transformed, the victim who, unlike self-transformed witches who always seem to retain their human capacity for speech, loses the power to speak, and so is treated just like any other animal.

      

      

Circe’s spell is first discovered when Odysseus’ hungry sailors almost eat their comrade, transformed into a pig.

      

Artemis punishes the hunter Actaeon for a transgression by transforming him into a stag. His own dogs are unable to recognize him, he’s unable to call them off, and they rip him apart.

      

In the Japanese animated film Spirited Away, the heroine Chihiro yearns to rescue her bewitched parents, transformed into pigs, but they’re in a pen with hundreds of other pigs, destined for the dinner table. They can’t identify themselves to her and so it’s an impossible task.

       Wolves and Werewolves

      Depending upon what one understands a werewolf to be, the line between wolves and wolfmen may be very fine indeed. Mirror-images of each other, they can’t really be separated and so are considered together.

      The emotions evoked by wolves and the treatment accorded to them parallel those toward witches. Some find profound beauty, spirituality, something indescribably unique and special about wolves; words aren’t sufficient to evoke the holiness many perceive. On the other hand, the passion, hostility, determination to exterminate wolves—out of all proportion to any damage they might possibly do—parallels emotions toward witches: the urge to kill off something wild, free, and independent.

      Like witches, wolves are demonized. Wolves have historically been hunted and exterminated just like witches, shamans, and diviners.

      

      

By 300 BCE pagan Celts were breeding wolfhounds especially for killing wolves.

      

Vargr, “wolf,” was the term used in Icelandic law codes to refer to outlaws who could be hunted down like wolves. The word also implies that wolves could be hunted down like outlaws, the worst offenders.

      

In Anglo-Saxon England wolves were sometimes hanged near criminals. The Saxon word for gallows is “varagtreo,” “wolf tree.”

      

In France, in approximately 800 CE, Charlemagne founded an order for the purpose of exterminating wolves, the Louveterie.

      

In 1281, King Edward I hired a man, Peter Corbet, to destroy all the wolves he could find in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, and Worcestershire.

      The desire to eliminate wolves was frequently translated into what may be considered a “wolf-craze” similar to the European Witchcraze. In various parts of Europe and North America, it wasn’t sufficient to merely kill wolves; instead they were brutally tortured to death. There is a sadistic quality to the history of the extermination of wolves that more closely resembles the witch-hunts than extermination of other animal species. In the United States, for instance, wolves were captured alive and dragged behind horses until they were torn to pieces. Other wolves captured alive had their jaws (and sometimes penises) wired up and then were released.

      Wolves, shy and wary, very rarely attack humans. (Not a single case of a wolf killing a human has been recorded in North America.) Dogs and automobiles are responsible for a vastly greater number of human death and injury, yet both are beloved. Wolves have been known to prey on livestock, but only when humans have encroached on their territory. It’s not wolves who’ve spread out—their territory has consistently diminished over the last two thousand years; humans have spread out, cleared and destroyed wilderness, removing wolves dining alternatives.

      However, for some, wolves are the essential spirit of the wild. Without wolves, some magical earth power is also extinguished. In Lakota, the word for “wolf” translates as the “animal that looks like a dog but is a powerful spirit.”

      Wolves are identified with witchcraft:

      

      

In Germanic tradition, wolves are witches’ mounts and were believed to carry them to sabbats.

      

In the Navajo language, СКАЧАТЬ