It has been elsewhere shown that the howling dog, or wish-hound of Hermes, whose appearance under the windows of a sick person is such an alarming portent, is merely the tempest personified. Throughout all Aryan mythology the souls of the dead are supposed to ride on the night-wind, with their howling dogs, gathering into their throng the souls of those just dying as they pass by their houses.[73] Sometimes the whole complex conception is wrapped up in the notion of a single dog, the messenger of the god of shades, who comes to summon the departing soul. Sometimes, instead of a dog, we have a great ravening wolf who comes to devour its victim and extinguish the sunlight of life, as that old wolf of the tribe of Fenrir devoured little Red Riding-Hood with her robe of scarlet twilight.[74] Thus we arrive at a true werewolf myth.
The storm-wind, or howling Rakshasa of Hindu folk-lore, is "a great misshapen giant with red beard and red hair, with pointed protruding teeth, ready to lacerate and devour human flesh; his body is covered with coarse, bristling hair, his huge mouth is open, he looks from side to side as he walks, lusting after the flesh and blood of men, to satisfy his raging hunger and quench his consuming thirst. Towards nightfall his strength increases manifold; he can change his shape at will; he haunts the woods, and roams howling through the jungle."[75]
[73] Hence, in many parts of Europe, it is still customary to open the windows when a person dies, in order that the soul may not be hindered in joining the mystic cavalcade.
[74] The story of little Red Riding-Hood is "mutilated in the English version, but known more perfectly by old wives in Germany, who can tell that the lovely little maid in her shining red satin cloak was swallowed with her grandmother by the wolf, till they both came out safe and sound when the hunter cut open the sleeping beast." Tylor, Primitive Culture, I. 307, where also see the kindred Russian story of Vasilissa the Beautiful. Compare the case of Tom Thumb, who "was swallowed by the cow and came out unhurt"; the story of Saktideva swallowed by the fish and cut out again, in Somadeva Bhatta, II. 118-184; and the story of Jonah swallowed by the whale, in the Old Testament. All these are different versions of the same myth, and refer to the alternate swallowing up and casting forth of Day by Night, which is commonly personified as a wolf, and now and then as a great fish. Compare Grimm's story of the Wolf and Seven Kids, Tylor, loc. cit., and see Early History of Mankind, p. 337; Hardy, Manual of Budhism, p.
501.
[75] Baring-Gould, Book of Werewolves, p. 178; Muir, Sanskrit Texts, II. 435.
Now if the storm-wind is a host of Pitris, or one great Pitri who appears as a fearful giant, and is also a pack of wolves or wish-hounds, or a single savage dog or wolf, the inference is obvious to the mythopoeic mind that men may become wolves, at least after death. And to the uncivilized thinker this inference is strengthened, as Mr. Spencer has shown, by evidence registered on his own tribal totem or heraldic emblem. The bears and lions and leopards of heraldry are the degenerate descendants of the totem of savagery which designated the tribe by a beast-symbol. To the untutored mind there is everything in a name; and the descendant of Brown Bear or Yellow Tiger or Silver Hyaena cannot be pronounced unfaithful to his own style of philosophizing, if he regards his ancestors, who career about his hut in the darkness of night, as belonging to whatever order of beasts his totem associations may suggest.
Thus we not only see a ray of light thrown on the subject of metempsychosis, but we get a glimpse of the curious process by which the intensely realistic mind of antiquity arrived at the notion that men could be transformed into beasts. For the belief that the soul can temporarily quit the body during lifetime has been universally entertained; and from the conception of wolf-like ghosts it was but a short step to the conception of corporeal werewolves. In the Middle Ages the phenomena of trance and catalepsy were cited in proof of the theory that the soul can leave the body and afterwards return to it. Hence it was very difficult for a person accused of witchcraft to prove an alibi; for to any amount of evidence showing that the body was innocently reposing at home and in bed, the rejoinder was obvious that the soul may nevertheless have been in attendance at the witches' Sabbath or busied in maiming a neighbour's cattle. According to one mediaeval notion, the soul of the werewolf quit its human body, which remained in a trance until its return.[76]
[76] In those days even an after-dinner nap seems to have been thought uncanny. See Dasent, Burnt Njal, I. xxi.
