More Research Struggles, This Time Involving Werewolves
I have complained about the perils of research before. Most Medium bloggers would hit a pay wall if they tried to reach academic papers, and they have to rely on publicly available stuff. Some folks have enough of a background or education to have that access for a really deep dive, but it’s rare.
Most of us can wind up resorting to a quick Google search, and some of us might not have the background to usefully judge what is real and what isn’t from that search.
Some of this is that whole Vygotsky thing: children learn by scaffolding new ideas on old facts. You need a knowledge base to judge correctly.
And some (read: all) of us are deeply immersed in a culture that is providing background misinformation.
Take the claim that the church banned autopsies: it’s a distortion of the plea that nobles quit having most of their bodies buried at home while some body parts were taken to Jerusalem. The nobles ignored this regularly. (I mean, you do you, The Bruce, but I hope you put your heart on ice or pickled it in alcohol for the journey.)
Actually, it was the ancient Romans who had a thing against autopsies. The church allowed the university at Bologna (I think it was Bologna, or was it Barcelona?) to have the corpse of a criminal once a year for an anatomy lecture.
However, historical mystery writers claim this because it gives us an easy point of conflict for our investigators to look good in. Welcome to fiction writing, where easy conflict is the best possible outcome.
The way to correct this would be to go back to the first papal bulls, searching through the millions that have been produced over the years, provided you could get to them. I can’t, so I have to rely on Sawbones and The Five-Minute Medievalist to quote them for me.
And now I am in the same spot regarding St. Augustine. Two podcasts I know of have done werewolf episodes, but each characterized St. Augustine’s take on them ever-so-slightly differently. Then I finally got around to reading ‘The White Devil, The Werewolf in European Culture’ and that book actually contains the quote from The City of God, “I thus do not admit in any way that demons be capable, by their power or their tricks, to transform in reality not the soul, but simply the body of a man into parts and shapes of beasts.”
That sounds like good ol’ Christian ‘we can say any old nonsense about the invisible, undetectable soul, but we have to worship at the altar of wealthy Romans who say they saw people turning into wolves.’ So, demons can change the body, but the soul is left alone.
But there is an ellipse in the quote, and I don’t know what the rest of the paragraph is. Not to mention, The White Devil says something about Augustine attributing the transformation to Pan. Or Pan knows how to do it, which, huh?
At least I can hope that ‘The City of God’ is on Archive.org, because it would cost a fortune to access any other way.
And would I have the background necessary to parse it once I find it?
Anyway, always take my words with a grain of salt, people. I write fiction for a reason.