Coleraine author taps into fascination with mythical beast

Published Date:
16 February 2010
By David Rankin

A Coleraine author's blood-curdling new book on werewolves is taking America by storm.

Dr Bob Curran's Werewolves - A Field Guide to Shapeshifters, Lycanthropes and Man Beasts (New Page Books) reached No1 in the Independent Publishers List and sparked a new frenzy of interest in the mythical beast.

Over the past few months, Dr Curran has appeared on a number of US radio shows along with other supernatural experts to discuss our morbid fascination with werewolves.

In the past week The Wolfman - directed by Joe Johnston and starring Benicio Del Toro, Emily Blunt and Sir Anthony Hopkins - was released in cinemas, much to the delight of horror fans.

"The idea of the werewolf," writes Dr Curran, "may represent an amalgam of a number of deep human fears and perceptions - the separation from nature, the fear of the wild, a horror of cannibalism, and inherent awareness of the savagery and ferocity that often lies under the veneer of human 'civilization.'"

In his best selling book, Dr Curran examines the deep psychological roots that underlie the linking of human and beast.

He reveals that the modern sympathetic vision of a forlorn man-wolf transforming under the moon's rays are very different from, say, the 16th century perspective, when lycanthropy was considered an abominable offshoot of witchcraft and Devil worship. Or from further back, to the Dark Ages, when taking on the mantle of the wolf was seen as a sign of virility, and battle-hardened strength.

The notion of a werewolf as we understand these days appears to spring from a 13th century text entitled "Otia Imperia" (Resurrection of the Emperor) by Mediaeval chronicler Gervase of Tilbury.

Darker aspects of early werewolf ideas included cannibalism. The idea of a foreign 'Manbeast' was a common xenophobic attitude in Christian Europe. Tales told by travellers returning from far away lands would spread rumours of tribes in distant mountains who ate human flesh.

Dr Curran also notes that in medieval Western European tales the werewolf is often perceived as a noble creature. Later, as the West expanded, a more horrific set of tales emerge.

This generated a fear of werewolves that sparked prosecutions of alleged werewolves, particularly in 16th century France. Burning at the stake inevitably followed.

The paranoia and irrational beliefs of the day sit well with the gothic horrors of latter-day fiction, which Bob Curran also explores later in the book.

But there have also been real-life examples of manbeasts. Dr Curran catalogues examples of cannibals, feral children, the psychotically ill, and the Leopard Men cult of Western Africa back in the 1940s.

So why is there a cultural fascination with werewolves?

Dr Curran says that they represented freedom - "the thrill of the hunt together with the absence of the constraints of a more regimented culture.

"It was wildness; it was the exhilaration that civilized men imagined existed within the bestial world. It accorded hidden passions and concealed rages, as it shook off the very trappings of what made mankind 'civilized'."

http://www.colerainetimes.co.uk/news/Coleraine-author-taps-into-fascination.6075277.jp
(Submitted by Caty Bergman)