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.
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