The werewolf was born in the yearning of primitive man who sought to obtain the powers of the wolf to survive. To transform himself into a wolf, the primitive dressed in the wolf's skin, used ointments and hallucinogenic drinks during ceremonies and ritual initiations invoking the wolf in his mind and body. The primitive man conjured the wolf to become a wolf, we speak of a physical and symbolic transformation that could only occur by renouncing humanity.
Viking warriors induced their transformation through a strange ointment to become feared fierce warriors, but did they become animals? Their inner transformation made them feel like real beasts, and their fellows also feared their fierceness in battle. The wolf as a totem is a symbol of power and primitive man sought to obtain beast-like powers.
Shamans and sorcerers could transform themselves into beasts, it was said that they unfolded and that their double was an animal that inflicted goodness or evil on people. When the animal died, man also met the same fate, Nahual was his transforming ability and his double, the double that all men are said to possess. That is why it is said that every man has an animal double, a beastly double, but when did the wolf become the other half of man?
In the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, we find the definitive myth of the werewolf, as it was interpreted and retold many times by different authors of antiquity. According to the myth, the one who turned into a wolf was a man named Lycaon, king of Arcadia. He was said to be a great king, although he had barbaric customs such as performing human sacrifices and practicing cannibalism. A major insult was to murder all strangers and visitors who came to the city, violating the sacred law of Greece.
Seeing this Zeus wanted to visit him. Lycaon realizing this, invites him to dinner and amid his audacity, decides to play a terrible joke on him and serve him human flesh for dinner. Enraged Zeus throws lightning bolts, sets fire to the place and, of course, decides to administer justice by turning Lycaon into a wolf, because Lycaon already had bestial habits, he is only transformed into the beast he already was.
The werewolf according to Greek mythology is he who has let his animal side prevail, he is he who has let himself be seduced by bestiality, he is he who has given free rein to violence, for whatever reason. The werewolf is he who has turned away from the gods and the world of men. Plato takes up the myth of Lycaon as a werewolf to illustrate in his political theory the figure of the tyrant.
Tyranny is characterized by the rule of a single individual who wields absolute power, ignores laws, and rules arbitrarily. As a tyrant, this beastly man does not hesitate to shed the blood of his enemies to maintain power. A tyrant, according to Plato, does not find a way to fully satisfy his passions and gives himself up to madness. This man finds himself a prisoner of his desires and will do anything to satisfy them. The tyrant is a slave, who is a prisoner of his passions.
However, the tyrants of ancient Greece were not always viewed negatively; the people supported some as popular figures and liberators of oppressive regimes. On the contrary, tyranny and the figure of the tyrant will later, in the Latin tradition and then among modern and contemporary thinkers, represent an opposition to democracy and the legitimately constituted government that observes the law. In these instances, tyranny is equated with absolutism, dictatorship, and totalitarianism. The tyrant is a solitary figure who rules for his own benefit and in an oppressive manner, comes to power by force, and uses force while in office.
For Plato the man who becomes a wolf has lost his rationality, he is a creature of chaos. In the sense of the myth, the werewolf is a barbarian who belongs more to the world of the wild, not to the civilized world of the polis, his ways are those of a wild beast, not those of a man.
If the wolf belongs to the world of wilderness, what is wilderness? The wild is a place that man has not intervened, it is the place where that which is inhospitable to man survives and which constitutes a home for animals, their sanctuary. It can be the jungle, a forest, a desert, or the deep sea. The wilderness is the realm of nature and all the living beings it houses. Man does not belong there, man has created his own home based on his way of being, a hybrid, a rational animal. His world is the world of the rational, he belongs there. Therefore, the werewolf is an alienated, an outsider, an exile. He can no longer belong to the rational world (political, human), he can only live alone, away from other men in the world of the wild.
Aristotle, who describes man as a social animal, since man can only live well within a society, says that a beast is also the man who is outside society: The man who likes solitude is either a beast or a god, for he who lives outside society is called a beast.
In this way, the werewolf is configured as a man who, because of his violent and barbaric nature, cannot coexist with his fellow men. However, every man carries a beast within, as much as he cannot separate himself from his bestial past. Man is a being who is half divine since he participates in the divine intelligence of the gods, and at the same time he is half animal since he participates in the animal nature; man wants to elevate himself like a god, but at the same time he is dragged down by the animal instincts.
When the philosopher Thomas Hobbes alludes to Pausanias' phrase "lupus est homo homini" "A man is a wolf to man," he is speaking of the fact that man carries within him a wild beast, which is very much his own. However, violence in man has purposes beyond mere survival.
Man, attacks to defend himself, but also out of pride and greed. Hobbes, within the framework of the social contract theory, justifies the necessary figure of an absolute power that controls a pack of men, half man, half beast. This figure will provide them with shelter and the needed safety to live, but to do so, the man-beasts will yield their power of violence to the Leviathan.
His immediate opponent, the philosopher John Locke, stated that men did not have to grant absolute power to a ruler, men agree on the conformation of a society where the leaders are elected to fulfill a function within the state. Men are not beasts; they are rational beings who agree on a society of liberties and duties where the laws are the reflection of what is good and by reason.
To live in a civil society, man must make a pact. Anyone who does not belong to civil society, that is, who does not follow the rules and laws that make it up, is in a state of nature or a primitive state. He is outside society and is therefore a beast.
To combat Hobbes' idea of an absolute power that must control the whole state, Locke argues that the opposite of civil society is a society that has no laws and is ruled by an absolute king or prince. This society is based on force (force is the law of the beasts), people do not obey the law but fear, remember that among animal groups the law of the strongest prevails and this one becomes the leader of the herd, therefore this community belongs more to the world of the beasts and the territory of the wild.
Primitive man was close to nature and lived with the beasts, so he wanted to be like the wolf, seeing this as something that could help him survive. In the world before civilization, the werewolf was not seen as something barbaric, bestial, or evil. The werewolf becomes morally reprehensible when the tribe becomes a community, that is when primitive man becomes civilized.
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