Sabine Baring-Gould's Book of Were-Wolves (1865)

There are times I feel despair for where the world may be going now: are we heading towards new repressions, new violence, new wars? Was the post-WW2 period a brief moment of peace, and have the generations passed so that the visceral memory has faded, and fascism, war, violence and otherness return?

A quote like this makes me think the stories of werewolves and other human monsters is the way those in the past dealt with the returning cycle of human awfulness.

> It is to be observed that the chief seat of Lycanthropy was Arcadia and it has been very plausibly suggested that the cause might be traced to the following circumstance:—The natives were a pastoral people, and would consequently suffer very severely from the attacks and depredations of wolves. They would naturally institute a sacrifice to obtain deliverance from this pest, and security for their flocks. This sacrifice consisted in the offering of a child, and it was instituted by Lycaon [an Arcadian king who fed his son to Zeus and was subsequently turned into a wolf for his perversity]. From the circumstance of the sacrifice being human, and from the peculiarity of the name of its originator, rose the myth.

Coincidentally I just yesterday read an interesting factoid in the footnotes to Plutarch's "Life of Pyrrhus" [1]:

> Lukos or Lycus, in Greek, is a wolf, and Lukeios, or Lycius, a common epithet of Apollo, who as the archer-god was conceived of as the slayer of wolves, and who was also the tutelar deity of Lycia. The word lukē, however, is found in Greek vocabularies, corresponding to lux, light, and this, it is very possible, was the original significance of lukeios, though in after times more obvious meanings were attached to it.

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Plutarch%27s_Lives_(Clough)/L...

At the time I had no way to find out what an "ashstock" was or what Bujan represented.

Now, I'm guessing that "ashstock" is "the stump of an ash tree" with "stock" in the sense of the etymological root meaning "stick" or "tree trunk" and from which the various modern uses derive: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stock#Etymology_1

And Bujan is a magical island in East Slavic folklore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyan

I picked up a complete set of his Lives of the Saints that was being discarded from a seminary library a few years back. It’s a delight (in part owing to what Walther describes as the “inordinate” attention he pays “to the most minor details of his subjects' terrestrial existences”).