Episode 24: Therianthropic Theories | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therianthropy
https://www.samwoolfe.com/2021/06/part-human-part-animal-therianthropes-tricksters-human-nature.html
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1590-animal-headed-humans-appear-in-earliest-art/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10816-021-09523-9
Ok, let’s jump into this week’s topic, “Therianthropes”. I’m so excited about this one, I’m going some fun places with my research so buckle up.
Per the Wikipedia article on Theriathropes, a therianthrope is “the mythological ability of human beings to metamorphose into other animals by means of shapeshifting.” We have confirmation that the term started being used in folklore stories throughout Europe in the early 1900s, with some scholars believing the word came into use as early as 17th century werewolf trials.
Related to therianthropy we have the concept of “theriocephaly”, which is the folkloric depiction of animal headed humanoids. These include the animal headed forms of deities across culture (see our buddy Hermanubis from the coyote/jackal episode) and can be found as early as cave paintings from roughly 30,000 years ago depicting a bison headed humanoid. An aside, this drawing has been called “the Sorceror” by scholars and for some reason that just makes me happy.
So…as for shapeshifters in North American folklore…there are creatures that people familiar with the spooky side of folklore are probably expecting me to cover but out of both respect for indigenous people who have spoken out repeatedly about how distasteful it is for non-native folks to discuss them and my personal fear because if you call these shifters by their name you draw attention to yourself I am going to refrain from that. If you guys listening want those stories, maybe ask yourselves why your thrill seeking is more important than Native religious sovereignty. That’s something I’ve had to grapple with and I think we can all do better.
Stepping off of that soapbox for now, I will admit that that left me in a bit of a pickle about what to discuss this episode. So I started reading up on theories surrounding shapeshifters in folklore in general and I think you all are going to enjoy where we’re going.
So throughout folklore worldwide shapeshifting tends to be associated with religious leaders, often referred to as shamans but there is some disagreement in academic circles about what sort of religious structure includes someone who would be called a shaman. Broadly speaking, a shaman in this context is a religious leader believed to use magic for the purpose of aiding the community. And the ‘shapeshifting’ that we are referring to here isn’t necessarily fully transforming into an animal, it’s more taking on aspects of the animal being channeled in order to use abilities that humans either don’t have or don’t have in abundance. Like bear or jaguar strength, fox cleverness, owl wisdom, etc.
Now, one thing that is strikingly common with how shamans achieve this sort of shapeshifting worldwide is the need to enter into a sort of altered state of consciousness. So in some cultures you have a “trance” dance where members of the community dance with the shaman figure in movements designed to alter the mental state.
Today, we’re going to talk about what is subjectively the easiest way to get to an altered state, psychedelics. Specifically for the Americas, ayahuasca. It’s been noted in several modern first-hand accounts of ayahuasca users that, depending on your dose, you see yourself shifting into an animal shape while under the influence. To make this commonality even more oddly specific, people by and large see themselves shifting into some sort of large feline.
This lends some credence to the theory that Incan shamans regularly used plant medicine, or more colloquially, drugs, in religious rituals. For example, the ruins of Chavin de Huantar, an ancient ceremonial site in Peru, show stone carvings of someone mid-transformation between human and jaguar. One carving in particular shows this figure clutching a San Pedro cactus. And what does a San Pedro cactus have in decent quantities? Mescaline, a compound with psychedelic properties comparable to LSD and psylocibin.
I also found some fun comparisons between shamanism and trickster figures. Both shamans and tricksters are often seen as having the ability to take new forms, both are seen as able to cross the boundaries between worlds, and as we’ve discussed in our Fox and Coyote episodes, in North American indigenous folklore tricksters and shamans are both seen as figures who bring necessary knowledge to the community.
I know this research is a little all over the place but I personally love the comparison between trickster figures and shamans, and I even saw the hypothesis that the traditional court jester could be considered a contemporary shaman figure, and that the jester headwear is analogous to early human depictions of therianthropic transformations, ie that the headwear often looks like horns or rabbit ears sprouting from the jester’s head, but this is one podcast episode not an essay on shamanism through the ages so I’ll cut things off here.
Corinne’s Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therianthropy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Trois-Fr%C3%A8res
Joseph P. Laycock. (2012). “We Are Spirits of Another Sort”: Ontological Rebellion and Religious Dimensions of the Otherkin Community. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 15(3), 65–90. https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2012.15.3.65
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsune#Kitsunetsuki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werehyena
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buda_(folklore)
Finneran, N. (2003). Ethiopian Evil Eye Belief and the Magical Symbolism of Iron Working. Folklore, 114(3), 427–433. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30035127
You may remember that in last week’s episode where we discussed werewolves that clinical lycanthropy doesn’t just refer (or even most frequently refer) to people who believe they have transformed (or are currently transformed) into wolves or dogs. It’s not at all the most common outcome.
And so it goes to follow that other forms of “were” creatures are often the focus of mythology and folklore. And if we’re working under the definition that a therianthrope is a being that transforms between a human/humanoid and bestial shape, you could lump selkies into the mix but since a) amanda already humored me by doing an entire episode on selkies and b) that would be cheating, I’ve dug into the topic a little more.
Belief in therianthropy seems to go back to the Neolithic era. There are some arguments that a carving from Les Trois Freres caves in France depicts a therianthropic figure. The art in question, a piece called “The Sorcerer” is WILDLY interesting, and its interpretation is open to TONS of debate, especially because it seems that the gentleman who made the most famous copy of the painting uhhhhh embellished a little bit (the whole saga is super fascinating, and his added bits are part of why “The Sorcerer” was often used as an anthropological argument for a sort of prototypical “Horned God” of the hunt. This is, alas, not the episode for me to dig into that, but you best believe that I added it to the content ideas queue).
I could also theoretically touch again on the “were-jaguars” of the Olmec culture, but again, it’s a topic I got to explore in our Big Cats episode–side note, I genuinely think that might be my favorite episode we’ve done?
SO OFF TO GOOGLE I WENT. And hold onto your butt Amanda because I found were-hyenas (and a couple of other things because I can’t focus on any one topic for very long)!
Were-hyenas are found most often in several African nations (especially Somalia, Eritria and Ethiopia, which is where I’ll be doing most of my focus), but also in the Arabian peninsula, the Levant, and other regions.
As the name implies, were-hyenas transform between human and hyena form. Unlike the European werewolf, not all were-hyenas start out human! Some are hyenas that can take on the forms of men.
In Ethiopia and Eritria, metalworkers are often associated with becoming were-hyenas, and are referred to as “Bouda”. In general someone who is Bouda is typically an artisan of some sort (often metalworkers) and also a hereditary sorcerer capable of laying the evil eye on someone in addition to being able to turn into a hyena. Why a hyena? In Ethiopian Evil Eye Belief and the Magical Symbolism of Iron Working, the author Niall Finneran explains that the animals are associated with being “dirty, evil scavengers”.
One way that these were-hyenas terrorize the neighbors is to dig up the corpses of recently deceased Christian men and women to eat.
Oh, did I mention? Historically metal workers in Ethiopia are Jewish, and it’s often a family trade. So uh. Basically were-hyenas in this region of the world are a new spin on blood libel.
So now that we’ve bopped through that bummer, I’ve got one other thing I’d like to touch on! In modern times, I think it’s fair to point out that otherkin are often (but not always) a form of therianthropy.
At first I wasn’t really clear on what differentiates Otherkin from other groups like furries. From my understanding (and please don’t castigate me if I’m wrong, I’m basing this off the information I was able to find, I’m genuinely not trying to be a dick), while furries are furries, otherkin feel that they are in some ontological, non-biological sense, not human. And this sense of “other” isn’t necessarily that they feel part animal in some way, it can also be fae, or angelic, or even alien. Physically they are human but it’s often described as their “souls” being other.
I ended up reading a really fascinating article on “otherkin” as a framework for a contemporary spirituality, even though people who ID as otherkin don’t necessarily think of it as a religious framework. But whether or not it’s considered as a spiritual or religious movement, the development of contemporary Otherkin communities does derive a lot of its movement from New-Age counterculture movements, especially development of Pagan communities in the United States in the 1960s, and having an opportunity to grow and expand and encompass more ways of being once the Internet acted as an intermediary for people to gather and converse.
I’m just really fascinated by this extremely contemporary example of “therianthropy” in a sense (and I’m using it in an extremely broad sense here) when the concept itself goes back so far into pre-history, if we take the example of the “The Sorcerer” from Les Trois Freres as evidence of therianthropy as well.
