Wolf Messiah

tinyurl.com/wolf0messiah
History...
is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.
— James Joyce

[From a Usenet post of December 20, 2003:]

"wyldhunt" wrote [in part, responding to Eric Smith posting "The Gospel Poem":]

> lest they be burned and tortured for all eternity
> by the god of love and understanding

Mmmm, since the "Gospel" times there are historical changes in Christian beliefs and practices, mixing the benevolence of the early years with the ferocity of the later Crusades and witch-hunts. This leaves the genuinely benevolent liable to be tarred with the viciousness of others, while the vicious lay claim to the mantle of the benevolent.

For one thing, that "burned and tortured for all eternity" seems not to have been what Jesus was talking about. He was referring to a place where corpses were taken to be burned, and to worms eating other corpses; in essence saying, "If your soul is not saved, then the final end of you will be that your body is burned or the worms eat it." Nothing eternal in that — in fact, the whole point is that this is an *end*, not eternal.

For another thing, the oppressive methods (justified by Augustine of Hippo) of conversion and correction by fire and sword were adopted as enforcing a state religion. Before the Roman Empire was Christianized, methods just as harsh were used to enforce worship of the emperor's spirit ("genius") — in fact, Christians were put to death for their failure to perform that worship.

So this appears to be a trait of a state religion (no matter which), rather than of Christianity itself. One more argument for separating church & state.

Arguably, the blame for the religious wars and persecutions, from Imperial times through Charlemagne and Savonarola, to the Irish Troubles, are not so much due to Christian belief as to the yet-untamed savagery of its adherents.

Cannibals converted to Christianity might well observe their old traditions in the form of the Communion. (Preacher say, this my body, this my blood — and him tasty, too.)

Sharks would worship a Shark-Christ, wolves would venerate a Wolf Messiah.

I wrote a poem on this subject, inspired by Robert Eisler's Man Into Wolf, An Anthropological Investigation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy (1952), which I suspect helped inspire Jack Williamson's brilliant dark fantasy Darker Than You Think.

Eisler just barely survived the camps run by the sadists (werewolves?) of Nazi Germany, and delivered the lecture which is the core of this book, in London before dying a few years after the war.

He traces the psychological traits of compulsive violence, and of obsession with becoming a beast, back to the evolution of humanity as omnivores, in tribes some of which became killer-omnivores (carnivore totem) preying upon, or conquering and breeding with, vegetarian (plant and herbivore totem) tribes.

This "split ancestry" paradigm links the old Mongolian legends of human origin (in the marriage of a Wolf-man and a Deer-woman), to the Greco-Roman and medieval myths of furred forest-dwelling savages, to the two fashions for women in mid-century England — the meek wearing flowered prints and fruit-plate hats, the bold wearing fur coats and blood-red claw-shaped fingernails. (Which fashion attends the men of power? Perhaps the carnivores still rule.) Food for thought.

If indeed the human ruling class are the heirs of the predators (marked by fur and claws on the women), and the ruled class descend from the prey, is it any wonder that, occasionally, frustrated men and women, lacking power and position yet still urged by throwback impulses to seize them, might dream of predatory aggression, of becoming feared instead of fearful, strong instead of weak, of gaining the sign of power? Perhaps the will to power is the essential drive of lycanthropy.

    Wolf Messiah
             by
    C. M. Joserlin

Once all the scattered tribes survived
On grain and fruit and growing foods;
Then human wolf-packs rose, and thrived
By preying on plant-eating broods.

The wolves ruled sheep. Of course it seemed
They always would, until the Lamb
Arrived, whose visionaries dreamed
Of sheep-kind saved and wolf-kind damned.

They sought and slew him by their laws,
The killer folk, the wolfish horde,
Then took the Christ up as their cause
To spread the faith with fire and sword.

So for the gentle Prince of Peace
They issued calls to Holy War;
Let unbelievers never cease
To fear the Christ Pantocrator.

The flames grew bright across the land
To save the souls of sheep who erred,
But Wolf-Christ learned a gentler hand;
Now others wished the wolf's teeth bared.

While man became a wolf to man, *
The "hero wolf" fought savage wars,
And followed conquest with a plan
To "cleanse the world" of herbivores.

No longer the old-fashioned pyres
In which the helpless sheep folk screamed;
From modern and efficient fires
In furnaces, their ashes streamed.

The shepherds fought the Wolf, and won,
And now his dreams of empire lie
In ashes — yes, that wolf is gone;
Now "Peace on Earth", the wishful cry.

But still the shaggy past prevails,
And people yearn to get and keep
A furry coat, sharp teeth and nails;
To rule as wolf, not serve as sheep.

And still the wolf-messiah's power
Recruits his followers afresh:
Each week they gather to devour
The lamb-messiah's blood and flesh.

—("Say, brrotherrr, are you washed in the blood of the lamb?")—

* In 1927 Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a 39-year-old condemned as a dangerous anarchist and sentenced to die for a murder which he did not commit, told the Massachusetts court, "Your laws, your institutions, and your false god, [will be] but a dim remembering of a cursed past in which man was wolf to the man." At that time, Adolf Hitler (whose name means "Conquering Wolf"), a 38-year-old war veteran praised as a savior of law and order, was just six years away from national dictatorship in Germany.

[The Suno AI has composed and performed a tune for this song.]