evolution, now for cryptozoologists
Should you come face to face with a werewolf and find yourself short on silver bullets, just reach for your copy of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. According to Brian Regal, it makes for a very effective werewolf repellant. In a review of cryptozoological stories and reports, he found that stories of werewolves rapidly drop off as some of the basic concepts behind today’s theory of evolution were gaining prominence. Instead of werewolves, the public developed a taste for humanoid ape monsters like sasquatch and the abominable snowman because the idea of a human/canid hybrid sounded absurd from an evolutionary standpoint. So did Darwin manage to put the werewolf legend to sleep or is Regal just reaching for a theory for why the stories suddenly stop?
Think about this. Why would legends born of popular horror writers letting their imaginations go wild on paper and inspiring millions of fans spooked by their novels and short stories to see bizarre creatures when a stray dog or an unusually bid and curious wolf came into their view, follow any sort of scientific rule? There were a few cases of panic when people with hormonal imbalances that left them much hairier than usual spooked a random town or two. Likewise there were reports of real life vampires inspired by scientific ignorance about the progression of tuberculosis and the early stages of human decomposition, but they were driven first and foremost by mob mentality rather than science. Although, to be completely objective, there are people who do feel the need to drink blood for reasons doctors don’t really understand yet.
A much more likely explanation for why werewolf stories dropped off and giant ape men were thrown into the spotlight is that the whole idea of humans turning into giant furry monsters with big teeth was so old, it simply went out of style when the tabloids started reporting a new kind of mysterious creature. There’s also no room for hybrids in bigfoot legends. They’re not humans growing an extra three or four feet, a forest worth of fur and wandering off into the forest, lured by the magic of the full moon. They’re supposed to be a different species, an evolutionary cousin that somehow managed to evade us for hundreds of years despite our ability to track down species of frogs that live in one pond in the most remote and wild parts of the Amazon rainforest.
[ illustration by expert pumpkin carver mcgalio ]
Why hasn’t Darwin put a damper on the current vampire craze?
Technically speaking, humans could evolve into vampires if they developed fangs and could exploit the nutrients in blood. If we say that having no reflection or being burnt by sunlight or turning into a bat were just rumors but the core of the myth, humans with a thirst for blood, were out there, it’s evolutionarily plausible.
Check out the video about a real life human vampire too. It seems that some people do have the urge to drink blood but if that need is psychological or physiological, we don’t really know because these cases are so rare.
Consider also that werewolf and vampire lore is tied to witches, human agents of the devil, evil sorcerers, etc…From the perspective of a sorcerer, hiding your magic in superstitious beliefs of your neighbors is highly useful for survival. People the world over are still not to keen on what we do, even though they are confused about just what that is. Also, if the tulpa phenomenon is any indication occult forces at work are more palatable to our senses if perceived from the lense of whatever particular frame of reference is culturally in fashion. This example of Darwin bears a striking similarity to the effect of the Babylon working and the pulp (graphic) novels had on popular conception of changeling abductions and fairy encounters transforming into alien abductions and UFOs culminating in 1947 with the Roswell incident.
If it didn’t make it clear enough, a lot of the lore was invented by occult practitioners to mislead and misdirect attention away from what they were actually doing, which ranges from the malicious to the beneficial to downright alien to normal conceptions of just about anything. Faith will not save you from your atavisms given fleshy form, cannibalizing your neighbors emotions, desires, beliefs; “the blood is the life.”
I hope these quips give you some food for your fire, gobble up, digest, putrify, and purify. These topics are rarely transparent enough for the occult forces to cast visible shadows of the Dark Light, especially for those who cannot (yet) See.