2 - The Superstition of the Speech-stealing Wolf

Summary

LOPEZ DES CRIBES THE fear of wild animals, or theriophobia, as no more than the ‘fear of the projected beast in oneself’, at the core of which is ‘the fear of one's own nature’. ‘In its headiest manifestation’, he writes, ‘theriophobia is projected onto a single animal’, a ‘scapegoat upon which [the human] could heap his sins’ and ‘externalize[] his bestial nature’. A prime example is the perceived wolfishness of outlaws and criminals. The wolf has become a repository for impulses deemed inhuman, and so to contemplate these animals has become an exercise in contemplating oneself. ‘The wolf’, as Lopez states, ‘takes your stare and turns it back on you’, forcing the person with whom it exchanges this glance to turn their stare inwards, to contemplate what it means to be ‘human’ rather than ‘animal’. Like Derrida's cat, the wolf who looks into the eyes of a human forces its recipient to question ‘the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself’.

Yet the shared gaze between wolf and human not only forces the looked-upon person to confront ‘the ends of man’ as they must do under any ‘gaze called “animal”’. In the wolf's case, this theoretical contemplation of ‘the ends of man’ gains concreteness and immediacy as, according to a superstition which circulated in classical and early medieval Europe, this animal's eyes held the power to strip a human of their ability to speak. In so doing, the wolf removed the very faculty by which the person might declare himself ‘human’, the facet which evidenced his difference from animal-kind by giving voice to his capability for rational thought. The wolf's stare erodes the species distinction like that of no other animal, his onlooker losing the oratorical abilities which both evidence his superiority over the ‘animal other’ and make possible its assertion.

True to the speech-stealing powers of the wolf which it purports, this superstition remains relatively poorly documented even despite the fact that it appears in numerous keystone texts such as Pliny's Naturalis historia, Isidore's Etymologiae, and Ambrose's Hexameron.