N MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE EUROPEAN PAINTING, THE ENTRANCE to the Underworld is often portrayed as an enormous mouth with fangs, sometimes recognizable as that of a highly stylized lion or serpent. This iconography reflects a recognition that, in the natural world, to be eaten is the virtually inevitable fate of all creatures, from the mightiest to the smallest. It is also a testimony to the enormous hold large predators continue to have over human imagination, even for people living in towns or highly cultivated landscapes. Mircea Eliade has traced much of religious experience to “the mystical solidarity of predator and prey” and Christ, for example, is traditionally represented as both a lamb and a lion. The Eucharist, which is the central mystery of Christianity, places believers in the role of predators, and the Deity in (essentially) that of prey. In a more secular context, predators are generally associated with royalty and nobility, and carnivorous animals are prominent in heraldry. As parts of the world grew more democratic, resentment against the mighty was taken out on large predators, which were often hunted to near extinction in the nineteenth century. People have traditionally seen the burying of the dead as a defining moment in the creation of “civilization,” through which we attempt to exempt ourselves from the cycle of birth and death that governs the lives of other creatures. According to Judeo-Christian traditions, animals ate only vegetation until after the Flood and the New Covenant. Our profound ambivalence about predators, in summary, impacts our entire relationship with the natural world.
Other animals that might have been included here are the crocodile and the eagle. The former is in Chapter 17, “Behemoths and Leviathans”; the latter in Chapter 18, “Divinities.”
LION, PANTHER, JAGUAR, AND TIGER
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the cherub cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
—CHRISTOPHER SMART, “My Cat Jeoffry”
Lions are social animals that live in prides, in which the females do most of the hunting. They inhabit open plains, though their once vast range is now reduced to the savannas of Africa. Lions are often followed by scavengers from vultures to hyenas, which has contributed to the idea that lions are kings attended by a court. The male has an enormous head and luxuriant mane, which suggests the sun sending forth rays. Tigers, by contrast, are usually solitary, and they are found in the jungles of Asia and the forbidding hillsides of Siberia. Though normally shy near human settlements, they will occasionally attack human beings. Panthers, which are almost identical to leopards apart from the color of their fur, are smaller than either lions or tigers, and they rely more on stealth and speed in hunting. They are able to climb trees, where they can hide meat from scavengers, observe while unnoticed, and pounce suddenly upon their prey. Panthers and leopards are solitary, nocturnal hunters, often associated with chthonic realms.
Even in Paleolithic times, the great cats seem to have had a special religious significance, and they were given a place of honor among the cave paintings of Lascaux in a cavern known as the “Chamber of Felines.” At the dawn of urban civilization, people already thought of these animals as primarily feminine. Our words “female” and “feline” both ultimately come from the Latin “felare,” meaning “to suck.” Several figurines of women, possibly goddesses, accompanied by great cats have been found at Çatal Huyuk in Turkey, the earliest known walled town.
In early pantheons, the great cats are most closely associated with feminine deities. Among the foremost of these was the Egyptian Hathor, who was the goddess of love, dance, and feminine arts but was also capable of great fury. When men rebelled against the sun god Ra, she attacked them as a lioness and soon developed an insatiable thirst for blood. When Ra himself was satisfied that the rebellion had been defeated, she continued to kill, and the gods feared that she would destroy all humankind. They left out vats of red wine, and she drank them, mistaking the liquor for blood, fell asleep, and finally awakened with her anger appeased. Hathor in her incarnation as a furious avenger was known as Sekmet and was depicted with the body of a woman and the head of a lioness. The Babylonian goddess Ishtar, in her capacity as a deity of war, was represented standing upon a lion. Lions were harnessed to the chariot of Cybele, the Syrian goddess who was adopted by the Romans as their Magna Mater.
Illustration by Julius Schnorr Carolsfeld, mid-nineteenth century, to the story of Daniel who was thrown to the lions but remained unharmed.
Male lions, however, are just as common in the visual arts of the ancient world. Both the Egyptians and Mesopotamians placed stone lions as guardians on each side of the doorways to temples and palaces, a practice that eventually spread eastwards all the way to China. In Sumero-Babylonian animal proverbs, which are among the very earliest literary works to have survived, the lion is already established as the king of beasts. This motif soon became one of the most widely established literary conventions, found in fables attributed to the semi-historical Aesop. The lion often appears as a figure of brute power that terrorizes other animals, and the sly fox in one fable observes that many tracks lead into his cave but none lead out. The lion is not always dominant, however, and in another fable the ass and other animals he once tormented beat the aged lion. In African legends as well, the majestic lion frequently falls victim to weaker but cleverer creatures such as the hare. The motif of a lion as monarch has been used in the Hindu-Persian Panchatantra, the Medieval European stories of Renard the Fox, the Narnia stories by C. S. Lewis, and countless other works throughout the world.
To kill a lion was a supreme achievement for a warrior in the ancient world, and kings of Egypt and Mesopotamia frequently had themselves depicted hunting lions. Many heroes of the ancient world including Gilgamesh, Hercules, and Sampson, were conventionally depicted wearing the skin of a lion. The Greco-Roman fable attributed to Babrius told of how a lion and man were once travelling together, when they passed a sculpture of a hero strangling the king of beasts. The man pointed to it as proof of human superiority, to which the lion replied that if lions had done the carving, “You would see men victims of lions.” Even the Hebrews, who generally despised predators, could not help feeling some admiration for these animals. The lion became a symbol of the biblical Judah, later of Saint Mark the Evangelist, and of Christ himself.
Romans imported vast numbers of lions for their gladiatorial games, where these creatures represented the Emperor as they devoured criminals before a raucous audience. Since lions do not readily attack human beings, the animals were starved or specially trained for the job. According to one popular story, a runaway slave named Androcles who had been recaptured was placed in the area with a lion. Instead of devouring him, the lion licked his feet. A leopard was immediately let loose, but the lion killed it. The Emperor Drusus ordered the slave to come forward and asked why the lion had spared him. Androcles told how, after extreme mistreatment, he had escaped his master and taken refuge in a cave. The lion had come to Androcles and held up a bloodstained paw, from which the fugitive pulled out a thorn. From that time on, the lion had fed him, bringing Androcles part of every kill. Moved by the story, Drusus granted both Androcles and the lion their freedom. (The circuses relied on theatrics almost as much as on blood, and this incident could possibly have been staged, in order to make the Emperor seem magnanimous.)
The Romans did have remarkable skill at training lions. According to Pliny, Mark Anthony harnessed lions to his chariot and rode around with a courtesan, an event that shocked his contemporaries and may have contributed to his eventual downfall. The Emperor Caracalla later had a pet lion that sat by his table, slept in his bedroom, and was even kissed by him in public. In the Christian era, Saint Jerome, who lived as a hermit in a cave, reputedly tamed a lion in the same way as Androcles, and thus a lion was traditionally painted at his feet.
In heraldry, the lion has always represented royalty, and it is often depicted wearing a crown. This symbolism was even adopted in areas that had been free of lions since Paleolithic times, such as China and Western Europe. Precisely because actual lions were unknown outside of a few royal menageries, it was easy to stylize these animals into symbols. King Richard I, known as “Lionheart” for his courage in battle, chose three golden felines against a red background for the coat of arms of England. Though some scholars believe these were originally intended to represent leopards, people universally regard them as lions today. The English lion and the Scottish unicorn now flank the heraldic emblem of Great Britain.
Eventually, the lion became so deeply associated with the institution of kingship that it was almost impossible for most Europeans to think of the animal in any other context. Monarchists liked to imagine the lion as dignified to the point of blandness, and they excused the predatory nature of the beast by saying he would only kill as much as he needed to eat. In the modern era, however, democratically inclined people often stigmatized lions as vicious.
The lion king surrounded by obsequious courtiers.
(Illustration by J. J. Grandville, from Fables de la Fontaine, 1839)
The nineteenth-century French romantic Eugene Delacroix painted bloody battles between lions and Arabs, celebrating the ferocity of both. In the same era, the lion tamer became a feature of large circuses. He would be a burly man with a handlebar moustache, often wearing leopard-skin trunks, who would compel lions or other big cats to obey by cracking a whip. The spectacle dramatized the ability of humanity to control nature, and, by analogy, the dominance of men over women.
The tiger was a more unequivocally romantic beast, admired almost as one might admire a storm or volcano. Malaysian myths tell of a city that tigers built entirely from human skin, bones, hair, and other body parts. The Hindu Kali, goddess of time, who wears a necklace of skulls and holds a sword of destruction in one of her many hands, has often been portrayed riding upright upon a tiger. In his aspect as a destroyer, the god Siva wears the skin of a tiger. We should remember, however, that the annihilating power of these figures was viewed not as evil but simply as part of the cosmic cycle.
In China, the tiger, ruler of the earth, has often been paired with the dragon, ruler of the sky, as the two greatest primordial powers. The dragon creates clouds, while the breath of the tiger becomes wind, and together they bring rain. The tiger is associated with autumn, since it resembles that season in its violence and destruction; its black and orange coat also reminds people of fallen leaves. The tiger, rather than the lion, is called “king of beasts” in Asia. It is the third sign of the Chinese zodiac and is often depicted with wings. Patriarchs of Taoism have been represented riding upon tigers, signifying their ability to live in harmony with the elements.
The tiger entered Western imagination as Alexander the Great invaded India. The god Dionysus, sometimes identified with Alexander, has been occasionally depicted in a chariot pulled by tigers when crossing the Tigris River on his way to India. The Romans, who were as much attracted to exoticism as violence, had tigers in their circuses.
Pliny the Elder reported how people accomplished the seemingly impossible task of capturing tiger cubs. The captor would steal several cubs, jump on a fast horse, and ride until the tigress would start to overtake him. Then he would drop one cub, forcing the tigress to pause and take it back to her lair. She would then start off again after the captor, and this might be repeated several times until at last the man would reach his ship with a single cub. This story was frequently repeated in Medieval bestiaries, but with an additional twist. The horseman steals only one cub, but he throws glass balls to the tigress, and she mistakes her reflection for a cub.
Medieval depictions of Eden usually included the lion but almost never the tiger. The tiger was too unequivocally frightening to be used much in heraldry, but it again entered Western awareness when India became part of the British Empire. Thomas Bewick wrote towards the end of the eighteenth century that the tiger “fears neither the sight nor the opposition of man … and it is even said to prefer human flesh to that of any other animal.” For the British colonists and many of their Indian supporters, extermination of tigers became a humanitarian mission, and many boasted of having killed hundreds. Meanwhile, the most intense opposition to British rule in Southern India came from Tipu Sultan who believed that it was “better to live two days as a tiger than two hundred years as a sheep.” He sat on a throne decorated with tigers, had the stripes of a tiger placed on the uniforms of his soldiers, and emulated a tiger’s reputed cruelty.
It was at this time that Blake wrote “The Tyger,” perhaps the most famous animal poem of the modern era, which began:
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
Tales of the cruelty of Tipu Sultan, which were filtering back to England, probably influenced Blake, and he might have seen the tigers on display in the menagerie of the Tower of London. The illustration that Blake painted to accompany the poem, however, shows far more affection than awe. It is clearly a domestic housecat, though perhaps he intended to show how every pussycat has a tiger inside.
The beauty and terror that are inextricably blended in the tiger are expressed in a parable called “The Lady and the Tiger,” which anonymously passes through our culture like a legend—everybody has heard it, yet hardly anybody knows where it is from. It was actually written by Frank Stockton and published in The Century Magazine in 1882. A king had decreed that justice for a serious crime was to be decided by a test in which the accused was placed in a large arena and, before spectators, choose between two doors. Behind one door was a tiger that would rip him apart with its claws. Behind another was a lady, carefully chosen as a match, whom he would have to marry. The King heard that his daughter and a common man were in love, and he ordered the young man sent to the area to be judged by providence. The princess found out what lay behind the doors, and made a secret signal to her lover. The story ended with the famous question: “Which came out of the opened door—the lady or the tiger?” This sort of choice obsessed Victorians: bourgeois domesticity or unadulterated passion? But the beautiful lady, as Freud recognized, is really an aspect of the tiger, and marriage to her is a sort of annihilation.
In the twentieth century, the tiger has taken over many symbolic values previously associated with the lion. In his poem “Geronition,” T. S. Eliot used the tiger as a symbol of Christ. Advertisers have constantly exploited the primitive energy associated with the tiger. Esso Petroleum, for example, has since the mid-1960s advertised gasoline with the slogan “Put a tiger in your tank!” Symbolic importance in human culture, however, often makes animals more vulnerable in the wild, since it means that people will be more drawn to hunt them for folk remedies or sport. The Caspian tiger became extinct in the 1970s and the Javan tiger a decade later, while the few surviving species continue to hold on very precariously.
In the legends of Africans, who had direct experience of both, the lion may often have been the ruler of animals, but the leopard generally inspired greater awe. The black color of the panther enables it to blend into forests, while the spots of the leopard suggest innumerable eyes. Members of powerful, secret societies of Central Africa claim the power to transform themselves into leopards, though they are very secretive about how this is done. The legendary ancestor of the kings of Dahomey and other African lands is a leopard that came out of a river to lie with a woman, and the ferocity of the beast explained their penchant for war. The Biblical prophet Jeremiah, frustrated by the inability of the Hebrews to put aside their wicked ways, asked, “Can … the leopard change his spots?” (Jeremiah 13:23). A leopard’s skin is a garment traditionally worn by African monarchs. The style has been taken up in the west, where leopard spots, suggesting fierceness and status, are often printed on women’s garments and accessories.
The leopard or panther was sacred to Osiris, god of the dead, in ancient Egypt. The Greeks identified Osiris with Dionysus, and the priests of both wore the skins of a panther. Panthers generally drew the chariot of Dionysus, and they were sometimes depicted in his entourage. Both of these deities, in turn, often came to be identified with Jesus, and writers of the Middle Ages often praised the panther. Medieval bestiaries told how other animals would follow the panther drawn by the sweetness of its breath. Only the dragon would flee and take refuge in a cave, much as the Devil would run in fear from Christ.
With the end of the Middle Ages, however, many people strove to cleanse Christianity of pagan elements, and the panther, so important in pre-Christian religions, was consequently condemned for viciousness. At the beginning of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the narrator encounters three predators, a panther, a she-wolf and a lion in a dark wood. The panther is the first to threaten him, but he is saved from the beasts by the intercession of the poet Virgil.
In the early twentieth century, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke lamented the loss of primeval wildness in his poem “The Panther.” It describes a panther pacing ritualistically in the zoo, where it can see little besides bars, and concludes:
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
Lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
Rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
Plunges into the heart and is gone.
The iconographic use of the panther in recent times has veered between anger and nostalgia. A militant African-American group that supported armed revolution against the American government in the 1960s and 70s was known as the “Black Panthers.”
Perhaps the most mysterious big cat of all may be the jaguar, native to Latin America. The motif of the jaguar appears so often in the arts of early Native South American communities that historians of religion believe it may have been the master of animals, perhaps even the supreme god. In tribes of Bolivia, at least until very recent times, killing a jaguar with a wooden spear has been a test of manhood, used in the initiation of a warrior. Shamans are sometimes believed to be able to turn themselves into jaguars. During an eclipse, people howl to scare the jaguar that is trying to devour the sun. In recent times, however, machines have increasingly taken over the symbolism of animals, and for most people today the “jaguar” is a luxury car.
WOLF
Homo Homini Lupes est. (Man is a wolf to man.)
—PLAUTUS
Perhaps more than any other animal, the wolf has been associated with martial qualities. It has been continually condemned for rapaciousness and cruelty, yet it has also been praised for fierceness. Language contains many traces of lupine totems among several Eurasian tribes in archaic times. Many German names include the root “wolf”: “Wolf,” “Wolfgang,” “Wolfram,” “Wolfhart,” and others. The common French name “Luc” and the English “Luke” are related to “loup,” the French word for “wolf.” Names containing “wolf” are also common among the Cheyenne and other Indian tribes of North America, one remarkable testimony to the surprising universality of animal symbolism. The Native Americans admired the wolf not only for its prowess in hunting but also its loyalty to the pack.
A totemic identification with the wolf is perhaps most memorably recorded in the story of Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome who were suckled by a wolf in their infancy. Initially, the wolf was probably not merely their nurse, but also their mother. Every year on the 13th through the 15th of February, Romans celebrated the Lupercalia, an archaic festival in her honor, on the Palatine Hill by the cave where the infants had been sheltered.
It is also likely that Romulus and Remus were, at one point, werewolves—human beings who transformed themselves into lupine form. Legends of werewolves were common among the warrior clans of the ancient world. The Iliad mentions a warrior named Dolan who went about in the guise of a wolf until finally recognized and killed by the Greeks. Herodotus reported a belief that a Nomadic tribe known as the Nueri would change themselves into wolves for a few days every year. Sigmund of the Volsung clan, a hero of Norse and German mythology, would put on a pelt at night to become a wolf. Pliny the Elder reports a belief among the Greeks that the Arcadians would select a man from a certain noble family every year and lead him to a marsh. The man would then strip, hang his clothes on a tree, swim to a desolate area and become a wolf for a period of nine years. The legend probably derived from an initiation ritual into a clan of the wolf. The wolf was also sacred to the god Apollo.
As humanity became increasingly settled and urbanized, the reputation of the wolf declined. Ovid writes in his Metamorphoses that Jupiter, the supreme god, once came to King Lykaon in the guise of a simple traveler. As was his practice, the King served up human flesh for his guest. Enraged, Jupiter took on his true form, rose to the sky and hurled a thunderbolt at the palace. The King fled in terror and, as he ran, was changed into a wolf.
Even Herodotus and Pliny, who were often credulous, did not fully believe reports of people changing into wolves. By the time of Christ, the educated people of Greece and Rome generally dismissed stories of werewolves. Such tales appealed, however, to a growing taste for horror. Perhaps the most famous werewolf tale of all is in the Satyricon of Petronius, written in the middle of the first century CE. The freedman Niceros accompanied a young soldier to a farm at night. They stopped for a while by a cemetery, where the companion slipped away. After waiting nervously for a while, Niceros looked around and caught sight of the soldier taking off his clothes. The soldier then urinated in a circle, and, after completing this ritual, turned into a wolf, howled, and ran away. Niceros hurried to the farmhouse, where he learned that a wolf had broken into the pasture and attacked the sheep, but one of the farmhands stabbed the beast in the neck with a spear. On returning home, Niceros found the soldier bleeding profusely from the neck, and he knew that his former companion was a werewolf.
Norse mythology shows a highly ambivalent attitude towards the wolf. Two wolves accompany Odin, the god of magic, but he is destined to fall prey to the great wolf Fenris when gods battle giants at the end of the world. This monster was sired by Loki, the god of fire, and he grew so strong that the gods themselves were terrified. No ordinary fetter could hold Fenris, so the gods summoned the dwarves to fashion a chain made from the footfalls of a cat, the roots of a mountain, and other mysterious ingredients. Though the fetter appears soft as a silken string, Fenris refused to let himself be bound with it, unless a god placed one hand in its mouth as a pledge. Only Tyr, god of battles, had the courage to do this. After failing to break the chain, Fenris bit off Tyr’s hand. As the final days of the world approach, Fenris is destined to escape.
A wolf being arrested for the murder of sheep
(Illustration by J. J. Grandvale from Les Animaux, 1868)
The ancient Hebrews were primarily a tribe of herders, and wolves were a constant threat to their sheep. In the Bible, wolves were often identified with either invading armies or with Hebrews who have become greedy and corrupt. Reproaching his nation, the prophet Ezekiel said, “Her leaders in the city are like wolves tearing their prey, shedding blood …” (Ezekiel 21:27). Jesus told his disciples, “I am sending you out like sheep among the wolves …” (Matthew 10:16).
St. Francis tamed a wolf, Gubbio, who later accompanied him, a feat Christians often interpreted as the triumph of spirituality over appetite. During the Middle Ages, bounties were placed on wolves, sometimes in the same amounts as those for the heads of brigands and highwaymen. Wolves were hunted to extinction in England during the fifteenth century, in Scotland during the sixteenth, and in Ireland during the eighteenth. The last wolves in Germany were shot around the middle of the nineteenth century. Wolves have remained continuously in mountainous regions of France, Spain, and Italy as well as in the forests of Eastern Europe. With the growing fear of witchcraft in the Renaissance, people began to regard wolves not simply as pests but as agents of the Devil.
In the Malleus Mallificarum or “Witch’s Hammer,” a manual for witch finders (1484), author Heinrich Kramer, and possible co-author James Sprenger, stated that wolves that show “such astuteness that no skill and strength can capture them” must be either devils in disguise or scourges of God. Wolves were regarded as a form in which witches went about at night. Particularly in France, suspected werewolves were often brought to trial and executed. Certain physical features such as eyebrows that grew together were considered signs of a secret identity as a werewolf, and any unexplained wound or scar might arouse suspicion of clandestine adventures in lupine form.
The wolf’s reputation for rapacity extended across Eurasia, and stories of werewolves were also common in Eastern Europe. A good example is a Lithuanian tale recorded by Edmund Veckenstedt of a peasant who repeatedly went to the stable in the morning and found the mangled bodies of his horses with their necks bitten through. One night, he stayed up to watch the stable, and his neighbor approached carrying a bundle of sticks. The intruder threw the sticks to the ground and began to roll over them. After passing the first stick, his head became that of a wolf, and with every subsequent stick another part of his body changed, until finally he was entirely a wolf. In this form, the neighbor raided the stable, but, while he was gone, the peasant quickly took one stick away. After his predations were finished, the wolf rolled over the sticks once more, and changed, part by part, back into a man. But the transformation was not complete. The peasant accused his neighbor in town the next morning, and a physical examination showed that the culprit had the tail of a wolf.
The most famous literary product of this period is the story of “Little Red Riding Hood,” who is lured from the path to her grandmother’s house by a wolf. Early versions of the story, including the version in Stories of Mother Goose by Charles Perrault (1697), are all simple warning tales. Perrault ended his tale as the wolf, having already devoured the grandmother, ate up the little girl. He concluded with the moral:
Wolves may lurk in every guise.
Handsome they may be and kind,
Gay and charming—never mind!
Now, as then, tis’ simple truth—
Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!
Perrault clearly wanted to drive home the lesson as emphatically as possible, but many people could not bear the harshness of the ending. In the somewhat convoluted version from the collection of fairy tales published by the Grimm brothers, a woodsman rescued Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother from the belly of the wolf.
In the heavily populated regions of Northwest Europe, wolves were less of a threat, and a more complex, if not always more favorable, view of them emerged. As the antique tradition of the beast fable was developed in Medieval Europe, it was increasingly adapted to social commentary and various sorts of animals were used to represent different classes. The wolf served as a satiric portrait of a monk. The relatively long hair covering the heads and bodies of wolves reminded storytellers of the robe and cowl of a monk. Even more significantly, monks and wolves shared a reputation for greed. Finally, in the middle of the twelfth century, an unknown Flemish author wrote a humorous epic about the wolf-monk entitled Ysengrimus. The monk, Ysengrim, ingeniously tried to reconcile his ravenous appetite for sheep with monastic law, and he claimed to practice a “religion of the stomach.” He matched wits with the peasants, and with his companion the fox, until a clan of swine finally killed him.
Over the next few centuries, the wolf Ysengrim played a prominent role in the cycle of Renard the fox, who emerged as a cunning peasant. No longer a monk, Ysengrim had become a naïve noble who fell prey to the wiles of his small but unscrupulous adversary. He was constantly beaten, cuckolded, and maimed, and the stories about him left readers torn between frustration, laughter, and pity. He represented the aristocratic order that was slowly but inexorably starting to give way to the emerging bourgeoisie.
Aristocratic houses had often adopted the wolf as their heraldic symbol; as regimes became increasingly democratic, the wolf was blamed for the cruelty and intemperance of royalty and the nobility. This was particularly true in the United States, where the campaign to eliminate predators such as the wolf became a moral crusade. By the 1920s the grey wolf, which once had probably numbered in the millions, was almost completely extinct in the United States.
But the disappearance of the wolf created a wave of nostalgia. At the end of the nineteenth century Rudyard Kipling, known as “the poet of the British Empire,” wrote The Jungle Book, a collection of animal stories centered mostly on an Indian boy named Mowgli who was raised by wolves. Like Britain, the wolves have both a king and a parliament, but the “law of the jungle” which they follow is sterner than that of a modern republic. The den of wolves is essentially a military school, which endeavored to make aristocratic young boys into “men.”
As World War I began to approach, ever more people felt admiration for the martial qualities of the wolves. German authors such as Hermann Hesse and Hermann Löns wrote stories in which the wolf appeared as a representative of a natural order, heroically resisting the encroachments of civilization. In a story entitled “Lobo, the King of the Currumpaw,” (1900) the Canadian-American author Ernest Seton-Thompson celebrated a wolf named Lobo as a romantic outlaw.
The regime in Nazi Germany, seeking to cultivate the fierceness and cruelty often associated with wolves, made the wolf into a sort of cult. Adolf Hitler himself adopted the nickname “little wolf,” and he gave his various headquarters names like “Wolf’s Lair,” “Wolf’s Gulch,” and “Werewolf.” He once explained that people cheered him rapturously because “a wolf is born.” Near the end of World War II, a Nazi commando unit formed to operate behind enemy lines was called the “Werewolves.” On a more practical level, the Nazis introduced the first legislation for the protection of wolves.
The United States and other countries, however, were not very far behind. Aldo Leopold in his essay “Thinking like a Mountain” (1948) tells how he, as a young man, had never passed up an opportunity to kill a wolf. One when day he shot an old wolf and her pups on a mountainside. This passage, which expresses regret for the deed, is perhaps the most famous in all of American nature writing:
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean a hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
At about that time, American conservationists under the leadership of Leopold began to defend wolves as an integral part of the environment.
With government protection, the population of wolves in America began to rebound in the latter half of the twentieth century. In 1963, naturalist Farley Mowat published a fictionalized account of his sojourn in the wilderness of Alaska entitled Never Cry Wolf, in which he wrote about a pair of alpha wolves named George and Angela. The book quickly became a bestseller and established a popular image of wolves as living an ideal of family life. Mowat’s praise of the marital fidelity of wolves resonated in a society where people were increasingly concerned about divorce. In the 1990’s, Clarissa Pinkola Estes published her bestselling Women Who Run with the Wolves, in which she used the wolf to symbolize the “wild woman archetype.” That is the female who, though nurturing to husband and children, retains a primal connection with the natural world.
Today, in America and much of the world, a craze for wolves continues, and they are often seen on posters and in jewelry. Nevertheless, the old ambivalence towards wolves remains, and the old hatred of them can erupt unexpectedly. Plans to reintroduce wolves in Yellowstone National Park were implemented in the 1990s over vehement opposition from ranchers.