Lycanthropy Once a Myth
O2000 Bob Orndoff
It won’t be long before there’s another full moon. They come once a month, always have, and I hope they always will.
Romantic and enchanting, the pale green-gold globe has inspired lovers and poets since the beginning of time. It somehow affects everything large and small. Even the great Atlantic and Pacific, captivated by its mysterious, unseen gravity force, swell and surge higher to the shore.
Some, however, are uneasy about the moon, especially the one that is full. In fact, there was a time when the full moon was indeed quite unwelcome to many. It was also time when it was terrifying to some...and it wasn’t that long ago.
Every 27 days 7 hours 43 minutes and 11.5 seconds the moon is further from the sun than is the earth. Its face completely illuminated by the sun, although only reflecting about 7 per cent of the sun’s light, can be bright enough here on earth to light our way along a forest trail at midnight.
It’s really one of life’s great little treasures, and it’s free. A walk in the woods under the full moon in the balmy summer when the woods smells of green, dewy-wet grass can be a soulfully calming experience.
And the sounds...
The lonely, deep silence of the moon enhances exquisitely the soft autumn sounds of Nature. Your ears seem to focus naturally on the crisp wrinkling noise of foot steps on the cold-stiffened oak leaves that have fallen on the forest floor.
The crunch of frosty boots breaking crusty snow in January is both at once a sharp and a delicate sound. And with pearly-slick blood-red fangs glistening bright with moonlight, the soft baying howl of the lone werewolf...
Wait a minute, Werewolf? Where?
Once part of common culture and now of distant folklore, werewolves lived among us largely unnoticed as most humans usually do. That is, they looked and acted just like the rest of us for the first 26 days of each lunar cycle.
It was the 27th day that caused concern. For then, and only then, according to legend, would the man (or woman) so afflicted with “lycanthropy” (the name for the condition of being a werewolf) transform into a hairy, snarling, fanged wolf-like apparition, a ferocious and cunning beast bent upon horrible murder, mostly of peasants, I presume.
All that was once thought to be almost true, a scary superstition, perhaps believed by some but not most of us. Then came America’s Last King, and we were all wrong to doubt.
If you will follow me back to the eighteenth century, back to the time when America was struggling as a loose and disorganized collection of thirteen newly founded colonies against the greatest world power of the time: the British Crowns.
Figuratively, one crown was the British State and its naval and military forces. Literally, the other crown was on the head of the King, George the Third, considered by those who really knew him to be stark raving mad, especially during that phase of the moon known as full.
Dr. Edward Turner, former Dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in his book entitled: George the Third: America’s Last King, gives us a wonderfully entertaining and thorough understanding of the King’s periodic bouts with madness.
Porphyria, its called, is a rare disease affecting the normal metabolism of heme which, when combined with protein becomes hemoglobin, the iron-containing, oxygen-loving component of red blood cells. Those who have the disease accumulate abnormal amounts of heme’s iron-containing, red-colored pigments, porphyrins.
The effect is ghastly, to say the least. Those afflicted may grow hair, long, bushy animal-like fur, all over the arms and face, except the eyeballs themselves. The result is a human with a Schnauzer’s mug. And in the not-so-darkness of a full moonlit night, a wolf by any other name.
Fangs? No, not the great canine fangs of lobos, but enough strange dentition to add to the spectacle. Those with porphyria have blood-red teeth caused by the excess pigments. And, during episodic periods of the madness caused by the disease’s neurological damage, they rant and rave as if in great agony, and scream and howl, too. If encountered at night, in the depth of a forest, a werewolf indeed!
Porphyria is not a new disease, not even back then, in the 1700’s when King George III was America’s last monarch. It is also not an acquired disease, thank our lucky stars (or moon.)
Those unfortunate to have porphyria in their immediate family, it’s genetically inherited, are most at risk. And, with timely medical treatment, and regular shaves, it can now be managed to some degree by proper diet low in protein and high in carbohydrates.
Back then, however, back when Irving’s headless Hession terrified Sleepy Hollow’s homesteads, and back further even before George III, there was a time when porphyria and lycanthropy were likely one in the same in the minds and terrified hearts of men, women and children who heard the terrible tales, and the howls, and the snarling furry faces of demented wretches whose madness escaped understanding.
Posted by bkorndoff
at 10:42 AM EDT
