The Curse of the Wer.. - Site de Thomas - Free

WEREWOLVES AND SCHOLARS
the ‘disease of language’ deriving from Sanskrit, but its primarily
German exponents asserted that the subject of mythology was meteorological
phenomena, particularly lightning, rather than the sun. Kelly
introduced this interpretation of mythology to the British with his
Curiosities of Indo-European Tradition and Folk Lore, published in
1863. Because this work made the theory accessible by relating it to
British folklore, it proved more influential than the rather fatiguing
prose of Müller. 77 Chapter nine of Kelly’s book was entitled ‘The Werewolf’,
and most of his material was drawn from Wilhelm Hertz’s Der
Werwolf. Beitrag zur Sagengeschichte (1862). The celestial explanation
for the werewolf stems from the mythological association of wolves
with howling winds. In Vedic mythology,
The Maruts and other beings who were busy in the storm assumed various
shapes. The human form was proper to many or all of them … and it would
have been a very natural thought, when a storm broke out suddenly, that
one or more of those people of the air had been turned into wolves for
the occasion. 78
The reduction of all the variants of a myth to a solar or meteorological
motif in these ways tended to dismiss as extraneous or incidental
the imaginative embellishments that had clustered around these
stories over time. The creative ingenuity of successive cultures was
stripped away to expose the myth in its oldest and barest form. Viewing
the poetic artistry of myths as an aberration caused by shifting
linguistic structures was an approach that rejected romantic values in
favour of the logic of ‘natural’ structures and laws. By squeezing the
spiritual and creative expressions of humanity into a scientific model
based on the conception of a natural law (‘the disease of language’)
comparative mythologists participated in the institutionalization of
scientific philosophy as the preferred mode of explanation in mid- to
late-nineteenth-century intellectual culture.
Edward Tylor, traditionally considered the patriarch of modern
anthropology, was another scholar influenced by Müller’s ideas. Tylor’s
innovation was to introduce an ethnological and evolutionary dimension
to the reading of myth. Tylor believed that Müller’s ‘disease of
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