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36 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
language’ could be used to decipher ‘primitive’ cultures and explain
human evolutionary development from the ‘savage’ through to the
‘healthy prosaic modern citizen’. 79 By extending Müller’s approach to
include mythologies deriving from societies that had not developed a
literary culture, he was able to turn his attention to the oral traditions
of folklore. As a consequence of this focus, he identified ‘metempsychosis’
or the idea ‘that a man’s soul may go out of his body and enter that
of a beast or bird, and … that men may be transformed into animals’
as the consistent idea linking manifestations of the werewolf belief in
all societies and ages. 80 Tylor saw such folk legends as the surviving
remnants of ancient mythological systems, and utilized the concept
of ‘survival in culture’ to explain their importance. The survival of
mythic fragments could illuminate aspects of history and ‘confirm the
broad theory of development, as opposed to the theory of degeneration.’
81 He argued that humanity had long been advancing through
various stages of barbarism to civilization, and that the survival and
occasional outburst of relics from these past stages of development
were proof of the general advancement of humankind.
In this way, Tylor synthesized the folklorists’ work and furthered
the perception of folklore research as an empirical science. His notion
of ‘survival in culture’ based on evolutionary theory was to shape
the methods of folklorists well into the twentieth century; the Folk-
Lore Society, founded in 1878 and including Andrew Lang among its
members, was to champion this idea. Eventually, the anthropological
folklorists would supersede the school of comparative mythologists,
largely as a result of Lang’s invectives against Müller, but the two
approaches coexisted in the 1870s, as evidenced by Charles Hardwick’s
essay ‘Werewolves and the Transmigration of Souls’ (1872), which
presented the insights of the solar and celestial mythologists alongside
Tylor’s notion of metempsychosis. 82 The nineteenth-century American
historian John Fiske was also influenced by the approaches of both
Müller and Tylor and attempted to synthesise their insights with his
own in his 1871 discussion of the werewolf. Fiske sought to combine
comparative mythology with a historical approach, stating, ‘It is the
business of the comparative mythologist to trace the pedigree of the