Christianity: Ritualized Cannibalism?

One cannot contemplate Christianity without encountering, at its heart, a structure that both fascinates and unsettles: the Eucharist, in which bread and wine become, in one doctrinal view, the body and blood of a human being, and in all views, a ritualized participation in death rendered sacred. If one examines the rite with a detached scrutiny, one sees immediately the formal resemblance to acts universally condemned: cannibalism, the deliberate consumption of human flesh, the mingling of blood with desire and sustenance. Even when the substance is symbolic, the ritual repeats the essential form: ingestion of human matter, repeated across generations, celebrated with joy and solemnity, taught to children as a source of divine communion. The act is not incidental, nor ornamental; it is central, constitutive. The mind recoils because it recognizes, beneath the layers of symbol and theology, the uncanny shape of transgression rehearsed in the form of devotion. And yet, in this recognition, there is a strange exhilaration: a momentary sense that morality and horror are not merely opposites but entwined, that the mind can inhabit both simultaneously without disintegration.

The crucifixion extends this meditation on the paradoxical beauty of horror. A human life is offered as a means to redemption, and this offering is elevated above the ordinary condemnation of human sacrifice, enshrined in scripture, hymnody, and liturgy. The letters of early authorities declare that without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness, that salvation flows only through the veins of the one sacrificed. One may argue that consent, or divinity, or cosmic necessity absolves this act, yet these arguments do not alter the structure: a life is expended for the benefit of others, the act of killing is central to salvation, and ritual remembrance repeatedly enacts the logic of sacrifice. The ethical problem is unavoidable: what is celebrated, repeated, and memorialized is an act that, outside its theological frame, would be regarded as atrocity. And yet, here too is the paradoxical optimism: by ritualizing the horror, by enveloping it in narrative, song, and sacrament, the faithful convert the act of violence into an object of contemplation, beauty, and even joy.

One may consider the function of ritual in this context. Ritual is never inert; it educates, habituates, and habituates the imagination. To participate in the Eucharist is to meditate on mortality, to taste the paradox of nourishment in death, to rehearse the formal patterns of human sacrifice while simultaneously affirming divine grace. In this sense, morality and aesthetics are intertwined: the horror of cannibalism and the atrocity of human sacrifice are abstracted into patterns of meaning, and these patterns are themselves objects of fascination. The child who asks how many Eucharists it would take to consume a whole Jesus articulates, innocently, a question implicit in every act of ritual: the mind confronts the intimacy of life and death, and wonders at the measure of participation, the degree to which one can embrace the sacred through transgression imagined or symbolic.

One might object that consent and divinity render these practices ethically distinct from ordinary acts of violence. Yet the mind, trained to see horror sublimated into beauty, finds that these distinctions, while perhaps sufficient to remove culpability, do not remove the uncanny resonance of the act. Ritualized horror educates the conscience not by forbidding, but by transforming. It teaches that the boundaries of what is morally intolerable can be approached, circled, and rendered luminous, and that the repetition of transgression, framed by narrative and awe, may itself be a form of moral and aesthetic education. In other words, Christianity presents a paradoxical landscape: horror is not erased but transfigured; what would ordinarily repulse becomes, in the domain of faith, a source of contemplation, intimacy, and even joy.

The metaphysical claim – divinity incarnate, death redemptive – is inseparable from the ethical and aesthetic experience of the ritual. The participant consumes not merely a body, but the narrative of life and death made legible, distilled into a form that satisfies both intellect and imagination. The crucifixion is not merely history, it is a model: suffering, willingly embraced, ennobles; mortality, willingly consumed, redeems. One is reminded that the human mind is capable of perceiving horror and beauty simultaneously, that the ethical structure of ordinary life need not exhaust the imagination, and that ritualized transgression can reveal, almost ecstatically, the limits of moral understanding.

To judge the morality of such practices requires both care and courage. If cannibalism and human sacrifice are immoral, then Christianity, at least at the level of form and ritual, engages with them without hesitation. Yet to stop at this judgment alone is to miss the full human experience of the ritual: its capacity to illuminate, to transfigure, to render the unacceptable sacred. The horror is undeniable, but the exhilaration of the intellect and imagination, the strange delight in contemplating suffering and mortality made meaningful, suggests a kind of optimism at the edge of terror. Christianity, in this view, is not merely a repository of moral paradoxes, it is a laboratory for the mind: a place in which horror and beauty, transgression and redemption, are brought into intimate contact, and in which the human soul learns that the boundaries of morality and aesthetic delight are not always coincident.

Thus the moral question remains: does repeated ritualization of formally impermissible acts implicate participants in immorality, or does the aesthetic and contemplative transformation absolve it? Analytically, the moral caution cannot be dismissed; the horror is real and structured. Yet simultaneously, one cannot ignore the ecstatic optimism in which horror is not merely endured but comprehended, sanctified, and rendered luminous. The rituals of Christianity teach that life, death, and the consumption of mortality itself can be experienced as an object of understanding and even of joy, that the mind may inhabit the sacred and the transgressive simultaneously, and that the act of contemplation itself transforms what would otherwise horrify into a locus of reflection, beauty, and subtle exultation.

Post-Lecture Wolf Musings

 

 

The conference went very well. My talk on werewolves and human cruelty sparked lively discussion, with some interesting questions and a few amused smiles reminding me that the wolf still prowls the imagination. 

The talk explored how werewolf myths function as cultural mechanisms for understanding extreme human violence. The following is a brief summary of the talk.

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If humans are indeed wolves to one another, then it is unsurprising that the wolf – a predator at once admired and feared – became a canvas upon which societies projected their darkest apprehensions. The phrase Homo homini lupus, originating with Plautus in the Asinaria (line 495), referred not to generalized ferocity but to the mistrust that lingers between strangers. Erasmus preserved it in the Adagia, Hobbes codified it in De Cive and echoed it in Leviathan, while Seneca, Montaigne, and even Freud would later invoke it as emblematic of humanity’s intrinsic, often inscrutable cruelty. 

And yet, a paradox emerges: wolves rarely kill for malice; they kill to survive. Humans, alone among animals, devise the tortures of their imagination and execute them with ritual precision. Beneath our rational veneer lurks a substratum of primal imperatives – subcortical structures governing fear, aggression, and territoriality, the evolutionary echoes of survival strategies predating the cerebral cortex.

So why wolves? 

In pre-modern Europe, wolves were predators with the literal power to devastate subsistence economies. Sheep and livestock vanished under their fangs; flocks were shredded, stores plundered. Aristotle deemed them inherently wild, and across languages the term “wolf” became synonymous with savagery. Criminals were designated wargus esto in Norman England; in Germany, a “wolf” was often a robber. Roman rituals draped criminals in wolfskin; Petronius’ Satyricon places human–wolf transformation in a cemetery, while Homer, Aeschylus, and Lucan preserve graveyard scavenging by wolves, linking the predator to both death and the uncanny. Such practices, augmented by rabies or similar maladies, lent credibility to tales of lupine metamorphosis. Wolves, in short, were ideal intermediaries for projecting human violence – a natural exemplar of transgression, fear, and predation.

Prehistoric communities further reinforced this metaphor. Draped in animal pelts for warmth, concealment, or ritual, humans gradually imprinted symbolic significance onto the skins of predators. To wear a wolf’s pelt was to assume cunning, ferocity, and nocturnal supremacy. Anthropologists posit the Indo-European kóryos: marginal war-bands of adolescents adopting wolf-like behaviors to signify liminality and martial prowess. Across cultures, ritualized wolf-behavior appeared – from Herodotus’ Neuri to Greek ephebes, Germanic Harii, and Vedic Vrātyas. Rabid humans, ecstatic trances, and trance-like possession of wolfish behaviors reinforced these proto-lycanthropic beliefs. Myth and ritual intertwined: from Gilgamesh’s Ishtar to Ovid’s Lycaon, divine retribution often entailed transformation into a wolf, rendering cannibalism or violence intelligible through allegory.

Medieval Europe translated these anxieties into jurisprudence and folklore. Extreme acts of violence – children torn limb from limb, livestock slaughtered – posed an existential and moral puzzle: how could a God-fearing, law-abiding society account for the seemingly unprovoked capacity for atrocity? The werewolf emerged as a cognitive prosthesis, a moral exoskeleton. Violence was situated outside humanity, projected into the wolf, the Devil, or the witch, enabling societies to acknowledge atrocity without implicating the social self. Early 15th-century Switzerland witnessed this nexus in the Valais witch trials (1428–1447), where accusations of animal transformation coalesced with diabolic maleficium. By the mid-16th century, France and the German states became epicenters of lycanthropy trials: Gilles Garnier in Dole, Peter Stumpp in Bedburg, and the Gandillon family in Jura testified – under torture or suggestion – to wolfish transformation, nocturnal predation, and communion with infernal powers. Such confessions reveal a remarkable psychological and moral mechanism: attributing the incomprehensible to a liminal figure, the werewolf, which could absorb human cruelty, ritualize it, and render it narratively digestible.

Yet regional and cultural nuance persisted. In Livonia and the Baltic provinces, 17th-century trials reveal an alternate conception: wolves as liminal, even protective spirits. Figures like Thiess of Kaltenbrun denied diabolic allegiance, framing themselves as “Hounds of God” combating witches in the night – a folkloric echo of agrarian spiritual defense and pagan shamanic memory. In the Low Countries and Spanish Netherlands, trials continued, but confessions increasingly reflected trance states, hallucinations, and suggestibility rather than literal belief in transformation.

By the 18th century, skepticism and rationalism reshaped the myth. Johann Weyer, Friedrich Spee, and Balthasar Bekker treated lycanthropy as superstition or mental disorder. Dom Augustin Calmet emphasized moral allegory; Voltaire mocked literal belief. Folklorists such as Jacob Grimm and Sabine Baring-Gould preserved the tales as cultural memory, collecting the horrors of transformation, cannibalism, and silver bullets into literary archive rather than courtroom spectacle.

By the 19th century, medicine had recast lycanthropy as pathology, shifting attention from supernatural malediction to human physiology and psychology. Modern fiction similarly reframed metamorphosis as internal, moral, and psychological rather than magical. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) exemplifies this transformation: Jekyll’s metamorphosis into Hyde foregrounds psychological duality rather than sorcery. Hyde embodies the repressed, instinctual, socially unacceptable aspects of Jekyll – the “beast within” – mirroring the traditional werewolf’s association with primal violence, now transposed into human consciousness.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), adapted from Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, continues this trajectory. Norman Bates’s split personality manifests in homicidal episodes, preserving the structural and symbolic framework of lycanthropy: a socially respectable figure whose hidden impulses erupt uncontrollably. No literal beast appears; the narrative emphasizes the tension between civility and feral instinct. The 20th century, scarred by two world wars and the mechanization of slaughter, increasingly recognized humanity’s capacity for violence. Horror and crime fiction treated monstrosity as a product of the mind rather than a curse. Lon Chaney Jr.’s The Wolf Man (1941) and Hammer’s Curse of the Werewolf (1961) depict repression and emotional disorder, in which violence erupts from the human psyche rather than a lunar curse. As Stephen King observes, The Incredible Hulk functions in essence as a werewolf tale: an allegory of anger and alienation masked as heroism. Early cinema’s technical limitations also gave rise to the hybrid werewolf, a necessary compromise in special effects.

Explanations of violence no longer required supernatural figures; werewolves became culturally peripheral, appearing more as novelty or incidental motif than central terror. Later iterations – Teen Wolf, Ginger Snaps, Twilight – translate metamorphosis into a metaphor for adolescence, depicting libido, rage, and selfhood emerging under the skin. As King notes, I Was a Teenage Werewolf speaks to every adolescent who recoils from the alien presence glimpsed in the mirror. The modern imagination, hardened by genocide and industrialized death, no longer requires the wolf to personify cruelty. The wolf “monster” has ceded the stage to human monsters – criminals, psychopaths, morally fractured individuals. Figures such as Albert Fish – the “Werewolf of Wysteria,” the “Brooklyn Vampire,” the “Moon Maniac” – illustrate that the real horror now resides within the ordinary citizen. Contemporary horror, from true-crime documentaries to slasher films, has largely dispensed with transformation entirely: the beast no longer lurks in the woods; it inhabits the self. Violence is no longer supernatural but systemic; no lunar curse is necessary.

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The werewolf myth allowed cultures to name cruelty while maintaining innocence: the violence was “in the wolf,” not in us. Its decline mirrors a broader cultural maturation – an acknowledgment that cruelty is not supernatural or monstrous but, unfortunately, mundane. Humanity has brought the wolf indoors, domesticated it in consciousness rather than the forest. The figure of the werewolf persists, but now as metaphor and mirror: a reminder that the darkness we once projected outward resides within the ordinary, rational, and seemingly civilized self.

Lou Costello’s retort to Lon Chaney Jr. in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein captures this with sardonic clarity. Chaney, as the tormented Larry Talbot, laments: “You don’t understand. When the moon rises, I’ll turn into a wolf.” Costello replies: “Yeah… you and about five million other guys.” The werewolf, once a monstrous intermediary, has become an emblem of the banal ubiquity of cruelty, a cautionary mirror reflecting that monstrosity is not merely elsewhere, in the woods or under the full moon, but here, within us, waiting to be acknowledged, named, and understood. Its enduring power lies less in terror than in revelation: the wolf is us.

 

 

From the Mouth of an Angel

Art is never finished. Just abandoned.

A Truism

 Desire is a terrain where body and soul conspire and betray in equal measure.

The Black Velvet Band

 

The Black Velvet Band is a traditional folk song with roots in Ireland and the British Isles. It tells the story of a young man who is tricked by a beguiling woman and sent to Van Diemen’s Land as punishment. Like many folk songs, it has been passed down through generations, each singer shaping the story in small ways.

I wanted to create my own version because I am drawn to the folk tradition of storytelling, and I relate deeply to the tragedy of being deceived, to the sense of fate and misfortune overtaking ordinary life. 

 

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Her neck arched pale, a swan in flight,
Yet terror lay beneath her light;
The laughter soft that drew me near
Was Zeus’s guile, both cold and clear.
O heed, young lads, take warning well:
The fairest eyes may weave a spell;
What seems so soft may bind so fast,
As I was bound, too late, at last,
By the cruel black velvet band.

Before judgement I stood, undone,
Seven long years beneath the sun;
Friends and kin like shadows fled,
And all my youth lay cold and dead.
Yet still her hair, her swanlike grace,
Haunts every bleak and desolate place;
Her eyes, her eyes, like diamonds gleam,
The memory of a vanished dream,
Held fast by the black velvet band.

So hear me, lads, when ale is poured,
And laughter runs along the board;
For beauty hides the power to kill,
And innocence masks a cunning will.
Her eyes like diamonds, coldly shone,
Her hair a swan’s wing, darkly thrown,
And I, alas, by fate unmanned,
Was lost beneath the velvet band.

 

 

Terrible Miracle

Healing is not relief; it is possession. Knowledge is not triumph; it is invasion. 

The body, once pliant, is no longer yours.

The mind, once solitary, is no longer yours.

Every heartbeat is an echo of forces you cannot name, every thought a corridor through which some alien presence walks.

And yet, the miracle compels you to continue, to live, to marvel.

And in that marvel lies the terror, the exquisite, unrelenting terror, of knowing that life itself is no longer your own, but a canvas for currents that move unseen, endless, and merciless.

Monsters Exist

Today, our vampires are CEOs; our ghosts are social media addicts; our werewolves are spree shooters. The forms mutate. The underlying tremor does not.

The true horror is not that there are monsters out there. The true horror is that the categories fit.