Animal Metamorphosis
From a discussion at Mythic Journeys '04
with Charles de Lint, Carolyn Dunn, and Terri Windling
transcribed by Brenda Sutton

Windling: We're all here to talk about animal metamorphosis not only because it's something that we're all interested in folk lore and mythology, but because it's a theme that runs through all of our works. I think that's why they put us all on this panel together.

Dunn: It makes sense, because our work is quite similar in certain ways. I'd like to start off with a piece from my book of poetry called Outfoxing Coyote. It's a bit of a dialogue between the American Indian Coyote spirit and the Deer Woman spirit. It comes directly from this land, from the southern area, from Georgia. I say this every time that we're in a panel because I want to remind people that Georgia is the old Muscogee Nation, the old Creek Nation before we were removed to Oklahoma. A lot of this Deer Woman spirit comes out of this particular area, so I wanted to begin by reading one of the many Deer Woman poems that are in this collection. In the Deer Woman spirit in our mythology and in our stories, she's a deer and a woman at the same time. Somebody asked the question in one of the panels that I was visited this morning: How can somebody be an animal and a human being at the same time? And I said, "That's easy. Duh. What do you mean?" (laughter) It's hard when I try to talk about it because I just say, "Well, duh...they are. Deer Woman is a spirit and a woman at the same time."

The story of Deer Woman is a puberty narrative for our traditions. She teaches us the correct way of behaving, and especially the correct use of our sexuality in terms of our marriage rites. The Lakota have Deer Woman and Elk Man narratives very similar to our Deer Woman stories. The gist of the story is that the Deer Woman is very beautiful, very enticing. It's easy for you to fall in love with her. If you notice that she's a deer, you look down at her feet and you can see that instead of feet she has hooves, and then you think, "Oh, this is Deer Woman, and I know who I'm dealing with." So you're okay because you're able to think, "I recognize who she is." But if you don't recognize who she is, you become totally enchanted with her, completely enspelled by her, and she drives you to madness, and some say prostitution, and illness or disease which is a break with the community. That is a little bit about the Deer Woman character and what she means to us. It's called Deer Hunter, and it has a short preface from Grandmothers of the Light by Professor Paula Gunn Allen.

Deer Woman:
Cherokee, Chocktaw, North Carolina, Mississippi,
Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma

A supernatural who appears as a human woman and as a doe by turns,
she is said to bewitch men and women,
and eventually cause their deaths into descent and prostitution.

From the desert
across a breath of sky
I hear her voice
a tiny spark-like
flame of sound
somewhat like a flash
of eye in a headlight.

An adrenaline rush
heart pumping
madness to the ear
and she was saying
my name
over and over.

I heard it through
the eyes of my
bright sun child
tasted it on his tongue
tasted my blood
upon his teeth
white and gleaming
under a fool moon
and blazes of moving stars
and Moon in motion.

I heard her voice
when he looked at me
in sunlight
when he wouldn't look at me
in sunlight
when he knew
what he had done.

I heard her voice
in desert plains.

Vast windless prairies
of sand. rock. death.

In this desert
they have created
an oasis.

She speaks the price.

She speaks through the eyes
of another one.

A man whose tongue
tastes of alcohol
and chlorine.

His eyes are dark
and he presses up against me
forcing me against the wall
of my own desires
and that is of forgetting
the sun-child
who looked at me
wouldn't he
couldn't he
look at me.

I've learned about icing
and penalty boxes
it's passion yes
my body sparkles
under dust
under him
but there is shame there
too.

I have not named it
for myself.

He and he
try to do it for me.

But I will not let
him.

She speaks across
oceans of broken
terraces and thick air
winds that come from nowhere
on wings of darkness and
thick deep water.

Is this madness —
the madness of knowing
through the eyes of a deer?

She was trying to warn me —
and I looked into her eyes
perhaps now I can save myself.

Now I have looked down
seeing her hooves
solid black shining
bits of ground glass
and dried pieces of bone
I look to the ground
and see my feet
hooves covered with dust
and stained with blood
pours from the open wound
of my breasts
to the earth
where it dries
and forms red stones
shining
and I shape them into a necklace
of deep crimson
nearly black.

Her feet have become mine
her voice in my head
as I look to the ground
the car still running
those are my eyes
full of headlit fear
across the night air.

And I know
this madness
this animal rage
this taste on my tongue
and lips.

Her voice roars from my
mouth
like stars
and I understand.

I have seen the deer
in the glass of the window
when the moon makes
a reflection at night
and I can see myself
driving
across
a desert plain
the madness of men.

I did not look down in time.

And caught my eyes
in my own headlights.

Threw myself on the dash
and drove and drove
until I could drive
no more.

Dunn (cont.): What I've always been interested in with our traditional stories is how stories change with the telling, how narratives change with time. This story started off way back when at the very beginning of our story cycles as something specific to our culture and in the ancestral home land where we were living in Tennessee. These stories follow us, and Deer Woman follows us as well. Not only are we telling these stories, but the stories change with time. The stories take on a life of their own. They take on an Oklahoma life. These stories take on a California life. We can't help but move westward because we're pulled to do that, whether we're forced to do it or whether we do it voluntarily. What I'm interested in is how the stories have changed, how they follow us, and how our spirits remain archetypal but yet they take on these modern lives, as we have taken on modern lives. Even though she originated here in this part of the world, yet I meet Deer Woman in northern California. I see her in Hawaii. I see her anywhere there are Creek people, Cherokee people, Seminole people, Chocktaws, Chickasaws...everywhere where we are, our spirits are with us.

Windling: One thing that I find interesting about Deer Woman, and about a number of stories about animal people, is how, when you get to the early versions of these tales, though they are often dangerous figures they are still positive figures. Deer Women has a lot to teach men and women about correct relationship with each other. But you get to some of the later versions, and suddenly Deer Woman is presented —particularly in some of the versions recorded by white anthropologists— as a malicious figure. If you meet Deer Woman in the woods, you will go mad, you will lose your life. There's no hint in some of the later retellings of the sacred quality of Deer Woman in the woods, and how she has something to teach you about how to approach the Mystery, how to deal with the numinous correctly, how to relate to the fantastic suitor or the fantastic bride in a way that brings the fantastic and mystery into your own life. There's an assumption in the later versions of the story that any contact with that creature will be a bad one.

If you look at some of the really early versions of the Kitsune, or Fox Woman, tales in Japan, the Kitsune weren't always necessarily deadly. You also hear some early versions where, approached correctly, you could marry a Fox Woman. It could be a dangerous thing, or it could be a very profound thing. We also see that in the folk tales in Europe, in some of the early fairy tales about marrying the beastly bride or the beastly suitor. The suitor goes through a series of tasks and things that he must learn to do correctly in order to marry a magical being, but the outcome can be quite a good thing. Then you get these later versions of the tales in which...

Dunn: They're evil.

Windling:...they've become evil spirits.

de Lint: Which is like Pan when Christianity moved across Europe and took all those stories saying, "No, that's not a good thing." That's why we've forgotten about Pan and only see his bad side.

Windling: Boria Sax talked about this in his book about animal brides, The Serpent and the Swan: The Animal Bride in Folklore and Literature. I agree with his theory in which he looks at the tales in relationship to our attitude toward nature at different time periods. He noted that the early tales in which the beastly groom, the fantastic bride and the human bride and bridegroom marry successfully come from a time period when there was a world belief that humans and animals were inter-related, that we were cousins. The notion of the two coming together wasn't so far-fetched in a metaphorical story-telling sense. With the rupture between the human and animal worlds (the civilized world being here, the wilderness being over there, with a very firm line between them) you start finding a lot of stories in which the humans and animals brides or bridegrooms come together, but the ending is tragic. Those two worlds can't ultimately mix. Take the tales of the Seal Woman whose skin is stolen by a fisherman. She stays on land and marries him, but eventually deserts her family to return to the sea.

With more recent stories, you start seeing a third part to the cycle where the two come together, there's a rupture, and then they find each other again. In the Norwegian tale "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," where the poor peasant girl marries a bear, the marriage is a happy one in a sense, even though she can't see her bridegroom. Then the rupture occurs when she tries to see him, followed by her quest to refind him, and the two are finally reunited. It's interesting to look at that in relationship to our various ideas about nature. (Boria Sax) was saying that those third types of tales — the loss and retrieval of the fantastic bride or bridegroom — reflect our feelings of a rupture from the natural world, and our desire to return to that sense of union.

de Lint: We are actually still related to the animal world, not in the same way as in the stories, but we are in terms of how we share the world. I think one of the interesting things is how those stories remind us that we're mammals along with the other animals in the world —not just metaphorically but truly. We don't actually have domain over them. We're supposed to be sharing the world with them.

Some years ago I did research for a TV show for the Discovery Network. I interviewed a psychologist at a mental institution in Boston who'd written the definitive paper on lycanthropy as a psychological mental affliction. He did that in the '70s because psychological authorities had decided that there was no lycanthropy anymore, and they had determined to do away with that category. He and four colleagues wrote a paper in response saying, "Well, damn...we're working in these institutions, and we're sure seeing it still." They catalogued the number of people who believed that they transformed into animals. The number one animal that people transformed into was a wolf, number two was a cat.

Dunn: In this Western culture... in Japan it would probably be a fox.

de Lint: Further down the list there were, strangely, gerbils and hamsters... (laughter)...whole different transformations. The question he asked of us, and the thing that fascinated him as a psychologist was, given that we no longer live with the animals, why wolves? Why is it that the one animal that everybody still seems to move to when they drift into lycanthropy?

Dunn: Maybe it's because they're the most like humans?

de Lint: They're also part of popular culture with the Wolfman movies in Western society, alongside those of the vampire and the Frankenstein monster. If you're going to transform into something...

Windling: In Japan and Korea you find that Fox Woman (occasionally Fox Man, but usually Fox Woman) is still very strong in popular culture. It was believed in times past, but not all that long ago, that mental illness was caused by fox possession. There are cases as recent as the 1910s and 1920s where mentally ill women were still being treated for fox possession in Japan. There's somebody who has had a hand up in the audience.

Audience Member #1: It's probably also because, even though we're attacked by animals, we have our eyes in the front which makes us predators also. I would also remind us of the divorce between Eastern and Western thought. If you look at the origin of the word 'animus' it originally meant 'spirit' but after the divorce meant 'matter from spirit'... the basic divorcing of ourselves from the animal world, reviling of the flesh. The flesh is where all corruption lies. Flesh, according to Western thought, is where the soul could become corrupted.

Audience Member #2: My conclusion, based on that, was that it has to do with the power. Wolves, large cats, and such are powerful animals. Would you want to transform into an animal except for those of power?

Dunn: How do you explain those people who transform into gerbils then? (laughter)

Audience Member #2: So I'm wondering, given your remarks that until recently in Japan mental illness was considered to be possession by the fox, may we assume that the fox therefore is seen as a power figure in that culture?

Audience Member #3: I remember hearing someone who was a mixed blood of some variety who talked about (with a lot of tongue in cheek humor) people who did vision quest kind of experiences, usually led by people who came from people who didn't do vision quest...the vision quester would come back and their spirit guide would always be a wolf or a really big friggin' buck with enormous antlers. Nobody ever came back with a gerbil or a mouse.

Dunn: Right.

Audience Member #3: I met a Blackfoot person in Glacier National Park a few years ago, and I asked him about that. He says, "Oh, I'll tell you. It's not a secret. I'll tell everybody here. I'm a mouse." I asked, "Why a mouse?" because he was this really big guy. He said, "I'm a mouse because I can get in anywhere." The reason that he was named Mouse by his spirit guide was because he'd climbed in easy and he'd done amazing things with the repatriation stuff. It changed my whole understanding of how that transformative approach can work.

Dunn: Mmm, so he could get in anywhere.

Audience Member #3: He could get in anywhere. He'd got into where he could go. It was delightful, and it pointed out to me that we think of wolf and creatures like that as power animals, but in fact there is weakness within power, and there is power within weakness.

Windling: Very true.

Audience Member #3: Wonderful tension.

Windling: Thank you for that.

I want to get back to something that you (Dunn) were saying about how there tends to be this line drawn between humans and animals, even in the way that people approach the stories. When we look at some of the old "animal people" tales, particularly in the various Native traditions, the line between human and animal was blurred; we don't know whether they were in animal form or a humanish form. It's not really delineated, and it's implied that it's beside the point to have to know...

Dunn: To knock heads over that... and it is beside the point.

Something that we had talked about just a few minutes before the panel began was where the sacred and the secular fell apart from one another, but in a particular world view. Not all Native people believe this way anymore because we've been acculturized. Growing up in Southern California, I'm about as acculturized as you can get...maybe a little less than some, a little more than others... but it hasn't kept me from being able to see into that other world—where the worlds come together—through the stories that I heard and read. Understand that the sacred and secular are one thing—seamless—you can't separate those two. That's why many of us have such difficulty in the Western world, because we don't see things that way. It can be difficult.

In my writing, I find myself thinking, "Oh, thank goodness, now I can talk about Deer Woman" where the "I" character (whoever that may be in the poem or short story) becomes the Deer Woman. In the story that was in The Greenman where Deer Woman emerges into the world, I was very clear and very careful to write that she's not seen as a positive or a negative because she's not. She's not a positive or a negative character. It's what we do with her when we're confronted with her that becomes good or bad.

I belong to an all-women's drum group called The Mankillers (that's a whole other story, too). We've traveled all over the world performing and being crazy women and having a good time together. We were in Heymez, New Mexico for one of member's first dances that she had participated in after having been adopted out. (She is a full-blood Heymez Pueblo adopted by a non-Indian family and she was raised in Hawaii — another interstitial poster child.) I always tell my students about our crazy Uncle John. We have these Uncle John stories, and my students are just dying for Uncle John to come in and play flute for them. Uncle John would tell us all these stories, and he gets this wild look in his eye. "The snake man! You guys were all in there and the Snake Man came out and he talked, and his eyes were so cold, and I've never heard such a scary story." He was talking about the Heymez witches, but also explaining that he was a Snake Man. Now, Uncle John's crazy, but he doesn't drink or he doesn't use other substances. Everyone else around him was drunk (we weren't, but the people around him were). He was totally sober. He said that he was actually confronted by their witch who takes on this other animal persona. That's what people do. They take on that persona. Whether or not we want to say, "Was it a snake or was it a man, Uncle John?" He was a man who was a snake. And that's the thing that I keep trying to beat people over the head with. You don't have to define that individual as a man or as a snake. That individual is just who that person is...animal person and man.

Windling: In rituals too. In dances and rituals where you take on the personality, you take on the being of the eagle, the kachina, or, in Europe, one of the European gods. We have this literal way of looking at it now. "Oh, it's so-and-so impersonating Loki." "It's so-and-so impersonating the Eagle." And it's not that. You're in that state where you're halfway between a human being and that god or that creature or that energy. You're in a liminal state where you're not one thing or another. (To de Lint) One of the things that I love about your fiction is that you manage to portray those in your characters. They're in that liminal state between secular and spiritual, between animal and human, between benign and malign. You capture that very well in books like Someplace to Be Flying. There's no surprise to me at all when Carolyn told me that you have a huge Native American following.

de Lint: Obviously, I don't come from the same place that you came from. I was thinking about that when I saw that I was part of this panel discussion. I was also thinking about the "drawing down the myth" that we were doing earlier today. When I was a kid I grew up reading these books in the Netherlands where my family is from (partly from the Netherlands and partly from Japan) but the Dutch part of the family...we grew up reading these books called Bulka the Bear. I also read The Wind in the Willows, and Winnie the Pooh. The point that I'm making is that I read a lot of books where animals were people. They were going about the way that people would, except that just happened to be animals. That stuck in my psyche. When we were talking about "drawing down the myth" what I'm writing about gives me...oh, what's the word I'm looking for? I hate getting old...it gives me a language to write about and to tell the stories in. I want to tell stories.

When I first started writing I had literal wolves and bears and badgers and things. They were characters and they never changed. They were these animals who just happened to talk. As it progressed and I learned more, they transmuted into a man or a woman or an animal. They would appear that way in the story as well, kind of change as it was going along. It was interesting to watch that happen in my writing, but I didn't know why. I think it's because I ended up, after reading all of those books that I was reading, I tried reading books by Native writers and a lot of the folklore things where that kind of thing happened. I never think about my writing. I just write the story. If they come, I have to think about them afterwards to try and figure out "What was I doing?" Or "Why was I doing that?" I didn't do it on purpose. I was lucky, although I thank you for it.

Windling: There are a lot of folklorists and mythologists who can get into the theories and the histories of animal metamorphosis, but what I'd like to look at is...you know, we're here as creative artists. I'd like to look at at what we're doing and whatt other people are doing with this whole idea of animal metamorphosis. A writer who comes immediately to mind is Louise Erdrich in The Antelope Wife— and the ways that she used the Antelope Wife mythology and folklore as a metaphor to explore modern relationships: the relationships between men and women, and the relationships between traditional and non-traditional Indian lives. I guess because animal-human transformation is such a liminal state, it's a potent metaphor for all those liminal places in our lives, all those places where things are both related and intentioned. Linda Hogan works with some beautiful transformation imagery, particularly in Power, which is a wonderful book. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. But not just Native American writers - look at Alice Hoffman's Second Nature. That's the book in which a child is raised by wolves...

de Lint: Oh, right.

Windling: ...and then he's brought into civilization. He's not literally a wolf, but he's lived as a wolf, and it's very much in a metaphorical sense an animal metamorphosis tale. It's one of those second cycle animal bridegroom tales in that the union between the civilized woman and the wild man can't be sustained. He does have to eventually return to the wild by the end of the book.

de Lint: I also love more of the "feral child" stories.

Windling: You can read it either way though. I mean, it's not literally an animal metamorphosis, in that he's never in the literal sense turned into a wolf, but he's lived as a wolf for all of his life.

Kij Johnson wrote a gorgeous version of Kitsune, The Fox Woman. It's a stunning version of the Kitsune legend, so if you have an interest in the subject and you haven't picked it up, please do. She sets the novel in historical Japan, and she tells it from the point of view of the fox who falls in love with a married Japanese lord and becomes human in order to seduce him. You get the story from the fox's point of view, you get the story from the lord's point of view, and you get the story from the lord's wife's point of view. The tussle between these two, the woman and the fox is all woven together within the most beautiful language.

Audience Member: There is a Neil Gaiman story called The Sandman: The Dream Hunters that is beautifully illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano about the fox and the badger who make a bet to trick a monk into leaving a monastery where they both wish to build a den. Very similar lines about the fox falling in love with the monk.

de Lint: And within Japanese folklore, the badger can turn into a kettle as well.

Windling: And Midori Snyder has written a story about a princess who turns into a gerbil! ("Golden Fur," published in Swan Sister: Fairy Tales Retold, edited by Datlow & Windling.)

Snyder (from audience): That's right, I have. (laughter)

Audience Member #1: We have a little calico cat, a little ball of fur...our cats are very important to us. This occured some years ago. I've long been aware that she's very fascinated with my husband. She's always climbing into bed with us and squirming between the sheets. One morning I rolled over in the bed and I saw the woman that she was. She looked at me with these big green eyes as if to say, "In another form, he'd be mine." Then my eyes blurred and I woke up a little more. She jumped from the bed to the window, and proceeded to wash herself.

Windling: It can be such a privilege to live with animals, sharing your home with a creature of another species, to feel both that interconnection that we are both woman, we are both animal, and also the alien-ness that, "Oh, you really are different from me." My experience of living alongside different kinds of animals in different ways, whether it's the cat in the house or the coyotes that roam around our house, really gives resonance to these animal metamorphosis tales and vice versa.

I'm personally rather obsessed with animal metamorphosis; it shows up in all of my work and most of my art. I cannot seem to paint without putting deer horns or bunny ears on my figures. (laughter) Having this discussion really interested me because I'm trying to get at the roots my obsession. I'm curious to know why other people are drawn to it as well.

de Lint: I think the only time that I deliberately thought this thing out was when I wrote Green Mantle and I wanted to have that Stag Man character. I wanted him to be different for who so ever approached it. When the Bible-thumpers approached it, he was the devil. When the good people approached it, he was this benevolent fellow who was going to help this little village. The dogs approached him differently. I worked very hard so that the central figure of Green Mantle was never just one thing. He was all the different things, depending on how people approached him.

Dunn: I'm the same way with Terri, that Deer Woman just sneaks in there. I could tell her, "Go away! I'm done with you. I'm finished with you." I just completed this play, and there was nothing about Deer Woman in it. So, of course, she makes an appearance in the play. It was not about her, and she was not supposed to be involved in it at all but, all of a sudden...there she was. I go with it because she just wants different parts of her story told. I just got that.

Windling: You open up your lives to these creatures, and then they're there all the time.

Dunn: They never leave you.

de Lint: As creative people, we have to trust the Muse who comes to us. If that's how they're going to appear, for us to close the door on them, we might not be able to write or paint or do...whatever. That's how it expresses itself through us. I don't question or worry about it myself. I welcome it into my life.

Windling: To think of these various animal human characters as being in the role of Muse reminded me of Patricia McKillip's book Stepping from the Shadows, where a Cernunnos figure, as stag-horned man, haunts her. How interesting that the Muse would come in animal/human form, bringing the wild, bringing the Mystery with them, bringing you into the borderlands, into the liminal places. Sometimes that Muse is Trickster; God help you if it is. (laughter) If the Muse you're following is Coyote or Rabbit or Raven, that can lead you into really interesting places, but it's really aggravating at the same time.

Dunn: And it's tricky. That was not a pun; it just came out that way. It is a "negotiated borders" kind of space.

Windling: Those are the paintings or the books where you get part way through creating them and then you really screw up, and you tear your hair out thinking (particularly with a painting), "It's gone!" And then something totally new and fresh and different is born from the mistake. I hate those paintings, because you have to go through that despair of, "Oh, I worked hours on it, and now it's gone! It's ruined! And it's horrible!" My studio mate has learned to just ignore me when I say that. (laughter) Because something magical happens. Always. Unless you abandon it, always something good is born of the mistake.

Dunn:I'm very lucky in that I live in a part of Southern California that is right on the ocean. I'm surrounded by probably the last section of undeveloped coastal lands that will ever be in Southern California (assuming that Donald Trump has his way, but we won't talk about that yet.) I've always had this beautiful landscape at my back and this wide open ocean with Catalina Island out there waving to me. Our wildlife is very much a part of every day. We get scorpions in our house, which is kind of scary. It is a desert landscape, and people forget that Los Angeles is part of it. I keep arguing back and forth with the Native Seed Search people who keep telling me that Los Angeles is in the South West, and yes it is.

But we have hawks all over the place. They congregate all over our house, which is a whole other story, too. When we were talking this morning and yesterday about how important landscape is to a particular area, it reminded me of Keith Basso's beautiful book about the Western Apache storytelling tradition, Wisdom Sits in Places He talks about stalking with stories—how for the Western Apache there are a lot of these name places that have an animal metamorphosis story associated with it.

The example that he uses is of a girl who showed up to ceremony with curlers in her hair. Grandmother doesn't say, "You never show up to ceremony with curlers in your hair! You always have to look good!" Instead, when they are telling stories at ceremony she says, "Oh, there was this young girl..." and she goes into this whole animal narrative about a young girl who made the wrong decision and the wrong choice, and she never lived it down, and so she was turned into a rock. Now the girl, who is in her thirties at this point, says, "I drive by that place and it stalks me. I know, whenever I go by that place, I'm never going to wear curlers to ceremony again." The idea that something in the landscape is trying to get you.

I love going to visit Terri because there are coyotes all around, and coyote stalks me. He's all over the place. We talk about Deer Woman appearing, but there's Coyote over in the corner saying, "What about me? Don't forget about me!" The last time we visited, my young son whimpered, "Are the coyotes going to come get me?" And I said, "Yeah." (laughter) "But no, not in the way that you're thinking," You're going to get there eventually because they do stalk you. The animals do that too. I dreamt last night about rattlesnakes, and that's a very powerful animal spirit in our tradition from here in Georgia. I know that's why I dreamt it, because I'm here, so Rattlesnake came to me.

Audience Member #4: There was something that you said about being at a point of transition, straddling two different worlds — the animal world and the human world. It reminded me of a tradition in Europe where men would dress as women, or women would dress as men, and don the Fool's cap. You're in the traditional state where you're allowed to speak great truths. Maybe that's a factor in it also.

Windling: That's a good point.

Audience Member #4: Being between two worlds, you're given another perspective that you're able to draw upon.

Audience Member #5: I just found out about a Saint's Day in Belgium, St. Dymphn'a's Day. St. Dymphn'a is supposed to be the basis for the Donkey Skin fairy tale. On that day adults are bid to be silent, and only children are free to speak as a marker of the honor apparent in the animal state.

Audience Member #6: There is a similar tradition in the West Indies where slaves were allowed to become masters for a day.

Windling: Is that set during Carnival?

Audience Member #6: I don't know.

Windling: Because that's certainly like a Carnival tradition.

Audience Member #7: It certainly can be fascinating when you talk about being around more coyotes. Every now and then when we get an intrusion of an animal which we don't associate with faery showing up. On the way to the conference just the other day I heard a news report of an area of town called Buckhead just north of here; it's very popular as a nighttime bar and restaurant area, very upper class area real estate. There were numerous reports of neighbors spotting a lynx. That was the last thing you would expect to see in Atlanta. I don't know how it turned out, if they actually found it or not...but it had me thinking.

Windling:It's the same now reading East of the Sun, West of the Moon. When the bear comes knocking on your door, the wild coming to you feels rather wonderful. We have to remember that in past times when those stories were told, the idea of a bear knocking on the door was horrifying because wild animals were a genuine danger. It wasn't so long ago that Red Riding Hood meeting the wolf in the woods was frightening. In the earlier versions of her tale, where it was a werewolf, that was frightening specifically because that wasn't so outrageous. It was a real possibility that walking in the woods you might meet something that could kill you. The interesting thing is that if you go back to some of the Northern Italian versions of Red Riding Hood, Granny was the danger. It was called The Grandmother's Tale. Little little Red Riding Hood is sent off through the woods to visit her grandmother and bring her greens and food, and Grandmother is an ogre, Grandmother is the danger, who really does have the lupine qualities of the wolf.

Audience Member #8: With the transmission of those stories, the fear of old wives tales, the transmission of this information that could somehow corrupt a young listener, does the comadre—the godmother figure—have something to do with corrupting the storytelling?

Windling: That one is a tricky one because we're looking at Red Riding Hood as we know it today with the addition of the Wood-cutter who wasn't in the older versions. If you look at the older French versions of Red Riding Hood, she goes through the woods, she meets the wolf. He says to her, "Which path are you taking-the path of needles or the path of pins?" In some versions she takes needles, and in others she takes pins, but it all has to do with rituals of female sewing societies in Europe at that time. She gets to the house, and at that point he's reached there before her and gobbled up Grandmother. He's a werewolf, not a wolf — he's a wolf/man, which explains a little more why she wouldn't recognize him in the bed dressed in Grandma's clothes. It's kind of hard to imagine not recognizing a wolf, but a man in bed dressed up in Grandmother's clothes is a little easier to disguise. She gets there and the wolf gives her a bit of her grandmother's flesh to eat and a bit of her blood to drink. This whole cannibal part is left out in the later retellings.

Audience Member #9: The needles and pins societies go back to the time when women who were left unsupervised shared stories, spinning tales, spinning yarns — that could be a thread through it.

Windling: In these older versions, it is very much a female initiatory story. The needles and pins represent the sewing societies for young girls who at puberty would be sent off to live with the various seamstresses. That was considered a rite of passage, an initiation into young womanhood. You dated by being given pins by a young man. The tale had all that female maturation, puberty rite stuff attached to it.

The story ends when she does a whole striptease. The wolf/man says, "Take off your clothes and come to bed, my child." She takes off her apron and says, "But Grandmother, what should I do with my apron?"

"Throw it on the floor, child. You won't need it anymore." And they go through every element of clothing. Then she gets into bed with him and she's starting to glom onto the fact that this is not her grandmother. She says, "I need to go out and relieve myself." And he says, "Oh, do it in the bed, my child." She realizes that it is not her grandmother at this point and says, "No, no; I cannot do that. It would be unclean. I must go outside." So he ties a string around her ankle so that he won't lose her. She goes outside and she ties the string to a plum tree that's in the yard and escapes. She has saved herself. It's not a woodsman coming along to save her.

Dunn: The good guy, hm.

Windling: In some versions of the story, the wolf figures out that she's escaped and comes running after her. She gets to a river, and there are laundresses (more women's figures) washing their sheets by the river. She says, "Help me cross, help me cross!" and four laundresses hold four corners and stretch it flat. She runs across the river. The wolf gets there, and he says, "Help me cross, help me cross!" and they do the same thing. As soon as he's midway across, they drop the corners of the sheet and down he goes. The laundresses in these old societies were the ones who swaddled the newborns and swaddled the dead, so again we're talking about rites of female passage.

To have that change by (Charles) Perreault and then by the Grimm Brothers to a story that's not at all about cleverness, maturation, actualization but about a spoiled little girl who goes through the woods and is very silly and talks to the wolf and then gets eaten by him (that's the end in Perreault's version) or eaten by him and saved by a woodman (as it ends in Grimm's) is very different from the kind of wolf/man tale that we had earlier. Fairy tale scholar Marina Warner relates this to animal metamorphosis when she talks about the interesting parallels between Granny and the wolf, not only in the Italian versions where the two were conflated, but in other versions of the tale, in that both the wolf and Granny are off living in the forest. There's this hint of: Granny is off, away from civilization. She's alone in the woods. Why is it that Red Riding Hood didn't recognize the difference between Granny and the wolf? Were we supposed to see some subtle similarities there? The femme savage? The wild woman and the wolf actually had a bit in common. A long-winded answer to your question...

Audience Member #10: I was really interested to examine the idea of metamorphosis as punishment unasked for, whether it is punishment or enchantment. Sometimes it is necessary for someone engaged in a rite of passage, at that moment where you metaphorically die when you are, against your will, transformed into something, whether it's a new land, stag, dragon, a fish, a tree, seven swans. Then it becomes essential for an agent that somehow brings you back from that other world to your true self— your true self, but yourself now transcended into the next stage of your life...

Dunn:...with that experience.

Audience Member #10: Yes. The animals here become negation of that which is human. It absorbs that old identity and allows you, for that moment, a time to be solely animal. Nothing human of you is permitted. Then that journey has to happen in the other direction.

Windling: Do you win yourself back in some tales, or are you won back by someone else? It goes both ways. The men who are won back by women, the women who are won back by men.

Audience Member #11: Or like the Irish story of The Black Horse where he assists someone else, and then at the end someone else says, "Kill me if you love me. Kill me. That's the only way to end this enchantment." And it usually turns out that he's the brother of the bride whom the young man's been persuing. There are always those very interesting moments where the animal shape creates an interesting disguise.

Windling: It goes back to what Carolyn said about Deer Woman: the solution to the problem of bringing the wild back to civilization, back into human shape, comes from doing something correctly. Not in that Brothers Grimm sense of being the good little girl, but by approaching the fantastic correctly.

Dunn: You still have a choice in that approach. You can still say, "I know the story. I know how this could end. So I either choose this way, or I choose that way." You do ultimately have a choice, the free will in the story. There's no evil influence upon you, because you have that choice.

Windling: One thing that I found rather charming: not too long ago, I was looking at a bunch of animal bride and bridegroom stories for a magazine article. So many of the ones that I'm familiar with are those like The White Cat where at the end of the story the cat becomes a princess, and we learn that she was under enchantment all along. Her cat head is cut off and she's allowed to change back into a human being. In so many of those stories there is always an explanation that animal-people were human to start with. When you start looking at some of these older stories like those out of the Arabian Nights or the Tibetan stories, they are actually animals to start with, and they choose to take on human shape. During the course of the story, they are able to go back and forth, but they give up that ability in the end in order to live with their human suitor or spouse. I find something incredibly charming about that idea. It allows true union between the animal and human to be possible. It's not saying if your lover is really a selkie that they will always have to leave.

Audience Member #12: You also have a whole arrangement of fairy tales with animal helpers assisting those who are in trouble. The animal helpers are sometimes transformed at the end of the tale into humans and sometimes not.

Windling: And sometimes they choose to take on that shape to live in the human world. It's interesting on a metaphorical level, too, when you think of the times in our lives when people choose to take on a different shape, live in an alien culture for the rest of their lives, crossing boundaries to be another person, another being, and leave their old being behind. I find that very compelling on a lot of levels.

Dunn: I'd like to get back to that powerful metaphor for transformation and change of having to enter into this life about which you know nothing. I'm so California-centric, but here in the South there was much inter-marriage and intermingling between races and cultures. Not a lot of people talk about it, but I'm interested in how that happened. A lot of people were forced to enter into a completely foreign way of living in order to survive.

Windling: These tales are wonderfully metaphoric of union with the "other," whatever the "other" might mean — the other race, the other sex. That can be a mystery. Living with the alien being that is your wife or husband. (laughter)

Dunn: Oh, yeah.

(Here there was a very long comment from someone in the back of the room that was impossible to hear on the tape...sorry...)

Windling: There's a passage in Linda Hogan's book Power that makes me cry every time that I come to it. It is very brief, where the narrator (who is a young girl) is looking at the animals in the swamps in Florida, and an old Aunt tells her what the animals want from us. "They come to hear our singing," she says. "They love our singing." It gets me every time. It sounds so silly, but when I'm outside by myself I always sing.

Dunn: I know. I do too.

Windling: I'm just thinking, "Well, okay, if they want me to sing, maybe Linda's right.

Dunn: Or I can see Snow White when all the animals come up (laughter...) But that's so true.

Windling: Why else would they care about us, doing what we do to the planet? That's such a lovely thought, to think that there's something that we do that they really like.

Audience Member #13: My hiking partner used to hike down the path and sing so that the bears wouldn't come near.

Windling: (teasing) No, the bears like it. (laughter)

Audience Member #14: We would hope so.

Audience Member #15: It's so they know where you are. They know exactly where you are, and they are assured. They sense that you're there, but if you sing it makes it easier for them.

Dunn: It calls them. Again, wrapped up with these Deer Woman narratives is the men's side of the story. A lot of the same love magic songs are the same songs that they use for the charm song for hunting a deer. They're the same songs, because it's all wrapped up in being able to provide for your family. If you go out and hunt for the deer, then you're the good provider for the family. The deer is very feminine magic, but there's that whole men's side connected in that way. I'm also very interested in the idea of animal helpers where you go out into the wilderness to gain that knowledge, like with the Yellow Woman stories.

The robber bridegroom, which you all know, is my other obsession. There is something about the Beauty and the Beast story that resonates with me, the whole mixed marriage thing. Becoming transformed by that relationship with the animal, the earth, or the wilderness is something that, because I haven't put my finger on it, I keep writing and talking about it.

Audience Member #16: The subject of that story is a transformation of discovery, too.

Dunn: Yes. And, again, it's the women's power to depend upon one another.

Windling: Midori (Snyder) has written about it in The Monkey Girl, but the transformation here is for a man who is involved with a beastly bride. It's interesting looking at it from both sides, not only what it can do for a woman to be involved with the beast, but for a man to marry the beast. If you haven't read it, it's in the second edition of a book called Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales. It's a gorgeous essay about the Monkey Bride that relates the tale to modern marriage.

Audience Member #17: There's a sociological study by a woman named Joyce Salisbury called The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages where she did a study of the relationship of human beings to animals, going back to pre-Christian European society. She decided that we've been having real relationships with animals for a very long time. Her evidence was that whenever Christianity moved into any region in Europe, one of the first things that they did was impose a law that made bestiality illegal. Her argument is that, if they had to make a law as soon as they arrived, clearly everybody thought that it was okay (laughter) until the church arrived and went, "Oh, you cannot be doing this!" She says that you can see that they immediately imposed this law throughout Europe, but until they got there it was just hunky dorey.

Dunn: I get nervous too when I get called for submissions that say "No bestiality." There goes my chance! (laughter) (jokingly) That's what I'm writing about.

de Lint: And then we have the whole Furry phenomena. (laughter) which is weird.

Windling: Mike and I were talking about that last night.

Snyder: Because we saw a guy in a giant chicken suit outside, and we called him down.

Dunn: There is a whole episode on CSI: Miami about (furries).

de Lint: That just is strange.

Audience Member #18: Has anyone seen the Discover channel program about people who are transforming themselves into animals?

Dunn: The snake man...

Audience Member #19: The guy who is applying whiskers and cat fur on himself...one who wants to be a lizard who is getting his face cut so that the skin looks like scales. It's going much further than Furry culture. (laughter)

Dunn: Yeah. Well, that's just a suit that you can take off.

Windling: A few years ago, I was sitting out on a mountainside for a few days, and I was watching these hawks that were on the opposite cliff. At first all that I could see were two hawks being very nervous about the fact that I was on the opposite side of this small ravine. Eventually I was there for long enough that they got used to me. Their little family came out, and they were feeding their little ones. I watched them over the course of four days. I was fascinated by watching this little family drama. When it was time for me to leave that place, a friend of mine who is Tohono O'odham came to fetch me. As he came into that little area of the mountain, the big male hawk was screeching and screaming to make him go away, go away. He just walked right over that little valley and up the side and went about as far away from them as Greg Frost is to me, and he knelt down and he started singing. That male hawk landed. Inch by inch by inch, my friend came up right there, and he just sang. When he finished the song, the hawk went again. My friend came back over to fetch me, and I said, "What were you doing?" He said, "Hawk medicine has been in my family for generations." It was quite a privilege to witness.

Audience Member #20: Could it possibly be wired to recombine the spirit and matter? In the Middle East there is a very powerful symbol of a square intersected by a spear that represents the four corners of the world entering into spirit and being combined. When you look at Hesiod theogeny, the very beginning of all things is when Chaos (Father Sky) combines with Gaia (Earth Mother), and the very first god is produced, Eros (Love). The combining of the earth and spirit, matter and sky creates that first divine impulse for people.

Windling: We combine these things and we have the spark of art and story.

de Lint: It's that whole magic life between. That's probably why they attract us so much. It's why there can be a magic created. You can change from animal to human - that's a "between." Between is a place of magic already.

Windling: In mythic art, that's a natural place to go, that between place.

Dunn: The border is that between place.

Audience Member #21: We're also thinking of those creatures who have to be part of that "bestiality" thing...(laughter)...sleeping with the bull and winding up with the Minotaur who is really a monster, terrorized and treated as such and hidden away. I think that, as a character, he is biologically both (bull and Minotaur). There is something so uncomfortable, at least as far as the Greeks are concerned. One can shape-shift. One can spend time and come back, one way or the other. One cannot be frozen in both without it being an accident. While one is permissible, the other is seen as aberrant.

Windling: But that's very Greek. In Native American traditions you can absolutely be both.

de Lint: With the Minotaur, I think of Thomas Burnett Swann. His characters were frozen into those combination shapes, but it wasn't a negative thing at all.

Windling: But it is good to be reminded that the human/animal metamorphosis can be monstrous. Part of what gives it power is that it is not necessarily safe, it can be quite dangerous and quite beastly. The original versions of Beauty and the Beast, if you go to the original tales in the 18th century, the beast was beastly. He wasn't a gentleman just covered in fur. He was horrifying. He had to be civilized before Beauty could love him. She didn't fall in love with him in beastly shape, and it was never suggested that she should. That story was changed in subsequent re-tellings.

(There was one final comment from an audience member who stood too far from the mic to be heard on the tape...sorry. Whatever it was, Terri Windling pronounced it a fantastic note on which to end the conversation.)

Read more by Charles de Lint at his website

Read more by Carolyn Dunn at her carolyndunn.com website

Read more by Terri Windling at the Endicott Studio website

Return to Mythic Passages Menu

Subscribe to the Mythic Passages e-magazine