spirit of evil: feeding the wolves

…The notion of craftiness is known to all, the evil impulse that urges the individual to sin. That impulse does not push into sin all at once; it seems an incremental process towards some blood in your eyes insanity. The minor transgression, the trivial, slowly towards graver transgressions and so on until the level playing field gives root to a monster. Funny thing is this evil impulse, the Devil, may not necessarily invoke that the person sins, in fact may even urge “good deeds”, like the road to hell is paved with good intentions, yet the end result is utter evil, since he wants man to do the good deeds for al the wrong reasons: man approves of it, it makes sense to him. Every conceivable reason except the proper one. The craftiness of the Devil is the shrewd insight into man persuading man that nothing stands higher than himself, that he alone ultimately decides the validity of any idea, any code, any discipline and that he is the sole arbiter of right and wrong. The Devil whispers do good deeds but only because it meets your approval…

—Stills from The Company of Wolves. Courtesy of The Cannon Group.—click image for source…

So too, to come to the point, is the Steppenwolf a fiction. When Harry feels himself to be a were-wolf, and chooses to consist of two hostile and opposed beings, he is merely availing himself of a mythological simplification. He is no were-wolf at all, and if we appeared to accept without scrutiny this lie which he invented for himself and believes in, and tried to regard him literally as a two-fold being and a Steppenwolf, and so designated him, it was merely in the hope of being more easily understood with the assistance of a delusion, which we must now endeavor to put in its true light.

The division into wolf and man, flesh and spirit, by means of which Harry tries to make his destiny more comprehensible to himself is a very great simplification. It is a forcing of the truth to suit a plausible, but erroneous, explanation of that contradiction which this man discovers in himself and which appears to himself to be the source of his by no means negligible sufferings. Harry finds in himself a human being, that is to say, a world of thoughts and feelings, of culture and tamed or sublimated nature, and besides this he finds within himself also a wolf, that is to say, a dark world of instinct, of savagery and cruelty, of unsublimated or raw nature. Hermann Hesse Steppenwolf, 1927. Basil Creighton translation…

—The “Trea­tise on the Step­pen­wolf” is a book­let given to Harry Haller which describes him­self. It is a lit­er­ary mir­ror and, from the out­set, describes what Harry had not learned, namely “to find con­tent­ment in him­self and his own life.” The cause of his dis­con­tent was the per­ceived dual­is­tic nature of a human and a wolf within Harry.—click image for source…

The existence of villainy in a world under divine supervision is a question that has long troubled humanity. All that can be said s that, as far as literature and the arts are concerned, the serpent god put into the Garden of Eden was an unmixed blessing. If villainy hadn’t existed it would have been necessary for the creator’s of the world’s literature to invent it. …

You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are. Step between the portals of the great pines where the shaggy branches tangle about you, trapping the unwary traveller in nets as if the vegetation itself were in a plot with the wolves who live there, as though the wicked trees go fishing on behalf of their friends – step between the gateposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite precautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you. They are grey as famine, they are as unkind as plague. .

The grave-eyed children of the sparse villages always carry knives with them when they go out to tend the little flocks of goats that provide the homesteads with acrid milk and rank, maggoty cheeses. Their knives are half as big as they are, the blades are sharpened daily. But the wolves have ways of arriving at your own hearthside. We try and try but sometimes we cannot keep them out. There is no winter’s night the cottager does not fear to see a lean, grey, famished snout questing under the door, and there was a woman once bitten in her own kitchen as she was straining the macaroni. Fear and flee the wolf; for, worst of all, the wolf may be more than he seems….

…They say there’s an ointment the Devil gives you that turns you into a wolf the minute you rub it on. Or, that he was born feet first and had a wolf for his father and his torso is a man’s but his legs and genitals are a wolf’s. And he has a wolf’s heart. Seven years is a werewolf’s natural span but if you burn his human clothing you condemn him to wolfishness for the rest of his life, so old wives hereabouts think it some protection to throw a hat or an apron at the werewolf, as if clothes made the man. Yet by the eyes, those phosphorescent eyes, you know him in all his shapes; the eyes alone unchanged by metamorphosis. Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips stark naked. If you spy a naked man
among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you. (Angela Carter, The Company of Wolves)