Haunted Cosmos - The Metamorphosis

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

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This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Indigo Sundry Soap, Backwards Planning Financial, New Dominion Design Co, Grey Toad Tallow, StoneCrop Wealth Advisors, Serif Guard, Squirrely Joe's Coffee, and our supporters at patreon.com. Did you know that our top two patrons get early access to all of our main shows and all of our patrons get our main shows ad-free? patrons also get access to our exclusive weekly show, The Dusty Tome, only available on patreon.com. So if you like the show, consider becoming a patron today to get access to all these benefits and more. And now on with the show. There was once an old king in a faraway time and place. He made his dwelling in arid and high desert land, but his realm was vast and covered much of the known world during his time. He was a powerful king, driven by an indomitable spirit.

for conquering. Despite thousands of miles in all directions belonging to him and answering to him alone, still did not seem to be enough. What's more, the supposed lack of land to represent his kingship over the world, only the entire world itself would have been enough, caused him to consider other ways wherein he might exercise lordship. He made monuments of himself, idols of the self-proclaimed God King, that he made his people venerate with every external symbol he could conceit. of. In brief, this king was, this emperor was an arrogant man, bent upon his own selfish interests and ambitions, even to the detriment of the lives and souls of the people he was responsible for ruling over. After one of the seasons of war, this king led a host of captives out of a small

kingdom that had lain at the fringes of his own rule for many years. Men, women, and children, cattle and wealth and slaves, all alike were driven like sheep across the treacherous terrain back to their new homes deep in different regions of his kingdom. But a handful of these captives, the highest nobility of the conquered people, were reserved to be raised up in a king's own palace, to be sages and magi in his service. This king, very shrewdly, figured that if he could steal the hearts of the nobles and rulers for himself, there would be no risk of him ever losing this little nation that now owed him obeisance. Despite the narcissism of the king, a thing that so often leads to the inevitable,

ruin of the narcissist. Things were going well for him at every turn. All of his goals and plans and wildest dreams were coming to fruition. The world was becoming more and more his. But dreams are deceptive, and the king eventually had one dream that caused his heart to stir with unease. He summoned his wisest counselors, his magi and necromancers,

and bid them tell him the meaning of the profound vision of darkness he had seen. Unfortunately, there was not one, among his best aristocrats who could explain what the king had seen. Distraught and desperate, the king finally decided to summon one of the bright pupils of the small kingdom he had recently conquered. The humble young man, barely able to be counted as a man at all, walked with poise into the throne room and inquired of the king as to the nature of his vision. Thus the king began his discourse with the young astronomer.

I saw and behold, a tree in the midst of the earth. and its height was great. The tree grew and became strong and its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the end of the whole earth. Its leaves were beautiful and its fruit abundant, and in it was food for all. The beasts of the field found shade under it,

and the birds of the heavens lived in its branches, and all flesh was fed from it. I saw in the visions of my head as I lay in my bed, and behold, a watcher, a holy one, came down from heaven. He proclaimed aloud and said thus, chop down the tree and lop off its branches, strip off its leaves and scatter its fruit. Let the beasts flee from under it and the birds from its branches.

But leave the stump of its roots in the earth, bound with a band of iron and bronze amid the tender grass of the field. Let him be wet with the dew of heaven. Let his portion be with the beasts in the grass of the earth. Let his mind be changed from a man's, and let a beast's mind be given to him, and let seven periods of time pass over him. The sentence is by the decree of the watchers,

the decision by the word of the holy ones, to the end that the living may know that the most high rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will and sets over it the lowliest of men. Daniel's spirit faltered upon hearing the words of Nebuchadnezzar. He reeled in shock at the severity of what this meant and could not find it in himself to tell this great ruler of men the truth behind this terrifying vision. But at a word of encouragement from his king,

the noble prophet commenced his interpretation, and it served as a judgment. This is my interpretation, O king. It is a decree of the most high, which has come upon my lord the king, that you shall be driven from among men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. You shall be made to eat grass like an ox,

and you shall be wet with the dew of heaven, and seven periods of time shall pass over you, till you know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will. And as it was commanded to leave the stump of the roots of the tree, your kingdom shall be confirmed for you from the time that you know that heaven rules. Therefore, O King, let my counsel be acceptable to you. Break off your sins by practicing righteousness,

and your iniquities by showing mercy to the oppressed, that there may perhaps be a lengthening of your prosperity. One year later, as King Nebuchadnezzar was walking along the roof of his palace, admiring the glory and power of his mighty works from behind his painted parapet, a voice from heaven rang like a rushing wind in his ears and proclaimed his kingdom departed from him. The destitute king was driven from the world and society of men. He shed his clothes and grew hair like black feathers to cover himself. His nails grew and were sharpened to claws. His maddened main and uncovered body grew wet and stank with the constant soaking of the morning dew. He ate grass like a beast of burden and suffered the decree of the watchers in its fullness. After seven years, he became a man again. His reason returned to him, and the once haughty king now made meek,

lifted his eyes up to heaven and worshipped the one true and living God. And so his kingdom was given back to him, and he rejoiced in the rich increase and abundance wherewith his domain flourished. The old king of Babylon suffered a great chastisement from God. Becoming like a beast is no small thing, but it was also no uncommon thing. And while we can be somewhat certain that, through it all, Nebuchadnezzar never became something other than a man, false and wicked gods who dole out similar punishments to the sinners beneath their own sinful egos were not always so gracious as Jehovah.

Indeed, who can be? According to the Greeks, the genesis of the world's seasons was marked by a divine, tragedy, whose import continued to mystify mankind for many generations after it had occurred. As Helios made his maddened run across the sky, he looked down to behold a curious sight. A black chariot driven by Olympian teams were racing across the paradisal earth on their way to a cavern that had just opened in a hillside. The orange glow of Tartarus and Hades within the cave, along with the desperate yet somehow still captivatingly beautiful screams of a goddess in the carriage betrayed what had happened.

Hades, the god of the underworld, had finally acted on his lust by abducting the lovely Persephone, daughter of Demeter. Now, we have discussed this tragedy before in our episode on psychedelics and machine elves and the final episode of season two. This is the story that led to the Elysinian rites

that still puzzle us to this day, but we aren't concerned with the mysterious cult that sprang from this story's end this time. This time, we're concerned with some of the punishment doled out by Demeter upon the mortals who were unlucky enough to find themselves involved in this intramural fight of the gods. Some say that before Persephone was taken, she was picking flowers for a garland with some mortal women. When Demeter discovered that there had been these witnesses, who had then refused to tell her the whereabouts of her daughter, she was furious. She could think

of only one sentencing severe enough for these turncoat and false friends. It was not death and was not servitude, no. The goddess decided to turn these girls into half-birded Siren chimeras, cursed to lure wayfares to their death upon Poseidon's waves. She shifted the shape of their bodies until they resembled a butchered caricature of some mixture of things that exist, but that should never exist in that way together. They were forced to remain in this half-dignified state for the history of the world. While Demeter had still been looking for her lost Persephone, she stumbled into the city of Attica, ragged, hungry, and thirsty. The locals welcomed her warmly with gifts and offers of rest and luxury.

They still had to worship the goddess, even if she was tired after all. A servant boy named Mizmi took pity on the exhaustion of the Olympian and offered her a drink of the ancient Kaikian. When Demeter emptied the glass in one single gulp, Mismi laughed and lightheartedly called for an entire cask to be brought for the goddess. This laughter offended to meet her, though, who was in no mood to joke or find fun in her bleak search. She splashed the few remaining drops of drink onto the boy with a cursing mouth, and turned Mizmi into a lizard for the remainder of his days.

Fickle and capricious gods have always loved to shape-shift on behalf of others, to take them down from manhood into creaturely servitude, only to keep them there and destroy them without a second thought. In the cold reaches of Hyper Berea, the hero's Sviphtiger is transformed into a dragon by a vengeful Odin, as the mortal steals the love of the goddess Freya. In the same myths, the giant Fafnir is transformed into a dragon for reasons of intense self-centeredness and greed. In other stories, Freya, that same lover of Svipdiger, is found transforming her students into wild boars and whirlwinds for various ends that seem so petty to the outside eye.

And these are but a few of the dozens, maybe hundreds of examples of the pagan gods, punishing the mortal enemies beneath them, with a punishment similar to that of Nebuchadnezzar, only far more complete, severe, petty, and damning. But there is one story that stands out from the rest, one whose namesake is now the moniker of a condition that transcends mere punishment from the gods and reaches into the darkest corners of human depravity one can fathom. It is, of course, the story of King Lerner. like Heon. Ovid tells us that in the midst of the third age of the world, already bronzed and

battered by the folly of gods and men, Zeus looked down from Olympus to see man's depravity and hatred for them grew in his heart. He endeavored to accumulate evidence that he might use to charge them, with all the horrible things he longed to justly punish them for. And so the king of the gods dressed himself in the raiment of men, old and ugly, and trod upon the earth, traveling here and there, and finding no shortage of evil with which to accuse mankind, as he would soon pour out his wrath upon them. As the years of his reconnaissance waxed, he journeyed into the pine forests of Arcadia that suffered under the ruling hand of Lycaon their king. He asked leave to stay in the inhospitable house of the king, and did not hide his true identity as king of the gods. He gave them signs

of his godhood that should have removed all excuse for their ignorance and continued mistreatment of him, But eventually a great horde of the people began to worship him and pay him due homage. The king, Lycaon, ridiculed their piety, saying that they were fools to worship one who was so obviously a charlatan. He devised a test to determine the true identity, divine or mortal, of this mysterious guest that tarried in his halls. Thus the king sent to kill Zeus as he slept in his quarters that night, but the attempt failed. Still certain of Zeus's falsehood, Lycaon ordered a prisoner of war.

brought before him and the god. Before Zeus, Lycaon cut the throat of the man and spilled his blood Zeus's feet. Whereupon the man was butchered, his arms boiled and his legs roasted. Lycaon placed the cannibalistic feast before Zeus, who could no longer contain his angst and vengeful spirit. He brought the roof of the palace down upon his own head, but Lycaon escaped and began sprinting away. The desperate man ran all the way to the outer fields, only to find a change at consumed him. Instead of shouting in fear, he howled. Instead of sweat on his brow, foaming spit poured out of his mouth. His purple robe became a height of gray hair all about him, and his arms twisted to become the legs of a great dog. He hungered for the raw and unshawed flesh of sheep nearby,

and so hunted them in a rush of mania while Luna looked down in full brightness. As Ovid says, quote, he was a wolf, but kept some vestige of his former shape. There were the same great gray hairs, the same violent face, the same glittering eyes, the same savage image." Thus the werewolf, the lichenthrope, was born. And so it appears that the fallen principalities of our world at least claim to have this ability over others, over nature itself, and it is almost always seen as something tormenting to man. Even to the pagans, shape-shifting and metamorphosis is not a thing for him to exalt in. So what about the stories wherein he does?

As we move from the affairs of the gods, beneficent or no, true or false notwithstanding, we must dig into the puzzle of what the state of a man's soul must be for him to wish to be turned into something he's not. Why is fallen man sometimes attracted to shape-shifting? What happens to a man when he rejects all law, both divine and natural, and descends into a well of depravity? What happens when a man is a man is, bent so far beyond recognition that instead of wanting to multiply on the earth, he wants to see

his own image, his own likeness snuffed out of existence. What happens when he becomes an agent of his own annihilation along with that of others? What do we call something, a something that should be a person which craves to consume and bring to an utter end the flesh of mankind? Is that person less than a man? In rejecting the order of God and substituting the worship of the creature for the worship of the creator, do men sometimes become mere creatures themselves? If you treat yourself as far less than a man, will you eventually become far less than a man? Now, in previous episodes, we have noted how the culminated twisting of truth from light to dark leads to a category of evil that is no longer worthy of being called mere sin. Eventually, like in the case of a witch,

one who has so stubbornly insisted on partnering with the forces of darkness in order to achieve some selfish gain for themselves must be called demonic. They aren't just sinners anymore. Now they are demoniacs. Enemies of God so filled with vitriol and hatred of all that is good and true and beautiful that though they know what it is, they hate it and want to see it destroyed. Thus, the witch goes from a selfish woman to a witch, a servant of the devil himself and all of his,

legions of which she is now joined apart. With this commitment to the flourishing of darkness comes a new religion for the practitioner of black magic. Where the Christian enjoys the rest of the Sabbath and the nourishment of the Lord's supper, the witch engages in the witch's Sabbath, where she is used and abused and sent further down the road to perdition, and the twisted and vile devil's supper where human flesh is consumed and children are murdered. It's sickening, yes.

It's violent, but it is the reality of the ugliness of evil. But the phenomenon of intentional shape-shifting shows us how man's commitment to satanic activity in the world does not always look exactly the same, but the principles behind it are always unchanging. It has been the belief among all of Christendom that men seeking out and practicing the power of shapeshifting are both very real and very terrible. In every case, it demands the exercise of dark magic and the joining of one's own life with the forces of evil in God's world. In this way, shapeshifting as a specialty practice is very familiar to the broader topic of witchcraft in general. But the shapeshifter's focus is a bit different from the witch.

It's somehow even more self-centered and more hungry. Where the witch is crafty and manipulative and eager to destroy those around her with cunning and shadowy arts, the shapeshifter, whether it be a werewolf, skinwalker, or Wendigo, is content to openly attack people for the world to see, sometimes even in broad daylight. It should not surprise us that they're almost always men. The direction in which they are bent towards evil is certainly a more masculine direction, the open attack, however inverse and confused that masculinity is. So as we explore the dark stories of these predators in the world, bear in mind that you're hearing tales of those evil people who are akin to which,

in that they are magicians of evil who are actively in league with the devil, but in trying to fulfill a lust even more carnal than the witch, the mere satisfaction of bloodlust. The shapeshifter, or in the case of this next story, the werewolf, abandons all semblance of humanity and becomes like the thing he so desires. A beast. Around the year 1530, near the then-small township of Bedburg, Germany, a child named Peter was born to the farming family known as the,

the stumps, a well-to-do upper-middle-class family of landowners. His birth marked a turning of the tide for the entire Holy Roman Empire, one whose end nobody could have foreseen. Only some 13 years earlier, a friar named Martin Luther had begun a discourse of disagreements with the Roman Catholic Church that had continued to escalate in its importance and hostility through the day of Peter's birth. While little is known about Peter's adolescence, most believe that he and his parents eventually came around to this Protestant tradition. In doing this, they were following the trend of many German families in a similar class. Religious convictions aside, Peter grew to carry a reputation that could be described as simply ordinary. He maintained his wealth and land into adulthood.

He got married and had two children. He made little to no social splash and was generally respected by all. Eventually, as was common in the time, his wife was stricken with illness and succumbed to death, leaving Peter with a 15-year-old daughter and a son whose age remains unknown to this day. Maybe it was this spat of dark providence that set Peter on the path of woe. Maybe it was something else entirely. Either way, it was around this time in his life that the folks around Peter began to notice a change. His countenance darkened and his mood grew less palatable to his neighbors. He was no longer friendly, nor was he hospitable.

He kept more and more to himself, like someone, paranoid about every action in the world around him. His daughter started behaving strangely as well, and the overall picture of relative domestic flourishing started to wrinkle and peel at the corner of Peter's life. Something was wrong. As people in Bedburg continued to notice this shift in Peter, the rest of the town was overcome with grief at a larger tragedy. People, young and old, men and women, were turning up dead all over the place. They had to reckon with the fact that these people had not died of any sickness or seemingly natural cause. Every single one of them had been maimed beyond recognition. Blood pooled around the disfigured and unrecognizable remains of

dozens of people. It looked as though the victims had been hacked to bits by some mythical beast from the depths of hell, or maybe a group of them. Eventually, the people banded together and decided, with the support of the civil magistrate, to get to the bottom of whatever judgment had fallen on village. So it was that evidence was compiled, opinions were heard, and prayers were offered up to God for help in guiding them through their plight. It was not long before they had landed on what they were confident was the problem. Bedberg was being afflicted with the attacks of a werewolf. Maybe it was only one, maybe it was multiple, but they were sure that this was the culprit. Upon concluding this, some of the prominent men on the investigative team took a closer look at the

at the odd behavior exhibited by Peter and his family from recent months. As the aperture of suspicion focused in on Peter, everyone grew in their certainty that he was at least partially to blame for these attacks. Peter's stump, everyone became convinced, was a werewolf whose bloodlust was wreaking havoc on the serenity of their home. The wheels of justice moved quickly and Peter was arrested under suspicion of being a lycthropic destroyer of mankind. mind. The hearing passed by without Peter's confession, and so the next step made itself clear to the

investigators. Torture. They stretched Peter upon the rack and prepared themselves for the gruesome interrogation that was soon to begin when, to everyone's surprise, Peter began to tell them everything. In tears of lamentation, Peter admitted to being a werewolf. He said that he had begun practicing black magic at the age of 12, whereupon he began engaging in regular communions with the devil. His insatiable hunger for evil was nourished by the prince of the power of the air, and Peter said that the devil eventually gave him a magical girdle, which would allow him to transform into the form of a massive and ferocious wolf, so that he could indulge in his twisted fantasies with greater ease. When the girdle was in place, Peter's likeness transposed into a greedy

and devouring wolf, strong and mighty, whose eyes shone bright and large and red like fire. His mouth widened and filled with fangs. His hands turned to pause with nappy fur and long, sinister claws. Peter admitted to using this guise for the purpose of great evil for the previous 25 years. He began by sucking the blood of goats and lambs he found alone in fields at night. But it was not long before this wasn't enough. Peter admitted to killing and cannibalizing numerous women, even two pregnant women and children, a full 14 of them.

He even admitted to killing and eating. his own son who had caught him in an incestuous affair with his daughter. He hated himself for these things, especially for the abuse of his daughter and devouring of his son, but his raging bloodlust, he said, had taken full control of him. Peter was no longer Peter. He was something else, something less than that. Gone were the days of any human dignity left within his soul. Peter was executed by torture alongside his daughter and mistress, who had admitted to working with and aiding the werewolf. His death served as a reminder to other werewolves in the area of what they could expect should they be caught

and how their death would only be their introduction to the eternal torment at the mercy of God's justice. It said that during his confession, Peter had told his interrogators where he had hidden the girdle. He claimed it was stowed away deep within one of the dark valleys around the liminal forests of the town. But despite an extensive search, the magical girdle of hellish power was never found.

Welcome to Haunted Cosmos. My name is Ben Garrett. That was Shatner-esque. Next to me is a gentleman, a male. A male. Land-owning male, indeed. Whose name is Breon-Souvid. So close. So close. It is so close. It's actually Brian Sauvet. I answered a suvied. I answer to Brian Saute.

Really a lot of different cooking terms I will answer, too. Ben, it's great to join you here in really one of the greatest sets ever put together in the history of YouTube. I think that YouTube is like insanely impressed. They're like, what is happening? Why is the set different every time? Here's why, guys. On the other side of this wall, which is a new wall, by the way, is our actual set, which is being painted currently. Yes, by a wonderful gentleman named Daniel.

He's painting it up for us. He's painting it green. Wallpaper coming in soon. So, guys, we're just, we're out of the studio and we had to scramble today. So we're in my office. Yep. The blue door was not my design decision. But I think it's nice.

It's like a door to heaven. The drop ceiling paneling around the door is a nice touch. Also not done by me. It really lends to the sort of like backrooms vibe that we're going for. It kind of smells in here. In terms of a place, though, this is historic. I mean, I've recorded much of my music that's been released in this room. That's so true.

Hey, by the way, why don't you tell the people about, your music. Go check out Brian Savay on Spotify. I suppose a lot of Honed Cosmos listeners have no idea. Well, he has an album about dragons. I do. It's called Even Dragons Shall Him Praise. It's settings of Psalms. It's about how Even Dragons shall Him praise. That's what it's about. All the Psalms that relate to dragons worshipping the Lord. So yeah, thanks, Ben. Go listen to it. I hope it doesn't suck. Here's the point, though. We're not in the usual set and let's just move on. just move on. We all know it's bad. The lighting is bad. We get it. We'll get it. We'll figure it out. Eventually, like, everything will be settled. It's a work in a steady state. Homeostasis, baby.

It's a work in progress. But today, we're talking about something that you don't want to make as a work in progress in your own life, which is shape-shifting into a beast from hell and attacking your fellow image bears. If you do that, I get news for you. It's not going to go well for you. Like, let's get conclusion out of the way. shapeshifting is bad. It's bad, don't do it. And we'll get into all the reasons why. Yeah, you don't want to do it. But you definitely don't want to be caught shapeshifting, because that means that you're being caught using black magic,

which means you're being caught being a witch or a warlock, which means you're... You'll be killed. You'll be killed. By the magistrate. If the magistrate is doing his Romans 13 duty, that'll be the end of you. But, you know, speaking of the end of this transition into the next thing,

I was going to say, Speaking of these dirty floors, let's do some housekeeping. Yeah. So good. Come on. We're going to be doing a giveaway with this episode. That's right. The giveaway is going to be one of my favorite books of all time.

Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein. Hey, pop quiz, what's the subtitle? I knew he was going to ask it. And I refused to prepare by remembering it. I vaguely know it's the, there's a word in it that once I hear it, I will immediately remember. What about... Give me the word. Or? Wait, it's Prometheus.

Right? Prometheus is in it. It's Prometheus. Which Prometheus? Modern Prometheus. Right. Or the modern Prometheus. The modern Prometheus. Frankenstein or the modern... No, or... I knew he was going to ask that and I refused to look it up because I wanted to answer with integrity. Yeah. Hey, good for you. By showing that I vaguely remembered kind of the subtylidels. Well, I asked that question at a trivia night that we did at our church one time. And no one got it. No one got it.

And it blew me away. Ben was asking the most obscure Silmarian-related questions. I asked like one Silmarillion question. Or engineering-related questions. Everything else was like, who is the king of clay in the French Open? He was like, it's Raphael Nadal, dude. The king of Spain. Do I look like I play tennis slash am homosexual?

Dude, I play soccer like a real man. No, tennis is white boy summer. That's, well, pickleball. Grown up. All right. But we're doing a giveaway of a great edition of Mary Shelley's classic. Yeah, five actually. Five lucky patrons that sign up the day that this episode drops.

We'll receive a DM on Patreon if you've won. And it's going to be just telling you like, hey, we bought the book. It's a beautiful, like, cloth-bound edition. It's really, really nice. And we'll send that to you guys totally free just as a thank you for being willing to sign up to support the show. And I was just going to say, I think that if you do that, I don't think you'll be disappointed. We really try to put a lot of value into the patron experience. You have almost 70 episodes of Dusty Tomes that you can listen through and binge,

and then you'll have a new one to look forward to each week after that. It's like 30 to 50 hours of material that only patrons get. And it's just me talking. It's really good. Slowly. All, I mean, a full day of work goes into each of those typically. So, you know, what most people release as their main podcast, we keep it just... We put that much effort just into our patron podcast.

Just for our patrons. So hope you guys enjoy that. If you like what we do and you want more of it, definitely support on Patreon. Sign up there. New Christenum Press, which is our publishing house that we belong to, also just published our first book. Has nothing to do with werewolves. I mean, feminism. Yeah?

So it's related. Well, feminism is a monster. Feminism is to werewolves what man is to Medusa. Boom. That's exactly correct, actually. And if you understand that, tweet us and explain the reference that Ben just made. Feminism is a gorgon that will kill the world with snakes. So true.

And it should be killed with fire. Honor thy fathers recovering the anti-feminist theology of the reformers, Great book by Pastor Zachary Garris. You should check it out. We have a special hardcover edition that we're already more than halfway sold through that run.

And there's no promises that that exact edition is going to come out again. So check it out, newchristinimpress.com slash fathers. And if anything that we just said really offended you,

then just leave us a one-star review. You leave us a one. Smash that thumbs-down button. Smash that unsubscribe. smash that. I hate those guys, but either that, any of those things are available to you, or, you know, just give the book a try. Give it a try, guys. And see just what we're saying. Like, I love women. I'm married to one, you know?

I have two that I co-created and I'm married to one. I have one little woman cooking in my wife's womb. A hundred cosmos announcement. Guys. Not only is Ben's wife pregnant, but they found out it's their first girl. Yes. I'm so amped, man. What a can.

We've had two boys who I love, Abner and Ambrose, but ready for, ready for a little Andromache to come out. Okay, that's not going to be your name. That's not going to be your name. I keep trying to push that. And Allie's like, absolutely not. Let's talk more, unless we've missed any housekeeping, I think. No, I don't think so.

Let's start talking about this because I wanted to start by asking you, Ben, a question. As we've looked into this topic, both of us, this is a topic that we've looked into over the years, read her different stories, made, you know, connected different phenomena in our own minds. But as we've prepared for this episode, what kind of themes have really come to the forefront for you in this topic of shapeshifting being the umbrella? And then under that you have things like lycanthropy, werewolves. So you have skinwalkers. Even vamporism. Vampirism is a kind of shape shifting in a sense. And comes with shape shifting into bats. Right. Exactly. That's what I meant. Yeah. Yeah. So the big,

So the reason that I picked Frankenstein as the giveaway is because that's been one of the biggest themes that I've been thinking is why is this bad? What makes shapeshifting so bad? And it really gets into the question of what makes a person a person. Yeah. Is the appearance of a person part of what makes them intrinsically human? Or is it something that's disposable? Yeah. Is it accidental to man or essential to man that they look like a human being?

Yeah. Is it just the soul? Can you know, could you take like my human soul and put it into a bird and say, that's now been? And my answer is no. And part of why my answer is no is because part of the essence of man is the way that he looks. It's the kind that God made him into. Man is an embodied soul. And oftentimes we think that that just means like, oh, well, the real knee is inside. And that's not really true. The embodiment is part of that phrase. Like, man is embodied also.

And so you have to have a likeness of man in order to really be a full person. Yeah. And so where I'm going with that is you get into these stories. And, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about the historicity of them and whether or not they're real or not. Sure. you get into these stories where people start to become so focused inward that they lose sight of what it means to be a human at all

and a lot of times for men in these myths of shape-shifting it inevitably leads to them wanting to be something that they're not which is a werewolf or you know some kind of like stag demon-looking thing if you're a windigo or you know whatever it may be How many demons, ghosts, or vampires do you have in your investment portfolio? Well, if you've invested in the S&P 500, it's probably more than you think, since it's full of companies who actively support causes that go against your faith. Stonecrop Wealth Advisors is here to help.

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And so anyway, that's one of the biggest themes to me. It's just, what is a person? And if we're Christians, what is an image bearer of God? What does it mean to be made in God's image? Yeah, that's definitely one of the through lines. It's easy to miss in a story like this or stories like this. We start to think about werewolves, and we just think of spooky stories or, you know, Professor Lupin or, you know. It was probably the coolest werewolf of all time.

Probably, you know, probably. And it's easy for us not to take the next steps of thought and, and actually examine the phenomenon, say, why is this an actual real instinct that these stories really should warn us against? I think of passages in scripture, like even when Paul is speaking to Titus, about the Cretans, and he even calls them beasts.

Yeah. In fact, Paul does this many, the scriptures in general, Paul in particular, several times uses the language of becoming like a beast to describe a person who is so, given to sin that it's like they're forswearing or forsaking their humanity, they're

being made in the likeness of God and they're embracing the lowliness of a lesser thing. They're becoming beastly where they're just driven by their carnal hungers and desires and they're driven by just this pure instinct and they've

lowered themselves Tolk, or not Tolkien Lewis does this as well obviously in the Chronicles of Narnia where he He talks about the, Aslan makes the talking beasts, and then, which is, by the way, why our record label at New Christenam Press is called Talking Beast Records. I love how you say hours if.

It's just me. Or anyone else apart from you. But what happens is that there are, especially in the last battle, you see this story arc where one of the talking beasts sins so grievously that they descend back into the lower beasts, where they're no longer talking. They're no longer a talking beast,

and they become a dumb beast. And sin generally, just not that you're literally going to turn into a werewolf if you sin. Right. That's not the point. But sin makes us like beasts. And so whether we take any of these stories as real or not,

like whether someone actually ever did become a werewolf or if it's just like this mythical, thematic motif that people use, is sort of beside the point that I'm making. Like, obviously, it happened once, and it was to Nebuchadnezzar because it just says that that's what God did. And if you look at the sins that Nebuchadnezzar was committing,

I think that it reveals how we become most like a beast. So Nebuchadnezzar, when it actually happened, after the vision had been seen and Daniel's, his interpretation had been heard, it's a year later, and it says that Nebuchadnezzar is just, up on his palace, examining his kingdom, and saying, wow, aren't I great? I'm so great.

For doing this. I am a genius. I'm powerful. I'm strong. It's like what we're all tempted to do when we finish mowing our lawn. Yeah. Edge it. You look back and you're just like, you're like, I am amazing.

Well, I'm a God. I'm a Lord of Men. Yeah. Like, but that's, and so essentially what he's saying is I am God. Yes. I am the God that did this. And so I am worthy of veneration and all. And that is.

is so antithetical to what it means to be a person. You know, the whole theme of the universe is that you give your life for the good of others. And that you have nothing that wasn't given to you by the true God who you ought to be venerating. Instead of worshipping yourself, you worship something else. And we're made to do that. So anyway, that is like the root sin, this really, really nasty pride that Nebuchadnezzar is engaged in. and God shows him how nasty a pride it is by turning him into the natural end of that pride,

which is something subhuman. Yep. Which is really fascinating to me. Like, the Medieval's had four categories of existence on Earth. And it started with, like, rocks, which is just mere existence. And then plants, which is existence with growth. And then animals, which is existence with growth and community or something like that. And then it was man, which is all those things with rationality.

And so the subtext, when we look at these medieval myths of werewolves, is that when a man becomes so self-centered and prideful, when he becomes a narcissist, he actually loses the thing that makes him a man, which is reason. Yeah. So you abandon all rationality when you forget that the point of your life is to spend it for the good of others and for the glory of God. One of the chapters that I wrote for the concluding section of our forthcoming book, Honan, it's called Haunted Cosmos, Doing Your Duty in a World That's Not Just Stuff. That's our current, like, working title. One of the whole chapters is on, I won't spoil it, but a lot of it relates to this idea

of the fundamental duty of man being love, which is unwinding or unbend, it. It's the unbending of man, where man becomes like the bent one in Tolkien or in Lewis's. I've done that twice. In Lewis's Ransom Trilogy, the bent man, the unman, the bent one, two related characters. Augustine described sin and the warping of sin as homo incurvatus insay, which is the man curved in on himself. So we become through sin like collapsing stars, where our sin, we warp all of our love, instead of upward and outward to God and to our neighbor, which turns out to be proper self-love.

Right. You love yourself properly when you love God and your neighbor. And instead, we've warped all of the object of our love and affection onto ourselves, which makes us like dying, collapsing stars. That just eventually you go past a point of no return, and your humanity itself collapses into this just singularity of wreckage. Yeah. where the image of God is ultimately effaced and destroyed and marred,

and you become something less than this divine image bearer, this glorious high thing that you were made. In the same way that Lucifer created as this bright morning, this beautiful, glorious creation of God becomes a fell and lowly and worm-like thing, serpentine, draconian sort of thing. We collapse inward, and it's important to see that, Like one of the ways we fight the dragon and fight the inner werewolf, we fight the beast within and where we become like a beast.

We fight it through love. Yeah. We fight it through like, we want to pick up, you know, and we're haunted cosmos. We like spooky stories and things like that. We want to, you know, become like the werewolf for the vampire hunter. Van Helsing. Yeah, Van Helsing in Dracula, which is a really fun read.

Yeah, honestly a great part. Like, I want to pick up all my weapons. And really, like, the weapons of our warfare, fundamentally, they are the tools of love. Learning to love a right. Learning to have our loves ordered properly, upward and outward, and not curved inward, in a self-destructive collapsing inward spiral of inhumanity. Yeah. So one of the themes you see in these werewolf stories, and it's crazy how the throughline holds,

not just through medieval and obviously within Christian culture stories of lycanthropy and things such as as our friend Wendegoon says and I aspire to be his friend I'm not actually his friend Elijah I'm pretty sure that's

we'd love to hang out with you please have your people call our people and we're just our people so calls things such as these Christian stories when you go into the Native American

which is just paganistic paganism and things you find the same through line that the skin walker, as we'll see, is just the man who so rejects his humanity to become a skinwalker in their lore. You have to often be initiated into that world by doing something so violent against your humanity. Right. You know, this is a through line. It's not just in the Christian stories. And I think it's worth pointing out that that means you can't just, you're not just hating God. It's not this like a,

like in your mind only you're saying oh well i hate god i believe you know you always manifest what you believe and so uh your hatred of god manifests itself in a hatred of nature and the thing that he made yes and so uh the way that we see that with someone like lucifer is that god made a natural order of hierarchy in the heavenly realm with himself at the top and lucifer hated that he hated god and so he hated that yeah and in his hatred he he you know as milton says i would rather be a king in hell than a servant in heaven that goes hard it's just this complete twisting i'm milton is such a chad um and then we see how that works with humans in in texts like romans one where uh man is actually given over to his depravity

and it's this saying i say it all the time um the judgment for sin is oftentimes more sin you know if you if you're in sin well you know that you're in a really really bad way if you just want to keep sinning more. If you don't care, if your conscience is not biting you, if you feel no sorrow, you're really, really bad. Yeah.

Because the judgment for sin is just that you would continue to collapse in on yourself. I think that's a great, you know, like a black hole kind of metaphor is really good. And so part of our whole, again, like what you're saying,

the tool to combat that is properly loving. And it includes properly loving the way that God made the world. world and the hierarchies that he put in the world. So I was talking to my wife last night, actually. One of our sons is, you know, he's three. So he's especially aware now of the fact that he's not the king of the universe. Or he's becoming aware of that. He's becoming self-aware and he's realizing that in the pecking order of the home, he's actually at the bottom, which is good.

Yeah. It's where he needs to be. It's a gift. Yes, because he's new. He doesn't know anything. If he's he was at the top, we'd all be doomed. To not be exalted past your station is a gift. It's a gift. And so I was talking to my wife and I was like, yeah, I was thinking, you know, I tell him like, Adner, this is exactly what you need to do, what you need to say in order for everything to be okay. And we can all go back to having fun and, you know, full restoration.

And yet he still is just, he hears me and he's like, I don't believe you. I'm going to do the other thing. And I was talking to her about how sometimes when I'm at my worst, I'm like, man, why does he do that? Like, that's so silly. And then I think, oh, I do that every day. I still do that. That sounds like what I do here every day. It's insider trading. It's just sin. But it's this particular vein of sin that says, I know for a fact that this is the way that God, it's a law that God put into the world, that parents are over their children. And I hate it. Yep. And so I'm going to, even if it means my own misery, I'm going to go against it.

So in conclusion, animorphs are demons. Animorphs are demons 100%. Like, I think there's a group, there's a group that someone created on Facebook so that they can tag it and people tag it all the time

and it's just haunted cosmos investigated this and determined it was demons. Animorphs are demons. What are other? Flipper, a demon. Probably like Free Willy. Free willy is 100%. Any animal that can communicate with a man.

Any animal that would probably was once a man, first of all. So true. Free Willie actually was a man named Will. Will. And then he... Animorphs, Power Rangers. Power Rangers, for sure.

Dude. Transformers. I was about to say. On notice. All of the animals in Darnia. But we should continue now. And I think I'm going to take us into a story.

About the Windigo. The Windigo. One of my... These are some... And actually like... Just real quick. Go ahead. As we go into it.

Yeah, you got to find a picture. find your page, think of how this, the Windigo origin and myth and stuff is a little bit different from most of the other ones we're going to talk about. In the year of our Lord 1907, a Cree Indian man named Jack Fiddler sat in a jail cell with his son Joseph. Jack was 87 years old at the time, stoic and weathered from a life of chafing against powers he knew nothing of. He sat unfeeling on the cold metal bench of the jail and stared blankly through the bars of the cell as if he could see straight through the brick wall beyond them. Images of his recent acts flashed in his mind like a visceral alarm, ringing in a decrepit

house that you find yourself completely alone in on a dark and wet night. He did not want to remember. He did not want to see, but he did nonetheless. And this was his cross to bear. He was a martyr lauded by none, a bloody servant whose exploits of protection received no recognition save that of condemnation. See, some days prior, Jack and Joseph had been arrested for the murder of another local Cree woman. The two had put up no fight when being arrested, nor any defense in their speedy trial. Rather, they boldly pled guilty with great confidence in their eventual vindication. Their confidence stemmed from what they believed to have been an ironclad excuse for what they did and why they did it. As Jack provided this justification for his gruesome acts, the judge sat in

entranced by the charisma of this village elder and living legend. You see, though he was not praised or all that well regarded, he was well known by the community. For his entire life, Jack had pursued a side hustle as a Wendigo Hunter. According to him, he had killed 14 of the undead beasts over the course of his career, all of it free of charge and in pure service to the tribe. This recent arrest, though technically the killing of a person, had been another in that same list of acts of service to his people. The woman he and his son had just killed was,

according to him, in the process of fully turning into an evil and subhuman Wendigo. Though the transformation was not yet fully complete, it had passed the point of no return. In order to keep the rest of the tribe's people safe, Jack needed to kill this woman. It was merciful. It was loving. It was self-sacrificial. After all, he was the one that had to live with it.

He was the only one willing to get his hands dirty. They should be thanking him. The Algonquin people consist of Native American tribes who now live in the eastern areas of central and northern Canada, but who originated as a distinct people group around the Great Lakes region in the modern U.S. For centuries, these various tribes reaped the fruit of living so close to such a rich ecology. Fresh water ran in rivers and sat in beautiful lakes all around them. Small and large game left their trails and clues virtually. anywhere they looked. Produce yielded well, fruit grew on the trees and bushes. It was an idyllic

garden of life and potential growth from the day they set foot in the region. But that was only in the warmer months. When winter descended from the northern wilderness down the bare back of the great lakes, the terrain took on a new personality altogether and almost overnight. What were once powerful rivers were now frozen valleys and crevasses hiding death and suffocation beneath any foolish feet. The lakes turned from warm and sunlit paradises for every man into miniature deserts of ice and snow, a stark white flat irons which only yielded their fish after great pains of labor from the people. Much of the game descended into unfound holes for months. The ground held back its produce in a vice grip of desperate cold and frozen dirt. The fruit was gone. Those less prepared for the harsh

conditions suffered severe punishment for their sluggishness. Water, shelter, and fire. were all quick to come by, but when the food ran out, it was pretty well completely gone. Those under the judgment of famine had little hope to survive until the spring warmth thawed their woods and hearts. And it was by these conditions that the legend of the Wendigo was first conceived. For it was said among the Ojibwe people that with the winter, cold, and snow comes often another enemy from the north, a monster of immense size and with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. Though the monster was always said to take the form of a man, to call it a man would be to stain the entire race of humankind with unwashable blight.

The origin of these monsters could take many forms, but they all shared some common denominators that yielded the title of Wendigo. Hunger would drive the weary nomads of the Upper Canadian Marches to full desperation. In their amaciation, they would begin to harbor unnatural desires in their heart. The hunger robbed these men of sleep. The sleep robbed these men of sanity. The psychosis robbed these men apparently. of any trace of humanity.

Thus they transformed from human to humanoid. They began to walk on all fours with their lanky and nobly limbs undaunted by the cold. In place of hair, they grew dreads of dead string that hung like tarnished fabric from patches on their scalp. And where bare skull used to be, spikes of excess bone now formed and broke the skin. Antlers shot out of the creature's head

like branches from an undead and decaying tree. Were any warmth to return to their lives, land upon this final transformation. It would not matter. The hunger for man's demise would never leave them now. For however long their miserable days wore on, they would lust for the flesh of the beings they had once been. Tribes would be terrorized. Villagers would have their children snatched away. After some days, the picked skeleton of the victim would be found in the forest. When no other victim presented itself to these hunters from hell, they would consume their own flesh in a mad state of ravenous vendetta against their own weak moral spines.

Final and horrific punishment before the pains of hellfire. Or at least, this is according to the legend. But how trustworthy is it? Well, for quite some time, historians have hypothesized that our understanding of the Wendigo is altogether faulty. Some camps advocate for an early mistranslation of Wendigo from fool to ghoul that led to these macab conclusions. They say that the word simply referred to the village drunkard. Others swing to the opposite side and say that the word refers to a psychotic maniac, an ancient

kind of serial killer, who certainly behaved in a beastly way, but was in all just a sick and twisted person. They call this Wendigo psychosis and claim that any description of ghoulish or inhuman attributes given to these people were just hyperboized and metaphorical descriptors used by the tribe to convey an impression of what the person had become. It's all symbolism. It's all simile. It's all in its essence, not real. For this take, historians appealed to the story of men like Swift Runner, a trapper member of the Kree tribe from Alberta. It's well documented that over the course of winter in 1878,

the food ran out for Swift Runner and his family. They slowly starved with no hope. As death acquainted itself with them, despair struck her final blow. Swift Runner's eldest son died. something tripped in the man, a switch closing a circuit in his mind of heretofore unthinkable violence. Over the course of the next days,

he butchered and consumed his wife and five remaining children. Initially, people assumed this was the sad story of a man driven to madness by the certainty of death by starvation. But as they dug deeper, they found it wasn't so simple. See, though the winter was harsh, travel was still possible. And there was a cache of emergency food supplies open to any who needed them, only 25 miles away from Swift Runner's home.

He could have saved his family, but instead he consumed them. Swift Runner confessed to his crimes and was executed by the authorities. The records record his mental state as that of Wendigo Psychosis. What came over him? What tripped? What deception caught him and refused to let go? But the question remains, are these modern historians who want to materialize all the old myths actually

right? Is it all just legend and metaphor? Is it all just hyperbole? Is it all just the ravings of an ancient people who know no better? No. Ben is like Wanda goes to real. The thing is

we didn't get into really many stories of Wendda Goes there, but you see it's because they're hard to find. You get like the stories one of the most recent ones I heard was from a you know a man goes out with his family to a remote cabin up in the northern pine for us. And he's, you know, there with his loved ones. And, you know, he's got his

teenage kids. And they're kind of like, I don't want to be here, dad. You know, this is kind of annoying and sulking a little bit. And, you know, they realized one, one evening that, like, the teenage boy is nowhere to be found. And so it's getting dark. And the dad's like, he's probably just went down, you know, walked around out in the woods and just, you know, was sulking, being a teenager. And so he goes out. and the dad's searching for him, and the night is falling around, and it's kind of like, I'm getting a little creeped out, you know, the feeling.

And then he's like, starts hearing this blood-curdling call. It's like, doesn't know what animal it is. It's some kind of wailing call. And if he had just listened to Haunted Cosmos, this unreleased episode. This unreleased episode, he would have known that it was a classic Wendigo. Right.

You know, classic Windico call. The pitch is A minor. A minor, typically, but it's usually like 440 tuned, not 432. And so he's searching for his boy calling out. He's getting freaked out. And then in the meadow, like he comes to a meadow with breaking the trees, and he sees this like seven foot tall, gaunt, skeletal, antlers coming out of his head, red-eyed, just terrifying beast.

And it's just looking at him. And he just, like, is frozen and knows he can't do it. He, he, this thing is could do whatever it wants to him. Right. And it just kind of looks at him and then lopes off into the woods. And of course he runs back. And the sun is back. And he's like, where were you?

I was just, you know, out back or whatever. It's these, you hear these stories. There's hundreds and hundreds of them of people who claim. Did you see the, do you see the, do you see the, did you see the TikTok video that was going around? Which one? Which one? Which one? It was this guy.

he was riding his motorcycle you know like KTM or whatever through the back country. Yeah. And he was all alone. This is terrifying. It's creepy as freak. Yes. And he's all alone. You know, light is starting to get low.

It's not dark, but it's kind of that everything, it looks like you have a blue lens or a blue filter over your glasses or something. And it comes with this fork in the trail. and you can hear his bikes on, he turns his bike off because he doesn't know which way to go or if he just wants to turn around and call it a day. And you hear all of the insects and birds, all kinds of things. And I mean, in a moment, it just gets dead quiet.

Dead quiet. You can't hear anything. And the guy comments on it in the video. He's like, what the heck? It's like a noise cancel. And then there's like he's looking over in this direction in the chest GoPro or whatever. wearing, if you blink, you miss it, but it catches this weird shadow humanoid thing. Oh, good.

Lurking out of the bushes, looking right at him and coming towards him, he sees it and freaks out and gets on his bike and, of course, it doesn't start. And so he's like kicking as hard as he can, looking over his shoulder. And finally it starts and he just beelines it out of the trail. This is where you glocky-glock. And you find out if Wendigos are immune to a bullet spruce. Carls caliber hollow points or not. This is why you always need to be...

You always need to be chambered with a silver bullet. I'm not making that up. Look, I don't know if that's real. It is. It seems made up. Hey, you want to know what I learned about why vampires don't like garlic? Why?

Do you know why they don't like garlic? I have no idea. It's because a vampire is a fungus on society. It's like a viral infection. Yeah. And garlic doesn't get... It doesn't ever rot. It doesn't know.

It's not, it's not, it's incorruptible. Yeah, it's, it, you can't have bacteria or whatever. Interesting. Survive on it. And so they would throw garlic at the vampire because the vampire was just one big bacteria. Anyway. And because of that, the manufactured China virus remapped my brain and made garlic taste horrible. Oh, I can't stand garlic anymore.

It made me into a macrob. Dude, it made me into a vampire. Dude. Oh, this is the last one. I'll tell you another. So this is one that's like, I heard an interview with this guy. So this is a first-hand story that I, you know, this isn't creepypast or something. My sources like, I was looking, really hard. This one is from a cattle rancher up in Alberta. So again, same,

it's the correct region. Yeah. For the thing. Alberta. And they, they farm up there, but they're bordered by the king, the king's land. It's like the, the equivalent of BLM land here in Utah, or in, in America, Bureau of Land Management, not Black Lives Matter, but they're again, both bad organizations. And they're bordered by, it's basically mountains and forest and stuff like, and that's like 500 acres or something where they were ranching and growing corn and they had cattle and all sorts of things. And one of the things they would do is they'd beat the fence. So they go along the fence lines or the borders and make sure that nothing's getting into the crops. And this was just a regular duty, kind of like a chore.

You get on your horse, he's riding the fence, and he notices a breach in the fence and then some, like something's been coming into the corn that's large, but the corn's not eaten, which means that it's a predator. That usually means, because if it's

something ruminant or something, it's going to eat the corn. Yeah, they'll just destroy that. But a predator will come in... We'll touch peb on that corn. That's absolutely right, dude. Couldn't have said it better myself. A predator will use the corn and wait for animals. that eat the corn. So he spends a couple nights, tree stand, just out there with his rifle. You're thinking it's something, some large predator, bear, a cougar or something.

And he's going to defend the crops, doesn't want their cattle, getting ed up, nothing, you know. So he's back and forth and he's just, you know, it's still happening, but he doesn't know what's doing it. So one day, broad daylight, he goes out, and this time he stopped carrying the rifle because it was real big and heavy. He started carrying a large shotgun, 12-gauge slug. Can take down a very large, like a bear. A bear will stop with one of those. Easier to maneuver on his horse. So he rides his horse out, kind of loosely ties it to the fence.

And his horse was drop lead trained so that if you just drop the lead, it will act like it's tied up and stay. but he kind of loosely tied it so it could get away if something happened or whatever. And he goes out into the corn and he finds another track where it's been coming in. And he's out, it's under the woods. And he's like looking, looks in the woods a little bit. Can't find it. And so he said, I'm going to follow it into the corn and just see how far it got. And he's expecting nothing there, but just the trail.

See if he can pick up any tracks or whatever. So he goes in there. He's got a shotgun. and about, you know, 20 yards in, not that far. He just gets this dread, like that feeling of, I'm in danger. And he starts hearing a rustling up ahead. And he's like, okay, I'm scared because there's a large predator here. There's a bear or something up in there.

He's going. And then all of a sudden, about 10 yards away, up out of the corn, pops this enormously tall, gaunt. He can't describe it as any animal he's ever seen. And he immediately, I mean, what a Chad King. He does what I just described. Yeah. He immediately, he's Canadian, but I mean, he acts like a red-blooded American.

And so anyway, I started blasting. He shoots the creature, and he knows he hit it, like right in the shoulder with a 12-gauge slug. Yeah. And he turns and he's... That'll just like cut your arm off. Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of kinetic energy hitting you. But the thing is like coming towards him now, drops down into the corner.

He knows it's coming for him. So he bolts, runs, he jumps back over the fence. He gets on his horse and he doesn't even look back. He just starts riding for home, which is like over a mile away. Riding, riding, riding. And he's pretty convinced the thing's still following it. So he rides up all the way to the house, the way that their house was laid up. It actually, like, he could literally ride the horse into the house.

It was like a very rustic barn kind of, oh, man. He literally rides his, the rest of his family gone. It's just his dad and him there at this time of the year. And his dad is like, what the heck are you doing? Riding the horse into the house. And he's like, dad, something is hunting me. And his dad just doesn't even say where ghost gets his rifle. and they just, for like 12 hours,

because it was towards the evening, they watched and they said they saw something over on the hill, at the hill line, just kind of walking, stalking, like bipedal, upright, big. And the, he's speculated. I don't know what it was. He's like, maybe from the normal explanation, it was a bear that had disease and was starved,

and they can stand up and look really weird. but he was like, I've seen bear. I don't think it was a bear. You know, was it a big foot? Was it a Wendigo? Yeah. And he couldn't. Dude, it was a Wendigo.

So what I'm saying is it was a Wendigo. And again, I heard this first person. And the guy seemed real normal. Yeah. Cattle Rancher type. Dude, I'm sure he was. He was like, nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I believe it.

I believe it. Could have been a Skidwalker too, though. It could have been. And I'm thinking the reason I thought Wendigo is because of the region. I was like, oh, it's Northern Canada. Sure. This is a Wendigo. country.

Right. Of course. Wendigo country. We do need to make a distinction. So, yeah, I was going to say the Windigo versus Skinwalker thing, a windigo, and I hope that what we read kind of got this across,

a windigo isn't necessarily trying to become one. It's not like, you know, a guy wakes up one day and he's like, I would love to shape shift and become a demonic windigo. Yeah. Skinwalker does. Skinwalker is a

is a practitioner of dark magic, black magic, and they want to become a Skin Walker. You can think of it like the distinction between, you know, Draco, Malfoy, and his dad. Actually? Like, Lucius is, Lucius is knowingly malicious, wants to be evil. Draco has a weak moral spine. And so he gives himself over to it. But it's not like he really wants to be there. He doesn't want to be doing these horrible things. And you get that in the book and everything. Even, like, I'm kind of torn on like what Smeagle would be. I think Smeagel is much more like a windigo.

He had this lust for the ring that like overcame his weak moral. Consumed him. Yeah, and it consumed him. But he didn't just think like, I can't wait to kill my friend Degel. And become a horror. It just in a moment. And so, but it is worth saying contra Draco, but like Smeagel, once they overcome that moral, that moral barrier.

they do give themselves to it. So like a windigo, once he becomes a windigo, even though he doesn't want to be one, he really like plays the part, so to speak. Brian, I got bad news. The other day, I was using one of the big box soap products to wash myself. And I got this weird urge to go buy a Stanley cup and fill it with iced coffee. And it started to feel a little cold in the house. I just wanted to wrap myself up in like a heavy wool blanket.

And then also, I started Googling ticket. prices to Taylor Swift concerts. Ben, what are you doing? Don't you know that these big box soap companies just jam all their soaps full of hormone-disrupting chemicals? They're probably turning you into a girl. Well, I know that now, but what am I supposed to do about it? Ben, you ignorant normie. All you've needed to do is go to indigo sundry soap.com and support a great Christian family business that's making all sorts of soaps that are completely free of hormone disrupting chemicals and other nasties. Okay, I am literally going to indigosundrysoap.com. right now. Tell me what to buy. Ben, what I would recommend doing is clicking on bundles and then

selecting the best one for you. You could get the men's six-pack. You could get my favorite, the clay bundle. Ooh, I like the pipe and jug bundle. That seems cool. Or a men six-pack, because that'll make me feel like I have something that I actually don't. So true, King. And you know what else I heard? Because they're such good friends of the show, Indigo Sundry's soap company is offering 10% off your order. If you just use all caps, discount code, haunted cosmos, no spaces. Wait, Brian, you're going way too fast. I didn't get all that. Is that information in the show description?

Ben, you ignorant normie. It's always in the show description. Okay, so I'm going to go to indigo sundry soap.com. I'm going to pick the men's six-pack bundle, and I'm going to use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout, all caps, no spaces. And if I forgot all that, it's in the description of the show. Of course, Ben.

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That's COS MOS 15, all caps for 15% off your order. So once they're given over, the difference between them and like a skin walker is fairly negligible. but the origin is different. What happened to Jack Fiddler? Jackie Fidd? Yeah, did he go to jail? How did the trial go?

I have no idea. I couldn't find anywhere like what actually happened to him. So Jack Fiddler claimed to have been killing this woman because she was a Wendigo. He was like, officer, I was just touching Pett.

She was turning into a Wendigo. Like I was trying to just keep it real, do my duty. She was mid-windigo, Animorph. And I went for it. People that don't know what animorphs are. Actually, I was asked,

so our co- Worker Ethan Sen. I was asking him yesterday, like, hey, what should we title this episode? He was like, Animorphs. I have this really strong fourth grader memory of being sick one day. And I was like, I was genuinely, I wasn't faking it. But I was like, oh, sweet. I get to stay home and read animorphs all day. And I read like three animorph books. I never read Anamorphs. Dude, Peregrine Falcon, the guy that becomes Tobias or whatever becomes a Perigran Falcon. Spoiler alert. Dang. He can go fast. He's the fastest animal in the world if he's in free fall. You ever seen a video of a peregrine falcon, like, running into a bird?

The bird is... I mean, straight, like, dude, it's the coolest video I've ever seen. That bird thing just got eight. It's this explosion of feathers. Hey, I think we should talk about skin walkers. Yeah, what we need to do is the thing that I really want is I want to hear about some skin walkers. And I'm going to tell you about him. So the Navajo magic was a part of life.

It wasn't a matter of if some unseen but active force was present in the world. It was only a matter of which unseen or active force one gave oneself to, the forces of good or the forces of evil. Of course, the Christian has the tools to look at such an ironic cosmology in a pagan people, and remember that for those without the one true living God, all communion with supernatural forces will be communion with evil. Even if that evil takes different shades of appearance, even if that evil appears as an angel of light.

At any rate, though, at least the Navajo could read the world for what it is, something that includes much more than whatever is seen, smelled, felt, tasted, or heard. But what they did with this information betrays their lamentable godlessness and paganism that ultimately served to seal their own destruction. As the Navajo matured into their own people, certain ones among them stood out as particularly skilled at the craft of supernatural communion. The way these people made themselves known was by using a mixture of natural resources, talismanic charms, ceremonial chance, and other religious rights to offer healing,

blessing and prophecy to the tribes people around them. Whether it was the rotten fruit of a psychedelic trip to the machine elves, or a momentary trance at the spoken word of a powerful charm, these medicine men, as they came to be called, started benefiting their tribes in larger societies in massive ways. And for a while this is all that happened. The beneficent medicine men would commune with the so-called benevolent gods and would then bestow gifts from those gods upon his neighbors and people.

But the temptation to darkness was always present. And as the medicinemen grew an influence and power, the temptation to use their abilities for selfish ambition became too much for many of them to take. So it was that the Navajo witch came to be, former medicine men, most of whom still acted as medicine men during the day and only turned to their witchery under the cover of night. Dove headfirst into the most grotesque and inhuman forms of magic available to them,

in order to satisfy whatever lust they could concoct in their fallen hearts. Many of these witches, craving blood and the taste of human flesh, craving escape from the limiting cage they thought their body was, soon sought out the favor of the gods and became shapeshifters, man-animal chimeras of different forms, but all bred for a single purpose, to steal life away from the world. These witches were the skinwalkers. To become a skinwalker, one had to be initiated to the order

by a higher congress of gods and existing witches. The subject would be forced to murder a relative, usually a sibling in cold blood and with pleasure. With this done, the subject would be admitted to the ranks of other skinwalkers and would receive his or her own, though usually it was men, supernatural ability to shape shift and to endow himself with supernatural strength and toughness. From there they wreaked havoc. Delicate life was stolen away.

The women of the tribe were always at particular risk. Not only did the mostly male body of walkers prefer the murder of women, but less women would mean less mothers. Less mothers would mean less children. Less children would eventually mean the death of the tribe altogether. Sometimes in order to gain greater power, the skinwalkers would dress themselves in the skins and bones of the animals they were most adept at shifting into the form of. They became less and less men and more and more beast.

In their hatred for God's image, they reduced themselves to driveling murderers of the night, who used animals they had killed while in animal form as talismans to help them stay in their animalistic state, even when they transformed back into the form of a man. Eventually they would forget what it was to be a human at all. Instead of a man transforming into a coyote or wolf, the veteran Skinwalker saw itself as a coyote or a wolf, transforming into the guise of a man periodically. Despite this, any unlucky woman or child who caught sight of a Skinwalker in its animal form immediately knew it for what it was. According to these witnesses, the eyes never changed. The eyes were always the eyes of a man.

This uncanny detail only added to the horror. Given this reality the Navajo faced, it's no surprise that hatred for these turncoats of mankind ran deep in their tribes. After the tumultuous beginning that was U.S. Navajo relations, the countless wars the Navajo engaged in with the U.S. Army in the 19th century. A watchful peace was found between the two parties. In this time of peace, an epidemic of skinwalkers began to eviscerate the Navajo ranks, while they also brought curse and blight down on their huntsable. and crops. Whole families starved to death. Parents lost children to the subhuman night predators, those witches that preternaturally towed the line between man and beast, and the leaders of the Navajo became desperate for some respite to their trouble. These leaders sought

the support of the U.S. government in allowing them to carry out trials in their tribes, whose result would purge the evil from among them. And so in 1878, the Navajo Witch Purge began in earnest. 40 people were executed by the Navajo, 40 skinwalkers according to them, who were beastial servants of the world's most evil forces, and whose death would bring harmony and flourishing back to their lives. Consider that. Only 150 years ago, 40 people were tried and found guilty for shape-shifting, witchcraft and murder, and all the most sensible people in both the Navajo and U.S. government thought it not only acceptable, but necessary. Our rejection of these things is not a a sign of maturity and modernism success. It is a sign of our forgetfulness and pride.

I'm going to take a cart out of Brian Sobey's playbook here. And I just remember the Skinwalker story. I want to hear it, Ben. That is so creepy, dude. And if you don't sound design, I'm going to include this where you can't cut it out now. If you don't sound design, all of these amazing stories we're telling between takes. Bro, I unsubscribe from Honda Cosmos. There was a episode, previously in the season where Brian was like you got to sound design this and then I just to bother him

I didn't I will sound design these I was so I was like hey I was irate hey dude I was I was hey hey hey I know you will do I got it dude but anyway so this story okay so this family goes up and they buy a mountain house

up in like the Pacific Northwest or something like that okay as one does could be Skinwalker country Easily. Because skin walkers can be anywhere. And they can be. Probably several in this room right now. Exactly.

Where is the skinwalker in this room right now? And anyway, so they go, they buy this vacation home. They stay there for a while, have a wonderful time. There's a lake close by, all this good stuff. And then they leave and, you know, years pass. The allure of the mountain house begins to wane. They're not as excited about it anymore. And so really, it's just their oldest son.

who loves to go up there. Yeah. He goes up there to go hunting and fishing, on breaks from school, and then eventually he gets to college, and he goes up there for longer stays in between classes. Can you imagine? That would be amazing. Can you even imagine?

It reminds me of Kyle Mason, who, like, lived with, like, no electricity, no plumbing. Literally, for five years. He had to have five years. What a kid? And he's, like, the smartest guy I know. He is so smart. Dude, no offense.

No offense to you. No offense to you. He's way smarter than both of us. He is so smart. Anyway, so this kid, he goes up, and one time, he goes up there, and it's the only house for miles. And he's getting settled and everything, and he starts to hear the sound of children laughing. And never go towards the children laughing. Never go towards the children.

But it's like right outside the door. And so he's thinking, like, well, did another house get built or something in the time that I was away? And maybe I have neighbors now. So he just goes out and he's looking around out the window, doesn't see anything, but here's the noise still. Walks out the door and then he sees it. There's a radio in the front yard playing the sound of children laughing. Okay, that is the creepiest thing I've ever heard in my entire life. I know.

I immediately shoot it. And it wasn't there before. My solution to almost any situation is glocky, glocky, glocky, talky talk to the glocky glocky. Well, so he's freaked out. He's like, what the... But classic alpha male college student doesn't think a good enough reason to leave. Instead, he takes the radio

and he just, like, chucks it deep into the woods. Now they're mad that you wreck the radio. Right. Well, so later that night, he's woken up by the familiar sound of children laughing. Okay. He goes and looks out the bedroom window he can see into the front yard,

and sure enough, the radio is right back where it was. Skinner, like, her holding up a boombox. It's like, I love you. But come back to me. So he stays up, night watch. He's not going out there in night. Dude, heck no. You know?

So he just like turns all the lights on, make sure all the doors are blocked with furniture and stuff and just is waiting it out. Yeah. In the morning, he gets the radio and, like, drives it far away and then throws it again into the woods. And then what do you know? The radio is not the problem.

But the thing bringing the radio. Exactly. What is wrong with? Again, later that night, he's woken up to the familiar sound of children laughing. He looks out and he sees the radio once again in his front yard playing. Well, this time, he does destroy it. He waits, he bars the doors and windows, waits till the next morning, goes out. I don't know, I don't remember what he does if he shoots it or just like runs over it with his truck or something.

But either way, the radio is no more. He keeps it in the trash. And it's completely unusable. And then that night, he's woken up by the first. familiar sound of children laughing. And he goes and he looks out the window. There's no radio in the front yard. And so he's especially confused that.

He goes out the door, he peeks out, and he looks and all he can see is the whites of two eyes on the tree line. And that is what's making the sound of the children laughing. And the reason that it's a skin walker is because skin walkers are well known. This is well documented. This is true. In the lore. That they mimic the sound.

of people that they have consumed. Even the voices of loved ones. Yes. And so they can make you think you're hearing something completely innocuous and innocent. And in reality, it's just a, it's like a fishing lure of the Skinwalker. If I was a Skinwalker, and I'm not,

and don't desire to be, but if I was, I would probably eat, someone like, someone with a, I'd eat Ben, so I had his voice physiognomy. Dude, if I was a skinwalker, I would be the best skinwalker ever. I'd be like chomping down on like rugby players.

Well, you don't, do you get their voice or just their attributes? Oh, but like they're meaty. That's what I'm saying. Like meat on the bone, dude. I'd be a fat skinwalker. I'd be eating like people with really good singing voices.

Like an opera singer. I would eat. And I would just be figaroing around. I would eat Matthew McConaughey. Dude, I would eat Owen Wilson. And then I'd be able to... Wow. Wow.

Harry Potter. I would eat... Avatacadab. I'd be able to do it perfect. I would eat Donald Trump because the comedian that can do the Donald Trump voice so perfect. Shane Gillis?

He sounds better than Donald Trump. He actually sounds more like Donald Trump than Donald Trump. You know who I would eat? Who would you eat? Andy Baxter of Penny and Sparrow. That guy's got a great singing voice. Yeah. I mean, if I think we've come up with a good plan.

Yeah, 100%. I think we've brought a lot of... of value. If we ever completely apostatized. Yeah, absolutely. Became Skinwalkers. Let me just...

Let me ask you this question, bro. Okay. Do you ever think that shapeshifting could be redeemed and could be used for something good? I feel like this is a trick question

because if I say no, then I have to renounce my guy from the Hobbit. Beore. I have to renounce him. That's so true. And I don't want to, because he's so, he's such a lovable grump.

But he eats orcs, he takes, well, I don't know if he eats him. They'd probably be disgusting, but he kills orcs. Gollum did. Gollum ate orcs all the time. Orcs used to eat orcs. That's true. Yeah, like, I mean, in stories and myth, we see this happen. Yeah, okay.

So, yeah, we have, like, examples of Greek goddesses and gods that are actually giving people shape-shifting as an act of mercy. Uh-huh. Athena does this to a woman who was violated and she turns her into an owl so that she is no longer violated. That's the whole fix. So she can fly away? Well, no. Just so that she, like, no one ever messes with it. She's an owl. She's just like, oh, it's just an owl.

I don't know if that's actually helpful. Well, couldn't you just give her a gun? No, because it was ancient Greece and the Bronze Age. Yeah, but if you can make an owl. Out of a person. Come on. Daphne was given the power to change into a laurel tree to escape the advances of Apollo. And then we see Tolkien kind of take this motif.

teeth, and which is why, just no one's gotten this yet. What? But there's a reference to it in the song Daphne written by me. She's a... Mama's eyes are Laurel green. No one's gotten. I'm actually kind of disappointed in the world. No, I got it, dude.

I just got it. I didn't know what you said in that. You got it. It's okay. No, I didn't know what you said in that line. Yeah. Because I didn't look up the lyrics. It's okay.

I'm so sorry. I'm disappointed in all of us. But look, here's where I'm going. Yeah, where are you going? Here's what I'm going with this. Two questions. All right, so first of all, we have Tolkien, giving us an example of redeeming this motif

for the purposes of a really good Christian story. Baron and Luthian are able to shape shift into different creatures, even bad ones, so that they can penetrate into angband. Animals. Yes. And steal the Silmaril from Morgoth's Iron Crown. Okay, yeah. Okay. So I think Luthian becomes a bat like a nightbird and Baron is a dog or a wolf, a hound. A wolf, not a hound. And then you also have the story of Elwing. Now, Elwing was the daughter of Dior. She was the wife of Airendil, mother of Elrond and Elros.

Who was a mariner that tarried and Arvernian. Yes, of course. He built a boat of Timberthel. Timberthel and Nimrithel the journey in. Yes. Of course he did. Obviously. And while Aarendil is away on one of his many, many voyages, the sons of Feanor come to take vengeance on Elwing and her people for taking one of the Silmarils, as one does. Okay, like all of her people are slaughtered, Elrond and Elros are taken by the sons of Feanor, the Elwing is cast into the sea. But Olmo, the valor of the sea, saves her and sends her to Airendil by turning her into a great white bird.

Oh. So here's the question. So all of these Tolkien examples do they demonstrate. It's just because I wanted to talk about. I know, I know. In the real world, the answer's no, no shape-shifting. Just don't do it. But like, dude, here's my question.

Can glorified man-shaping? No. All right. Answer, no. No, they can't. But it does show. I mean, that we know of. I, no.

But I do think that Christians should be free to, like, in enjoying stories and reading myths and stuff. We should actually be free to use this motif in a way that can be good. You know, it's like, can a vampire be good? Well, if you turn them into a Christian vampire, yeah. But that's not a vampire. That's different.

And this isn't like anthropy. It's just a pointy-toothed Christian. Because he's not going to be like murdering people and drinking their blood anymore. But he could be like, he could be like, it's like, what's, what, Blade? He's killing all the bad vampires. All right.

I do think in seriousness, kind of summing up some of the threads here, whether mythological or actual, we do see this real instinct in people. And you see it even in, like, where we want to make war with nature, with the nature of our being as God created it, and become something other than we are. You see this in transgenderism, in the mutilation of the human figure through this like, surgical alchemical alchemy where we're like we'll just transmogrify ourselves into something that we are not right it's a rebellion and and it says a lot about the religion of the age where uh you know man is is again he's made to worship he's made to venerate but with the enlightenment when you say that god is dead god will be replaced by something else and one of the things he's replaced with in our modern America is science.

People think, oh, you trust the science. That was literally a whole slogan of one of the greatest bamboozlements in all of... Bamboozlings. And all of modern history. Trust the science. Trust the doctors. The doctors know what's good for you. Well, what about when the doctors tell you that even though you were born a little boy,

you can be a girl? And better yet, I'll do it for you. And I'll do it. I'll only charge you like a million dollars. Yeah, yeah. And you really can be a girl. Yeah. What does it say when doctors even...

work around the authority of the parent. You know, school counselors telling children, well, it sounds like you actually just want to be the opposite sex. Yeah, they're just being witches. And your parents never need to know. And we can totally, we can give you hormone blockers. We can do all these things.

This false God that the modern world is worshipping is giving out the same petty, capricious punishments, guised as gifts to its worshippers. And that is that just like the Greek gods did with so many of the subjects beneath them, the modern gods of science and the medical practice are telling people, you don't actually have to be the way that you are. And it's such a lie.

But when people give themselves over to that, especially at a society level, one of the things it does is it destroys society. So transgenderism is a civilization level threat. Yeah. Because it's seeking to completely end human. humanity. Yeah. But even at an individual level, it's leading those individual people down a road of perdition that will leave them almost subhuman, where they no longer actually are a part of the

human race. They've become something completely foreign to themselves. And you even see that with people taking up like furries and stuff. Yeah, where they're basically saying, it's usually some sort of sexual. Yeah, perversion. Perversion. perversion or, you know, where they're, yeah, they're basically saying, I'm going to reject my humanity and become this other thing. Again, it's the collapsing inward of the disordering of loves leading you to become a self-consuming thing, where you ultimately, like you said, the sin's, the judgment for sin is often you get more sin. The sin is a judgment on itself where you get what you wanted and you find out that you just keep destroying yourself further. and degrading yourself further and further and further. And there's redemption in Christ.

Yeah, 100%. People need to hear that, that in our fallen state, man is like a beast. He reasons, his reason, his moral fortitude, all of the, every part of what it means to be human has been corrupted, infected, and affected by sin. But what Christ does is he redeems. He reaches down and he makes a new humanity in his image. where we turn from our sin and we turn back to life. And we're actually turning, we are being made like Christ,

but in being made like Christ, we're being conformed to the image of true humanity again. Yeah. Because he's the God man. He is the bridge. He's between heaven and earth, between God and man. He's the perfect, immortal high priest.

And we are conformed to his glorified humanity and so restored in the likeness of true men again. We can be ransomed from our beastliness and restored to humanity. We don't become something other fundamentally than God intended man to be. It's not like where, it's not like like anthropy in the other direction, where we become inhuman again, just in a nice angelic sort of way. Right. No, we become true men, true women. Actually, the way that glorified man, the highest man that you can possibly be.

And so one of the takeaways, honestly, is like, again, I've said this. before, but whether or not these things really happened, whether or not King Lycaon became a dog at the behest of Zeus, or whether that was a mythical theme that people were feeding on, it doesn't make a difference because we still have the same thing today. Transgenderism is just likeanthropy. It's the intentional joining of dark forces, the forces of sin and evil in the world, to get people to transform themselves into something they're not, and the result is that they're now less than they ever were. And so one of the reasons this is a civilization level threat, by the way, is because the reformed understanding of the image of God is that each individual person is made in

God's image, and they are an image bearer. And yet, you don't get the fullness of God's image unless you have full humanity, all of humanity joined together in being God's image bearers on the earth. That's the fullness of the image of God, apart from Christ. And you can't have that if a huge proportion of that humanity is something that is less than human.

In order to have the image of God in this collective sense, you actually have to have people. And so when there's a whole movement in our modern world of trying to kill people, abortion is another example of this, then you actually are losing something that you desperately want to see at the end of all things, which is an innumerable number of people, humans that have been redeemed and that can stand before God as his imagers in the new earth. So, yeah, when people are

dying, whether their lives are actually being taken or their whole being stolen away in transgenderism and they're, you know, consenting to it, then that's a civilization-level threat, a heavenly civilization-level threat. All right, Ben, well, it's time to go to France to end this episode. Yes. That is where every episode should end in France

with a crazy story. This is a well-documented story from history. You want to know what's called? What's it called, Ben? It's called Le Bette of Jevoudon. That's right, the beast of Jevoudon. The well-to-do farm. trod through a densely wooded portion of his land. This business of hiking through and over the

ridged and rugged forests in between his fields and the cover of night was not natural to him, and he didn't care for it much at all, but he was driven by necessity. A night watch had been set in place by he and other well-respected men in the small town. He knew that only a hypocrite would demand a people's watch and then fail to participate in it. Therefore, he focused as best he could, with the help of his servants and friends, on his vast expanse of wealth and potential wealth in the southwest of France, thinking that it would behoove him to look to his own, but also being convinced that his estate would be a particularly tempting place for the devil of his day to visit. He mold all of this over and over in his mind while he pushed through

the deadfall, an unpredictable ground that stretched for a few hundred yards between the end of the barley field and the beginning of the sheep's pasture. His breath started to get louder with a steady rhythm as the man succumbed to the strain of a brisk walk, the demands one open one's mouth to breathe heavier. Swet pooled into beads on his forehead, and the full pale moon met the nightwoods onyx black in a stark juxtaposition that seemed surreal to the man. Like it was a scene one could only hope to encounter in a painting, but never in real life. Normally, this might inspire awestruck wonder in the farmer, but tonight it only added to the foreboding that he and all his fellow townsfolk had been burdened with for the previous months.

Something started to happen as he kept on his walk. The sweat that sat in ranks of beads on his brow vanished in a flash as a cold wave swept through the man. His mouth started to fill with a horrible flavor, and his stomach churned with nausea, threatening vomit. A disgusting smell filled the air around him suddenly, like a match being struck in a pitch-black room penetrates the darkness with Diracian light. The man stopped.

unsteady now and swaying over unsure feet. He blinked quickly and hard and tried to focus himself. The moon peered out from behind a thin cloud, and the bleached light made that much more progress in its fight against the darkness. Presently, a sound like a stomping giant welled up behind the man. Trees snapped under the weight of this monster as it charged through foliage and wind. The man turned around. In a moment of frantic lucidity, he studied the face of this demoniac creature

and found it held up well to the descriptions he had heard. Eyes that shone like fire in the hearth. Black matted fur that dripped with alien oil and blood. Teeth too long to hide behind lips that were coiled back in anger and hunger. The monster saw the man and directed his course more precisely toward him. The farmer closed his eyes and accepted the violent doom that overtook him. But with a sensation that something had just flown past him, he opened his eyes again to see the hound of hell landing up on a ridge above him,

after having leapt over his head. Before his consciousness failed him, he heard the piercing and shrill voice of a man escaped from the maw of this murdering tyrant. Agree that, for an old man of 90, that's not a bad jump. The revelation of the truth that this beast was somehow also a man

struck the farmer dumb, and he only came to once Dawn had already broken the next day. He was one of the few to survive an encounter with the infamous beast of Jevoudon. When the Romans conquered trans-opine Gaul, they treated its people in customs in much the same way as they did other subsidiary regions of the empire. So long as the locals acclimated themselves to every Roman custom imposed on them, including civil and certain religious laws,

they were free to continue practicing their own idiosyncratic customs as well. Any time the two conflicted, depending on the severity of the event, its time, and its place, Rome would either demand they prioritize the Roman custom, or they may show leniency and allow the people to maintain their own pre-Roman way of life. This Roman rule of thumb gained widespread acceptance throughout the empire, and it led to a high level of strange syncretism between its own culture and the various cultures it ruled over. Nowhere was this more pronounced in the latter days of the empire, perhaps, than in the Gaulish regions of France and Germany. You see, southern France was one of

the earliest tributary states to Rome, and so developed a deeply rooted mixture of Roman and Gaulish culture. While the people were quite content to look and act like Romans in the civil sphere, they were always less inclined to adopt the less tangible or religious qualities of Rome. Now, to be sure, Rome was most certainly pagan, but it was a paganism that appears to be a shade different from the hyperliminal and dark forest paganism of the more northerly reaches of Europe. So while Transalpine Gaul, again today's southern France, moved with the times of the Roman Empire into Christendom and into the golden age of Carolingian rule with relative ease and lockstep, a deep taproot of latent paganism still remained in a small subset of people that lived far away

from the hustle and bustle of important empirical matters. One of these places was eventually named Jevudon. And for about 18 months, from late June 1764 to November of 1765, Jevudon was plagued by these old and forgotten memories of a more hellish past. One day, as everyone from impoverished beggars to rich noblemen diligently, or not so diligently, labored at their summer task before them, a young woman tended to her cattle. She stood at the forest's edge on the outskirts of Javel Dome and inspected the herd for pregnancies, while also taking care to note the condition of any recently born calves. After a time, she noticed the herd began to stir as a strange smell filled the air.

Cows circled around her and loat uneasily. Between the legs and tails and udders, she caught glimpses of a dark shadow moving swiftly around the ring. Finally, she heard a high-pitched cry from near the trees and watched one of the few bulls charge out from their protective circle. As she jogged over to see what it ran towards, a sharp image of pure horror met her gaze. Reared up to meet the charging bull was a massive wolf-like creature. She later went on to describe the dire beast as like a wolf, yet not a wolf.

Bright, but somehow soulless eyes sank into a brow of black hair that sagged with filth and wet. Claws like a dragon's rang in the bright sun and pointed towards the charging bull, which came up shortened fear and left the beast with a grunt. The creature, apparently seeing no need to endanger itself, gave the girl one final and purposeful glare before turning to walk away. Later, the girl would learn that the monster did not stop its hunt after it had left her. One of her neighbors, a 14-year-old named Jean Boulet, was found mauled and maimed, nearly beyond recognition that same day. She was in the middle of her family's field.

A sobering tragedy mixed with fuming terror, other victims started to rack up. Dozens and dozens of body littered the Allier River Valley of France, all of them having succumbed to death in the same way, while having their throats viciously ripped out by long and serrated fangs. With these high numbers, though, the beast also started to be able to bellowed. started to leave jobs unfinished, so to speak. Over the course of 210 total documented attacks, only 113 of the victims died, leaving the rest as witnesses that could report back on the horror they experienced.

As these reports came in, the relatively simple terror of a wolf on the loose began to give way to the more religious horror of some servant of the devil wreaking havoc on their haven of Christendom. Survivors claimed to have shot the beast multiple times, only to stand dejected and as it shook off the impacts without a second thought and continued its charge toward them. The sheer size of the thing was said to be mythical in itself, and people claimed to have watched its switch between running like a simple dog and running on its two hind legs much like a man.

Some people, akin to the farmer we opened to this story with, even reported hearing the creature speak with the voice of a demoniac human. Thus, the hidden foothold of paganism that remained in the unkempt woods of Javelin made itself known as the townsfolk grew in their certainty of this beast being a warlock filled with bloodlust who had turned himself into a werewolf to indulge his cravings and destroy the beauty he saw in his home. And if the witness reports are even halfway reliable, this conclusion is nothing short of entirely reasonable. Given the state of the body count, the civil and ecclesiastical spheres jumped into quick action. While the state funded official hunts of the creature, the church

exhorted her parishioners to pray for deliverance from this hellish plague on their fatherland. But alas, it was not in the Lord's pleasure to grant these petitions yet. Despite the full focus of the King of France bearing down on this ungodly shapeshifter, the attacks continued. Finally, one fateful day came wherein the wheels of Providence were set to roll over the beasts condemned life. A group of peasant women, led by Marie Jean Valais, the daughter of a parish priest in the area, stood on the far bank of a river and prepared to cross the little footbridge before them to the other side.

As the women modestly lifted their skirts above their ankles so as not to trip, they started shuffling across. But at the halfway mark, the group was stunned, stone still by the wild raving shrieks of a madman. They studied the tree line that stood on the bank they were going towards and reeled back in fear as the wild wolf beast walked out towards them. Valet fumbled around on the bridge and found a loose piece of wood that was sharp at one end from breaking. She stood her ground and faced the beast, forcing her courage into submission under her will that fought against staying. The other girls fled into the trees they had come from, and once they felt safe turned back around to watch the encounter. The beast flung itself on to Valet and tort her viciously. But as the maiden fell back under the maw of the creature, she set the makeshift spear onto the monster's chest and let it

fall right into it. The angry shrieks turned to desperate yelping screams as the beast fell off the bridge and into the river before scurrying up and sprinting back into the woods from whence it came. For this valor, valet was labeled a local Joan of Arc, the maid of Jaevodon. The king's hunters, following blood trails left by the creature and taking advantage of its reduced speed, eventually caught the hellhound and shot it until it died. The body of the creature was identified to be Jevoudon's terror by other survivors, and so it was sent to Versailles to serve as a trophy in the King's Hall. With this, everyone sighed with relief.

The beast of Jevoudon, whatever it was, was finally gone. Or was it? Some months later, new attacks began in the same region, all with the same symptoms. Sounds like that of a man escaped the monster. It was said that the creature could run like a man on two legs and was impervious to most attempts at attack or defense from its prey. Over a dozen more people were slaughtered beyond decency by this hater of man.

And again, the people knew, contra us moderns, what was really going on. They knew it was another warlock turned werewolf, taking revenge for the death of what everyone presumed to be his friend some months before. Want more hunted cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content as well as exclusive content, content, and regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself. So go to patreon.com slash haunted cosmos and sign up now.