Werewolves And Vampires Explained

When I was a child, I had a recurring dream.

Every night, I would go to bed dreading I would have my dream again.

I must have been only 9 or 10, and it was only suddenly sometime in my early 20s that I realized what had been happening.

Every night, out of love and care for me, my mother had been coming into my bedroom, and placing an extra blanket at the end of my bed, to keep my feet warm.

My recurring dream had been that every night, a wolf would creep into my bedroom, and lie at the end of my bed.

I would of course pretend to be asleep, and I suppose pretence must have led to sleep eventually. But I was terrified.

In my sudden realiztion, I recognized that what in fact my loving mother had been doing, without realizing its effect on me, had been to come into my bedroom with a blanket that she placed on the end of my bed.

As soon as I realized this had been the case, something lifted from me. I have never told my elderly mother what her love and care had been doing to me, it wouldn't be fair.

And somehow just the realization of the source of this nightmare has been a relief to me.

I have recently been reading Cities Of Dreams by Stan Gooch, a quite remarkable work in effect of anthropology.

Werewolves and Vampires do not figure at all in this book, but it is clear that the rituals followed by Neanderthal peoples may have included the drinking of human blood, and to some degree cannibalism.

And the worship of the Moon figured highly in their belief structures, and just this morning, I had one of those moments of realization just like the explanation of my childhood dream.

It seems likely that we have inherited, consciously or not, considerable understanding of the Neanderthal understanding of the world. It is likely in fact that there was a degree of absorption of Neanderthal genetic material, and perhaps something of the rituals that they will have developed over thousands of years.

It is a simple fact that when one species or culture supersedes another that almost all aspects of the superseded culture are rooted out, and at best frowned upon.

It is likely that the witch trials of the 15th and 16th centuries were in some way related to this rooting out of the old culture, and no doubt of an old sense in which a female goddess had been the focus of world understanding.

In some respects, it is perhaps easy to understand that the moon should have played a central role in the lives of primitive peoples, if only for example because of the fact that the 28 day cycle of the Moon from new to full moon mirrors the female menstrual cycle.

If in some Jungian sense any memory of the past 30 or 40,000 years have survived within us, perhaps it is a natural thing that the moon should be associated with feared creatures that perhaps in fact we competed with for food and shelter.

In an extraordinarily hostile environment, particularly during the last Ice Age.

It is perhaps highly significant that werewolves change with the full Moon, and vampires - within many cultures - exist to prey upon humans and are particularly feared at night.

This would be just when a moon-centred ritual culture would be most active, and I suddenly thought this morning, that perhaps these things are connected. at a deeply psychological level.

It doesn't make Werewolves or Vampires any more real, simply that their strong presence in our modern consciousness perhaps has deeper roots than we realize.

Stan Gooch died only recently at the age of 95, and he never received the kind of honor for his work which I believe he deserved.

It isn't difficult to discover on the Internet how well thought of it he was by many people that recognized that his life's work, although counter to the prevailing theories about human development, may well have a resonance that will continue for many generations.

Cities Of Dreams is well worth reading, whatever your personal perceptions of human history might be.