Birth of the Ancestor
A Therianthropic Tale of the Beginning

Copyright © 2002 Marybeth "Background" Barton. All rights reserved.
Please do not reproduce or change in any way.

At the beginning of the world, the Moon melded with Mountain, Cloud, and River to create three races: the Wolf People, the Dragon people, and the People of the Hand, respectively. (The People of the Hand were the ancestors of humans, elves, dwarves, fae, etc.) The Sun rose on the first morning and was delighted with these nations. He immediately decided to bless each race, and the first person he saw was Dragon. He wearied himself showering blessings upon Dragon, but immediately thereafter he saw the People of the Hand and grew excited all over again. However, he only had the energy to bless half of them.

The other half became so dissatsified with this that they cried out to the Sun to give them something, so he gave each of them a weak blessing, a half-strength blessing, and moved quickly on, though this hardly solved anything. He saw the Wolf then, how beautiful and wise she was, and he had but one blessing left to give her: he touched her eyes so they would glow golden and be able to see in the dark. Exhausted, he set after only three hours of daylight.

The Moon, when she rose and saw what had happened, was frustrated by the young Sun's mishap. The confused and jealous People of the Hand, dissatisfied with their own wretchedness, pleaded the Moon to help them. With a sigh, but seeing no other way, she blessed them halfway, as the Sun had, with every blessing she knew.

The people were still confused, bitter, and hostile to each other and the other, coveted, fully-blessed Hand-folk. So the Sun-blessed Hand People began to avoid them, and withdrew often to the Otherworlds, and there they stayed. The confused, corrupt, and violent race were the only People of the Hand left in physical existence. These came to be known as humans, the Fallen Race.

The Dragon and the Wolf tried to help them, guide them, show them higher planes of wisdom and the arts of hunting. But the humans took all they wanted and forgot its source; they oppressed their mentors until the Dragons had withdrawn to the Otherworlds and the Wolves were skulking at the farthest reaches of the world, still living for their people's sake, but hiding from the humans.

Not all the humans were so bad. Many were reasonable, a few were likeable, and still less were very wise. The wiser ones lived within human society and called themselves any number of titles, from Shaman to Druid to Wise One to Witch. They followed their instincts (as society allowed) and made journeys to higher mind-sets and even to the Otherworlds, to visit their ancient brothers and sisters. Many wise humans thought often of the Earth and treated her like the living thing she is. Very few remembered the Moon as their mother and sister, but more often the Sun as their father, despite the fact that he had inadvertently caused their downfall--and so came the rise of patriarchy.

At some point there was a female Druid, or maybe a Witch--and rather young, for having completed the seventeen years of required training--who realized that the world was closing its fist around the throat of womankind. Now, of all humans, women are usually the most reasonable when it comes to dealing with the Earth, Moon, and beasts. Men have always known this, known the true power of women, and thus tried to oppress them. Now the oppression was taking hold.

Desperate, she ran into the forest and cried out to the Earth and Moon for help. Help, to save, if not women's lives, or women's liberties, then at least to save women's spirit. The Earth and Moon heard her cry.

Odd, that it was them to whom she cried, for the Earth and Moon, when combined, create the Wolf. And that is what they sent to her: the Wolf. The female spirit incarnate. Her ribs were deep and her hips sharp, but she moved like a leaf floating downstream.

The Druid thanked the spirits many times over, and urgently she fell to her knees before the Wolf so they could talk at eye-level. Whispered the woman, "We are the same, you and I, and we both know it. I know we are both dying, women and wolves, but together perhaps, we can become stronger than women, or wolves, or men."

The Wolf simply nodded, for she knew what the Druid would ask of her. The woman stripped naked and they walked together slowly up the forested slope. It was winter, and the Night was dark, and the cold set in quickly. The woman lay frozen at the mountain's peak until the Moon drew nigh enough to shed her light on them both. The hungry Wolf looked at the dead woman with her eyes of Sunlight, then solemnly lay down very close to her, laid her long head across the woman's shoulders, and she died as well.

Their spirits met over the mountain's crest, and churned about each other, dancing in Moonbeams, melding and blending just as the Moonlight had mixed with the Earth at the beginning of Wolf, and they became the same thing. In the light of the pregnant Moon, the woman-wolf was born again, and while she bore the body of a woman, she was wolf within, and the Moon blessed her with the ability to shift at will between wolf-mind, human-mind, and all the mucky places in between. It is said, though I don't know, that she could also skin-shift into her wolf-self and back again. I have also heard that that ability resides therein still today, and we who are like her can access the wolf-body, wish or need permitting.

This Druid-Wolf lived in the wilds for perhaps moments, perhaps centuries. All the animals taught her all she could ever need or want to know. She had every strength of wolf and human, and she was swift to learn. All that she saw, heard, or smelled, taught her something important. The deer taught her grace, the badger instinct, the raccoon resourcefulness, the eagle ethics, the boar strength, the bear healing, the cat survival, the fox cunning, the squirrel climbing, the owl patience, the hawk discerning, the rabbit life and death. The lessons were innumberable, and never forgotten. If she had followed the stagnant chain of time, she would have lived a very long time. But instead, her life and the freedom of her death were, and are, unending.

As if by contract, she lived among the beasts, and as every kind of beast at some point. This included returning to humanity for a short time, where she did manage to find a mate, and bore his children, but raised them as cubs so they were wiser than their human father. They in turn raised their children as such, and on and on.

The line was too great to fail, but it soon stretched so far and long, and spread itself so thin, that the memory of the Druid-Wolf faded into legend, then fable, then dust. They became as corrupt and greedy and arrogant as any other human, and even now the Druid-Wolf still has very occasional uprisings of her imbibed human nature.

Her most direct descendants were centered in Eurasia, and of all the roles and trades and places in society that could be imagined, there was one of her descendents in that place. Shepherds, smiths, prostitutes, priests, cooks, carpenters, merchants, warriors, outcasts, kings--if it existed, there was one of the animal-clan in that place. They were all strong, and they all held their positions once chosen, be it physical, religious, or political. They all held their scattered lineage with pride, not quite knowing why. Many could speak with the animals. They taught this to their children in secret. Some were prominent or highly skilled magicians and witches. All looked upon Wolfkind--and all Beasts--with respect. All loved the Moon obsessively, though few ever admitted it, even to themselves.

The line spread itself thin, and was soon visible mostly in Ireland, the land of Merlyn, the greenest of the green field and wood. The rest regrouped in Russia, Poland, and anyplace with cold winters. Many people in the Irish branch of the lineage were compelled by the greenness, and thought more as wolves than men or women. The women-wolves were found out and killed far less often than the men-wolves. This is because the discretion and wariness of the wild beast still beat hard in the female blood, as it always has and always will, be ye beast or no.

Instinct ruled some, and they bounded off into the Moonlit woods, the allure of freedom unbearable. The lupine aspect strengthened. Some were killed, some tortured. Others ran faster and farther. They were a strong people. They would survive.

America was founded. It aged quickly, and filled up even faster. From Ireland and Poland, Germany and Africa, England and Lithuania they poured in, lost amid the scuffle and struggle of humanity, the reek of sweat and suppressed wildness. From nation to nation they met and joined, and from there to undestroyed western America, where wolves once cried out to the tranquil darkened sky every Night. There was human savagery, lupine patience, Irish pride. All of them dreamed of the Moon, and of living in shadow, but none remembered it when they awoke. It mattered not; the lineage was solid, and was ready to offer that solidity to any who came to take it.

There was a girl born to people who had thoroughly forgotten the Truth, and the Moon, and the Wolf. They couldn't have imagined the base of their own lineage, the Druid-Wolf, the protector of the wild feminine. They would never have believed the sheer humanity, or the lupine strength that belied the shotty first glance. They would never have believed that animal life began when the first full of the Moon mixed with Land, Sea, and Sky. They never would believe how closely all life is related, that we are all brothers and sisters with the Moonlight as our source, and the Everything Entity making that happen. They would have condemned the girl for such thoughts.

But she remembered, and she knew. Shadows gliding across the brush at Night awakened memories not her own, feelings older than anger. She sought for the Truth and the Moon. She knew what she was. She knew that her first Grandmother was a Druid joined to be the same as a Wolf. She knew what she was. She felt just barely the Wolf that directed her dreams, and was forced constantly to remember the oppressed, iron-willed woman. She had always known the story of the animal-woman who had lived with the beasts and as the beasts, and she wished so dearly that she were this being, that she realized, she was. She was everything. She WAS the Wolf, and she WAS the Woman, and she IS all these things and more.

Then one day she sat down at a hand-me-down Toshiba laptop and decided to write the story of her ancestry, partly because she had gotten the idea from a book, and partly because she knew by the badger-instinct that she would find great enormous strength in doing so. So she did. And the writing itself wasn't any great achievement, but it had served its purpose. And then she added herself and all other therianthropes, wolf or leopard or bear, to the end of the ancestry, and here we have a paradox.