Things from Way Down Under
To the people of most ancient civilizations, there were two main places from which strange creatures or godlike beings could hail: the deep belly of the earth—or the sky. Portals, wormholes, and space-time tunnels are most often depicted in today’s religious and pop culture art as hovering in the clouds, but in fact are just as likely to be found lying beneath our feet. Caves, underground worlds, the Christian concept of hell, underground military installations, and even alien bases—all of these imply mysterious subterranean passageways of some kind, whether they are known physical constructs like elevators or sewers, or the more nebulous method of transport to a less-than-happy afterlife.
As above, so below is an ancient mantra that can be interpreted many ways. Many cultures have believed that, like the images in a reflecting pool, if there are portals in the sky that open for beings from heaven or the stars, then there must also be entrances in the ground from which darker beings climb or slither. And according to many mythic and legendary traditions, holes in the earth and hollowed-out mountains or caves have traditionally been considered entrances to hell, or, as Buffy of Joss Whedon’s classic sci-fi TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, called them, hellmouths.
Hellmouths and Other Gates to the Underworld
When it comes to tunnels and other openings to the underworld, I’ve noticed something of a turnaround in their traffic patterns over the centuries. Modern myth and legends seem to be all about monsters, demons, and the like taking advantage of hellmouths to escape from disagreeable underworlds. Many episodes of Buffy, for instance, deal with a giant hellmouth deep beneath the local high school that’s crammed chockablock with demons plotting to spill upward and wreak havoc on humanity. Underworld myths of earlier civilizations, however, focused more on heroic figures struggling to get into these abodes of monsters and dead people, and then, mission accomplished, returning to our world while the horrible entities stayed put where they belonged.
I think I like the old ways better.
The Gates of Mashu
A good example of the latter can be found in some of humanity’s earliest written mythic accounts, in the journey of the ancient Sumerian hero king Gilgamesh. Many scholars believe the character is based on an actual ruler of the southern Mesopotamian kingdom of Uruk, once located in present-day Iraq. He would have lived between 2700 and 2500 BCE. In this epic and iconic tale, Gilgamesh seeks to enter the underworld in hope of finding something still sought by humanity today: everlasting life. But before he enters, this king must become a bit monstrous himself, by growing his hair long and dressing in animal skins.
Once he makes it to the twin-peaked mountain called Mashu, which marks the entrance to heaven and the underworld alike, he encounters savage guardians—an army of scorpion people, no less—at the mountain’s gateway. Gilgamesh, always quite the socially adept schmoozer, manages to avoid a fight and talk his way past them and on into the mountain’s interior. He must then hike down a thirty-six-mile tunnel in total darkness in order to complete his quest and learn how to become immortal.
I had to stop at this point to wonder at the fact that at least five thousand years or so ago, people had already formed the notion of other worlds beyond our own that were inhabited not only by our dead but by gods and monsters, all reachable by traversing long passageways extending deep underground. Today, many world religions also believe that humans may end up stuck permanently in a (usually) ghastly world below when they die. But Gilgamesh is different. In true heroic fashion, he discovers the magical flower of eternal youth and returns with it from the underworld—only to lose it to a serpent who gives the precious bloom to its reptilian kin and thereby cheats humanity of its chance at earthly immortality.
We all hate it when that happens. And the motif of the clever, deceptive serpent recurs often in the religious literature of the world. Readers familiar with the Bible, for instance, are doubtlessly right now picturing forbidden fruit, one persuasive reptile, and a couple who suddenly find themselves naked, afraid, and unemployed as well. But that’s another book. The thing that’s pertinent in the tale of Gilgamesh, the thing that our modern stories share with these older traditions, is that idea of humans and monsters coming and going from mysterious underground worlds.
Contemporary Hellmouths
I’ve often stated that I don’t believe in the idea of actual, traditional werewolves—humans changing their flesh-and-blood bodies for those of flesh-and-blood canines in an unholy and unsociable union. Sometimes, however, I do receive a compelling report that makes me wonder if something like that is possible in certain situations. And I’ve always been willing to allow for some sort of spirit-generated facsimile or illusion of a wolfoid that at least looks like a werewolf.
If there were such a thing, it seems fitting that they should be said to lurk in the nether regions—in caves, mines, or even sewer systems. I have heard a rumor, for instance, that people have claimed to see werewolves in the sewers of Minot, North Dakota. I’ve never been able to verify it and haven’t even found a single witness, but I’ve since received some other reports that make it a bit more likely than I thought.
The Phantom Wolf of Wolfsegg
Few things would sound more classically spooky than strange moans and howls emanating from a deep, dark cave in the heart of Germany’s Bavarian Forest. Add a famous floating ghost known as the “woman in white,” and then pile on the sighting of a phantom wolf reported by a soldier with Canadian forces stationed near there in 1987—all the ingredients for a vaunted passage to an underground world are present and accounted for.
The intriguingly named village of Wolfsegg in southern Germany is most famous for its eight-hundred-year-old castle, a must-see for many tourists. The soldier’s wife, “S,” wrote me to relate that his troop was stationed that year at a US military garrison facility called the Hohenfels Training Area, not far from Wolfsegg. He and his comrades were camping overnight in a farm field nearby the training facility, and on one particular evening he had chosen to bunk inside his M458 military track vehicle. He was awakened during the night by a strange scratching sound at the vehicle’s window.
His wife wrote, “Suddenly a large canine head appeared in the window. It looked dog- or wolflike but had glowing red eyes (the eyes frightened my husband the most). It made bold eye contact for a couple of seconds, then disappeared from view. It would have had to have been six to seven feet tall [standing] on its hind legs to reach the window of the track vehicle from the ground.
“The next morning my husband tried to tell himself that he must have dreamed the whole thing, but he found tracks and paw prints all over the muddy ground outside his vehicle. He told his fellow soldiers about the spooky creature, but nobody knew what to make of it.”
The thought of a huge, possibly phantom wolf roaming a military training ground and window-peeping at slumbering soldiers does sound a bit fantastic. I call it a “possibly phantom wolf” partly because of its red eyes. Canid eye shine is normally light yellow to greenish or golden yellow, although sometimes physical eye conditions or illness can change any animal’s eyeshine hue. But as wolves were once very numerous throughout Europe, so were legends of large, black, red-eyed phantom wolves or dogs, believed by most clergy of the Middle Ages to be demonic. The noted German scholar Dr. Johann Keiler von Kaiserberg, for instance, preached a sermon on that subject in Strassburg in 1508. A local cleric published the good doctor’s words, including this interesting sentence: “He certainly says that the Demon often appears in the shape of a wolf, and in his sermon on wild men of the woods he speaks of lycanthropes in Spain.”6
Synchronistically, S added that Wolfsegg’s coat of arms features a wolf, actually the head of a black, shaggy wolf with a protruding red tongue.
The Wolfsegg Hole
But there’s more than just history to link the Wolfsegg area to possible phantom creatures. As mentioned earlier, there’s a well-known legend of a “woman in white” said to appear around the castle grounds. The apparition is thought to be the ghost of a woman killed in 1485 for marital transgressions.
Wolfsegg also is famed for a deep cave located about a hundred yards into the forest just outside the village. Residents nicknamed the cave “The Hole” due to its steep drop into a black, seeming abyss. It is at least thirty-five meters deep, and despite a few expeditions meant to discover its outlet, local tourism publications say it has never been fully explored.
A site called Travel Creepster claims, “There is a strange noise coming from the darkness of the Hole, sometimes just breathing, and sometimes grunts or growling, but the last thing witnesses would describe it as is human. The locals will tell you that the sounds are not natural of any creature they have ever heard, and they tell the story of travelers that got too close and were never seen again.”7
According to the site, one expedition led by scientists in 1920 entered the cave on the premise that the opening shaft was too steep to be used as a regular entrance by whatever animals were heard breathing in there and that therefore another, more horizontal level must exist. They did find horizontal tunnels, but they were much deeper than expected, and they were filled with animal bones that they judged had been left in the cave over a very long period of time by unknown carnivores. There are numerous other caves and old mines in the area as well, since this was once a very active iron mine region. And while I don’t want to give the impression that tunnels to possible netherworlds are absolute requirements for sightings of werewolves-in-progress, people have sent me some stunning examples of cases where underground access seems to have played a part.
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น