I’m about to get a little vulnerable and show my underbelly, so to speak. I think running a little diary about my “werewolf practices” sounded like fun, a little once a month reflective piece about my therian-adjacent experiences and little full moon revelries and thoughts on werewolf related things, and so on. I thought May might be a good starting point for these reflections as there is actually a blue moon this month. A second full moon will appear in the sky on the last day of May as well. This feels somewhat significant to me, as I only recently started consciously recognizing my “rituals” as what they are. It’s as though the moon too shows its recognition of me as a wolf under its power. This first entry will serve as both a recounting of my most recent “wolfing out” and as a more organized statement on werewolfishness, as I see it. I covered many of these points in a blog post from a couple months ago but this is meant to be the more coherent version of that.

I think the seed of this was really planted (I mean, even beyond my lifelong identification with wolves and werewolves) when I wrote my Wolf’s Den shrine (which I intend to revamp in the near future). As part of the research for that shrine on wolfaboo subculture I watched a lot of “real werewolf spell” videos since those were a huge part of my childhood wolf obsession. I tried a few. Maybe they worked- I’m a werewolf now, after all. It’s easy to write off those old spell videos as silly or cringe, but I thought and still think that there’s something so significant that the desire to no longer be human is so great that we collectively sought out occult methods to shed our human skin, that we believed so sincerely, that we tried, enacted, cast. I guess it was just a matter of realizing that that identity and that sincere belief was still so important to me.

I think of therianthropy, like... Okay, so my basic belief in magic is like, as an alternate path to get to the same results. You take the weird, kinda overgrown dirt road. I always use tarot as an example, I suspend my disbelief and let the cards guide me to think about what direction I want to go in life, I use the symbolism to kind of read into what’s already in my head and it's helped me go for job interviews, make decisions, prioritize certain things, take care of myself, etc. It doesn't actually predict the future, and I could probably think through those things logically and arrive at the same “results” but taking the “alternate path” got me there faster. My belief is what gave the messages any sort of meaning or power. If I were to pull from my deck and expect “meaningless bullshit”, I can't take the “alternate path”. It's more of a "life philosophy” or “trick” than a religion to me but I undeniably get the “results”. I have to, I guess, half believe in something and then suspend my disbelief just a little more and play pretend. It's playing. I'm playing with conceptual toys. It's fun.

I guess my theory is that therian identity is kind of an "alternate path" via animal symbology, which is a nice and tidy explanation for why everyone is a fox or a wolf or such in a way I find that the reincarnation explanation has never satisfied. Common species picks for therians are animals I consider to be "of an archetype". The cunning fox, the noble lion, the loyal and protective wolf, et cetera. In other words, some kind of spiritual bond with the animal as archetype that leads to an irrevocable link between the power their belief has granted the animal-as-symbol and their very Selfhood, thus leading to various involuntary sensations and animal behaviors. It's sort of like Get Out Of My House by Kate Bush. She doesn't change into a mule, she changes into The Mule (hee-hawwww~ sorry I love that song to bits) to stubbornly face off against the other voice in the song- mule as symbol. I kind of combine that idea with the folklore of werewolves donning wolf pelts to transform. It's a consciously invoked transformation. It is through the action of transformation itself that the werewolf attains inhumanity. This is why I call myself a werewolf or lycanthrope rather than specifically a therian.

Through my lycanthropy I find that “alternate path”- to center myself, spend more time outside and free myself from my all too human obsessive-compulsions, listen to the sounds of lake-birds and the wind in the trees, and immerse myself in my animal mind. And the moonlight is so bright I can see as though it were still day... It's a release of sorts and I welcome the supernatural sensations I experience as a result. It has this magical way of killing all my constant rushing thoughts and replacing them with images and instinct. I felt it even stronger under this full moon, we've been adding lots of plants to the backyard (including blueberry bushes yesss... They're not ripe yet though) and it just makes it feel a lot more like home. I don't worry about getting dirty or looking weird or anything. When I’m a human I care a lot about those things and have constant thought spirals. When I become a wolf, I don't care. I just let myself... be a wolf and be happy. It's a freeing thing. I naturally let myself hunch down onto all fours, roll in the grass, engage in playfights with my packmate (my doggy)... "Playing wolves" was always my favorite game on the playground as a kid and I have always been an advocate for the seriousness of play as a way to discover and understand our world. It just so happens that the way I play, discover, and understand is through... werewolfishness. I'd pretend to be an animal to be able to perservere through discomfort, I'd contextualize my friendships through the lens of "wolf pack", I'd simply think of myself as a wolf. I see my childhood through canine color vision (metaphorically not literally). I'm just resuming something I've always kind of done. (sorry if I tend to over explain stuff I just don't want to be misinterpreted... It's a frequent issue for me I tend to get long winded)

Today I wore my tail almost all day. I don't usually wear it super often (I’ve said it before, it's like wearing a fake tail over a real one that moves) but there is a sort of glee I get from looking behind me and seeing my tail swaying. The visual component is quite nice and I like being able to touch it, and it symbolically does feel like I am “donning the pelt”. I always prefer how it feels to wag and move my “phantom” tail though, haha. If I had to describe it I would consider it a "permanent shift", like I always have it "there"... I also wore some other appropriate accessories like a little wolf necklace I made back in a metalworking class I took like 4 or 5 years ago and a moonstone pendant, and I am of course wearing my favorite scent (cedarwood). It just felt nice to dress up a bit for the occasion. I had been itching to go out and transform all day (well, really all week, I’d been getting constant wolf-sensations leading up to it) and when I did it was one of my strongest transformations so far.

It goes a little like this: I go into the backyard with Autumn. I take off my shoes and walk into the middle of the yard, letting my body contort into the posture it wants, hunched over, animalistic, etc, until I find myself on all fours. I then sit like that for a while, looking up at the moon, listening to the sounds of the animals and bugs, feeling my muzzle shifting, stretching. That particular "symptom" always feels so significant to me since several years ago I had a vivid dream where I had a long muzzle stretching painfully out of my face while I stared up at the sky and transformed into a beast. The "muzzle shifts" feel almost exactly like in that dream... I’ve been getting "paw" sensations more lately as well. I think my connection to my wolfishness has only been getting stronger and stronger.

And then once I’m a wolf, when I’m in that headspace, I pant and bark and vocalize involuntarily, and I... play. I roll in the leaves and grass, I play fight with the dog, I sniff around at all the plants, et cetera. The world becomes so much brighter and more interesting with an animal's mind, compared to how easily distracted I am as a human. This full moon I wrestled and chased with Autumn which was a lot of fun, it's always so nice how easily we can read each other's body language. He got a bit bitey when we wrestled so I made a whining sound and he stopped and leaned against me all apologetically, it was cute. I love his guilty expressions, they're so funny. He always leans or rolls onto his back and wags his tail when he knows he did something wrong. It was the first time in a while I wasn't working a long night shift on the full moon so I got to kind of bask in it all day. I always feel happiest around the full moon and it was nice getting to enjoy that all to myself all day... It was such a gorgeous bright moon and a good night. I’ve been anxious about some irl stuff (financial, medical, et cetera) and it was nice to drive those spiralling thoughts out of my head for a bit and take my alternate path to relief from human woes. I change into The Wolf.