I also wrote our werewolf song - Winter Werewolf (aka Fevered Prayer) for a CD project on Werewolf Lore in Sweden. That's still on-line c/o The Wire - listen to it here:

http://thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/stream-tracks-from-werewolf-songs_music-inspired-by-swedish-folklore

What's that got to with anything? Well...

Beyond the realm of human perception and culture, the universe is an incomprehensible hellish wasteland, and what life there is exists solely to devour its prey in horrible ways. I had to switch of BBC4's Rock Pool documentary the other night as the alien-tooth maw of a Dog Whelk drilled through the Mussel shell to suck out the living creature within - and the scene of the cold-eyed Cuttle Fish demolishing the Crab was as disturbingly horrific as anything I've seen in Horror or Sci-Fi. Such grim & agonising realities largely confirm my life-long Gnostic leanings, though not being of a supernatural cast of mind I don't harbour ideas about a Demiurge Creator, but recognise that, as far as we Humans are concerned, the Natural World is very much Other / Evil.

Nature infects us, freezes us, starves us, terrifies us, violates our cultural / cognitive sanctity, and will, at last, destroy us utterly & horribly by means of stroke, cancer, heart failure or any number of ingeniously rancid means of terminating our all-too brief miserable tenures that would put even the most sadistic murderer to shame. Hardly the wonder we came up with the idea of Religion & God as a mythic salve to our various woes & wonderings, personifying our barely understood universe in terms of light & dark, benevolence & malevolence - the good, the bad, and the very ugly indeed. But it was all made-up by we Humans trying to make sense of the senseless as soon as we found ourselves different from the rest of it. Some say 50,000 years; others say there's evidence of Human funeral rights going back 180,000; still a mere blink in the cosmic scheme; even the biological one which rages over Planet Earth in a Godless determination to survive at any price; to kill or else be killed.


Enchanted by the moon, the Werewolf loses their humanity and goes out on the hellish spree regardless of the cost. There are, of course, no Werewolves. They are metaphors for the human condition in which a tiny minority of people are inclined to do that sort of thing anyway, often exceptionally, living only to repent at having acted in natural haste in their leisurely incarceration. Meanwhile, in nature, all is red in tooth and claw with murder and rape being pretty much the order of the day. Again, hardly the wonder the Gnostics perceived that as hell; hell as the natural here & now presided over by the Devil inspired by the God of the Old Testament into which darkness sparks Logos, or The Word, or Jesus Christ, a single point of light in an unremitting realm of utter & total darkness. Metaphorically speaking, of course...