The Two Wolves

There are two wolves in us. Two wolves share our guts, the wolf of good and the wolf of evil. These wolves, we carry them within us. They scold. They are brothers, they fight and tear themselves apart as brothers. The stake is your flesh. What is the wolf of good? How to recognize it?

To choose?

Wolf of good, wolf of evil, who will be your main ally? Before you can choose, learn what they are. If you want to coax them, make allies of them first. Give them gifts. Plenty of fresh meat. See how they work. Know their hearts. Then you will choose, if necessary. If wisdom has come, you will say to yourself: why choose? Feed one, starve the other, is the choice good? No. You have to feed both.

The wolf of evil is no less useful than the wolf of good. If you abuse him, if you starve him, you will make him furious. You will become its target. One day he will devour you.

The warrior sometimes takes years to understand. He often feels bites, he sometimes gives wounds, but he does not understand that two wolves are fighting in him. He doesn’t know them yet.

Sometimes strong, sometimes sweet, the warrior hears them growling. Under the full moon, they howl. Their dismal silhouette stands out on a ridge. Head back, they moan towards the star. The complaint turns into a war cry, a rallying cry. Could the pack join them?

Months, years pass. The warrior’s temples are white. The day fails. The warrior is getting older. He dreams in silence of the wolves of his childhood. His terrible fears, his blockages, these are two wolves that he could not put in a cage.

The wise wolf, the raging wolf, and the helpless child who sees them clashing without choosing their side.

The dybbuk

But deep in his old heart, he knows he was right. The wolf of good, the wolf of evil, we must feed them both. You don’t have to choose. To take one and reject the other is to lose half of your assets.

One fine summer evening, he falls asleep on the veranda. He has a dream. He meets a dybbuk. And the dybbuk took possession of his body. The warrior has not identified with his body for a long time. He calls it the animal, in memory of his boss François d’Assise, who spoke to his body by calling it the donkey. And he said to himself:

There are two of us in this animal. Me and the dybbuk. AND THE FUCKING DYBBUK!! We are two against him too, me and my good angel. There are three of us with the dibbouk.

This is the truth. Good and bad are people like you and me. But they have no bodies. They have no place. So they take the body of a wolf, and the two wolves look for a place.

They do this all the time. And they always end up finding a badly defended body. They settle in this animal. They live happily in this household of three.

The ram god, the goat devil

I call them the two wolves, the Judeo-Christian tradition calls them the good angel and the dybbuk. Dit bouc.French: said male goat Jo Brassens paid tribute to Stef Mallarmé:

Like a goat, a ram, a beast, a brute,
I’m haunted by rut, rut, rut, rut.

From goat to ram, there is only one step, a single little foot of goat that Jojo cheerfully crosses. The ram is Belial the ugly devil, but it is also Rama the good god. And coincidentally Jesus Christ The Lamb Of God. A lamb that can be a ram when necessary, as the following picture clearly shows:

As mythologists and my readers know, the devil is still the god of the previous religion.

On the one hand  former god Rama, the child of Hyperborea; Druid Ramos  who stopped a pandemic; Ram who has done so much for the good of this humanity, the fifth. The Ram who removes evil is generating too the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world …

On the other, Belial the obscure demon. He is accompanied by other ancient gods demoted to demons: Bel – Belen – Belenos, Belisama, Beelzebub, Baal … The gods before wore horns, they lived in the Age of Aries and that of Taurus. The gods of before became gods of evil simply because the times have changed. Manners have evolved. What was trivial has become shocking, what was accepted is now odious, and vice versa: what were once vices are now habits, as the Doobie Brothers told us.

What does the wolf eat? Lamb. What else?

The Wolf And The Lamb
by Jean de La Fontaine, English Translation © Richard Stokes