Apollo the Wolf-God

Apollo, the Olympian god of the sun, was well known as the god of music, poetry, light, medicine and truth, but one of his numerous titles was Lycegenes, literally "born of a wolf", and a statue of a wolf adorned his temple at Delphi. Though nurtured by a wolf as a baby, less attention has been paid to Apollo as a wolf god. Daniel E. Gershensen uncovers a wide range of Apollo's links to wolves, wind-wolves, werewolves, and even to the ancient fraternities of human werewolves still remembered in parts of Europe into recent centuries. We read about the werewolf "army of the dead" that survived in Germanic folk lore as "the Wild Hunt," so faithfully recorded by the Brothers Grimm. Aristotle's Lyceum, or "wolf place", was so-named because it stood close to a temple dedicated to the wolf-god Apollo, who was also the god of knowledge. Even the English fairy tale about the Three Little Pigs, in which a wolf huff'd and puff'd to blow their houses down, is shown to be a survival from early beli