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"Man is an animal endowed with language", is usually. But some animals communicate with one another as well via different languages. The wolf sends so well coded messages that its similars can understand them without difficulty.
One and a half century ago, quite all western people lived with wolves. Nowadays the animal has been destructed in most western areas. But he comes back with a variable success through the paths by which it had been repressed.

Between fear and seduction, man has damned and venerated this animal, disguising it sometime with baleful powers, making him sometime the defender of human being. Loved and hated, the wolf is indeed a mythological character without measure, ambiguous figure of passion and fascinating. Which relations had men in that period with wolf? We can only make some hypothesis and no doubt this animal was but one of many big cats against which prehistoric men had to insure around the clock.

Why this strange fascination of man for the wolf to the extent that he gives it such an important place in his, both eastern and western, mythology? There is a mistery. Never solved, insofar the wolf is represented like a nefarious and cruel being, as like an animal with beneficial influence, worthy of most pious worship. The same civilization can attribute it successively these two images.
Hindu mythology is in this respect very significant. In Rigveda, first of four scared books, the worshipper appeals Night to hunt the wolf in the distance. He asks God Pushan (the sun) to move away from the path of pious men the nefarious wolf, insincere. Moreover, in another hymn, the Açvins make the quail free in the morning, captive in the throat of wolf Vrika, meaning the liberation of the dawn locked in the cave of night. In India the wolf was by the way a sacred animal and it was repugnant to kill it or insult it.

By the Scandinavians, this constant duality is still striking. Odin, the supreme God, is sometime represented with a wolf head and comes always with wolves Gere and Freke, to which he leaves the dishes offered in the daily feast of heroes dead on the battlefield. It?s a wolf as well, Fenris, that causes the end of the world, the ?twilight of the gods?, from which Richard Wagner inspired for his Tetralogy.

Here then a divine tool of world?s destruction, the wolf can be anyway founder of a town. Rome owes first its birth to the excessive maternal instinct of a she-wolf.

Become adult, they will replace their grand father on the throne and will decide to ground a town in the very place where the she-wolf feeded them. You know the rest: a quarrel blows up between Rromulus, of proud and shady character, and Remus, mocking and jealous. Drawing the line of ?his? city with the swing plough, Romulus enjoins his brother not to cross the border; as Remus immediately violates this order, Romulus kills him. The most powerful empire in the world will rise thus on a fratricidal bloody ground. The she-wolf will so become the symbol off rome and will be put as a decoration on its coins and monuments.

In Greece, likewise, you find the theme of the wolf as protective for men. In Argos, it was venerated, because it had won the terrible bull that destroyed the region. In Delphis, Pausanias tells that after a thief had sacked Apollo?s sanctuary, was defeated by a wolf. Further on this alerted the town with his screaming. Inhabitants found the treasure again, brought it back to the temple and raised a wolf of bronze near the big altar.

But the wolf may also be the symbol of cruelty and voracity, in a world of evil. Zeus, Gods? God for the Greeces punished Lycaon, Arcadia?s Tyrant, who had offended him by changing him in a wolf, ?living image of violence?. (Mircea Eliade. "Les Daces et les loups", in de Zambonis à Gengis Khan. Paris, Payot, 1970.)

In Jewish mythology the wolf is an impure animal. Like hare, the bat, the lion or the fly. It is prohibited to eat it or offer it to God in sacrifice. The Old Testament evokes it too : " The chiefs of Jerusalem are as wolves which tear their prey, which spreads blood, making perish people to steal their goods." (Ezéchiel, XII, 27). On the other hand, when the prophet Isaïe announces the restoration of universal peace, in its sublime vision of the advent of the "Kingdom": " The wolf lives with the lamb, the panther lie down close to the kid, calf and lion feeds together under the control of a little boy." (Isaïe, XI, 6). The reconciliation of the wolf and the lamb will be the return to the so much awaited Golden age, the hope of a better and peaceful world.

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