The Political Wolf

I guess there are things you might as well know here, now that you are all grown up...

Things have been going on on this planet, as you well know, for a long time - Herodotus even says the Egyptian priests scolded the Greeks for 'being young, like children, and imagining that things that were recounted to them as stories only happened last week, when they in fact happened millenniums ago, even many times over and over again and again they happened...'  

The remains of the Temple of Zeus
on Mount Lykaion

And so I must tell you that when you see the wild and relatively sparse if not completely barren Mount Lykaion in Greece, and you imagine that this - as the archaeologists say - is the place where there was once a temple to Zeus, you should understand there indeed are many such places, and that they have never been 'out of service' as it were.

What happens in the secret rituals to the god, Zeus, is that items of art; books, writing materials, and especially musical instruments, are presented in a huge iron basin filled with sand, upon a large stone altar. Music and chanting and the burning of ceremonial fires takes place, and some time late in the night, possibly after midnight, lightning strikes the altar and this means God himself would oversee the affairs of those participating in the ritual the whole of their lives. This is all a secret of course and has never been revealed by Greeks as in the first place, it is only known to those not merely of aristocratic blood, but only those who are from the various family lines of regional kings. The rituals of Zeus belong only to royal houses.

'Oh dear.' It is a common enough saying. However, it is from the ancient European appeal to the ruler of gods and men - 'Oh Dias.' (Zeus).

The ancient Greek tale about King Lycaon (who ruled in Arcadia) proceeds along the lines that Lycaon and his entire family were 'nefarious' people, and at one point were so powerful and arrogant, that they sought to test whether a certain traveler in their midst, whom the local people had taken to have actually been Zeus himself appearing openly as a human (the gods never disguise themselves but appear as who they are, though not always perceived by the people as what they are) - and so they mixed a very tiny amount of human flesh in a meal served to this person, who promptly tipped the table over and walked out, though not saying anything.

King Lycaon though, became a werewolf, and established the first of such beings on earth, and burdened with various tasks and edicts about what such beings must do and live like.

Zeus and wolves are linked, and not all wolves
are bad

The moral of the story is this: a man, once having tasted the flesh of other men, is doomed to become a wolf, and is obsessed thereafter with the consumption of humans, and must resist this obsession or else remain an animal until they die. And because the story relates to something about Zeus, it has a political dimension (all stories about Zeus do, because he is the patron god of politics and leadership). A man, once having taken political power by taking life, or tasting the power that comes from having taken a life once he becomes a political leader, is destined to become an animal, and to be obsessed by that which is animalistic, wherein the seeds of a violent self-destruction both of him and potentially any he rules over, are sown.