Human Animals

Hamel, Frank. Human Animals. London: William Rider & Son, 1915. (using a Kessinger Publishing reprint, no publishing year noted)

Hamel covers a variety of sources and wide range of shape-shifters from werewolves to tiger-men, lion-men, werefoxes, werevixens, human serpents, and bird women. He also touches on witches, familiars, "fabulous animals and monsters", "cat and cock phantoms", "animal ghosts", and "animal spirits in ceremonial magic" among other things. As with many related works and authors from his era, Hamel draws together diverse sources from around the world to catalog and explore the subject, making his work an excellent starting point for further research, including terminology. On the other hand, he does have a colonial bias fairly common in his day, using such phrases as "savage races" with abandon.

The book does do a good job with a historical perspective on shape-shifting, including references to Frazer (the Golden Bough), Gerald of Wales, the Grimm brothers, and other well known writers on the subject. The third chapter presents a good example of Hamel's wide-ranging sources: the Bhagavad Gita, Ojibwa and Osage folklore, New Guinea folklore, the Masai of Uganda, Australian aborigines, Eskimos, Aztecs, Yakuts of Siberia, Samoyeds, and Melanesian legend are all factored into his discussion. In many ways, Hamel's work reads like Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces or some of Carl Jung's work with archetypes, which may be a hallmark of Jung and Hamel's era and fields.