Shapeshifter Mythology Around the World: An Overview

In brief: Beings of myth who change from one bodily form to another
Scholarly term: therianthropy, for change between human and animal
Found: in every inhabited region of the world
Usual animal: the most respected or feared creature of the region
Common means: a skin put on or laid aside
Common themes: kinship, disguise, captivity, return

A story told everywhere

There is no part of the inhabited world without stories of shape-changing. They are among the oldest stories there are, and they seem to arise wherever people live close to other animals, depend on them, fear them and admire them.

The animal in question follows the country. In northern Europe it is the wolf and the bear. Along the northern seas it is the seal. In Japan, China and Korea it is the fox. In India and the Malay world it is the tiger; in much of Africa the lion, the leopard and the hyena; in Central and South America the jaguar. People told of the creature that mattered most where they lived: the strongest hunter, the cleverest thief, the one whose eyes they met at the edge of the firelight.

In the study of folklore and religion, the general word for change between human and animal form is therianthropy. This is the older meaning of the word, in use for over a century, and it should not be confused with therianthropy as an identity.

Which way the change runs

Shapeshifter tales divide, roughly, by direction.

In one kind, a human takes an animal's shape. The werewolf is the type, and so are the warriors of the north who fought as bears. The change may be a gift, a skill, a punishment or an affliction.

In the other kind, an animal takes a human's shape. The fox who becomes a scholar's wife, the seal who steps out of her skin on the shore, the crane who weaves at a loom behind a closed door. These stories are often more tender, and they tend to end with a parting.

A third group stands apart: gods and spirits who wear any shape they please, and beings who are part human and part animal all the time. They are treated on the page of animal-headed gods.

Motifs that recur

Certain ideas appear so widely, among peoples who had no contact with one another, that they seem to belong to the subject itself.

Motif	What happens	Where it is found
The skin as garment	The animal shape is a coat, cloak or belt that can be put on and taken off.	Wolfskins in the north, sealskins on the Atlantic coasts, feather robes across Eurasia.
The stolen skin	Someone hides the skin, and the shapeshifter is held in one form until it is found.	Selkie and swan maiden tales; in reverse, the werewolf whose clothes are stolen.
The shared wound	An injury to one form appears on the other.	Werewolf lore from Rome onward; tales of animal doubles in Africa and the Americas.
The telltale sign	Something of the true form shows through: a tail, a shadow, a reflection, a missing feature.	Fox spirits of East Asia; the tailless werewolf of Europe.
The forbidden look	The shapeshifter stays only so long as no one watches them in their true form.	The crane wife of Japan; serpent brides of Europe and Asia.
The animal ancestor	A people traces its descent from a marriage between a human and an animal being.	Wolf, bear, swan and seal ancestors across Asia, Europe and the Americas.

A walk round the orchard

Each of the following pages takes one tradition and looks at it closely.

Fox spirits. The many-tailed foxes of Japan, China and Korea: messengers of the gods, lovers, tricksters and seekers after wisdom.
Selkies and swan maidens. The skin left on the shore, the robe of feathers by the lake, and the home that calls its children back.
The bear and the berserker. Shape-strong warriors of the north, and the bear as kinsman and ancestor around the Arctic.
The great cats. Tiger people of Asia, lion and leopard lore of Africa, and the jaguar of the American tropics.
Animal-headed gods. From the ivory lion-man of the Ice Age to the gods of the Nile.

The wolf has a path of its own, under werewolf mythology.

Others worth knowing

Many shapeshifters do not fit neatly under those headings. A few, briefly:

The water horse of Scotland and Ireland, which appears as a fine horse or a handsome stranger by the lochside and carries the unwary under.
The pooka of Irish tradition, a spirit that goes about as a dark horse, a goat or a hare, and is more mischievous than cruel.
The serpent bride, known from western Europe to China, a woman who is a snake below the waist or on one day of the week, and who is lost when her husband spies on her.
The raccoon dog of Japan, a round-bellied prankster who disguises himself with a leaf on his head.
The shark man of Hawaiian tradition, born with a shark's mouth between his shoulders, who must keep his back covered.
The bear woman of Korea, a bear who by patience became human and bore the founder of the first kingdom.

Told with respect

Some of these stories come from books long closed. Others belong to living peoples, for whom they are not entertainment but teaching, history or religion. The library tries to retell only what has been widely shared by the tellers themselves, and to say plainly where a tradition is not ours to explain. In particular, certain beliefs of Native North American peoples about those who misuse the power to take animal form are, by the wish of many in those communities, not discussed with outsiders, and we have left them where they belong.

What the stories are about

Shapeshifter stories are sometimes read as primitive mistakes about biology. They are better read as thinking: about the likeness between people and animals, which every hunter and herder could see; about the outsider who lives among us and is not quite one of us; about marriage, in which a stranger comes into the house and may one day leave; and about the sense, common to a great many people, that the self has more than one shape.

That last thought is where folklore and the modern therian and otherkin communities come nearest to one another. They are not the same thing. No one today changes skin. But it is no accident that people who feel themselves to be other than human so often love these tales, and find in the seal wife looking out to sea a picture they understand.