John cowper powys biography of christopher walken

"However that may be, there lived in present-day Transsylvania and Rumania, the very region where the belief in werewolves and vampires, as described in Bram Stoker's gruesome novel Dracula, is still very much alive, the ancient Dacians".--Man Into Wolf (1951) by Robert Eisler

"This horrible procedure survives today in the atavistic religious rites still performed annually by the Moroccan brotherhood of the 'Isawiyya, In the course of it men disguised as cats, lions, wolves, hyaenas formerly by the appropriate pelt, now by means of garments painted to resemble animal skins work themselves up by ritual dancing into a frenzy that enables them to tear to pieces with their bare hands living kids and lambs and to lacerate the victims with their teeth. I was able to show in 1929 the identity of this Berber rite with the Bacchic orgies of the Maenads or 'raving women' dressed in lynxes', leopards' or foxes' pelts and called, in a lost tragedy of Aeschylus, 'the vixens' (fiaaaaQat) , tearing to pieces and 'devouring raw' fawns, kids, lambs, snakes, fish and even children; as well as with the tearing to pieces of the 'scapegoat' in the ancient Hebrew ritual of the Day of Atonement [109], originally part of the vintage-feast, when the people dwelt in primitive booths of foliage, the 'tabernacles' of the Bible."--Man Into Wolf (1951) by Robert Eisler