Public Domain pick of the week: Robert Eisler's Man into Wolf

The best thing about Archive.org is the quantity streaming Dead and Ween shows.

But the amount of free public domains available for free as pdfs and even Kindle-ready e-books is a close second.

This week's pick is Man into Wolf, which you can get here.

In Ann Arbor a few years ago I stumbled across a work with the rather sensational title Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism and Lycanthropy.

The book, consisting of a 30-page essay followed by 249 pages of notes and appendices, was written by Jungian historian of religion and art Robert Eisler after he spent fifteen months imprisoned in Buchenwald and Dachau.

In it, Eisler, whose earlier work was on Jamesian Christianity, argues that a group of wolf-men began imitating wild predators in response to food shortages during the Ice Age. Subsequently they broke off from the pacific vegetarian proto-human family and their archetypal pack mentality, he argues, is present in the psychology of both sexual sadists and violent oppressors like Hitler.

For his evidence Eisler uses everything from the writings of Sade to European folklore to recorded dreams. The book's reception was mixed. One reviewer wrote, "The main value of this publication is in the valuable source material which might be used by future scientists."

Another commented, "In spite of the oddity of the argument, the book is plainly the product of a man of brilliant, if erratic, intelligence and strong character." Eisler’s text is a failure as a work of anthropology or theory of religion, but is a genre-blurring mixture of scholarship, autobiography and memorial to trauma that has a lot to teach us.