dressing, blessing. Oh, French dressing. Exactly.

I'm AJ Jacobs and my current obsession is puzzles. And that has given birth to my podcast, The Puzzler.

Something about Mary Poppins? Exactly. This is fun. You can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears.

Listen to the puzzler every day on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short-form series from

Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.

We continue this week with our look at werewolves, having previously discussed purported

prehistoric origins of the werewolf in the experiences and observations of early humans,

as well as the earliest known usages of the words werewolf and lecanthropy. The former

werewolf emerges in the early

second millennium CE, while the latter, lichanthropy, has an older but complex history as a

second century CE catch-all for various mental illnesses, which came to be conflated with the

Greek myth of Lycaean.

Lycaean was the legendary king of Arcadia, who dared to try and trick the high god Zeus into eating human flesh.

His ploy was unsuccessful, however, and Zeus inflicted a fitting divine punishment for one so

savage, which Ovid describes as following in the metamorphosis,

Henry Thomas Riley translation.

Alarmed, he himself takes to flight, and having reached the solitude of the country, he howls

aloud and in vain attempts to speak, his mouth gathers, rage from himself, and through its usual desire for slaughter, it is

directed against the sheep, and even still delights in blood. His garments are changed into hair,

his arms into legs, he becomes a wolf, and he still retains vestiges of his ancient form.

...