[NPPF] Canto Four: Versipellis

[s~Z]

My best time is morning; my preferred
Season, midsummer. I once overheard
Myself awakening while half of me
Still slept in bed. I tore my spirit free,
And caught up with myself--upon the lawn
Where clover leaves cupped the topaz of dawn,
And where Shade stood in nightshirt and one shoe.
And then I realized that THIS half too
Was fast asleep; both laughed and I awoke
Safe in my bed as day its eggshell broke,
And robins walked and stopped, and on the damp
Gemmed turf a vrown shoe lay! My secret stamp,
The Shade impress, the mystery inborn.
Mirages, miracles, midsmmer morn. (Lines 873-886)

"Thus we not only see a ray of light thrown on the subject of
metempsychosis, but we get a glimpse of the curious process by which the
intensely realistic mind of antiquity arrived at the notion that men could
be transformed into beasts. For the belief that the soul can temporarily
quit the body during lifetime has been universally entertained; and from the
conception of wolf-like ghosts it was but a short step to the conception of
corporeal werewolves. In the Middle Ages the phenomena of trance and
catalepsy were cited in proof of the theory that the soul can leave the body
and afterwards return to it. Hence it was very difficult for a person
accused of witchcraft to prove an alibi, for to any amount of evidence
showing that the body was innocently reposing at home and in bed, the
rejoinder was obvious that the soul may nevertheless have been in attendance
at the witches' Sabbath or busied in maiming a neighbor's cattle. According
to one medieval notion, the soul of the werewolf quit its human body, which
remained in a trance until its return."

     --also from "Werewolves and Swan-maidens" by John Fiske
     http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/1871aug/fiskej.htm