The Antlered Wendigo
I absolutely love the Ancient Magus Bride. It’s one of my favourite anime, and one that I always love going back to and digging into deeper. One of the aspects of the fan-base that I like the most is their interest in folklore and mythology, and how they discuss, research and explore each character and piece in the world. One of the primary characters, Elias, is a tall humanoid who has a stag skull as a head. What exactly Elias is has been up for debate in the fan-base, with one primary argument being that he is a Wendigo – the primary reasoning being his antlers.
Elias Ainsworth from Ancient Magus Bride
In American popular culture, wendigos are pictured as humanoid figures with antlers. This depiction of wendigos has always been interesting to me – it’s prominent in creepypasta, television and movies, including Antlers and Stephen King’s Pet Semetary. In some depictions, it’s far more werewolf-like, which is how it’s depicted in the television show Charmed, for example.
Today, I wanted to explore the wendigo, primarily looking at it’s origins in Native American folklore, and how it came to be represented by antlers. I wanted to also reflect on what it means for the antlers to be present, and how their presence has fundamentally changed the wendigo.
The story of the wendigo is from Algonquin-speaking people. These are various groups in North America, including the Ojibwe, Algonquins, Blackfoot, and several others. Wendigos here were malevolent spirits who could possess human beings. For some, wendigos were inherently tied to acts of cannibalism. A.I Hallowell wrote about wendigos through his fieldwork with the Ojibwe. Hallowell wrote that there were three meanings to the wendigo, each while separate also intricately connected. The first is the wendigo as the mythical monster; the second is the human who has become prone to cannibalistic urges; the third, the cannibalistic act. Thus, someone can “turn windigo” through their actualisation of a taboo act, and the act itself is equally monstrous to the malevolent creature. Monsters can be all sorts of different things, and uniquely one of those things while all of those things all at the same time.
There’s not a massive amount of images of the wendigo that is the same everywhere. Most often, wendigos are described as male, but are not necessarily only ever male. Carl Ray, an Ojibwe artist, has drawn a wendigo.
Carl Ray “The Wendigo”
As I’m sure it’s quite obvious, antlers are not present in that image. In fact, most of the depictions, while slightly different from group of peoples to group of peoples, tend to not ever really have antlers as anywhere in the equation.
Antlers may have first started becoming part of the wendigo description in around 1910 with Algernon Blackwood’s short story “The Wendigo”. Blackwood was an early horror writer, and whose work greatly influenced Stephen King and H.P Lovecraft to name only a few. His short story on the wendigo depicted the creature as a type of forest demon. His depiction and story of the wendigo is rooted in equal depictions of Native Americans as “savages”. His racism is palpable throughout the text, and stained the wendigo itself with the same tint. Blackwood did not spend much time on his description of the wendigo – focusing more on the emotions of fear rather than on what the creature itself looks like.
Following depictions of the wendigo from white popular culture artists draw more on Blackwood than on the Native Americans the story originated from. The view of Native Americans as inherently Other is what helped to push the wendigo into its antlered form. Native Americans are seen by white culture as inherently naturalistic and mystical. Their spirituality is over-emphasised and used as a way to demonstrate their special separateness from the more “human” white coloniser. These descriptions are what keeps Native Americans as the Other. Antlers are used in many whiter cultures as symbols of nature and spirituality – therefore inherently connecting the wendigo to the same Othered descriptions as Native Americans themselves. By adding the antlers to the creature, white people were marking the creature as mystical and naturalistic, and wholly Other.
Image of the wendigo from the 2001 film “The Wendigo”
Each pop culture creation of the wendigo draws on other pop culture, rather than on the original contexts, pulling the wendigo further and further from it’s own homeland. The antlered wendigo is a form of whitewashing, pulling the wendigo further and further away from its original context. The antlered wendigo is a perfect definitional example of cultural appropriation. There’s an added element to the antlered wendigo. By using the very light touches of original context (if even that), filmmakers and writers relying on the antlered wendigo for their narrative is able to draw on Native American folklore and myth without paying attention to the wendigo’s fuller background requiring confrontations with colonisation and genocide.
As a fan of monsters and the Ancient Magus Bride, I personally do not think that Elias is a wendigo – at least, I really I hope he’s not. He’s a British monster, one embedded in conversations of Celtic mythology and Christian folklore. To bring the Wendigo into this would require detailed conversations of the cultural upheaval that the Algonquin peoples went through – one that should not be whitewashed. The wendigo, if it is to be as purely represented as other pieces of folklore and mythology as is presented in Ancient Magus Bride, should not be antlered.
As we’ve discussed a lot on this blog, transformations in mythology do happen. In some ways, the antlered wendigo is a transformation of the mythology – and in some respects, that’s right. But we should not only be aware of our contemporary mythology, but to also recognise where it comes from. We should know the history of our mythology – and understand what conversations we are avoiding when we transform our myths. Creating new and alternate myths in our contemporary era does often give voices to those who did not have any before – but the opposite can also happen. What voices are we erasing when we let our wendigos grow antlers?