What Is a Shapeshifter? Stories About Bodies That Will Not Stay Fixed

Several distinct situations get collected under one heading. Voluntary transformation by a being with the power to do it is one, and covers gods who take animal form, sorcerers who change at will and tricksters who change to deceive. Involuntary transformation as a punishment is another and is extremely common, with a person turned into an animal, a tree or a stone for an offence, and in these stories the new form is a sentence rather than an ability. Cursed periodic transformation combines both, with the person changing against their will on a schedule, which is the werewolf pattern and which produces the distinctive horror of a self that becomes dangerous without consent. Transformation as disguise treats the change as tactical and reversible. And beings who have no fixed form at all, appearing however they choose or however they are perceived, occupy a different category again, since for them the question of a true shape does not arise.

Examples from separate traditions show how differently the same idea is handled:

• •Greek gods taking animal and human forms, usually to deceive, and mortals transformed as punishment throughout Ovid's collection of such stories
• •Norse accounts of warriors associated with bears and wolves, and of Loki changing form and sex freely
• •Selkies in Scottish and Irish tradition, seals who remove their skins to become human, whose stories almost always concern a stolen skin and an unwilling marriage
• •Kitsune in Japanese tradition, foxes who gain the ability to take human form with age and whose intentions range from benevolent to destructive
• •Skin-walkers in Navajo tradition, which are a serious matter within that culture and are frequently misrepresented in outside retellings
• •Werewolf traditions across Europe, which shift from a mark of sorcery to a medical affliction to a metaphor as the stories move through periods

The recurring themes are consistent enough to suggest what the figure is for. Identity is the central one, since a body that changes raises the question of what makes a person the same person, and these stories test it by removing the most obvious answer. The boundary between human and animal is another, with transformation stories negotiating whether that boundary is fixed, permeable or morally significant, and traditions that regard animals as persons produce very different stories from those that do not. Control and its loss run through the involuntary versions, which map readily onto illness, rage, intoxication and anything that makes a person unrecognisable to those around them. Concealment and deception power the tactical versions and connect to anxieties about not knowing who anyone really is. And the selkie type carries a distinct theme of captivity, since the stolen skin is a means of trapping someone who belongs elsewhere, and the endings are almost uniformly sad.

Two cautions apply. The first concerns flattening, since collecting these figures into a single category obscures that a fox spirit in one tradition, a punished mortal in another and a cursed villager in a third are doing entirely different work, and the resemblance is at the level of plot device rather than meaning. The second concerns appropriation, since several of these traditions belong to living cultures with rules about what may be discussed and by whom, and figures from Indigenous North American traditions in particular have been extracted into entertainment in ways that practitioners have objected to publicly and repeatedly. The safer approach treats each tradition's account on its own terms and notes the resemblances afterwards. What can reasonably be said in general is narrow: bodies that change are good material for thinking about identity, that thinking is useful in many cultures, and the specific anxieties attached to it differ with what each culture believes about persons, animals and the boundary between them.

Voluntary power, punishment, periodic curse and tactical disguise are four different situations gathered under one heading, and they mean different things. The stories test what makes a person the same person when the body will not hold still, and they negotiate the boundary between human and animal. Selkie tales are consistently about captivity through a stolen skin. Figures from living traditions have been extracted into entertainment over objections.