Lycanthrope Sancti

 

Paladin Alexander Anderson:  holy Father, Catholic crusader, and… werewolf?

 

            Anderson only shows up for two episodes and a 15 second clip of a third, but he makes a helluva an impression while he is around.  Indoctrinated into the Catholic Church and a paladin of the Iscariot Division, Anderson proves himself to be one of the Vatican’s most powerful weapons, and shows himself to be a man of many unusual talents, including the ability to heal himself almost instantaneously from wounds that should be fatal.

            Werewolves traditionally have always been extremely hard to kill; in fact, werewolves share many weaknesses with vampires.  Both can be destroyed (traditionally) by destruction of the brain or heart, decapitation, and can be injured by holy items (such as crucifixes and holy water) and silver.  Anything short of this is merely an annoyance to a werewolf, easily shrugged off and healed due to its constant cellular regeneration. 

            While Anderson is indeed shot in the head by Alucard by a silver bullet and this proves to not be fatal, I wouldn’t say that disproves this theory entirely.  Many of the more common rules of folklore do not apply to Hellsing.  Vampires walking about in daylight without taking apparent harm is one example; Alucard surviving decapitation with a blessed weapon is another.

            Werewolves are also traditionally insane.  Pragmatically, insanity is probably why many so-called accused “werewolves” did what they did or why they were accused of lycanthropy, but it is strongly associated with the breed and there is at least one other valid reason for this:  What would happen to a person’s sanity if their entire physical structure (including the structure of the nervous system and brain) was abruptly altered and rewired halfway through life, as would be the case during the transition from human to lycanthrope? 

            Why, I believe they’d go mad.   Behaviors specifically associated with a werewolf’s insanity include increased violence and aggression, unprovoked rage, and restlessness.

            Most of the people accused of being werewolves in the Middle Ages openly admitted to receiving their powers from Satan, such as the famous cases of Pierre Burgot and Jean Grenier. However, Anderson is quite clearly a madman on a mission from God.  By attempting to rationalize his sudden transformation in light of his faith as a gift from God and a powerful tool for killing vampires in the name of the Church, he manages to cope fairly effectively with his sudden violent mood swings and also manages to prove himself useful to the Church.  Interestingly, according to some werewolf lore, a lycanthrope who has been turned without consenting to be turned is not damned until it has tasted human blood.  A werewolf that avoids killing or biting a human being is, by this theory, morally pure… ergo, Anderson could be a “pure” lycanthrope, taking his bloodlust out on acceptable targets, and still accepted within the Church.

            Still, the Catholic Church would, without a doubt, be using Anderson, if this is the case, as a man would use an extremely vicious dog to guard his family or his livestock (more on this below).   They would be using something they see as evil productively to destroy evil.  Alucard refers to Anderson repeatedly as a “dog of the Church” or simply as a “dog”; it seems, actually, that this is his favorite insult for the priest, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.  Alucard asks directly what Anderson is: a man? a dog? a monster?  A werewolf is by any definition all of those things.

            Anderson is a particularly large man, with a wild, rough, untamed appearance and piercing green eyes.  Again, werewolves are usually depicted as larger than normal humans, and green is certainly considered a common eye color for a lycanthrope; werewolves in traditional and modern art and myth are most commonly depicted with either red or green eyes, with the common natural wolf color of yellow-amber being fairly rare in renditions of lycanthropes.  Werewolfry would also explain his perpetual five-o’clock shadow, and also his need for glasses (wolves have poorer vision than humans).  A careful viewer will also make note of the occasional appearance of pointed canines—fangs—in Anderson’s mouth.  This is especially noticeable in episode seven just after Alucard shoots off both of Anderson’s arms and destroys the blade he was holding in his mouth.  Anderson stops bare inches from the vampire’s face, snarling and biting off words with teeth that look equal to Alucard’s. 

            (Alucard… being Alucard… looks entirely too amused when he asks something along the lines of, “What are you going to do?  Bite me?”

            From the look of things, I’d say that it wasn’t unlikely at that moment.)

            Anderson’s fangs appear a few other times, usually when he’s emotionally riled up and thinking about stabbing someone.  Maybe the thought of causing carnage brings the inner beast out a bit…

            He is also extremely strong and agile, being able to slice a train car in half and able to hold his own against Alucard most of the time.  Again, normal human beings cannot slice through layers of metal nor keep pace with a supernaturally swift vampire.

            It is also interesting that in episode three and speaking of his regenerative ability, he speaks of  “humans” rather haughtily, like being human doesn’t apply to him. 

 

And then there’s that interesting flashback moment showing Anderson on his knees in a back alley-type setting and faced with an anonymous figure.  Seemingly terrified of the figure as it begins to change shape, he jams a gun barrel into his mouth in a suicide attempt. 

            Now, whatever that figure was (and you could argue that it’s any number of things, including a werewolf, a vampire, or even Alucard himself), it must have been extremely horrible to make a Catholic man attempt to kill himself… suicide being a transgression against God, a sin worthy of hellfire and utter damnation and one which Catholics are warned off of since birth.   I believe that whatever happened in that room, at that moment, was pivotal and changed the remainder of Anderson’s life.  I believe that whatever occurred there is what made him insane (or at least foaming-at-the-mouth fanatical), and what impels him to hunt vampires.

 

 

            Interestingly enough, canids, in particular wolves and dogs, were considered psychopomps—guardians and guides of the dead—in ancient mythologies around the world, ranging from the jackal- or dog-headed Egyptian God of Mummification and judge of the deceased’s moral soul, Anubis, to the Greek Cerebrus, the multi-headed dog guardian of Hades, to the pair of hunting hounds guarding the sacred Norse Hall of the Gods, Vallhalla.  The name-word “hellhound” is derived from the sacred hunting pack of the Norse goddess, Hel; it is said that dogs/wolves howl at night because they alone can see the shades of the dead still wandering the earth.  The association of canines and death/the underworld/judgment after death is almost universal.  Even in Christian mythos there exist the Gabriel Hounds, supernatural canines that run at night and destroy evildoers named after the archangel Saint Gabriel, the angel of Death.

            The idea of a werewolf, therianthropic dog-like human, or supernaturally intelligent canine dealing with the dead is an ancient idea, and more specifically interesting in this case are the examples like Anubis, Cerebrus, and the Gabriel Hounds, where the dog-deity also passes judgment upon the dead, and the souls of the deceased have to get past the canines in order to go onto the next life.  Certainly Anderson passes a moral judgment upon the vampires and ghouls he hunts, and by “killing” them sends them out from the half-life limbo they exist within and passes them onto the underworld/afterlife; he takes on the psychopomp role in a violent manner, but it is the same role—he guides the dead out of this world and into the next. 

            The connection could also be made between the wolf-dog as a guardian and the Biblical references to followers of Christ as “the flock,” “lambs,” and “sheep.”  Though the wolf was feared through Europe as a vicious killer of both people and sheep, the wolf—once tamed and called ‘dog’—also served to protect livestock from invading predators, including its own kin.  Priest are considered “shepherds” of their “flock,” their congregation; Anderson is a priest—he had been ordained—but he does not preach (interestingly, in some old Italian tales, wolves did aspire to priesthood and passed ordination, but they could not be trusted in Mass due to their proclivity for gluttony and lust[1])… instead, Anderson is sent out to destroy supernatural evil that threatens humanity, assuming not the guardian role of a “shepherd,” but taking the defensively aggressive role of a sheepdog attacking threatening wolves.  Anderson is without a doubt the Church’s pet—though his superiors are usually careful to phrase it more tactfully—“tamed” by the belief system enforced by the Catholic Church and docile to those that know how to handle him and appeal to his belief system. 

           

There are even a few, rare Catholic Christian tales involving good werewolves, which date back to the early years of the Church and take place primarily in England and Ireland.  One such story claims that a wolf burst into an English church in 617 and proceeded to destroy the heretical monks within and set the defiled chapel aflame; other tales associate the Catholic Saint Christopher with lycanthropy, and more particularly, with the psychopomp aspect of wolves.  When Saint Anthony became lost on his journey to visit the hermit Saint Paul, he was assisted and fed by a she-wolf; one of the emblems of the animal-loving Saint Francis of Assisi is a wolf, and according to one myth the Saint actually had a conversation with a wolf that was terrorizing a village, and when the wolf confessed his sin, saying that he only attacked out of cold and hunger, the townspeople agreed to feed him and he became a beloved member of the community.  A wolf was found to have been buried in the churchyard of Church of St. Francesco della Pace in Gubbio—interesting, because churches usually only buried good Christians within the church graveyard with no exceptions.  Giraldus Cambrensis, a Welsh Archdeacon in the Middle Ages, wrote of encountering a sympathetic pair of werewolves, and gave last rites to the dying female of the pair.  Saint Patrick of Ireland supposedly preached to many werewolf families, and, according to myth, even once turned the king of Wales, Vereticus, into a wolf.  The Irish Saint Albeus was said to have been suckled by a she-wolf.

            In this vein, one might also note that the founders of Rome, the home of the Vatican, Remus and Romulus, were suckled, guarded, and raised by the great Lupa, the she-wolf.  Because of this, the wolf is considered one of the symbols of Rome. 

Images of wolves appear in many old centers of learning in Europe, including monasteries and cathedrals; in particular, the wolf carving in the Cathedral of Parma is accompanied by a Latin inscription which reads, “Est monachus factus lupus hic sub dogmate Tracius” translated, “This savage wolf was made a monk according to dogma” or alternately as “This wolf was made a monk eloquent on dogma."

 

 

            Some fanfiction writers—heh, the fun people that they are—have put forth the a similar idea, but one that is probably much more true, and that is that the Catholic Church distilled the essence of lycanthropes, vampires, and other night-ghoulies and mucked around in genetic experimentation in order to create a human that was capable of fighting against such demons with their own strengths and as little of their weaknesses as possible; the perfect weapon against creatures of the night.
            This theory would also set Anderson and Alucard—having endured experimentation and possible genetic alterations at the hands of the Hellsing family—as being separate sides of the same coin, mirror images of the same monster… the causes behind their fight matter less and less as it merely starts becoming a battle of self.

 

            This is nothing but speculation, food-for-thought, and is based much more off of the anime  (manga Anderson’s a little more human-seeming). There are plenty of other theories, and it’s fun to entertain, especially since we are not given any more information about Anderson or his past.  This, like much of Hellsing, is left up to the audience to draw their own conclusions and ideas.

 

 

 


[1] A bit of twelfth century doggerel that addresses the yearning of a wolf to be religious and his tendency to sin:

 

“A wolf swore off his sinful way,
and to a cloister went to stay.
He wished a spiritual life to keep,
But he was told he must tend sheep.
From then on he was restless.
He bit the sheep and pigs and said:
’These deeds be on the pastor’s head’”

 

(Literally, the last line translates as “This is the doing of the priest’s big hound.”)

 

Furthermore, monks and priests were sometimes called wolves in folklore due to the Church’s greediness for material goods and land; the rapacious carnal appetite of the wolf for livestock was also used in metaphor to represent a fallen priest’s lust for a member of the community.