Fear of Turning Cannibal

A fear of one's own capacity is a different structure from the rest of the fears here. Nothing external is avoided. What is feared is what the person might do, which makes the object inseparable from the person holding it, and avoidance impossible in the way it is possible with a dog or a bridge.

The label applied is culture-bound syndrome, the same filing Fright Sickness and voodoo death carry. Some First Nations communities count two further things among its symptoms: greed that cannot be satisfied, and the wrecking of the natural world.

That last clause is worth sitting with. A condition whose symptoms include environmental destruction is a diagnosis being applied to a way of consuming rather than to an appetite, and it is doing moral work that no other entry in this catalogue attempts.

What the wendigo is

The figure belongs to Algonquian tradition, held by the Ojibwe and the Saulteaux, the Cree, the Naskapi and the Innu, and what it is in all of them is a hostile spirit. Descriptions vary and the common element does not: a malevolent, cannibalistic supernatural being, strongly associated with the north, with winter, cold, famine and starvation.

It is sometimes depicted with human characteristics and as able to possess human beings, causing insatiable hunger, a desire to eat other humans, and a propensity to murder. Some versions make it enormous and human-shaped with ice where the heart should be, and announce its arrival by a stink or by cold that has no business being there.

Basil H. Johnston, an Ojibwe teacher and scholar from Ontario, described it:

• gaunt to the point of emaciation, with desiccated skin pulled tight over the bones
• a complexion the ash-grey of death
• eyes pushed back deep into their sockets
• lips tattered and bloody
• an odour of decay and corruption

How the folklore explains the hunger

In Ojibwe, Eastern Cree, Westmain Swampy Cree, Naskapi and Innu accounts, wendigos are giants many times larger than a human, a feature absent from the myths of other Algonquian cultures. The reason given for the size is the important part: whenever a wendigo ate a person it grew in proportion to the meal, so it could never be full.

Hence a figure that is starving and insatiable at the same time, and hence its standing as the shape greed and excess take. One person eaten settles nothing, so it goes looking again immediately.

A being that grows by exactly as much as it consumes can never close the gap, and the starvation is not a failure of the appetite but a consequence of satisfying it.

What the creature retains

A wendigo need not lose the powers of cognition or speech. In some depictions it communicates clearly with prospective victims, or threatens and taunts them.

One story recorded early in the twentieth century by Lottie Chicogquaw Marsden, working as an ethnographer among the Chippewas of Rama First Nation, has a wendigo handling a knife, living through having part of itself cut away, and then eating that part. A wendigo takes a boy who is too thin, travels with him waiting for him to fatten, and cuts his hand periodically to check. The boy reaches a village and shows the people his hand. They cut off the wendigo's legs, and return to find it not dead but eating the marrow from the bones of its own severed legs, and remarking that there is plenty of fat on them because it has eaten so many people.

Which neighbouring being differs

The wechuge appears in the legends of the Athabaskan people of the Northwest Pacific Coast and is also cannibalistic, and it differs in one respect that inverts the reading: it is characterised as enlightened with ancestral insights.

Where the word wendigo comes from

Wendigo is a loanword from two sources, partially from Cree, wihtikow, and partially from Ojibwe, wiindigoo. Comparable forms appear in English from 1714, as Whitego.

The spelling wendigo was popularised by Algernon Blackwood, who published the novella The Wendigo in 1910. Reconstructed back into Proto-Algonquian it comes out as wi·nteko·wa, and the possible sense there is owl.

What this entry cannot do

Nothing in the material gives a prevalence figure, a case series, a diagnostic instrument or a treatment description for wendigo psychosis. What exists is a folklore tradition documented in detail and a psychiatric label applied to it, and the relationship between the two is precisely the thing this catalogue is careful about elsewhere.