Alice Axe is a lycanthrope, otherwise known as a werewolf. Clinically, lycanthropy is the delusion of human-to-wolf transformation, and the expression of an intense psychosis. But Axe, guitarist for New Jersey metal outfit Sonicide, says lycanthropy is not a psychosis. ‘They’ve given me a bunch of psychological tests and everything and I came out perfectly normal.’ And she doesn’t believe it is purely mental. ‘There are too many physical connections, like the tail thing.’ Connections also include the tooth thing (Axe had a massive fang tooth in her childhood that later shattered in an accident in which she smacked her face) and the uterus thing (Axe’s uterus is retroverted, which means it tilts abnormally backwards, unlike regular human females).
For Axe, the shift itself is not dictated by the moon exclusively, but by her lingering primitive urges. ‘I’ll have to be feeling it first,’ Axe says. ‘I’ll have to be in that mood. The best way I can describe it is like feeling wolfy. It’s already there, it’s under the surface. Then something will happen to cause it: anger, fear, sex, fires, police sirens. I really hate police sirens. They want to make me howl and stuff. I have to hold my ears. That’s one of the really strong triggers for me.
‘When you get into a full shift, it’s almost like you’re changing gears mentally. You’re going from your human thought pattern to the wolf thought pattern, and you see yourself completely different. You see yourself as a wolf [pause] completely.’
Axe’s hearing becomes acute. She can hear the whine of computer monitors. She can no longer smell the rancid odour of garbage. She no longer recognises language. ‘Yeah, and I run around on all fours,’ Axe says, stressing that she does not mean a human crawl, but an actual run. ‘And I hear I’m pretty fast [laughs, heh heh].’ She also growls.
‘I’m very comfortable doing it,’ Axe says. ‘I’ve always kind of done it. I was kind of raised a feral child. I lived till I was about eight in the boonies [isolated bushland]. They kind of let me run wild. But when we moved, then they had to crack down on me and put me into school. That’s when it became hard.
‘I didn’t have any knowledge of what [lycanthropy] was. I couldn’t control it. So I’d be wolfing out left and right. I’d bite other kids. I’d growl at the teacher. I used to go running around wild and naked. The school started complaining. The neighbours started complaining. Then I went through a lot of punishments. My parents, when I was at my worst, in my teenage years, they threatened me with institutionalisation and all that crap. That’s when I really got paranoid about it, and started learning to control it.’
Though Axe learnt to control her urges using certain tricks (Axe can curb the shift by concentrating on maths, for example), she continued to shift intermittently, including an occasion at a high school party, in which she chased everybody out of the house. ‘You know teenagers, they go out and party all the time,’ Axe recalls. ‘And I guess it like was a full moon or something had happened to set me off. I don’t really remember. I can only remember it from my wolf-state, so my recollection of it is different from everyone else’s. I remember I was in this house, and I shifted. I was uncomfortable. I felt trapped. And, of course, in the wolf-state I can’t think to open a door, because I see my hands as paws. I was running around on all fours, trying to get out. I imagine someone let me out. But I went to some friends the next day and they shied away from me. They kept telling me how I had turned into this wolf and was tearing up the house. They had a little thing in the newspaper about it, ‘The Mystery Wolf Woman’, or some kind of stupid tabloid thing, that came from these kids or whatever. When I woke up the next day, all I could remember was running through a field or something and turning back [into a human], going to someone’s house and crashing on their couch. That’s all I can remember. I know I was naked.’
To date, Axe’s family continues to ignore her condition. ‘They don’t talk about it. It’s a dirty secret.’
‘I have two wolf-hybrids that I live with,’ Axe says. ‘My companions.’ [Note: in the background of our phone conversation, I can hear howling.] ‘They’re kind of like my family. My pack. My home. I feel closer to them than I do to people. I’ve got some chickens too. We all kind of hang out together.’
I ask Axe whether getting wolfy changes how she ‘you know, does it’. She pauses. ‘Well, I don’t know that you’d say it changes it ... Obviously, you behave in a different manner [we both laugh]. I’ve been with another lycanthrope, and the relationship was actually a very animal affair.’ She considers this and then says, ‘But that’s another thing about me; I won’t be with someone who isn’t a lycanthrope.’ Why? ‘Just for the fact that they wouldn’t understand. And I would not feel comfortable with them. Or even passionate about them.’
The lycanthrope romantically linked with Axe was Tim, Sonicide’s drummer. ‘And our bass player is a wolf,’ she says. ‘That’s Jim. But they’re not strong in it the way I am. Tim, I guess he’s shifted before, but it’s very mild in them. Tim is just kind of feral ... Actually, Tim is a bear.’ In reported cases of lycanthropy as a medical syndrome, wolves and dogs only account for some of the transformations. Other cases have included cats, horses, birds, tigers and frogs. One subject turned into a bee.
‘There’s a phenomenon among some of us; we call it ghost body,’ Axe says. ‘A lot of us refer to the feeling of having a ghost tail. It’s very much akin to what people who are amputees describe as ghost limbs.’ The ‘us’ and ‘we’ that Axe refers to is the werewolf community that emerged through certain webrings in the mid-90s (polls conducted by one particular ring revealed that their community of animals included mostly wolves, but also coyotes, dragons and ferrets, that most were male, that a third had a beard, goatee or mutton chops and that 41 per cent had fangs). ‘It’s very hard when you have no one to talk to about it. You feel kind of alone if you don’t have other people. We’re pack animals.’
‘I haven’t really wolfed-out [on stage],’ Axe says. ‘I did once in a mosh pit. At a past show, I got a little carried away. I was out on the floor, and I ran around the room on all fours, but I think people took it as part of the mosh.’
‘Then again, it’s only a part of my life and I live most of my life as a human.’
Download Sonicide’s music from
www.sonicide.com or
www.myspace.com/sonicide.