40,000 years ago, when the world was still covered in ice, an unknown artist carved a piece of mammoth tusk into the earliest known human sculpture, a figure of a man with the head of a lion.

The first shapeshifter, but not the last.

I'm Anne Strange Champs, and this week, onto the best of our knowledge,

there have been shapeshifting myths and legends on every continent and in every generation.

What deep longings and hidden fears lie behind them?

Welcome to episode four of our series on kinship with the more than human world.

Wisconsin Public Radio I'm Anne Strange Champs, and this is to the best of our knowledge.

I'm Anne Strange Champs, and this is old as time of people who can become animals.

Animals who can become people.

Shapeshifters, border crossers, skinwalkers.

And there is a lesson for our time in those stories, if we listen.

I think my favorite stories of all, if I had a totem story, would probably be the Selkees story.

Sharon Blackie is a writer, psychologist, and mythologist.

A Selke is a seal who in certain circumstances usually once a month under the light of the full moon is capable of shedding her seal skin and transforming into a human woman.

So they come to a beautiful beach under the full moon, they slip off their skins, they dance on the beach.

But the story goes that there is a fisherman, a very lonely fisherman hiding behind a rock watching this going on.

He steals the skin of one of the silkies. She's forced to stay with him for seven years.

She bears his children.

At the end of seven years, she's desiccated.

She's not meant to be on land. She asks him for her skin back.

He will not give it to her. And in most of the stories, it is her daughter who finds the

skin and gives it to the mother. And then the mother goes down to the beach, puts it on,

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