Hello there.
I’ve been getting a few questions about Dr. Deaton and other druid stuff lately.
I’ve avoided the subject because it’s complicated. But then the folks at the Return to Beacon Hills
podcast got me thinking about it again this week. We were laughing about how vague Deaton was with
most of his advice but it turns out being vague and withholding is very on-brand for druids.
And since you can’t talk about the Teen Wolf druids without discussing how they
got involved in the story in the first place – I’ll also do a bit about the very first werewolf.
If you’re on-board for more of these trips back to Beacon Hills you really should
subscribe ... no pressure but, you really should. Yeah. Totally should subscribe.
Let me be clear about a few things up front. I’m only talking about the Teen Wolf druids here
which may bear some similarity to real world accounts of ancient druids
but should not be confused with the real thing or the so-called neo-druids practicing today.
I mean, these folks seem lovely but they’re not druids in the classical sense
because we genuinely don’t know what classical druids were like.
Everything written about them was written by people or groups
who were busy either conquering or exterminating druids and the communities they served. And most
folks who study the various historical accounts say they contradict and are generally suspect
or were made up completely by creative people who knew nobody could check their receipts.
Part of the reason we have little in the way of accurate history
is that the druids were weird about writing stuff down, "weird" in that they steadfastly
refused to write stuff down. Due to that, we have zero firsthand druid knowledge today.
Neo Druids: Mark oh spirits and hear us now. Confirming this our sacred ground.
Again, these people do seem lovely and they are apparently having a very good time dancing around,
but they’re not old school druids.
Teen Wolf druids are not classical druids either but some of the stuff
in the historical record does match up with what we saw on the show.
One popular account of the druids says “they uttered their philosophy in riddles”.
Who does that sound like?
Deaton: I used to golf. I learned that the best golfers never swing before first imagining where they want the ball to go.
Yeah, so Deaton’s poetic turn of phrase and
random golf analogies make sense in light of what the Romans wrote about the druids.
Morrell: And are you going to tell them what's coming?
Deaton: They've got enough to worry about.
What was I talking about? I’m all over the place today.
Let me try to take this from a linear perspective.
Gerard: Do you know the myth of Lycaon?
Scott: I know it's where we get the word "Lycanthropy".
Teen Wolf druids are part of the story of the very first werewolf. He was named Lycaon and was King of Arcadia
and supposedly lived way back in the before times, like 25 hundred years ago.
Turns out Lycaon was a total dick. And that word is appropriate in so many ways and also literally
because Lycaon fathered a full platoon of male offspring. He had 50 sons in total.
So this Lycaon guy was an asshole and mocked Zeus by sacrificing children to the old god. Now Zeus
was not down for that at all so he decided to pay a little visit with Lycaon and the king, being a
total bro hole, was all like: “Hey guys watch this. I’m about to totally fuck with Zeus.”
So, Lycaon killed his youngest son and had the cooks prepare the boy for Zeus as dinner.
Zeus wasn’t having none of that. He actually flipped the table
and turned Lycaon and his sons into wolves.
He then brought Lycaon’s youngest son back from the dead and was like: “Yeah,
you’re dad’s a total dick and so you’re the king of Arcadia now.”
On Teen Wolf we get this story from Gerard who
is an unreliable narrator but I think he’s telling it straight here.
Gerard: The part that's lesser known is how Lycaon sought out the druids to help turn him back to human.
So Lycaon seeks the help of druids to learn shape shifting and they teach him
and the 49 sons to flip back and forth from human to wolf.
In doing so, Druids gave the world the very first Alpha werewolves.
Each of Lycaon’s sons had their own families and so the werewolf thing spread down
through all the generations from them to where we are today.
Zeus’ curse still comes on werewolves hard during the full moon but they get a somewhat normal life
the rest of the time and in return the druids got some powerful shape shifting allies that could
help them against all those conquering Romans and other groups who tried to wipe them out.
But how did the druids know how to help Lycaon’s family?
The true answer is we don’t know because they never wrote anything down.
The fake histories we have falsely portray druids as
some sort of mystic wizards of the forest realms. But the Teen Wolf druid seems more in
line with what little we actually know about the role they played in their communities.
Druids are healers and political advisors and the equivalent of supreme court judges in some cases,
they know astronomy and agriculture. Pretty much if it grew from the earth or passed
through the heavens, it was the druid’s job to understand and use it in some way for the betterment of their community.
All this made them very important to the tribes of men they served.
Druid literally translates in some languages as “one whose knowledge is great and complete.”
Teen Wolf druids also serve this advisory role
and they show mastery over the various powers present in the natural world.
On the show, natural power travels through the earth by way of telluric
currents and can be channeled and molded by druids using various plants, trees and objects.
Plants like mistletoe and wolfsbane, crystals like moonstone,
trees like the mighty oak called nemeton and the mountain ash tree.
Deaton: It's from the Mountain Ash tree which is believed by many cultures to protect against the supernatural.
This office is lined with ash wood, making it difficult for someone like Scott to cause me any trouble.
But again as Deaton says, he’s not a wizard.
Isaac: What are you, some kind of witch?
Deaton: No. I'm a veterinarian.
What the Teen Wolf druids do isn’t magic in the Harry Potter or Brakebill’s kind of way. It’s far
more subtle and grounded. Just like in real life, certain substances have certain effects on people.
A couple of examples, a derivative of the Mountain ash tree can calm
a sore throat or shrink hemorrhoids in real life.
What? You don’t want to talk about butt stuff? Fine. A derivative of the mountain ash tree can calm a sore throat.
In Teen Wolf, it calms down werewolves.
Scott: I can't hear anything. It must be the mountain ash.
Kira: I feel it too. To be honest, I feel a little weak.
Scott: Yeah, it's like being sedated.
Now those mountain ash supernatural barriers, while fully fictional,
are simply the interaction of the mountain ash powder with power from the telluric currents.
When the mountain ash completes a circuit with itself,
nothing supernatural can cross that barrier. But it’s not magic it’s just a ground up tree
interacting with and focusing the power that is already flowing naturally through the world.
I hope that makes sense I don’t want to go all druid and resort to analogy here.
It seems pretty simple to me that you've got power from the telluric currents and you have a focus agent in the mountain ash.
Moving on. Wolfsbane in real life is poisonous to just about everything it touches.
On Teen Wolf, Werewolves can survive a lot of stuff that human’s can’t
but they’re more susceptible to this particular poison than anything else.
I mean, Jackson was poisoned by wolfsbane from Derek during Magic Bullet.
It caused hallucinations and general sickness in a human victim. It almost killed Derek because he got a higher
dose and there’s almost an allergic reaction in werewolves beyond the plant's natural poison.
Boyd: I think I stopped healing.
Derek: The bullets, they're laced with wolfsbane.
Both of these examples might seem like magic when presented on the show but again
it’s just a natural interaction of the tree or plant coming into contact
with different types of creatures and heightened a little bit through fiction.
One thing I have to mention here is that the show decided
in later seasons that wolfsbane didn’t effect humans that much. This is not true.
Victoria Argent breathing in a cloud of vaporized wolfsbane
in Raving would have killed her just as quickly as it killed Scott.
And this nom-nom Gerard did on the yellow wolfsbane
would have put us all out of our misery by immediately ending his miserable life.
Wolfsbane is poisonous. A little exposure can be treated
but don’t try any of the stuff they show on Teen Wolf because it will kill you.
Back to the druids, they studied all the useful plants and knew how to channel their effects into
healing and other needs by learning how all the natural elements work together.
That education passed down for thousands of years
is why they can do the stuff they do on the show. It’s not magic, it’s knowledge.
Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this one, let me know in the comments and I'll do one on how Jennifer Blake
worked her druid mojo. So, join me next time when we go back to Beacon Hills.