Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

3. the similarity between an Internet columnist and a were-fox is that both try to create mirages that human beings take for reality.

4. the difference is that a fox is able to do this, but an Internet columnist isn’t.

The last point is hardly surprising. Would anyone who was able to create plausible mirages work as an Internet columnist? Unlikely. An Internet columnist can’t even convince himself that his inventions are real, I thought, clenching my fists, let alone other people. That’s why he ought to sit quietly and only bark when . . .

Then I forgot about Internet columnists and prison-camp guard dogs, as the light of truth suddenly flashed in my head.

‘Convince himself that his inventions are real,’ I repeated. ‘That’s it. Why, of course!’

Quite unexpectedly for myself I had solved the riddle that had been tormenting me for ages. My mind had been creeping up on it for many days, first from one side, then from the other - and all in vain. But now something turned and clicked, and everything suddenly fell into place - as if I’d put a jigsaw together by chance.

I realized how we foxes differ from werewolves. As is often the case, this difference was no more than a mutated similarity. Foxes and wolves were closely related - their magic was based on the manipulation of perception. But the means of manipulation were different.

A brief theoretical digression is required here, or else I’m afraid what I say will be incomprehensible.

People often argue about whether this world really exists, or is something like The Matrix movie. It’s a very stupid thing to argue about. All problems of this kind derive from the fact that people don’t understand the words they use. Before discussing this subject, the first thing people ought to do is get to grips with the meaning of the word ‘exist’. Then a lot of interesting things would become clear. But people are rarely capable of correct thinking.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that all people are total idiots. There are some among them whose intellect is almost the equal of a fox’s. For instance, the Irish philosopher Berkeley. He said that to exist means to be perceived and all objects exist only in perception. You only have to think calmly about the subject for three minutes to realize that any other views on the matter are like the cult of Osiris or belief in the god Mithras. In my view, this is the only true thought that has visited the Western mind in its long and funny history: all the Humes, Kants and Baudrillards are only embroidering the canvas of this great insight in a fussy satin stitch.

But where does an object exist when we turn away and stop seeing it? After all, it doesn’t disappear, as children and Amazonian Indians think, does it? Berkeley says that it exists in the perception of God. But Cathars and Gnostics believe that it exists in the perception of the diabolical demiurge, and their arguments are no worse than Berkeley’s. From their point of view, matter is an evil that shackles the spirit. By the way, reading Stephen Hawking’s horror stories, I often used to think that if the Albigenses had had a radio telescope, they would have declared the Big Bang a cosmic photograph of Satan’s rebellion ... There is a middle way through this morass of idiocy - to believe that part of the world exists in the perception of God, and part in the perception of the Devil.

What can I say to this? From the point of view of us foxes, there never was any Big Bang, just as the Tower of Babel that Breughel painted never existed, even if there is a reproduction of the painting hanging in a room that you dream about. And God and the Devil are simply reproductions that are dreamed by some people to hang in a room of the tower on the picture hanging on the wall in a room they dream about. Berkeley assumed that perception has to have a subject, and so the coins that rolled under the cupboard and the socks that fell behind the bed were solemnly interred in the cranium of a Creator specially created for that purpose. But how do we deal with the fact that Berkeley’s God, in whose perception we exist, Himself exists mostly in the abstract thinking of certain representatives of the endangered European race? And he doesn’t exist at all in the consciousness of a Chinese peasant or a little bird which is unaware that it is God’s? How do we deal with this if ‘to exist’ really does mean ‘to be perceived’?

We don’t, say the foxes. Foxes have a fundamental answer to the fundamental question of philosophy, which is to forget this fundamental question. There are no philosophical problems, there is only a suite of interconnected linguistic cul de sacs created by language’s inability to reflect the truth.

But it is better to run into one of these cul de sacs in the first paragraph, rather than after forty years of searching and five thousand pages of writing. After Berkeley finally got the point, the only thing he wrote about was the wonder-working properties of the tincture of bitumen that he’d come across in North America. And as a result, ever since then he has been mocked by various philistines, who aren’t aware that in that distant time bitumen was produced in America from a plant called Jimson Weed, or Datura.

Religious hypocrites accuse us were-creatures of addling people’s brains and distorting the Image of God. The people who say this have a rather poor idea of the Image of God, since they mould it after their own sanctimonious mugs. In any case, talk of ‘distortion’ and ‘addling’ is too judgemental; language like that shifts the question on to the emotional plane and prevents any understanding of the real nature of the matter, which is as follows (please pay close attention to the following paragraph - I have finally reached the most important point).

Since the existence of things consists in their perceptibility, any transformation can occur by two routes - either through the perception of transformation or the transformation of perception.

In honour of the great Irishman, I would like to call this rule Berkeley’s Law. It is absolutely essential knowledge for all seekers of truth, gangsters and extortionists, marketing specialists and paedophiles who wish to remain at liberty. And so, in their practice, foxes and wolves exploit different aspects of Berkeley’s Law.

We, the foxes, use transformation of perception . We influence our clients’ perception and make them see what we want them to see. The illusion we induce becomes absolutely real for them - the scars on the unforgettable Pavel Ivanovich’s back are the best possible proof of that. But we foxes continue to see the initial reality just as, according to Berkeley, God sees it. That is why we are accused of distorting the Image of God.

This, of course, is a hypocritical accusation, based on a double standard. The transformation of perception is the basis not only of foxes’ witchcraft, but also of many marketing techniques. For instance, Ford takes the cheap F-150 pick-up truck, gives it a lovely new front grille, restyles the bodywork and calls the resultant product the ‘Lincoln Navigator’. And no one says that Ford is distorting the Image of God. I won’t say anything about politics, everything’s clear already in that area. But somehow it’s only we foxes who provoke indignation.

Unlike us, werewolves use perception of transformation . They create an illusion, not for others, but for themselves. And they believe in it so strongly that the illusion ceases to be an illusion. There’s a passage in the Bible on that subject - ‘if you have faith as a mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, “Move from here to there, and it shall move; and nothing shall be impossible to you.”’ The werewolves have this mustard seed. Their transformation is a kind of alchemical chain reaction.