DEVIL IN WOLF’S CLOTHING

Abstract

The proverb Speak of the wolf (or: of the devil) and he will appear leads back to early folk belief that uttering the name of a demon could serve to summon it. Correspondences of the proverb exist in a large variety of languages in an abundant morpho-syntactic and lexical variability. Especially the parallelism of WOLF and DEVIL raises questions that can be answered only within a wide range of cultural contexts such as folklore, mythology, symbolism, tabooing of names, Christian exegesis, fairy tales and literature, among other things.

Keywords

• concepts of WOLF and DEVIL
• etymology
• folk belief
• symbolism
• taboos
• widespread proverb type