• Joseph P. Laycock, ” ‘We Are Spirits of Another Sort’:  Ontological Rebellion and Religious Dimensions of the Otherkin Community,” Nova Religio 15, no. 3 (2012): 65–90.   DOI: 10.1525/nr.2012.15.3.65

• Venetia Laura Delano Robertson, “The Beast Within: Anthrozoomorphic Identity and Alternative Spirituality in the Online Therianthropy Movement,” Nova Religio 16, no. 3 (2013): 7–30. DOI: 10.1525/nr.2013.16.3.7

“Therianthropic,” coined from the Greek words for “wild beast” and “man,” first showed up in 1886, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, when a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica wrote of  “Religions, in which animistic ideas still play a prominent part, but which have grown up to a therianthropic polytheism”—such as ancient Egyptian religion with the jackal-headed Set, etc., I suppose. Other therio- combinations go back to the seventeenth century, such as theriomancy.

Both Robertson and Laycock rely heavily on blogger Lupa’s book A Field Guide to Otherkin.

Laycock’s Otherkin scholarship seems to be a spin off from his work with the Atlanta Vampire Alliance, which produced Vampires Today: The Truth about Modern Vampirism.

Although he has to take time to explain the Otherkin “community” to his readers (I use the scare quotes because I have some reservations about the world community in such cases), Laycock is really engaged in religion scholars’ ongoing debate over what “religion” is or whether the word “religion” is useful at all in a scholarly setting. (There are those who claim it is not, that it merely masks political and social competitions.)

He places the Otherkin in the historical spectrum of Western esotericism and spiritualism: the idea of “walk-ins” goes back to the 19th century, for example, while the influential English esotericist Dion Fortune wrote of “possesion by ‘elementals’ or thought-forms . . . . Despite Fortune’s rather pejorative view of such people, Psychic Self-Defense has since been cited as an early reference to the Otherkin phenomenon” (71).

To Laycock, Otherkin are perhaps best described as an ” ‘audience cult,’ a movement that supports novel beliefs and practices but without a discernible organization. Individuals frequently participate in audience cults simply through reading books and watching television programs. . . . As an audience cult facilitated primarily by the Internet, Otherkin are free to practice whatever religion they like, but their identity tends to color that practice” (73).

There is more, but I am just summarizing a few points.

Robertson spends more time explaining the concept of Therianthropes’ self-descriptions of “awakening” to their dual natures, goes into “Internet religion — Therianthropy popped up on alt.horror.werewolves in 1992 — and concurs with Laycock  that Therianthropes “reify their anthrozoomorphic identity through the appropriation of spiritual concepts into personal mythologies” (10).

She spends time on the idea of shape-shifting through history and the return of totemism through neo-shamanic teaching as well as contemporary Paganism. But she also notes that there are Christian Therianthropes who see themrmselves as “having a gift bestowed upon them by God to redress the balance between nature and civilization” (23).

Her conclusion is that the Therianthropy movement “exemplifies the innovation of spiritual individuals in the postmodern age . . . popular occulture and re-enchantment in motion” (24).  In other words, the key sociology-of-religion concept of re-enchantment is more malleable and multi-faceted than previously discussed.