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and there’s doubt that the entire “torture to death, bum at the stake” story is entirely accurate. Most heretics were publicly shamed rather than killed, and whilst the Spanish Inquisition used torture, they did so despite the protests of the Pope. Meanwhile, Galileo made his claim in the Renaissance, not the Middle Ages. And lastly, yes, the Crusades were an abomination, but they were also responsible for introducing the Arabic numeral system to Europe. Frankly, if you want to take shots at the church, I suggest you look at things like the blatantly moneygrubbing doctrine of Purgatory, which invited people to give the church money so that their dead relatives could get into heaven more quickly, or the way the church sold pardons of sin to the wealthy.

Backupcircuit snorts: Sure. Never mind that those heretics were mostly Jewspretendingto be Christians0 they could find work and not persecution, or thatThe point of all this is that the church was, for us, a place of learning rather than a place of ignorance, and at least some of us supported it. In this we made no friends among the other tribes, since some churches taught that wolves were of the devil. (The irony that most septs taught Garou that humans were of the Wyrm obviously never sank in.) Also, the developing Church had and did engage in persecution and murder of animistic faiths, which killed a lot of Kinfolk. We don’t really know how theWardersdealtwiththat,butIbettherewasalotofbad blood between other tribes and us over our support.

D0MdPV0Ph%?&lp!M Ckmmud/&m Another reason that we chose to support the church was our ability to hide in it easily, an important consideration for us in a time of such small populations! We’d already become excellent at hiding within Jewish cultures from our time in Canaan/Israel/Palestine, and much of that was easily transferred over to our time in the Catholic Church. Psalms remained very popular within our tribe, the ritualistic poetry and military overtones of many of the writings stayed as true in a Christiancontext as they had before. The major change was in many of the material components of our faith.

The most obvious technique we used was substituting images of Mary for images of Gaia. This happened in numerous ways, we used icons of Mary with very explicit nature overtones painted onto her clothing. Post-St. Augustine, young female cubs routinely took vows of chastity whilst being taught about Mary’s perpetual virginity, which allowed their teachers to instruct them about Gaia in guarded doublespeak right under the humans’ noses. Even if they were caught talking to their packmates on the issue, the same coded language allowed us to escape detection. and none of those were in great supply in these dangerous times. But it did happen. Consider the impact of the windmill, invented in this period.

The real reason that we had our heads down for so much of this period had more to do with our geographical location. A good deal of our tribe had been in Italy since the classical periods, and more migrated there late in the Middle Ages because the city-states of Northem Italy were filled with the spirits of technology we loved to deal with, and we always preferred a more urban existence ifpossible. Unfortunately, another supernatural creature has always said the same: vampires. Under the Roman Empire we had our influences on them to protect us, but its collapse allowed the vampires to dominate the period. They spread out across Italy so that they could each have their own feeding ground, and manipulating a few choice individuals to control one city was infinitely easier than trying to get a decent wedge in the Empire. So where could a werewolf fleeing his ancestral foes and with an interest in learning hide?

The answer was obvious: The church. 725 H!dM>&pM 956 D@&Ay@ckQmk Again, shut up before youevenstart talking, Backup.

The church did oppose a lot of thought, that’s true. But that’s also true of any large institution; I’m certain Slick will inform you just how well regular employees who try suggesting new strategies within corporations fare. You can also get the image of the monolithic, all-powerful Church out of your head. There were numerous monasteries, churches, cathedrals and individual bodies that made up the church, and there was thus the possibility of private dissent. Likewise, while the Pope exercised tremendous power over monarchs and leaders in the day, the church depended on the money of these lords to operate. There was interplay of power.

Backupcircuit fitly asks: Can I speak now?

Against my better judgment, yes.

I think you’re being more than a little soft on the Dark Ages church. These are the people who began the Inquisition and tortured heretics to death just for believing in a something different. They set back scientific thought by doing things like imprisoning Galileo for discovering that the sun was the center of the Universe, and they murdered thousands in the Crusades. As I recall, they murdered eight hundred non-combatants because they were Jewish, and thus allegedly the race that murdered Christ. I’m not denying that the church did some good, but there was a whole lot of bad mixed up in it too.

Sure, there’s good and bad in everything. But it’s never that simple. The Spanish Inquisition was more the product of Queen Isabella than the church itself, Chfipfer Ohe: AAytho!o5icn! L05ic I I P One interesting note is that the church also allowed us to maintain, for one of the few times in our history, non-urban caerns. The idea of monastic life came to Europe from China in 397 CE, and many of our tribe quickly took to the notion. There were a few reasons for this. It would not be improbable to suggest that there were rites that had been developed among our tribe in their time in China that may have been known by some of our Western members, and that returning to similar environment would have helped to resurrect their use. In addition, the idea allowed us a rare chance in Europe to expand outside the urban environment and develop caerns away from human eyes. Or some eyes, at least. Many caerns of the time seem to have been built on the periphery of a monastery, allowing human monks to live away from the caern itself.

In the end, those Garou that pretended to live as monks gained a useful edge when they became part of feudal society. Despite oaths of poverty, monks controlled large landholdings and efforts of agriculture and were responsible for the education of many. These were not small tools of power when they were needed.

Spirits were also easily accounted for in patron saints. The spirit who would eventually be known as Clashing Boom-Boom was known to the Warders of the day as the Archangel Michael, whilst the Golden Wheels occasionally made reverence to Matthew the Apostle. It should be noted that the Warders never actually worshipped the Christian saint as such (as did happen somewhat later), but merely hid their Gaia worship in the trappings of the faith.

We were also present in other areas of Europe and even beyond at the time, the Mugahl, or “Slave”

Dynasty in India was one area in which we’ve found evidence of our influence. Much like in Christendom, the Warders hid themselves by taking on Islamic trappings. They used the same lunar calendar as the Jewish people, and again we used it.

The notion of jihad easily settled in with Garou society, although one interesting piece of trivia is how our female warriors were assisted in continuing the war without being noticed. According to the hadiths, religious texts recording the words of Mohammed, the woman Umm Sulaim brought forward a dagger to tear open the belly of Islam’s enemies. Mohammed smiled at her for this, but told her instead to carry a water skin, so that the soldiers could drink. Even today, many female Glass Walkers in Muslim countries bind war-spirits into water skins to spill over their blade or claws before battle.

What began as camouflage has become tradition. %W!dMUdCq//tp PUf4 h D4kA@t#€%J& While I’m on the subject, this is when we get a significant bit of material evidence of a tribe named “The Warders,” curiously enough much along the same lines of our discussion, Backup. The record is a letter sent from one Gabriella Bernini, a Kinfolk and a nun in approximately 420 CE, which implores the receiver, Braccio di Danilo (Presumably also a Warder, although Kin or Garou is unknown,) to accept the church as a useful institution. The relevant quote declares, “Remember that in these times, the Church is all that humanity has to tie it together. Even with the Church, Italy is barely more than a string of camps ruled by warlords who spring upon the weak with bloodlust; without the Church it would be nothing more. Remember that just as they are their brother’s keepers, we are still their Warders yet.”

The religious connotations given to the tribe’s name here are fascinating, and repeated elsewhere, yet not all Warders saw their duty in religious terms. In fact, the dichotomy between Northern and Southern Italian Warders seems to have been considerably volatile, and even occasionally violent. A camp powerful in Northern Italy, the Golden Wheel, fiercely vilified a camp called the Brethren of the Book, most powerful in Southern Italy. The Golden Wheels were interested in trade and merchants, believing that kick-starting human learning would require new exchanges of ideas, and they accused the church of being hoarders of knowledge and wealth, so that neither benefited anyone. This included the Brethren of the Book (whose name describes them well, a bunch of scholars mostly), who were very heavily involved in church matters.

Whilst a few letters and records we have of meetings between the two groups are filled with pleading for a refrain from violence from both sides, this pleading shows that violence was present. ! 7 z d m d P d The one exception to all of this sectarianism was, of course, Frederick 11’s court in Palermo. Frederick the Great, the Stupor Mundi, Marvel of the World. He was to be frank, a madman, but the good kind. He gathered men of learning from all throughout France and Germany (remember, his court was in Sicily!) including Leonard0 da Pisa, who created the Fibonacci spiral, and the extremely influential theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. He had astronomers, philosophers, poets, physicians, magicians and yes, he had werewolves. I sincerely doubt he was aware of it, but one member of his court was the very capable Theurge and alchemist Drogo Krauthammer, one of the first members of a camp of alchemists known as the Firetenders.