One of the largest groups of animal and plant traditions in folklore and religious material is that of transformation. Familiar stories—such as Beauty and the Beast; the transformation of a man into an ass in the Metamorphoses by Lucius Apuleius, a Roman writer of the 2nd century ce; the frog king or the swan maiden, as well as such well-known traditions as that of the werewolf, the vampire, or leopard man—testify to the wide dissemination of this theme. Every permutation and combination exists: human into mammal, bird, fish, insect, reptile, amphibian, or plant; animal into human or plant; animal into ...(100 of 22834 words)