The Werewolf
The following is excerpted from the author’s upcoming book from Repeater Press, Here Be Monsters: How to Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other, to be published in September, 2023.
A few years ago I found myself flipping through the pages of a very surprising book. It was a grimoire, a collections of spells and incantations, entitled The Magic Secrets of Guidon. Published in 1670 as an appendix to the Grimoire of Pope Honorarius, the short text recounts various folk magic practices of Norman shepherds against all manners of ills and evils.
It’s a rarely cited fact that, while the vast majority of those accused of witchcraft in Europe and Britain were women, the opposite was the case in Normandy.1 Shepherds in particular were often suspect, especially because their work meant they were often in the wilderness (and thus less civilized), and had a parallel male society with other shepherds in the same way that bandits, rogues, pirates and others outsider groups developed.2
Somewhat rare for grimoires of the time, the spells in The Magic Secrets of Guidon are for practical matters, rather than for binding demons for power and wealth. Quite a few spells are for protecting sheep and horses or for healing ones that are sick; another protects small garden plots from rabbits. A few are directed at other people, mostly to turn away bandits and thieves or to counteract the spells of rivals. In addition, several spells are to deal with personal health problems, including bleeding, hemorrhoids, and other illness.
A particular health problem merits two spells: that of “mange” or scabies, a contagious affliction transmitted by touch. In the second of these two spells, we find the following peculiar curse aimed at the cause of the skin condition:
“May the werewolf farrier’s dick rot, because he fucked me.”3
A farrier is a blacksmith who focuses on shoeing horses, and the implication of the curse is that the farrier passed scabies along to the shepherd and to his animals after sexual relations. While this alone could merit an entire discussion of late-medieval sodomy and folk magic beliefs, most relevant is the accusation that the farrier is also a werewolf.
While less common than those regarding witchcraft, accusations that a person was a werewolf often resulted in public trials. The most prominent of these occurred in Switzerland in the early 15th century alongside a significant wave of witch trials which soon spread throughout Europe. Famous accusations (such as that of Peter Stumpp) became printed as pamphlets and distributed widely throughout Europe.
The Werewolf is much, much older than these trials. Like the Vampire, the Werewolf is also a widely-known monster. The ability to change from human into an animal (or the other way around) is a core feature of many shamanic and animist traditions, and stories of humans turned into animals by the gods as punishment for some offense or even as divine favor against an attacker abound in animist and pagan lore throughout the world and especially in European paganisms.
The ability to shapeshift into animals was a common accusation against witches in the medieval and pre-capitalist period of Europe: indictments against people accused of being Werewolves often occurred alongside the witch hunts, though—as with Norman shepherds—suspected Werewolves were rarely women and most often men.
Unlike the Vampire or the Zombie, the Werewolf is a living human. It is neither a ghost nor a revenant, nor does the Werewolf lack a wandering soul or animating spirit. Instead, like the Cyborg, the Werewolf is fully human, fully alive, but also a hybrid being as well.
Accusations against Werewolves often followed a similar pattern to those accused of witchcraft, except for one significant difference. Witches supposedly knew they were witches, were accused of actively seeking relations with the Devil or demons, actively performing malefica (curses), and were otherwise accused of choosing to be witches. Those who accused others of being werewolves, on the other hand, assumed their target didn’t even realize what they were.
The vast majority of recorded myths we have about the Werewolf are from France, but the word we use for it in English is specifically Germanic. In fact, the French word for them, loup-garou, is derivative of the word the Germanic Frankish peoples used for it, werawulf, which meant “man wolf.”4 For ancient Germanic peoples, the Werewolf was both a mythic creature but also an exile or outcast marked for death and reliant only upon the gods for protection.
The Threat of the Wolf
To understand how these two ideas were related, we need first to contemplate actual wolves and their relationship to settled society or “civilization.” In Europe particularly, wolves were the primary threat to the keeping of cattle, sheep, and other animals for meat, milk, and wool. A wolf could quickly destroy a family’s personal herd (usually just a handful of animals) before the humans could even intervene. Such a loss meant not just the loss of a few animals, but also loss of wealth and even life due to starvation.
Without attacking a single person, a small group of wolves could cause the death of an entire village by killing off their livestock. As such, in many places wolves took on a symbolic sense of destruction, famine, and also of an unstoppable natural or external threat to society. They also were sometimes seen as forms of punishment from displeased gods or ancestors, or a herald of a change in rulership since leaders and kings who couldn’t protect their people from such threats were soon replaced.
Wolves became themselves part of the rituals of punishment within society, including in one of the oldest recorded prescriptions for ritual capital punishment, the “poena cullei.” In that ritual, the condemned first has his head covered with a wolf skin before being put into a sack with other animals and thrown from a cliff or drowned in a river.
In his excellent book, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Georgio Agamben details how the connection between punishment for severe, unpardonable crimes and wolf-men extended from both ancient German and Roman law into the medieval period of Europe. Men who were exiled as murderers or bandits were defined as Werewolves or “wolf heads” even in English law:
“...the laws of Edward the Confessor (1030-35) define the bandit as a wulfesheud (a wolf’s head) and assimilate him to the werewolf (lupinum enim gerit caput a die utlagationis suae, quod ab anglis wulfesheud vacatur, “He bears a wolf’s head from the day of his expulsion, and the English call this wulfesheud”). What had to remain in the collective unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city—the werewolf—is, therefore, in its origin the figure of the man who has been banned from the city. That such a man is defined as a wolf-man and not simply as a wolf (the expression caput lupinum has the form of a juridical statute) is decisive here. The life of the bandit, like that of the sacred man, is not a piece of animal nature without any relation to law and the city. It is, rather, a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion: the life of the bandit is the life of the loup garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither.
Perhaps you noticed something in Agamben’s final sentence. He calls the Werewolf “a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man,” adding that it is “precisely neither man nor beast” and “dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither.”
That is, the Werewolf is the shadow of the Cyborg, or rather they are inverse twins of each other. The Cyborg is part-human, part-machine, a hybrid being with one foot in the human world and one foot in our technological dreaming. The Werewolf, on the other hand, is part wolf, part human. Each are both and neither, both part human but not fully human, part animal or machine but not fully those things, either.
This leads to several immediate conclusions. First of all, the Cyborg is not the first monster to arise into our consciousness when our definitions of what it means to be human become unclear. The Werewolf is a much older monster who arose from the very same sort of problem, the complications of understanding how we are different from the rest of the world and from what we create.
Secondly, both the Cyborg and the Werewolf were born from political questions. The Cyborg appeared just at the point capitalist societies began trying to overcome naturalistic ideas of what life is and what humans are capable of doing. Technologies that allowed for extending life, replacing human organs and functions with machines, and even surgically changing the genitals to switch people between man and woman created not just theological or philosophical questions but political ones. If “natural” laws or limits could be transcended and even shown not to exist at all, then the very basis of “natural” rights and protections, as well as questions of race and identity itself, seemed to fall away underneath us.
What’s Beyond The Pale?
The Werewolf appeared at similar moments and because of similar questions, but rather than technology being the trigger for these crises, it was civilization itself. Civilization and political are both words which derive from ancient words for city: civitas (Roman) and polis (Greek). Civitas forms the root of the words “civil” and “civilian,” while the words “polite” and “police” both come from polis.
To be “civil” and “polite” both originally had senses of acting correctly according to urban or societal norms. Those who were neither civil nor polite, who failed to act civilized or according the political norms of society, were often thought of being too natural, too rural, and too much like animals.5 They were in essence barbarians or outlaws, people outside the reach of urban law and power. Such people inspired the word “pagan,” originally a Roman slur for uncivilized people who lived past certain boundary markers (pagus) between the city and rural land. They were also the “heathens,” the Germanic word for those who lived on the rural heaths later used by Christians to denote non-Christians. The English phrase “beyond the pale” was also derived from a similar idea: those in Ireland who lived past certain border poles (pales) outside the reach of English law were considered savages, primitives, and dangerous people.
It’s hard not to notice that the very same places which inspired the words pagan, heathen, and the phrase “beyond the pale” were also places where wolves would have been common. Wolves tend to avoid highly-settled areas, hunting instead in more wild and sparsely-populated areas. Such places were also where political exiles, bandits, and other societal outcasts lived, since it was only in places far from settlements that they were not in danger of execution by civil authorities.
So, while the Cyborg is the monster of hybridity between human and technology, the Werewolf was the hybrid of human society and the wild. Instead of presenting a technological challenge to human society, the Werewolf was nature’s challenge to it, a threat to the stability and order of settled, political life. Exiled from society yet still human, it lived just outside the reach and grasp of social understanding and governmental power. Equally human and animal but not fully either, it showed that all our political understanding, our civilizational reach, and our urban politeness and civility could not overcome some ineffable part of us that makes us wild, savage, animalistic, and ultimately ungovernable.
It’s no wonder then that the Werewolf has stood also as a symbol for outlaws and rural resistance to political power many times throughout recent history. Here, the shadow of fascism looms particularly heavy, especially that of the Nazis. Reintroduced to German consciousness by a 1910 novel about a peasant revolt against imperial armies called Der Wehrwolf, Nazis adopted a symbol that had been a popular peasant symbol of resistance during German peasant revolts in the 16th century. That symbol, the wolfangel, was based off a barbed hook used to trap wolves called by the same name.
Inspired by the fictional account of those actually-occurring revolts in Der Wehrwolf, Nazis adopted the symbol as part of their regalia and even named one of their military operations, “Werwolf,” after the book. Both the Werewolf and the wolfsangel appeared again quite recently, this time in far-right movements in the United States (Operation Werewolf and the Wolves of Vinland), and the fascist-aligned AZOV battalion in Ukraine also uses the wolfsangel in their uniforms and official military logo.
So, the wolfsangel has appeared both as part of lower-class resistance to empire and also as part of anti-liberal war machines and fascist paramilitary groups. So, too, has the Werewolf, being both a symbol and an actual name for those who resist political control and choose to operate outside the law as well as those who wish to enforce their own power on others.
What should we make of this? What is the Werewolf trying to tell us?
As the Cyborg warns us of the limits of integrating technology into human existence without also losing our humanity, I think the Werewolf warns us that the animal, untamed, or wild parts of humanity cannot never fully be integrated into civilization or political regimes. In other words, no universal social norms or cultural revolution can ever accommodate—let alone conquer—every mode of being.
Considering the Werewolf’s appearance both in peasant resistance to authoritarian rule in Europe, as well as its appearance in authoritarian rule itself, it seemed to arrive at moments when some great political, social, and economic transformation was attempting to fully capture what Georgio Agamben referred to as “bare life.” Bare life is also natural or animal life, our everyday existence as humans outside of political orders and civilizational concerns. It’s the “reality” of being human rather than the “reality” of being a political or economic subject, the human part of the Cyborg or the animal part of the Werewolf.
Bare life cannot be fully integrated into political life, into law or societal norms. It’s the private part of the individual, as opposed to the public existence determined by political categories: bare life is who we are outside of identities, categories, and other social fictions. Put another way, it’s the body-soul, rather than the wandering soul, the part that becomes a Zombie when its other soul is trapped by sorcery or trauma.
Today a law that seeks to transform itself wholly into life is more and more confronted with a life that has been deadened and mortified into juridical rule. Every attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with the clear awareness that we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoē and bios, between private life and political existence, between man as a simple living being at home in the house and man’s political existence in the city.
Must Everything Be Political?
Agamben’s observations about the political having captured all of life seems to give a shadow meaning to the feminist slogan “the personal is political,” pointing to a general tendency we see in radical thought (particularly online) to define every identity conflict as a matter of politics.
One incident from a few years ago in the United States will illustrate what I mean for this. For a little while, the very expensive grocery store Whole Foods sold pre-peeled oranges in plastic containers. When news of this product became widespread, there was an almost maddening debate about it: one one side were those who saw it as ridiculous and hyper-capitalist; on the other side were those who insisted that critics of the pre-peeled oranges were “ableist,” since a disabled person who might not be able to peel an orange on their own would benefit from the product Whole Foods was selling.
The curious fact that an orange could become a terrain of political struggle and conflict demonstrates what Agamben meant. In a way we might say that the political has colonized every part of our life: our thoughts, our belief systems, our perceptions, and even what we eat. Put another way, it is as if there is no “outside” any longer, no realm beyond the reach of the polis where wolves roam and political ideas have no power.
Regardless, there is still the Werewolf, with a foot still outside the political realm and in the realm of nature. Of course, those who stand in both realms seem to us as monstrous, terrifying horrors that threaten the stability of every day life, which is why we exile them and their ideas from our consciousness.
Actually-existing fascists aren’t Werewolves, regardless of how they might like to style themselves as such. On the contrary, they are just as civilised and part of the polis as the rest of us are. The core aspect of historical fascism that we forget at our peril was that it was a political machine, a product of mass production and the production of masses, and its aim was to seize and transform society in order to “save” it from foreign and domestic threats. If anything, the fascist has much more in common with the hunters of the Werewolf and the judges presiding over those trials than with those living outside civilization’s grasp.
They also have much more in common with the bourgeoisie as Marx and Engels described them. The bourgeoisie acted as a transformative force on society, shaping morality, values, and our relationship to ourselves and each other according to their values. The fascist projects did the same thing to terrifying results.
Such a fact should give us deep pause when we consider radical projects of cultural and societal transformation as well. Of course “we” are are not the same as those “others,” yet for those who stand outside our often very small radical groups and spaces, it’s quite easy to understand that they might not feel the same we do. In other words, attempts to transform an entire society are totalizing political projects. While they may not start out as totalitarian, eventually those they exile and banish will become Werewolves, threats that “must be dealt with” to maintain the political order.
Carl Jung proposed that what we exclude or fail to integrate comes back to haunt us as our shadow. Because no political order can ever be truly total or universal, it will always banish or exile certain humans ways of being and thinking in order to maintain its sense of totality. What is excluded, just as the exiled men who became bandits or those with “wolf heads,” then returns like the shadow to threaten the social order.
When we name those who do not fully accept, agree with, or even see the point in our radical ideas as “fascist,” we hang a wolf’s head upon them. Thus we should not act surprised that we see threats everywhere, “fascists” lurking just past the boundary markers of “us” and “them.” We are sometimes creating the monsters we claim to fight.
This is a terrifying reality, but it is not the only possible reality. In fact, standing with one foot in the realm of human society and one foot in the realm of nature, being part human and part animal, was not seen always as a cursed position nor even as a threat. From the viewpoint of early modern thinkers, of course, the groups of men who tended flocks from the enlightened towns were both feared and degraded, dirty and tainted reminders that the economies and even survival of the towns and cities relied upon people who, rather conquering the wild, took on a part of it on themselves. Werewolves themselves were not always seen as aberrant threats or secret murderers: for some peoples, the Werewolf was a divine protecter of other animals and even of humans. In what is now Estonia, for example, a man named Theiss of Kaltenbrun confessed to being a Werewolf and explained he and others fought demons on behalf of humans. Rather than being executed, he was instead merely flogged and banished for admitting also to performing magic spells without calling on the Christian God for their power.
Further back, and even up to the present elsewhere, these hybrids have been revered as shamans, mystics, and other roles of sacred leader. The wolf itself, we must remember, is one of many animals which shamans might entreat, learn from, and even become. How better to learn about our own wild nature than from beings which represent to us—accurately or not—the potential collapse of all our human efforts to tame and wall out nature?
Put another way, the Werewolf is a kind of antidote to the hubris we humans so relentlessly exhibit, all the beliefs that we can not only conquer the rest of the natural world but also the nature that composes us as well. All the grand utopian dreams of remaking human society into something that stands fully outside of the larger reality that we are also animal and also nature fall apart under the Werewolf’s feral gaze. No matter how hard we might try to extinct the wolf—and in many places almost succeeded—we cannot banish from ourselves the material reality of what we are. We can only accommodate it, make space for it, plan around it and include it our reckonings.
The “Real State of Emergency”
What this means practically for the question of fascism is made clear in one of Georgio Agamben’s strongest influences, Walter Benjamin. In Benjamin’s eighth thesis in his Theses on the Concept of History, he suggests that our delusional beliefs about “progress” were what prevented us from understanding why such movements happened at all:
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.6
We see this same problem now in the panicked denunciations of populist movements by theorists and politicians. The condescending blindness of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Convention regarding the really-existing concerns fueling Donald Trump’s ascendency are one such example. Through dismissing everyone who didn’t fully buy into her political program (more globalized capitalism in exchange for identity recognition) as “deplorable,” she all but ensured their disparate concerns would coalesce into a singular movement to defeat her. Judith Butler’s assertion that there is a global fascist movement against “gender” is yet another example, as are the renarrations of any criticism of racialized politics as “class reductionism” at best but more often “white supremacist.”
States of Emergency—or States of Exception—has been a core tool of capitalist governments anytime they are under threat or seek to accumulate more political power over the people. In such moments, a crisis is named which then serves as justification for the suspension of specific explicit or implicit rights. In the United States, the attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York City in 2001, for example, resulted in one such moment. The quick rush to implement a new regime of surveillance, the founding of new policing agencies with previously unheard-of authority (the Department of Homeland Security, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement—or I.C.E.--for example,) new restrictions on the freedom of movement (“no-fly” lists, intrusive security checks in airports), and extrajudicial punishment and imprisonment (CIA “black sites,” coercive torture methods such as waterboarding, the suspension of habeus corpus for those identified as “terrorists,” etc.) all happened quite suddenly. Two decades later, few of these “emergency” measures have been relinquished by the government, and many of them have been expanded.
The same expansion of the political reach of governments has occurred throughout the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, Australia, and to some extent the rest of the world as well. The powers accumulated over the bare life of the people each time become normalised so that even those who noticed these changes come to accept them or even forget that there was ever a time we experienced less political control over our daily lives.
Initial resistance to these emergencies is often quite broad and is what we might call “populist” or pre-political, but then is later captured into political formations. One place we see this quite clearly is in the recent accumulations of state power in response to the emergency of COVID-19. Early on, protests against government restrictions on movement, curfews, lock-downs, and vaccine mandates was quite widespread and was not immediately aligned with “left” or “right” political ideologies. However, quite soon this populist resistance became re-narrated as a “right” or “extreme right” reactionary movement.
Without getting too deeply into the controversy, we should examine at least a few of the larger principles at play in opposition to these government policies and how leftists ceded these struggles to rightist formations. Firstly, as Silvia Federici noted in her essay, “In Praise of the Dancing Body,” the state has always tried to accumulate power over human bodies through restriction of movement.
Fixation in space and time has been one of the most elementary and persistent techniques capitalism has used to take hold of the body. See the attacks throughout history on vagabonds, migrants, hobo-men. Mobility is a threat when not pursued for work-sake as it circulates knowledges, experiences, struggles. In the past the instruments of restraint were whips, chains, the stocks, mutilation, enslavement. Today, in addition to the whip and the detention centers, we have computer surveillance and the periodic threat of epidemics as a means to control nomadism.7
Thus, we might have expected that the curfews and lockdowns would have been a target for leftist mobilization against the state. Instead, in the United States especially but also in the United Kingdom and Europe, leftist journals and Antifa websites described those who opposed the lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations as reactionary, murderous, and most of all “fascist.”
In places where large manifestations of resistance did occur, as in Germany, the political alignments of the participants were in reality quite mixed. Both far right and far left activists and political figures supported them and were present, which led to panicked news articles and analyses suggesting they were signs of a “red-brown” insurgency.
Another way to have seen these moments was that they the resistance to these new state powers was based in a pre-political or anti-political desire to maintain the borders between bare life and the power of the state and capital over the lives of people. The gilets jaunes movement in France was another such moment, attracting people from otherwise inimical political alignments together in resistance to increased government control over human mobility and labor. The quintessential example of this kind of resistance, however, was the anti-globalization or altermondialist manifestations, events which brought out the most dazzling array of different and otherwise opposing interests.
Unfortunately, leftists later came to divorce themselves from—and even actively denounce—the mass mobilizations. The desires that fueled those movements didn’t disappear just because leftists decided they no longer mattered: instead, that populist anger became captured by far-right and right tendencies. In other words, leftists ceded desire for freedom against and resistance to government control over bare life to the right.
I must be direct here. We are often creating the very conditions of the fascism we seek to stop by “hanging a wolf’s head” on anything that doesn’t fit into our narrow political visions. We exile and banish everything that is difficult to integrate or fight for, labeling struggles that do not look like our own as the enemy. Resistance to neoliberalism, for example, becomes immediately suspect; the understandable concerns of precarious workers or communities disrupted by policies like NAFTA get smeared as “reactionary” and “fascist” despite having at their core the very same anti-capitalist desire the left once held
Benjamin’s solution is that, instead of believing that society is one long death march of progress interrupted by “emergencies” which sidetrack us, we must understand these moments are inevitable products of capitalist mass society itself. When people become part of a mass—meaning becoming alienated individuals who lose their sense of attachment to place, to culture, to familial times, and to everything except mass identity—they become easy political tools.
Walter Benjamin insists that fascism organizes the masses and redirects their desires for a change in property relations into a desire for “expression.” This is how populist resistance to the state and the capitalist becomes channeled instead in service of an identity against other identities, but it is only able to do so because we cede that territory to them. By dismissing or even villifying those who desire more bare life, we allow fascists to re-institute or shore up the state which steals it from them and create an “emergency situation” that staves off the “real state of emergency” Benjamin argues we must introduce.
What does such a real state of emergency look like? To the dismay of capitalist, liberal, and conservative alike, it’s the people refusing to acknowledge the hegemonic control of the polis and of capitalist property relations over their private life. It’s people returning to the wild, to bare life, forging their own ways of relating to each other and themselves outside the political realm. It’s economic exchange, social forms, cultural expression, and land relations that cannot be shaped, governed, captured, commodified, directed, or regulating by the political regime and the capitalist class. Rather than being exiled or exiling others, a real state of emergency would be us all exiling ourselves from the reach of the polis. In other words, becoming the Werewolf, rather than the obedient citizen-consumer-producer.
To reach such a real state of emergency, to become faithful realists to the larger reality of the world outside capital, would require collective, organized exit. Such a moment would require us dropping the mass-identities that turn us against each other and make us easy tools in the hands of the capitalist, which is why no one seems more eager to make sure we never do so than those who’d rather never see such a real emergency ever occur.
Notes
See: Toads and Eucharists: The Male Witches of Normandy, 1564-1660 William Monter French Historical Studies Vol. 20, No. 4 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 563-595 Published By: Duke University Press
Such male-only societies were often accurately accused of being full of homosexuals. See Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity by Hans Turley. Also, for background of the anarchic tendencies of such men, see Bandits, by Eric Hobsbaum
The original Norman French: “Lupin ferrant à filli le grand, car il m’a fait cha,” which one translator notes means literally ‘the werewolf farrier will fail to get big, because he made me a cunt.”
Werawulf became garulphus in Latin and then garou in French. Thus, the French term for the Werewolf, loup-garou, actually means “wolf-manwolf”
The word “pagan” was originally a Roman slur for uncivilized people who lived past certain boundary markers (pagus) between the city and rural land. The English phrase “beyond the pale” once had a similar meaning, those in Ireland who lived past certain border poles (pales) outside the reach of English law.
Available at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm
https://abeautifulresistance.org/site/2016/08/22/in-praise-of-the-dancing-body
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd is a druid, a theorist, a writer, and an autonomous Marxist. He lives in the Ardennes and writes at From The Forests of Arduinna. He’s the author of Being Pagan: A Guide to Re-Enchant Your Life and the upcoming Secret of Crossings, both from Ritona Press. He is also the author of the forthcoming Here Be Monsters: How to Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other (Repeater, 2023).