thumb|A hyena as depicted in a medieval bestiary|alt=A hyena hunches over a prone male figure on a bed or platform, biting his shoulder. The hyena is portrayed with spines along its back and tail, and with bird-like talons. In folklore, a werehyena (a neologism coined in analogy to werewolf) is a creature which can shapeshift into a hyena. The creature has origins across countless African cultures. It is also present in tales on the Arabian Peninsula. Unlike werewolves and other therianthropes, which are usually portrayed as being originally human, some werehyena lore tells of how they can als
thumb|A hyena as depicted in a medieval bestiary|alt=A hyena hunches over a prone male figure on a bed or platform, biting his shoulder. The hyena is portrayed with spines along its back and tail, and with bird-like talons. In folklore, a werehyena (a neologism coined in analogy to werewolf) is a creature which can shapeshift into a hyena. The creature has origins across countless African cultures. It is also present in tales on the Arabian Peninsula. Unlike werewolves and other therianthropes, which are usually portrayed as being originally human, some werehyena lore tells of how they can also be hyenas disguised as humans.
==African cultures== In Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Kimbundu and Bakongo peoples believe that werehyenas can exist as spirits of the dead or deceptive evil spirits. Those that exist as evil spirits are called kishi, or spirits with two faces. One account of a kishi is that of a werehyena-like being that first appears as an attractive man, which allows him to lure away unsuspecting women with his charm. Once alone, he turns around to reveal a hyena face on the back of his head and devours the woman.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).