To hold the shape-shifter you must hold on through every shape it tries. In the Greek witness gathered here, the mortal Peleus is counselled by the centaur Chiron to "seize her and hold her fast" — her being the sea-goddess Thetis — and to keep his grip "in spite of her shape-shifting". She runs the whole ladder of forms to shake him loose: "now into fire, now into water, and now into a beast", one thing after another, and he does not let go until she has resumed her own body. The record is Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography compiled in the 1st–2nd century CE). Its editor, the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), lists the fuller sequence a reluctant goddess ran through — "water, wind, a tree, a bird, a tiger, a lion, a serpent" — until, in the form of a cuttle-fish (sepia), she was at last caught and held.

The pattern here is not a single change but a chain of them, form giving way to form under pressure. The same restless succession drives a Chinese witness. In Myths & Legends of China (a compilation published in 1922), the stone-born Sun Hou-tzu is schooled "to change into seventy-two different forms" and cycles through them to escape capture — a self that answers every threat by becoming something new, only to be pinned at last under a mountain much as Thetis is pinned at last in her lover's arms.

What the reader watches, in both, is a contest of endurance dressed as a contest of magic. The shifter's advantage is variety; the captor's is refusal to be surprised — Chiron's whole counsel is simply to expect the fire, the water, the beast and to keep holding. The transformations exhaust themselves against a grip that will not read them as reasons to release. If a thing can be fire and then water and then a beast and still be caught by someone who merely waits it out, where in all those shapes did its true form ever go?