Some figures do not suffer transformation; they command it. In the Greek witness gathered here, Periclymenus, a son of Neleus, is one "whom Poseidon granted the power of changing his shape", and he spends the gift in battle: when Hercules is sacking Pylus he "turned himself into a lion, a snake, and" a bee (ws), running through shape after shape at his own will until Hercules brought him down. 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), adds in a note the fuller reach of the power — that Periclymenus was reported "able to change himself into any animal or tree he pleased", the whole living world available to him as wardrobe.

Half a world east, the same willed shape-shifting drives a Chinese epic. In Myths & Legends of China (a compilation published in 1922), the stone-born trickster Sun Hou-tzu learns from his master "to change into seventy-two different forms", and boasts of it as a credential before the Buddha: "I can change myself into seventy-two different forms". When the armies of Heaven trap him in a net across the sky, he simply steps out of his own outline — "Sun changed his form" and slipped free. The number is not decoration; it is an inventory of a self that keeps no fixed edge.

What sets this address apart from ordinary enchantment is consent. The lion, the snake, the bee, the seventy-two forms are not a curse worked upon a victim but a faculty the hero reaches for the way another might draw a sword. In both witnesses the trouble is not becoming something else but the fight that forces the display, and in both the shifter is at last pinned — Periclymenus slain, Sun sealed under a mountain. If the power to be anything is real, why does it never save its owner from the one who finally holds him still?