Werewolves in Legend and History by William Shepard Walsh 1915
Were-wolf (i.e., man wolf), in mediaeval folklore, a person who had the power of transforming himself into a wolf, retaining human intelligence while taking on the ferocity of a beast of prey and the strength of a demon. It was usually held that when the were-wolf wore his human shape the hair grew inward, the metamorphosis being effected by turning himself inside out. Many of the poor wretches who in the middle ages were broken on the wheel were first partially flayed alive in the search for their inner coating of hair. Sometimes, however, the person was thought to possess a wolf-skin into which he crept.
Transformation into beasts is a commonplace in classic mythology. Ovid's Metamorphoses deals largely in legends of this sort. The gods of Greece voluntarily assumed zoological shapes to aid them in schemes of lust, curiosity or vengeance. In Scandinavian legend, Loki changed himself into a salmon, Odin into an eagle. Oriental religions abound in similar myths. Equally common was the analogous notion of a change of soul between man and beast. The Buddhist reveres the ox, whose body may be tenanted by the soul of some ancestor. The Greek dreaded the wrath of the gods who could change him like Lycaon into a wolf.
The main source of the belief in lycanthropy or the metamorphosis of man into wolf lay in misinterpretation of the phenomena of insanity. There still may be men who believe themselves or are believed by others to have assumed the inner propensities or even the outer shape of the wolf. The weird brute who has left his stamp on classic antiquity, and trodden deep in northern snows, and howled amongst Oriental sepulchres may still be prowling in Abyssinian forests, ranging over Asiatic steppes or found screaming in the padded cell of Bedlam or Bloomingdale. Baring-Gould in The Book of Werewolves accumulates proofs of "an innate craving for blood implanted in certain natures, restrained under ordinary circumstances, but breaking forth occasionally accompanied by hallucination, leading, in most cases, to cannibalism." This kind of insanity, called cucubuth by Avicenna, went among the ancients by the name of lycanthropy or kyanthropy or boanthropy according as its victims believed themselves to be wolves, dogs, or oxen. The chief seat of lycanthropy was Arcadia. It was there Lycaon was transformed for having put to the proof the omniscience of Zeus by setting before him a hash of human flesh. Ages before the supposed date of Lycaon, however, some kindred superstition had struck deep its roots into the Scandinavian and Teutonic minds. The ghouls of the Arabian Nights, the Vitra or Rakschasas of the Pankatranta and the Mahabharata, are the were-wolves of the Persian and the Hindoo.
The story of the Marechal de Retz shows that even without hallucination human nature may develop a wolfish craving for human blood. Especially revolting is the case of the French officer Bertrand (cited by Baring-Gould) who in 1848 was found guilty of rifling the tombs of Pere la Chaise and strewing the corpses in fragments upon the ground.
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John Fiske in Myths and myth-makers gives the origin and development of the werewolf as follows: From the conception of wolf-like ghosts it was but a short step to the conception of corporeal werewolves. . . . Christianity did not fail to impart a new and fearful character to the belief in werewolves. Lycanthropy became regarded as a species of witchcraft, the werewolf as obtaining his powers from the Devil. It was often necessary to kill one's enemies, and at that time some even killed for love of it (like the Berserker); often a sort of homicidal madness, during which they would array themselves in the skins of wolves or bears and sally forth by night to crack the backbones, smash the skulls and sometimes to drink with fiendish glee the blood of unwary travelers or loiterers. . . . Possibly often the wolves were an invention of excited imagination. So people attributed a wolf's nature to the maniac or idiot with cannibal appetites, then the myth-forming process assigned to the unfortunate wretch a tangible lupine body. The causes were three:
1. Worship of dead ancestors with wolf totems originated the notion of transformation of men into divine or superhuman wolves.
2. The storm-wind was explained as the rushing of a troop of dead men's souls or as the howling of wolf-like monsters (called by Christianity demons).
3. Berserker madness and cannibalism, accompanied by lycanthropic hallucinations, interpreted as due to such demoniacal metamorphosis, gave rise to the werewolf superstition of the Middle Ages. The theory that if one put on a wolf's skin he became a werewolf, is perhaps a reminiscence of the fact alleged of Berserkers haunting the woods by night, clothed in hides of wolves or bears. A permanent cure was effected by burning the werewolf's sack, unless the Devil furnished him with a new wolfskin. Primitively, to become incarnated into any creature, the soul had only to put on the outward integument of the creature. The original werewolf is the nightwind—a kind of leader of departed souls, howling in the wintry blasts. Encyc. Brit. under Lycanthropy:-The Berserkir of Iceland dressed in the skins of bears and wolves, and further on: “Beastform is in mythology proper far oftener assumed for malignant than for benignant ends.”
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