Werewolves!

 Werewolves!

“Even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers by night

May become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the Autumn moon is bright.”

—The Wolf Man (1941)

This presentation draws heavily from Dr. Bob Curran’s book Werewolves (2009), as well as Monsters (2001) by John Michael Greer and The Werewolf in Lore and Legend (1933) by Montague Summers.

What’s in a Name?

While the concept of the werewolf stretches back beyond the veil of recorded history, the actual name “werewolf” first appears in 11th Century England. Amongst Vikings and Saxons alike, particularly strong rulers or warriors were associated with wolves and bears. (The Celts held this ancient tradition as well. Keep in mind that “Arthur” means, in fact, “the bear,” and was most likely a title rather than a name.) During the 11th Century, a series of churchmen named Wulfstan (wolf-stone) helped to keep the Vikings at bay. One of them, Wulfstan II—chief lawmaker to both King Aethelred the Unready and Canute the Great—became bishop of London, and immediately bestowed upon himself the title “Lupus Episcopus.” The laity promptly translated this as Archbishop Werewolf. Though some have argued that “were” descends etymologically from the Latin “to change” or “become,” majority scholarship affirms that it simply means “man.” Thus, werewolf means quite literally a wolfman.

The Beast Within

The concept, and thus the fear, of the beast-man has been with us since the inception of humanity. French cave paintings dating back to 13,000 B.C. depict a man with antlers and a wolflike tail, crouching over on all fours—an ancient god or shaman, perhaps. In the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the protagonist Gilgamesh, part man and part god, finds his equal and bosom companion in Enkidu, who is part man and part beast. Only the trappings of civilization—bread, beer, and a temple prostitute—prove capable of taming, or humanizing, Enkidu. Shamanistic cultures throughout history have dressed as animals and emulated them in the hopes of enduing animalistic powers upon the hunters to ensure a successful hunt. Never underestimate the appeal of sympathetic magic and predator envy.

Shadow of the Wolf

Amongst animal world, few creatures have received such human attentions as the wolf. The cunning, cooperative pack hunters exhibit many parallels with humanity, and were some of our earliest competitors. As some adapted to the presence of humans, wolves also became our earliest partners; truly the dog has ever been Man’s best friend. When the goddess Ishtar tired of a shepherd’s affections in the Epic of Gilgamesh, she turned him into a wolf to be destroyed by his own hounds. (Later echoes of this story appear in Greek mythology, with the mighty hunter Actaeon coming upon Artemis bathing.) Romulus and Remus, legendary founders of Rome, were nursed by a she-wolf or wolf goddess, reflecting the ancient Latin wolf-cult of that region.

Werewolf Cults

Other wolf-gods appear in Egyptian mythology with Wepwawet and his father/successor Anubis, as well as in Teutonic mythology with the world-ending Fenrir. One of antiquity’s more disturbing legends, and one that establishes an oft-repeated pattern, comes to us from ancient Greece, where the thickly forested slopes of Mt. Lykaon hid the abominable rites of the cult of Lykaian Zeus. Lykaon was said to have been king of Arcadia before the Great Deluge. He invited the god Zeus to dine with him, only to reveal after the fact that he had fed to Zeus the human flesh of Lykaon’s own blood relations. Enraged, Zeus transformed him into a wolf. (Legends surrounding the biblical Flood also involve cannibalism.) In this form he had to remain for nine long years, at the end of which—provided he had not tasted human flesh—Lykaon could return to the human realm. The hidden shrines of Lykaian Zeus reenacted this legend, complete with human sacrifice and men raving as wolves in the night. The Arcadian boxer Damarchus, champion of the Olympic Games around 400 B.C., is said to have competed after spending his nine years as a wolf.

Mt. Soracte in Italy housed a similar cult, known as the Soranian Wolves, who were likewise possessed by wolf-spirits and practiced human sacrifice to the wolf-god Soranus. Herodotus claimed that the Neuri of Scythia changed into wolves and practiced cannibalism, and the Roman historian Pliny told the cautionary tale of a soldier who became a wolf after urinating within the sacred boundaries of a graveyard. If you’ve ever wondered what happens to a werewolf’s clothes, Pliny states that they are cast aside and turn to stone for the duration of the werewolf’s transformation.

The Dogheads

Civilized cultures often describe non-civilized cultures as somehow subhuman or bestial. This can be most clearly seen in the term barbarian, “bar-bar” being the Greek equivalent of “bow-wow.” A barbarian, quite literally, is one who barks like a dog. The term Saracen for eastern foes means essentially the same thing. Europeans, Persians, Indians and Chinese have all historically talked about savage outsiders as cynocephali, literally “dogheads.” The degree to which this is to be taken literally varies. It might be reasonable to suggest that belief in dog-headed peoples began as purely symbolic, to talk about barbarians who might as well have been beasts. Over time, people took these descriptions more literally. It may also be possible, however, that belief in cynocephali stems from encounters with sharp-faced primates such as baboons, or even from human beings with different facial features.

Dogheads are typically described as being both gigantic and also possessing cannibalistic tendencies. These, again, are traits associated with legends surrounding the biblical Flood. The Emperor Diocletian is said to have captured a dog-headed giant named Reprobus, “the Scoundrel.” Christian St. Christopher was also said to have been a large doghead of the Marmaritae tribe, and possibly a cannibal before his conversion to Christ. Debates arose amongst scholastics as to the nature of such creatures: were they animals who aped humanity, or simply a “degenerate” branch of humankind? The distinction mattered immensely, since the latter would indicate the presence of an immortal soul in need of salvation. Legends also arose that certain saints—St. Guinefort, St. Gelert, and St. Roche—began their lives as loyal hounds, who were then rewarded by God with humanity. Be they literal or symbolic, the underlying message of such legends remains the civilizing and humanizing nature of conversion to Christ.

Native American and Far Eastern cultures also spoke of shape-shifting creatures that blurred the line between animal and human. The Shoshone valued their relationship with wolves and wolf-spirits, whom they viewed as kindred hunters, and the kitsune fox-spirits of Japan were likewise viewed in a more positive light. Again, however, the issue dealt with the boundary between civilization and savagery.

Going Berserk

The Norse spoke of eigi einhamr, “those not of one skin.” The most famous of these were the Berserkers, peerless warriors who fought naked (without armored mail), possessed by animal spirits. Possibly bog myrtle and hallucinogens aided the process; there appears to be an ancient connection between trances, bloodlust, and mind-altering substances. The name Berserker literally means “bear shirt,” though in their battle-rage they often failed to distinguish friend from foe, let alone combatant from noncombatant. The greatest Berserkers could enter battle trances in their tents and send their bear- or wolf-form into the fray as a spirit—or so the legends go. The Greeks speak of a similar phenomenon. The Iliad refers to warriors who could send themselves into “frenzies,” and this was especially common (not surprisingly) amongst the Spartans. During the Battle of Platoea in Boetia, the Spartan Aristodemus seemed physically to change during his killing frenzies. (Of course, the Norse also held that those crafty Finns could shape-shift at will as well.)

Crom Cruach

The Irish likewise associated such battle-lust with wolves or hounds, which is why so many of their heroes sport the title “Cu-“ or “hound of,” such as the famous Cu-Cuhullain. The ancient Irish manuscript Coir Anmann tells of roaming groups of Irish “wolf-men,” akin to the berserkers, who fought alongside the old kings. They could change their shape to wolves in battle, and demanded no payment but that of human flesh upon which to feast. Theirs was the dark god Crom Cruach, Bowed Crom of the Mounds, who lived beneath the earth and fed on human sacrifice. Crom was one of the chief demons driven from Ireland—or Wolfland as it was often called—by St. Patrick, and Robert Howard chose Crom as the deity of his fictional pre-Celtic hero, Conan the Barbarian. More recently, Crom Cruach appeared as the antagonist in the animated film The Secret of Kells. This Irish werewolf god sounds suspiciously similar to Lykaian Zeus and the Soranian Wolves.

Let Him Be A Wolf’s-Head

The Saxons and Danes of England both had dealings with such savage forest men, looters and pillagers who rose up against the general peace. Criminals and ruffians became known as “wolf’s-heads,” identified with the great enemy of humanity. Such people were outlaws, literally beyond the protection afforded by human rights and laws, to be slain on sight without fear of legal repercussion. When William the Conqueror claimed great swathes of wild forest as his own royal parks, the slaying of large game became a crime against the king. (Think of Robin Hood.) Outlaws and wildmen who brazenly ignored such laws would at times raid villages or towns, sparing neither women nor children. (Not so merry men!) Similar bands of marauders arose in Kansas and Missouri during the chaos of the American Civil War. A wolf’s-head is a man gone feral, who thus no longer merits the protections afforded to people.

Wodewose

Related to the Wolf’s-Head is the forest hermit, someone who indeed lives outside of civilization and the rule of law yet means no harm to anyone. Just as the Wolf’s-Head can blur the line between man and wolf, so does the Wodewose blur the line between man and the gentler aspects of nature. Such wildmen of the forest were said to be large and hairy, to the point of no longer being fully human. Wodewoses can be recognized throughout cultures as the Sasquatch of North America, the Yeti of the Himalayas, or the Selinius of ancient Rome. Hanno the Navigator, of Fifth Century B.C. Carthage, described forest men in Africa whom he named “gorillae,” or “hairy women.” Wosewoses were less beast-men than they were nature spirits. Pushing the peaceful envelope were the forest companions of the Greek god Dionysus (Roman Bacchus) known as satyrs, hairy goat-men of voracious sexual appetite.

The Witch Hammer

Wolfmen and other shape-shifters, as we’ve seen, had deep-rooted connections with dark deities, as did historical witchcraft. Many confessed witches from the 15th through 17th Centuries claimed to be shape-shifters, taking on the forms of cats, hares, dogs and wolves by the powers of the Devil. (Some claimed only to see themselves as animals, while seeming human to others.) Dark pacts, a devil’s mark, magical ointments, cursed animal pelts, and thongs or belts made of human skin were all common elements in the witchcraft of shape-shifting. In response to the rapid spread of witchcraft, Pope Innocent VIII commissioned the Malleus Malificarum, which became the medieval witch-hunter’s manual.

As we’ve established in another presentation, witchcraft was no imagined phenomenon. We have ample historical, archaeological, and documentary evidence that people really did believe that they had made pacts with the Devil, and this belief led them to rob, curse, and often murder. They were said not only to change their own shapes but even to change others against the victim’s will. Nevertheless, the Church insisted that while God might change one manner of creature into another, such a miracle was beyond Satan’s power. Werewolves only seemed to transform, but remained essentially human. Their monstrous form was an illusion cast over—or perhaps in place of—the werewolf himself. Thus, they could be wounded or killed as easily as any man. The notion that werewolves (skin-walkers) have preternaturally tough hides is found only in Native American legends, and the use of silver bullets first appears in the Brothers Grimm as a remedy against otherwise bulletproof witches.

Holy Wolves

As the scholastic churchmen of the Middle Ages assimilated and synthesized pagan knowledge into a Christian framework, notions of transformation came to the fore. Given Christ’s transmutation of water into wine at Cana, the Transfiguration of our Lord atop Mt. Tabor, and the transubstantiation of the Eucharist, couldn’t God transform Man into beast? This seems to have occurred in legends of St. Patrick, who turned a band of marauders howling at the full moon into wolves (the first direct association of werewolves with the moon), and also of St. Natalis, who cursed the wicked Ossory tribe to ever have two members in wolf-form for a period of seven years per pair. Yet even these appear to have maintained their human souls, as for centuries afterwards priests in Ireland reported encounters with talking wolves who would request the Sacraments of the Church. Sins, such as bestiality, could produce monsters through deformity, but only God could truly change one manner of thing into another.

Celtic culture in general seems to have had a more positive view of werewolves, since the legends of Ireland, Wales, and Brittany speak of the “garwolf,” a man transformed into a wolf who nonetheless retains his human intellect and gentleness. Many variants of a classic Celtic tale involve a garwolf betrayed by his unfaithful wife, who steals away his clothes while he is in wolf form, thus preventing him from becoming human again. The garwolf goes onto ingratiate himself to the king and become a regular in the court, finally gaining the opportunity to reveal his plight and his wife’s perfidy, at which point the king forces the wife to return the garwolf’s clothes—and thus his full humanity. A version of this story has even made it into the Arthurian cycle of legends.

Loup-Garou

Few cultures have gone as werewolf crazy as the French, who seem to have been primed for such hysteria by the religious tragedies of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) and the War of Three Henries (1584-98). Both resulted in great Protestant-Catholic bloodshed, leading people to see hidden murderous beasts unveiled in the neighbors, as wolves descended from the forest to feed on the dead. In 1590 a French pamphlet told the gory story of the German Peter Stubbe, a cannibalistic giant from Cologne who could transform into a wolf, and who in this form murdered no less than 13 small children and two pregnant women, practicing incest with his sister and daughter and eating his own son’s brains. During his trial, Stubbe went into great detail about how the Devil gave to him a magic werewolf belt. Stubbe’s French contemporary Gilles Garnier, also a serial killer, likewise claimed to have been made a werewolf by the Devil, and was burned alive without strangulation for his crimes. Yet another case, that of the “Three Werewolves,” involved Pierre Bourgot and Michael Verdung, who together sold their souls to Satan for riches, attending Witches’ Sabbaths and transforming to wolves via a demonic ointment. Jacque Roulet, the Tailor of Chalons, the Gandillions family—the list goes on and on. While England held her witch trials, France found herself neck-deep in werewolf trials. (As was Canada with wendigos!)

Perhaps the most famous French werewolf case was also the most unusual. The Beast of Gevaudan in southern France attacked 210 times between 1764 and 1770, resulting in 113 deaths and 49 injuries. 98 of the victims killed were partially eaten. While people at the time had no doubt that this was the work of a particularly vicious werewolf, later investigation indicates that the Beast was, in fact, a trained hyena—quite possibly raised and unleashed by the same man who killed it to claim the reward.

Just A Poor Sick Boy

The turning point in French werewolf hysteria came with Jean Grenier, a homeless teenaged beggar who claimed to be a murdering werewolf. Tried at the beginning of the 17th Century, Grenier was treated not as a legitimate servant of the Devil but as a child abused by his stepmother, cast out by his father, and quite frankly sick in the head. He was sentenced not to death but to life in the monastery, in the hopes that his soul could be saved. We hear no more of him in the historical record. Doctors such as Johan Weyer (1515-1588) and Reginald Scott popularized the notion of werewolfism as a mental disease—the product of Romanist superstition and enfeebled minds. Drawing on classical understandings of human physiology based on the balance of the four humours, it was believed that the as the full moon affected the watery tides, so might it affect the “moistness” of the brain. Had not the full moon long been associated with lunacy, after all? Thus came about the notion of the werewolf not as diabolic agent but as hapless victim. New legends, especially in Sicily, spoke of bloodletting as the cure for lycanthropy, since bleeding was understood as one way to balance the four humours.

From the beginning, there had been an ambiguity between symbolism and literalism in legends of the werewolf. Had not some witches claimed to be the only ones who could see their own transformations? Did anyone know how seriously to take the notion of dogheads? Were shamans and berserkers dressed in animal skins, emulating animal movements, really changing their shape? Now lycanthropy came to be seen once more as illusory—not as a literal transformation in any sense. Freud chalked it up to repressed sexuality. (He was kind of a one-trick pony, Freud.) But we can’t close the case on werewolves just yet.

Leopard Men

In 20th Century British colonial Africa, people were being murdered. Throughout Nigeria and Seirra Leone, leopard cults were dragging victims off to hidden jungle altars, performing human sacrifice strangely reminiscent of Lykaian Zeus and the Wolf-Men of Crom Cruach. Eating human flesh, the cultists would worship their jungle god and take the form of leopards, terrorizing the populace. So frightened of retribution were the natives that they refused to aid the British colonial government in any way, even when suspects were discovered with dozens of shallow graves in their backyards. (Similar lion cults arose in central Africa and Tanzania.) Finally, a local British garrison disguised one of their own as the son of a wealthy local man, and set him on a journey down a dangerous trail known to be frequented by the leopard cult.

Though troops shadowed his movements, he was attacked by a leopard man without warning, and though he acquitted himself well with a knife, the leopard man killed him before reinforcements could arrive. His commander, however, left the soldier’s body in a public area under constant surveillance. That night, a man dressed in a leopard skin and wielding metal claws savagely attacked the corpse, as would a leopard returning to its kill. The commander promptly shot the leopard man dead, and displayed to the public that the leopard men were nothing more than mortals wearing animal hide. After this witnesses cooperated, and the leopard cult suppressed.

Brave New World

The rise of New Age thought brought about a new interest in shape-shifters and animal spirits. Abilities universally assumed to be the province of dark spirits now became attributed to human psychic powers: the shape-shifter surrounded himself with an “etheric shell” to enact his transformation from man into beast. Interestingly, the Church’s assertion that the change is illusory and the werewolf remains essentially human is here upheld. Other New Age thinkers write of thulpas, or “thought-forms” drawn from Eastern mysticism, which are basically psychic creations of the human mind or soul. A psychic could create a wolf thulpa to go and do the psychic’s bidding, or perhaps astral-project oneself in a lupine thought-form.

Witnesses still consistently report sightings of wolfmen in both Eastern Europe and the American Upper Midwest—primarily Michigan and Wisconsin, but also in Minnesota. Stories of the Michigan Dogmen have been popularized by the song “Legend,” and Wisconsin has grown famous for the Beast of Bray Road. One reporter investigating werewolf sightings along Bray Road compiled so many reports of contemporary werewolf encounters that her resulting book, Real Wolfmen, totaled some 400 pages. And that, mind you, compiles only American reports from the last few decades. (Nor let us forget the Rougarou of the Louisiana bayou.) Unlike their medieval predecessors, however, these wolfmen are rarely taken for human beings. New Age speculation talks about them as guardians of nature or of portals between worlds. While they’re certainly capable of frightening witnesses, they notably never seem to harm, let alone kill, anyone they encounter. We’ve come a long way from the serial murders and cannibalism of Antiquity through the Middle Ages.

Hollywood Hijinks

Modern Hollywood films, like comic books, tell monster stories in ways remarkably similar to the pagan myths of old. None of these mythologies have a “set canon”—the collections of Bulfinch and Hamilton, wonderful though they are, do not accurately represent the jumble of contradictory and ever-changing stories with which our pagan forebears were familiar. Ancient mythology acted more like present day superhero mythos, with stories told and retold by subsequent generations, always editing, always reinterpreting, dropping boring or uncomfortable bits of the story while adding popular innovations. Today we’d call this “retcon,” polishing a malleable tale over time, reshaping it in the retelling.

Modern werewolf stories largely began with Universal Pictures’ The Wolf Man (1941). This established the Hollywood image of the werewolf as a the product of a werewolf’s bite, as vulnerable to silver, as forced to transform during the full moon—and perhaps most notably as not a man becoming a wolf but as some sort of hybrid between human and beast. Subsequent films established the ever-growing size of the werewolf, and their seemingly irresistible sexual draw. (Such ideas were developed, adopted, and finally assumed over the course of many movies.) I remember the first time that I watched a werewolf movie wherein the werewolf could, inexplicably, stick to walls and ceilings. What did that have to do with being either a wolf or a man? Yet now this ability has become commonplace in werewolf films—as has the assumption that werewolves appear to be eight feet tall.

Conclusion

The werewolves with which we are familiar are Hollywood inventions, yet related to tales and notions as old as humanity itself. In many ways, the devil-dealing, serial-killing werewolves of ancient lore are far more frightening than the romantic New Age or supervillainous Hollywood versions. Certainly these were the monsters conjured up by Hitler when he named his Werwulf units. But most horrifyingly of all, the werewolves of old were real—real killers, real cannibals, really convinced that they were in league with the Devil. Their transformations, satanic or psychotic, were illusory. But their sins were not.