The Werewolf: Lycanthropy

AS old as time and as wide as the world, the belief in the werewolf by its very antiquity and its universality affords accumulated evidence that there is at least some extremely significant and vital element of truth in this dateless tradition, however disguised and distorted it may have become in later days by the fantasies and poetry of epic sagas, roundel, and romance. The ultimate origins of the werewolf are indeed obscure and lost in the mists of primeval mythology, and when we endeavour to track the slot too far we presently find ourselves mused and amazed, driven to hazard and profitless conjecture, unless we are sensible enough to recognize and candid enough to acknowledge the dark and terrible mysteries, both psychic and physical, which are implicated in and essentially permeate a catena of evidence past dispute, and which alone can adequately explain or account for the prominence and the survival of those cruel narratives which have come down to us throughout the centuries, and the facts of which are being repeated to-day in the evil-haunted depths of African jungles, and even in remoter hamlets of Europe, farmy woods and mountain vales, almost divorced from the ken of man and wellnigh un visited by civilization.

The mere somatist; the rationalist, often masquerading nowadays under Christian credentials; the rationalizing anthropologist; the totemist; the erratic solarist; "prompt to impose and fond to dogmatize," each and every, in his hot-paced eagerness to expiscate and explain the manner of all mysteries in earth and heaven, will not be slow to broach and argue his newest superstitions, the fruit of trivially profound research, vagaries which can neither interest, instruct, nor yet entertain the true scholar of simpler vision and clearer thought, since in the end these veaking inquirers commonly arrive at nothing, and like the earth-born sons of Cadmean tilth it has proved in the past that again and again do they painfully destroy themselves by internecine war.

Yet there may be found some in whom the missionary spirit of error is so pertinacious that they will refurbish and seemingly with intenser conviction reiterate sham theories a thousand times discredited and disproved. Thus, with regard to the very subject of the werewolf, which he only touches quite cursorily as he passes by, Sir William Ridgeway in his Early Age of Greece was constrained to warn the student that he "must be careful lest whilst he is avoiding the Scylla of solar mythology, he may be swallowed up in the Charybdis of totemism",

Precisely to define the werewolf is perhaps not altogether easy. We may, however, say that a werewolf is a human being, man, woman or child (more often the first), who either voluntarily or involuntarily changes or is metamorphosed into the apparent shape of a wolf, and who is then possessed of all the characteristics, the foul appetites, ferocity, cunning, the brute strength, and swiftness of that animal. In by far the greater majority of instances the werewolf to himself as well as to those who behold him seems completely to have assumed the furry lupine form. This shape-shifting is for the most part temporary, of longer or shorter duration, but it is sometimes supposed to be permanent. The transformation, again, such as it is, if desired, can be effected by certain rites and ceremonies, which in the case of a constitutional werewolf are often of the black goetic kind. The resumption of the original form may also then be wrought at will. Werewolfery is hereditary or acquired; a horrible pleasure born of the thirst to quaff warm human blood, or an ensorcelling punishment and revenge of the dark Ephesian art.

It should be remarked that in a secondary or derivative sense the word werewolf has been erroneously employed to denote a person suffering from lycanthropy, that mania or disease when the patient imagines himself to be a wolf, and under that savage delusion betrays all the bestial propensities of the wolf, howling in a horrid long-drawn note. This madness will hardly at all concern us here. Werewolf is also in one place found to specify an exceptionally large and ferocious wolf, and according to Dr. John Jamieson, in the county of Angus, Warwolf, pronounced warwoof was anciently used to designate a puny child, or an ill-grown person of whatever age.

Verstegan, that is to say, Richard Rowlands, in his A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, 4to, 1605, has: "Were our ancestors vsed somtyme in steed of Man yet should it seeme that were was moste commonly taken for a maried man. But the name of man is now more knoun and more generally vsed in the whole Teutonic toung then the name of Were.

"Were-wulf. This name remaineth stil knoun in the Teutonic, & is as much to say as man-wolf, the greeks expressing the very lyke, in Lycanthropos.

"Ortelius not knowing what were signified, because in the Netherlandes it is now clean out of vse, except thus composed with wolf, doth mis-interprete it according to his fancie.

"The were-wolves are certaine sorcerers, who hauing annoynted their bodyes, with an oyntment which they make by the instinct of the deuil; and putting on a certaine in-chanted girdel, do not only vnto the view of others seeme as wolues, but to their oun thinking haue both the shape and nature of wolues, so long as they weare the said girdel. And they do dispose theselues as very wolues, in wurrying and killing, and moste of humaine creatures.

"Of such sundry haue bin taken and executed in sundry partes of Germanie, and the Netherlands. One Peeter Stump for beeing a were-wolf and hauing killed thirteen children, two women, and one man; was at Bedbur not far from Cullen in the year 1589 put vnto a very terrible death. The flesh of diuers partes of his body was pulled out with hot iron tongs, his armes thighes & legges broke on a wheel, & his body lastly burnt. He dyed with very great remorce, desyring that his body might not be spared from any torment, so his soule might be saued. The were-wolf (so called in Germanie) is in France, called Loupgarov."

This "etymological explanation", says Professor Ernest Weekley in his More Words Ancient and Modern, "is substantially correct." This authority remarks that strictly were "should be wer, a word of wider diffusion in the Aryan languages than man or gome. It is found in all the Teutonic languages and is cognate with Lat. vir, Gaelic fear, Welsh gwr, Sanskrit vira. Were died out in early Mid. English, but survives historically in wergild". He also adds: "The disappearance of the simple were led Mid. English writers to explain the first syllable as ware, and, as late as 1576, Turber-ville tells us, 'Such wolves are called "warwolves", bicause a man had neede to be ware of...