An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Werewolves

The hideous transformation of man (and sometimes woman) into wolf is a traditional power of black witchcraft. Its usual means are by stripping naked, anointing oneself with a magical unguent, and then girding on an enchanted belt, sometimes said to be of wolf’s skin and sometimes of human skin. This causes the transformation to take place—according to legend, at any rate.

Is such an awful thing really possible? Or is it simply a foolish superstition, reduced to its ultimate absurdity by the makers of cheap horror films?

Some occultists believe that in a certain sense, werewolfery is possible. What is transformed, however, is not the physical body, but the astral body of the human being. There can be circumstances in which this astral entity can partly or wholly materialise, if it can draw sufficient substance from the physical body to do so. The physical body will in the meantime be lying in a state of deep trance.

Algernon Blackwood, that brilliant writer upon occult themes, has described in detail the precise mechanism of werewolfery in his story ’The Camp of the Dog’, one of the tales in his book John Silence (Eveleigh Nash, London), which first appeared in 1908. In the nineteenth century, the famous French occultist, Eliphas Levi, also attributed werewolfery to the transformation of the astral body. Levi added the detail that if the astral body of the sorcerer was struck at or wounded, while it was abroad in its wolf shape, the wounds or blows would manifest themselves upon the sorcerer’s material body. This phenomenon is well-known to occultists in connection with astral travelling, and is called ’repercussion’.

The Old Norse language has a significant word, ’ham-farir’, the meaning of which demonstrates the age of this belief. In the Icelandic-English Dictionary by Gudbrand Vigfusson (Oxford, 1874), this word is defined as “the ’faring’ or travelling in the assumed shape of an animal, fowl, or deer, fish or serpent, with magical speed over land and sea, the wizard’s own body meantime lying lifeless and motionless.”

A number of the more astute writers of ancient days also explained werewolfery in this way, notably Gaspar Peucer in 1553; but later, as the witchcraft persecution grew more intense, the anti-witch writers insisted upon the actual, crude physical change of man into wolf and back again. Writers of olden times also recognised a form of mental sickness called lycanthropy, in which the afflicted person imagined himself to be a wolf, and tried to run on all fours, howling in a horrible manner. This was originally regarded as a kind of madness, but later ascribed to the power of Satan, along with most things that were strange and in explicable.

Why, however, should the wolf be the favourite shape for these manifestations? Probably because this beast of prey was for so long a lively source of fear to our ancestors, in the days when the land was lonelier than it is now, the forest thicker, and the population much less. The last wolves in England were killed in the reign of King Henry VIII; but in Scotland and Ireland they were not exterminated until the eighteenth century. In other European countries, the danger of actual wolves remains to this day; and with it, very probably, the lingering belief in the wolf that may not be always a wolf, and the man that may not be unchangeably a man, especially on nights of the full moon.

Gervase of Tilbury, writing in about 1212, said in his book Otia Imperialia (quoted by Montague Summers in The Werewolf, Kegan Paul, London, 1933); “Certainly, we have often seen in England men who are turned into wolves at the changes of the moon.” He adds that these men were called ’gerulfos’ by the French, but that the English word for them was ’werewolf’, ’were’ meaning ’man’. (The modern French term is ’loup-garou’.) In Ireland, the people of Ossory were known in ancient times as ’the Children of the Wolf’, because of their reputed ability to become werewolves.

The werewolf belief is not something that arose merely in the Middle Ages. Pre-Christian writers also tell stories of werewolves; and there was an actual cult of werewolfery connected with the worship of Zeus Lycaeus, ’Wolfish Zeus’ or ’Zeus of the Wolves.’ This cult goes back to the very early days of Ancient Greece; but it was still being secretly carried on when Pausanius wrote his Description of Greece in about A.D. 176 (quoted by Montague Summers in The Werewolf).

The tradition of the werewolf in Europe goes back a very long way, and there may be a number of different sources from which it has evolved: cannibalistic rites of primitive totemism; dancers in animal skins; depraved blood-lust and sadism; the madness known as lycanthropy; and the projection of the astral body in animal form, aided by trance-inducing unguents and magical processes.

The chief recorded trials for werewolfery are all from the continent of Europe. In most cases, it was alleged by the prosecution that the werewolf gained his or her powers of transformation through witchcraft.

In December, 1521, three men were tried as werewolves at Poligny, in France, and in due course found guilty and executed. All three confessed to a number of killings while they were in the form of wolves, and also to coupling with she-wolves, which they preferred to normal intercourse with women.

In 1573 Gilles Garnier was executed at Dô1e in France, for having in the form of a werewolf devoured several children. A contemporary account says that Gamier was a solitary man who lived with his wife among lonely woods. They were poor, hungry people, and because of this Gamier had been tempted to make a pact with an evil spirit, which he met while wandering one evening in the woods. The spirit gave him an unguent or salve, by which means he was able to transform himself into a wolf and get meat to satisfy his hunger; but the meat he came to enjoy most was human flesh.

A very famous werewolf trial, that of Peter Stubbe or Stumpf, took place in Germany in 1589. It is well-known because a pamphlet account of it was printed in London in 1590, entitled “A True Discourse Declaring the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter, a most wicked Sorcerer, who in the likeness of a Wolf, committed many murders, continuing this devilish practice 25 years, killing and devouring Men, Women and Children. Who for the same fact was taken and executed the 31 of October last past in the Town of Bedburg near the City of Cologne in Germany.” There is a copy of this black-letter pamphlet in the British Museum.

In 1598, several big trials for werewolfery took place in France. One of them, in Paris, concerned a tailor of Chalons who enticed children into his shop, and then killed and ate them. At night, he was said to have roamed the woods as a werewolf. Among other things, barrels of human bones were found in the cellars of his house; and the details of the case were so frightful that the court ordered the records of it to be burned. The tailor, too, was burned at the stake.

In this year also, a whole family called Gandillon were found guilty of werewolfery at St.-Claude. An unusual feature of this case was that two of the accused were women. But the woman werewolf has been alleged to exist in other instances, though the charge is more frequently made against men.

Another trial of the same year was at Angers, where a beggar named Jacques Roulet was found guilty of killing children in the form of a werewolf. In his case, however, in spite of his confession of having been “devoted to the Devil” by his parents, and of having received from them the unguent that made him a werewolf, the sentence of death was remitted. He was sent to a hospital, which in those days would have been run by monks.

Similar mercy was shown to Jean Grenier, a lad of 14 or so who boasted of being a werewolf in 1603. His case is recorded in detail by Pierre De Lancre, the judge from Bordeaux who saw and questioned him. De Lancre describes Grenier’s strange and frightening appearance, with teeth that were unusually large and long, as also were his blackened nails, while his haggard eyes glittered like those of a wolf. He had marvellous agility, and could run on all fours and leap like an animal.

Grenier was a homeless, runaway lad, who seemed to like telling wild stories. But apparently he genuinely believed himself to be a werewolf; and several children in the district had been killed by a wolf.

Grenier confessed that he had been taken by another youth into the depths of a wood, and presented to a tall, dark man, whom he called the Lord of the Forest. The stranger was dressed all in black, and rode upon a black horse. He dismounted and conversed with the two lads, saluting Jean with a kiss; but his lips were colder than ice. At a subsequent meeting, Jean had agreed to bind himself to the service of the Lord of the Forest, who had marked him with a small dagger.

Then they had drunk wine together, and the Lord of the Forest had presented him with a wolf-skin and a pot of magical unguent, and instructed him in werewolfery. On several occasions, he said, he had seen meetings in the forest, where men whom he knew had bowed down before its mysterious lord.

Jean Grenier was at first sentenced to death; but this was commuted to life imprisonment in a monastery at Bordeaux. Here De Lancre visited him in 1610, and talked to him. Grenier seems to have been treated more as a sick lad victimised by an evil spirit, than as a criminal; though he was told that if he tried to escape from the monastery he would be hanged. He died in 1611, aged about 21 or 22.

It is possible to see in such tales as that of Jean Grenier the remains of a cult, which resembles those of the Leopard Men and Panther Men of Africa. We know that the cult of Zeus Lycaeus, which involved werewolfery, existed in ancient pagan Greece; and the Norse followers of Odin, who were called berserks because they wore the skin of bears or wolves, may be relevant also. On the other hand, the grisly feature of cannibalism that appears in accounts of werewolfery, could perhaps have arisen from sheer hunger for flesh meat among poor, half-starved peasants.