The Book of Were-Wolves
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Title: The Book of Were-Wolves
Author: S. Baring-Gould
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #5324]
Most recently updated: February 24, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5324
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK OF WERE-WOLVES ***
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[Note: Greek text is in curly braces, i.e., {}.]
THE BOOK OF WERE-WOLVES
Being an Account of Terrible Superstition
by SABINE BARING-GOULD
Smith, Elder & Co., London
1865
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTER II. LYCANTHROPY AMONG THE ANCIENTS
Definition of Lycanthropy—Marcellus
Sidetes—Virgil—Herodotus—Ovid—Pliny—Agriopas—Story from
Petronius—Arcadian Legends—Explanation offered
CHAPTER III. THE WERE-WOLF IN THE NORTH
Norse Traditions—Manner in which the Change was effected—Vœlundar
Kvœda—Instances from the Völsung Saga—Hrolf’s Saga—Kraka—Faroëse
Poem—Helga Kvida—Vatnsdæla Saga—Eyrbyggja Saga
CHAPTER IV. THE ORIGIN OF THE SCANDINAVIAN WERE-WOLF
Advantage of the Study of Norse Literature—Bear and Wolf-skin
Dresses—The Berserkir—Their Rage—The Story of Thorir—Passages from the
Aigla—The Evening Wolf—Skallagrim and his Son-Derivation of the Word
“Hamr:” of “Vargr”—Laws affecting Outlaws—“To become a
Boar”—Recapitulation
CHAPTER V. THE WERE-WOLF IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Stories from Olaus Magnus of Livonian Were-wolves—Story from Bishop
Majolus—Story of Albertus Pericofcius—Similar occurrence at
Prague—Saint Patrick—Strange incident related by John of
Nüremberg—Bisclaveret—Courland Were-wolves—Pierre Vidal—Pavian
Lycanthropist—Bodin’s Stories—Forestus’ Account of a
Lycanthropist—Neapolitan Were-wolf
CHAPTER VI. A CHAPTER OF HORRORS
Pierre Bourgot and Michel Verdung—’Me Hermit of S. Bonnot—The Gandillon
Family—Thievenne Paget—The Tailor of Châlons—Roulet
Chapter VII. JEAN GRENIER
On the Sand-dunes—A Wolf attacks Marguerite Poirier—Jean Grenier
brought to Trial—His Confessions—Charges of Cannibalism proved—His
Sentence—Behaviour in the Monastery—Visit of Del’ancre
CHAPTER VIII. FOLK-LORE RELATING TO WERE-WOLVES
Barrenness of English Folk-lore—Devonshire Traditions—Derivation of
Were-wolf—Cannibalism in Scotland—The Angus Robber—The Carle of
Perth—French Superstitions—Norwegian Traditions—Danish Tales of
Were-wolves—Holstein Stories—The Werewolf in the Netherlands—Among the
Greeks; the Serbs; the White Russians; the Poles; the Russians—A
Russian Receipt for becoming a Were-wolf—The Bohemian Vlkodlak—Armenian
Story—Indian Tales—Abyssinian Budas—American Transformation Tales—A
Slovakian Household Tale—Similar Greek, Béarnais, and Icelandic Tales
CHAPTER IX. NATURAL CAUSES OF LYCANTHROPY
Innate Cruelty—Its Three Forms—Dumollard—Andreas Bichel—A Dutch
Priest—Other instances of Inherent Cruelty—Cruelty united to
Refinement—A Hungarian Bather in Blood—Suddenness with which the
Passion is developed—Cannibalism; in pregnant Women; in
Maniacs—Hallucination; how Produced—Salves—The Story of
Lucius—Self-deception
CHAPTER X. MYTHOLOGICAL ORIGIN OF THE WERE-WOLF MYTH
Metempsychosis—Sympathy between Men and Beasts—Finnbog and the
Bear—Osage and the Beaver—The Connexion of Soul and Body—Buddism—Case
of Mr. Holloway—Popular ideas concerning the Body—The derivation of the
German Leichnam—Feather Dresses—Transmigration of Souls—A Basque
Story—Story from the Pantschatantra—Savage ideas regarding Natural
Phenomena—Thunder, Lightning, and Cloud—The origin of the Dragon—John
of Bromton’s Dragon a Waterspout—The Legend of Typhoeus—Allegorizing of
the Effects of a Hurricane—Anthropomorphosis—The Cirrus Cloud, a
Heavenly Swan—Urvaci—The Storm-cloud a Daemon—Vritra and
Rakschasas—Story of a Brahmin and a Rakschasas
CHAPTER XI. THE MARÉCHAL DE REZT I: THE INVESTIGATION OF CHARGES
Introduction—History of Gilles de Laval—The Castle of
Machecoul—Surrender of the Marshal—Examination of Witnesses—Letter of
De Retz—The Duke of Brittany reluctant to move—The Bishop of Nantes
CHAPTER XII. THE MARÉCHAL DE REZT II: THE TRIAL
The Appearance of the Marshal—Pierre de l’Hospital—The Requisition—The
Trial adjourned—Meeting of the Marshal and his Servants—The Confession
of Henriet—Pontou persuaded to confess all—The adjourned Trial not
hurried on—The hesitation of the Duke of Brittany
CHAPTER XIII. MARÉCHAL DE RETZ III: THE SENTENCE AND EXECUTION
The adjourned Trial—The Marshal Confesses—The Case handed over to the
Ecclesiastical Tribunal—Prompt steps taken by the Bishop—The
Sentence—Ratified by the Secular Court—The Execution
CHAPTER XIV. A GALICIAN WERE-WOLF
The Inhabitants of Austrian Galicia—The Hamlet of Polomyja—Summer
Evening in the Forest—The Beggar Swiatek—A Girl disappears—A School-boy
vanishes—A Servant-girl lost—Another Boy carried of—The Discovery made
by the Publican of Polomyja—Swiatek locked up—Brought to Dabkow—Commits
suicide
Chapter XV. ANOMALOUS CASE—THE HUMAN HYENA
Ghouls—Story from Fornari—Quotation from Apuleius—Incident mentioned by
Marcassus—Cemeteries of Paris violated—Discovery of Violator—Confession
of M. Bertrand
CHAPTER XVI. A SERMON ON WERE-WOLVES
The Discourses of Dr. Johann—The Sermon—Remarks
THE BOOK OF WERE-WOLVES.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
I shall never forget the walk I took one night in Vienne, after having
accomplished the examination of an unknown Druidical relic, the Pierre
labie, at La Rondelle, near Champigni. I had learned of the existence
of this cromlech only on my arrival at Champigni in the afternoon, and
I had started to visit the curiosity without calculating the time it
would take me to reach it and to return. Suffice it to say that I
discovered the venerable pile of grey stones as the sun set, and that I
expended the last lights of evening in planning and sketching. I then
turned my face homeward. My walk of about ten miles had wearied me,
coming at the end of a long day’s posting, and I had lamed myself in
scrambling over some stones to the Gaulish relic.
A small hamlet was at no great distance, and I betook myself thither,
in the hopes of hiring a trap to convey me to the posthouse, but I was
disappointed. Few in the place could speak French, and the priest, when
I applied to him, assured me that he believed there was no better
conveyance in the place than a common charrue with its solid wooden
wheels; nor was a riding horse to be procured. The good man offered to
house me for the night; but I was obliged to decline, as my family
intended starting early on the following morning.
Out spake then the mayor—“Monsieur can never go back to-night across
the flats, because of the—the—” and his voice dropped; “the
loups-garoux.”
“He says that he must return!” replied the priest in patois. “But who
will go with him?”
“Ah, ha,! M. le Curé. It is all very well for one of us to accompany
him, but think of the coming back alone!”
“Then two must go with him,” said the priest, and you can take care of
each other as you return.”
“Picou tells me that he saw the were-wolf only this day se’nnight,”
said a peasant; “he was down by the hedge of his buckwheat field, and
the sun had set, and he was thinking of coming home, when he heard a
rustle on the far side of the hedge. He looked over, and there stood
the wolf as big as a calf against the horizon, its tongue out, and its
eyes glaring like marsh-fires. Mon Dieu! catch me going over the marais
to-night. Why, what could two men do if they were attacked by that
wolf-fiend?”
“It is tempting Providence,” said one of the elders of the village;” no
man must expect the help of God if he throws himself wilfully in the
way of danger. Is it not so, M. le Curé? I heard you say as much from
the pulpit on the first Sunday in Lent, preaching from the Gospel.”
“That is true,” observed several, shaking their heads.
“His tongue hanging out, and his eyes glaring like marsh-fires!” said
the confidant of Picou.
“Mon Dieu! if I met the monster, I should run,” quoth another.
“I quite believe you, Cortrez; I can answer for it that you would,”
said the mayor.
“As big as a calf,” threw in Picou’s friend.
“If the loup-garou were _only_ a natural wolf, why then, you see”—the
mayor cleared his throat—“you see we should think nothing of it; but,
M. le Curé, it is a fiend, a worse than fiend, a man-fiend,—a worse
than man-fiend, a man-wolf-fiend.”
“But what is the young monsieur to do?” asked the priest, looking from
one to another.
“Never mind,” said I, who had been quietly listening to their patois,
which I understood. “Never mind; I will walk back by myself, and if I
meet the loup-garou I will crop his ears and tail, and send them to M.
le Maire with my compliments.”
A sigh of relief from the assembly, as they found themselves clear of
the difficulty.
“Il est Anglais,” said the mayor, shaking his head, as though he meant
that an Englishman might face the devil with impunity.
A melancholy flat was the marais, looking desolate enough by day, but
now, in the gloaming, tenfold as desolate. The sky was perfectly clear,
and of a soft, blue-grey tinge; illumined by the new moon, a curve of
light approaching its western bed. To the horizon reached a fen,
blacked with pools of stagnant water, from which the frogs kept up an
incessant trill through the summer night. Heath and fern covered the
ground, but near the water grew dense masses of flag and bulrush,
amongst which the light wind sighed wearily. Here and there stood a
sandy knoll, capped with firs, looking like black splashes against the
grey sky; not a sign of habitation anywhere; the only trace of men
being the white, straight road extending for miles across the fen.
That this district harboured wolves is not improbable, and I confess
that I armed myself with a strong stick at the first clump of trees
through which the road dived.
This was my first introduction to were-wolves, and the circumstance of
finding the superstition still so prevalent, first gave me the idea of
investigating the history and the habits of these mythical creatures.
I must acknowledge that I have been quite unsuccessful in obtaining a
specimen of the animal, but I have found its traces in all directions.
And just as the palæontologist has constructed the labyrinthodon out of
its foot-prints in marl, and one splinter of bone, so may this
monograph be complete and accurate, although I have no chained
were-wolf before me which I may sketch and describe from the life.
The traces left are indeed numerous enough, and though perhaps like the
dodo or the dinormis, the werewolf may have become extinct in our age,
yet he has left his stamp on classic antiquity, he has trodden deep in
Northern snows. has ridden rough-shod over the mediævals, and has
howled amongst Oriental sepulchres. He belonged to a bad breed, and we
are quite content to be freed from him and his kindred, the vampire and
the ghoul. Yet who knows! We may be a little too hasty in concluding
that he is extinct. He may still prowl in Abyssinian forests, range
still over Asiatic steppes, and be found howling dismally in some
padded room of a Hanwell or a Bedlam.
In the following pages I design to investigate the notices of
were-wolves to be found in the ancient writers of classic antiquity,
those contained in the Northern Sagas, and, lastly, the numerous
details afforded by the mediæval authors. In connection with this I
shall give a sketch of modern folklore relating to Lycanthropy.
It will then be seen that under the veil of mythology lies a solid
reality, that a floating superstition holds in solution a positive
truth.
This I shall show to be an innate craving for blood implanted in
certain natures, restrained under ordinary circumstances, but breaking
forth occasionally, accompanied with hallucination, leading in most
cases to cannibalism. I shall then give instances of persons thus
afflicted, who were believed by others, and who believed themselves, to
be transformed into beasts, and who, in the paroxysms of their madness,
committed numerous murders, and devoured their victims.
I shall next give instances of persons suffering from the same passion
for blood, who murdered for the mere gratification of their natural
cruelty, but who were not subject to hallucinations, nor were addicted
to cannibalism.
I shall also give instances of persons filled with the same
propensities who murdered and ate their victims, but who were perfectly
free from hallucination.
CHAPTER II.
LYCANTHROPY AMONG THE ANCIENTS.
Definition of Lycanthropy—Marcellus
Sidetes—Virgil—Herodotus—Ovid—Pliny—Agriopas—Story from
Petronius—Arcadian Legends—Explanation offered.
What is Lycanthropy? The change of manor woman into the form of a wolf,
either through magical means, so as to enable him or her to gratify the
taste for human flesh, or through judgment of the gods in punishment
for some great offence.
This is the popular definition. Truly it consists in a form of madness,
such as may be found in most asylums.
Among the ancients this kind of insanity went by the names of
Lycanthropy, Kuanthropy, or Boanthropy, because those afflicted with it
believed themselves to be turned into wolves, dogs, or cows. But in the
North of Europe, as we shall see, the shape of a bear, and in
Africa that of a hyæna, were often selected in preference. A mere
matter of taste! According to Marcellus Sidetes, of whose poem {Greek
_perì lukanðrw’pou_} a fragment exists, men are attacked with this
madness chiefly in the beginning of the year, and become most furious
in February; retiring for the night to lone cemeteries, and living
precisely in the manner of dogs and wolves.
Virgil writes in his eighth Eclogue:—
Has herbas, atque hæc Ponto mihi lecta venena
Ipse dedit Mœris; nascuntur plurima Ponto.
His ego sæpe lupum fieri et se conducere sylvis
Mœrim, sæpe animas imis excire sepulchris,
Atque satas alio, vidi traducere messes.
And Herodotus:—“It seems that the Neuri are sorcerers, if one is to
believe the Scythians and the Greeks established in Scythia; for each
Neurian changes himself, once in the year, into the form of a wolf, and
he continues in that form for several days, after which he resumes his
former shape.”—(Lib. iv. c. 105.)
See also Pomponius Mela (lib. ii. c. 1) “There is a fixed time for each
Neurian, at which they change, if they like, into wolves, and back
again into their former condition.”
But the most remarkable story among the ancients is that related by
Ovid in his “Metamorphoses,” of Lycaon, king of Arcadia, who,
entertaining Jupiter one day, set before him a hash of human flesh, to
prove his omniscience, whereupon the god transferred him into a
wolf:—[1]
[1] OVID. Met. i. 237; PAUSANIAS, viii. 2, § 1; TZETZE _ad Lycoph._
481; ERATOSTH. _Catas._ i. 8.
In vain he attempted to speak; from that very instant
His jaws were bespluttered with foam, and only he thirsted
For blood, as he raged amongst flocks and panted for slaughter.
His vesture was changed into hair, his limbs became crooked;
A wolf,—he retains yet large trace of his ancient expression,
Hoary he is as afore, his countenance rabid,
His eyes glitter savagely still, the picture of fury.
Pliny relates from Evanthes, that on the festival of Jupiter Lycæus,
one of the family of Antæus was selected by lot, and conducted to the
brink of the Arcadian lake. He then hung his clothes on a tree and
plunged into the water, whereupon he was transformed into a wolf. Nine
years after, if he had not tasted human flesh, he was at liberty to
swim back and resume his former shape, which had in the meantime become
aged, as though he had worn it for nine years.
Agriopas relates, that Demænetus, having assisted at an Arcadian human
sacrifice to Jupiter Lycæus, ate of the flesh, and was at once
transformed into a wolf, in which shape he prowled about for ten years,
after which he recovered his human form, and took part in the Olympic
games.
The following story is from Petronius:—
“My master had gone to Capua to sell some old clothes. I seized the
opportunity, and persuaded our guest to bear me company about five
miles out of town; for he was a soldier, and as bold as death. We set
out about cockcrow, and the moon shone bright as day, when, coming
among some monuments. my man began to converse with the stars, whilst I
jogged along singing and counting them. Presently I looked back after
him, and saw him strip and lay his clothes by the side of the road. My
heart was in my mouth in an instant, I stood like a corpse; when, in a
crack, he was turned into a wolf. Don’t think I’m joking: I would not
tell you a lie for the finest fortune in the world.
“But to continue: after he was turned into a wolf, he set up a howl and
made straight for the woods. At first I did not know whether I was on
my head or my heels; but at last going to take up his clothes, I found
them turned into stone. The sweat streamed from me, and I never
expected to get over it. Melissa began to wonder why I walked so late.
‘Had you come a little sooner,’ she said, ‘you might at least have lent
us a hand; for a wolf broke into the farm and has butchered all our
cattle; but though be got off, it was no laughing matter for him, for a
servant of ours ran him through with a pike. Hearing this I could not
close an eye; but as soon as it was daylight, I ran home like a pedlar
that has been eased of his pack. Coming to the place where the clothes
had been turned into stone, I saw nothing but a pool of blood; and when
I got home, I found my soldier lying in bed, like an ox in a stall, and
a surgeon dressing his neck. I saw at once that he was a fellow who
could change his skin (_versipellis_), and never after could I eat
bread with him, no, not if you would have killed me. Those who would
have taken a different view of the case are welcome to their opinion;
if I tell you a lie, may your genii confound me!”
As every one knows, Jupiter changed himself into a bull; Hecuba became
a bitch; Actæon a stag; the comrades of Ulysses were transformed into
swine; and the daughters of Prœtus fled through the fields believing
themselves to be cows, and would not allow any one to come near them,
lest they should be caught and yoked.
S. Augustine declared, in his _De Civitate Dei_, that he knew an old
woman who was said to turn men into asses by her enchantments.
Apuleius has left us his charming romance of the _Golden Ass_, in which
the hero, through injudicious use of a magical salve, is transformed
into that long-eared animal.
It is to be observed that the chief seat of Lycanthropy was Arcadia,
and it has been very plausibly suggested that the cause might he traced
to the following circumstance:—The natives were a pastoral people, and
would consequently suffer very severely from the attacks and
depredations of wolves. They would naturally institute a sacrifice to
obtain deliverance from this pest, and security for their flocks. This
sacrifice consisted in the offering of a child, and it was instituted
by Lycaon. From the circumstance of the sacrifice being human, and from
the peculiarity of the name of its originator, rose the myth.
But, on the other hand, the story is far too widely spread for us to
attribute it to an accidental origin, or to trace it to a local source.
Half the world believes, or believed in, were-wolves, and they were
supposed to haunt the Norwegian forests by those who had never remotely
been connected with Arcadia: and the superstition had probably struck
deep its roots into the Scandinavian and Teutonic minds, ages before
Lycaon existed; and we have only to glance at Oriental literature, to
see it as firmly engrafted in the imagination of the Easterns.
CHAPTER III.
THE WERE-WOLF IN THE NORTH.
Norse Traditions - Manner in which the Change was effected - Vœlundar
Kvœda - Instances from the Völsung Saga - Hrolf’s Saga - Kraka -
Faroëse Poem - Helga Kvida - Vatnsdæla Saga - Eyrbyggja Saga
In Norway and Iceland certain men were said to be _eigi einhamir_, not
of one skin, an idea which had its roots in paganism. The full form of
this strange superstition was, that men could take upon them other
bodies, and the natures of those beings whose bodies they assumed. The
second adopted shape was called by the same name as the original shape,
_hamr_, and the expression made use of to designate the transition from
one body to another, was at _skipta hömum_, or _at hamaz_; whilst the
expedition made in the second form, was the hamför. By this
transfiguration extraordinary powers were acquired; the natural
strength of the individual was doubled, or quadrupled; he acquired the
strength of the beast in whose body he travelled, in addition to his
own, and a man thus invigorated was called _hamrammr_.
The manner in which the change was effected, varied. At times, a dress
of skin was cast over the body, and at once the transformation was
complete; at others, the human body was deserted, and the soul entered
the second form, leaving the first body in a cataleptic state, to all
appearance dead. The second hamr was either borrowed or created for the
purpose. There was yet a third manner of producing this effect-it was
by incantation; but then the form of the individual remained unaltered,
though the eyes of all beholders were charmed so that they could only
perceive him under the selected form.
Having assumed some bestial shape, the man who is _eigi einhammr_ is
only to be recognized by his eyes, which by no power can be changed. He
then pursues his course, follows the instincts of the beast whose body
he has taken, yet without quenching his own intelligence. He is able to
do what the body of the animal can do, and do what he, as man, can do
as well. He may fly or swim, if be is in the shape of bird or fish; if
he has taken the form of a wolf, or if he goes on a _gandreið_, or
wolf’s-ride, he is fall of the rage and malignity of the creatures
whose powers and passions he has assumed.
I will give a few instances of each of the three methods of changing
bodies mentioned above. Freyja and Frigg had their falcon dresses in
which they visited different regions of the earth, and Loki is said to
have borrowed these, and to have then appeared so precisely like a
falcon, that he would have escaped detection, but for the malicious
twinkle of his eyes. In the Vælundar kviða is the following passage:—
I. I.
Meyjar flugu sunnan From the south flew the maidens
Myrkvið igögnum Athwart the gloom,
Alvitr unga Alvit the young,
Orlög drýgja; To fix destinies;
þær á savarströnd They on the sea-strand
Settusk at hvilask, Sat them to rest,
Dró sir suðrœnar These damsels of the south
Dýrt lín spunnu. Fair linen spun.
II. II.
Ein nam þeirra One of them took
Egil at verja Egil to press,
Fögr mær fíra Fair maid, in her
Faðmi ljósum; Dazzling arms.
Önnur var Svanhvít, Another was Svanhwit,
Svanfjaðrar dró Who wore swan feathers;
En in þriðja And the third,
þeirra systir Their sister,
Var i hvítan Pressed the white
Háls Völundar. Neck of Vœlund.
The introduction of Sœmund tells us that these charming young ladies
were caught when they had laid their swan-skins beside them on the
shore, and were consequently not in a condition to fly.
In like manner were wolves’ dresses used. The following curious passage
is from the wild Saga of the Völsungs:—
“It is now to be told that Sigmund thought Sinfjötli too young to help
him in his revenge, and he wished first to test his powers; so during
the summer they plunged deep into the wood and slew men for their
goods, and Sigmund saw that he was quite of the Völsung stock. . . .
Now it fell out that as they went through the forest, collecting
monies, that they lighted on a house in which were two men sleeping,
with great gold rings an them; they had dealings with witchcraft, for
wolf-skins hung up in the house above them; it was the tenth day on
which they might come out of their second state. They were kings’ sons.
Sigmund and Sinfjötli got into the habits, and could not get out of
them again, and the nature of the original beasts came over them, and
they howled as wolves—they learned “both of them to howl. Now they went
into the forest, and each took his own course; they made the agreement
together that they should try their strength against as many as seven
men, but not more, and. that he who was ware of strife should utter his
wolf’s howl.
“‘Do not fail in this,’ said Sigmund, ‘for you are young and daring,
and men would be glad to chase you.’ Now each went his own course; and
after that they had parted Sigmund found men, so he howled; and when
Sinfjötli heard that, he ran up and slew them all-then they separated.
And Sinfjötli had not been long in the wood before he met with. eleven
men; he fell upon them and slew them every one. Then he was tired, so
he flung himself under an oak to rest. Up came Sigmund and said, ‘Why
did you not call out?’ Sinfjötli replied, ‘What was the need of asking
your help to kill eleven men?’
“Sigmund flew at him and rent him so that he fell, for he had bitten
through his throat. That day they could not leave their wolf-forms.
Sigmund laid him on his back and bare him home to the hall, and sat
beside him, and said, ‘Deuce take the wolf-forms!”’—Völsung Saga, c. 8.
There is another curious story of a were-wolf in the same Saga, which I
must relate.
“Now he did as she requested, and hewed down a great piece of timber,
and cast it across the feet of those ten brothers seated in a row, in
the forest; and there they sat all that day and on till night. And at
midnight there came an old she-wolf out of the forest to them, as they
sat in the stocks, and she was both huge and grimly. Now she fell upon
one of them, and bit him to death, and after she had eaten him all up,
she went away. And next morning Signy sent a trusty man to her
brothers, to know how it had fared with them. When he returned he told
her of the death of one, and that grieved her much, for she feared it
might fare thus with them all, and she would be unable to assist them.
“In short, nine nights following came the same she-wolf at midnight,
and devoured them one after another till all were dead, except Sigmund,
and he was left alone. So when the tenth night came, Signy sent her
trusty man to Sigmund, her brother, with honey in his hand, and said
that he was to smear it over the face of Sigmund, and to fill his mouth
with it. Now he went to Sigmund, and did as he was bid, after which he
returned home. And during the night came the same she-wolf, as was her
wont, and reckoned to devour him, like his brothers.
“Now she snuffed at him, where the honey was smeared, and began to lick
his face with her tongue, and presently thrust her tongue into his
mouth. He bore it ill, and bit into the tongue of the she-wolf; she
sprang up and tried to break loose, setting her feet against the stock,
so as to snap it asunder: but he held firm, and ripped the tongue out
by the roots, so that it was the death of the wolf. It is the opinion
of some men that this beast was the mother of King Siggeir, and that
she had taken this form upon her through devilry and witchcraft.”—(c.
5.)
There is another story bearing on the subject in the Hrolfs Saga Kraka,
which is pretty; it is as follows:—
“In the north of Norway, in upland-dales, reigned a king called Hring;
and he had a son named Björn. Now it fell out that the queen died, much
lamented by the king, and by all. The people advised him to marry
again, and so be sent men south to get him a wife. A gale and fierce
storm fell upon them, so that they had to turn the helm, and run before
the wind, and so they came north to Finnmark, where they spent the
winter. One day they went inland, and came to a house in which sat two
beautiful women, who greeted them well, and inquired whence they had
come. They replied by giving an account of their journey and their
errand, and then asked the women who they were, and why they were
alone, and far from the haunts of men, although they were so comely and
engaging. The elder replied—that her name was Ingibjorg, and that her
daughter was called Hvit, and that she was the Finn king’s sweetheart.
The messengers decided that they would return home, if Hvit would come
with them and marry King Hring. She agreed, and they took her with them
and met the king who was pleased with her, and had his wedding feast
made, and said that he cared not though she was not rich. But the king
was very old, and that the queen soon found out.
“There was a Carle who had a farm not far from the king’s dwelling; he
had a wife, and a daughter, who was but a child, and her name was Bera;
she was very young and lovely. Björn the king’s son, and Bera the
Carle’s daughter, were wont, as children, to play together, and they
loved each other well. The Carle was well to do, he had been out
harrying in his young days, and he was a doughty champion. Björn and
Bera loved each other more and more, and they were often together.
Time passed, and nothing worth relating occurred; but Björn, the king’s
son, waxed strong and tall; and he was well skilled in all manly
exercises.
“King Hring was often absent for long, harrying foreign shores, and
Hvit remained at home and governed the land. She was not liked of the
people. She was always very pleasant with Björn, but he cared little
for her. It fell out once that the King Hring went abroad, and he spake
with his queen that Björn should remain at home with her, to assist in
the government, for he thought it advisable, the queen being haughty
and inflated with pride.
“The king told his son Björn that he was to remain at home, and rule
the land with the queen; Björn replied that he disliked the plan, and
that he had no love for the queen; but the king was inflexible, and
left the land with a great following. Björn walked home after his
conversation with the king, and went up to his place, ill-pleased and
red as blood. The queen came to speak with him, and to cheer him; and
spake friendly with him, but he bade her be of. She obeyed him that
time. She often came to talk with him, and said how much pleasanter it
was for them to be together, than to have an old fellow like Hring in
the house.
“Björn resented this speech, and struck her a box in the ear, and bade
her depart, and he spurned her from him. She replied that this was
ill-done to drive and thrust her away: and ‘You think it better, Björn,
to sweetheart a Carle’s daughter, than to have my love and favour, a
fine piece of condescension and a disgrace it is to you! But, before
long, something will stand in the way of your fancy, and your folly.’
Then she struck at him with a wolf-skin glove, and said, that he should
become a rabid and grim wild bear; and ‘You shall eat nothing but your
father’s sheep, which you shall slay for your food, and never shall you
leave this state.’
After that, Björn disappeared, and none knew what had become of him;
and men sought but found him not, as was to be expected. We must now
relate how that the king’s sheep were slaughtered, half a score at a
time, and it was all the work of a grey bear, both huge and grimly.
“One evening it chanced that the Carle’s daughter saw this savage bear
coming towards her, looking tenderly at her, and she fancied that she
recognized the eyes of Björn, the king’s son, so she made a slight
attempt to escape; then the beast retreated, but she followed it, till
she came to a cave. Now when she entered the cave there stood before
her a man, who greeted Bera, the Carle’s daughter; and she recognized
him, for he was Björn, Hring’s son. Overjoyed were they to meet. So
they were together in the cave awhile, for she would not part from him
when she had the chance of being with him; but he said that this was
not proper that she should be there by him, for by day he was a beast,
and by night a man.
“Hring returned from his harrying, and he was told the news, of what
had taken place during his absence; how that Björn, his son, had
vanished, and also, how that a monstrous beast was up the country, and
was destroying his flocks. The queen urged the king to have the beast
slain, but he delayed awhile.
“One night, as Bera and Björn were together, he said to her:—‘Methinks
to-morrow will be the day of my death, for they will come out to hunt
me down. But for myself I care not, for it is little pleasure to live
with this charm upon me, and my only comfort is that we are together;
but now our union must be broken. I will give you the ring which is
under my left hand. You will see the troop of hunters to-morrow coming
to seek me; and when I am dead go to the king, and ask him to give you
what is under the beast’s left front leg. He will consent.’
“He spoke to her of many other things, till the bear’s form stole over
him, and he went forth a bear. She followed him, and saw that a great
body of hunters had come over the mountain ridges, and had a number of
dogs with them. The bear rushed away from the cavern, but the dogs and
the king’s men came upon him, and there was a desperate struggle. He
wearied many men before he was brought to bay, and had slain all the
dogs. But now they made a ring about him, and he ranged around it., but
could see no means of escape, so he turned to where the king stood, and
he seized a man who stood next him, and rent him asunder; then was the
bear so exhausted that he cast himself down flat, and, at once, the men
rushed in upon him and slew him. The Carle’s daughter saw this, and she
went up to the king, and said,—‘Sire! wilt thou grant me that which is
under the bear’s left fore-shoulder?’ The king consented. By this time
his men had nearly flayed the bear; Bera went up and plucked away the
ring, and kept it, but none saw what she took, nor had they looked for
anything. The king asked her who she was, and she gave a name, but not
her true name.
“The king now went home, and Bera was in his company. The queen was
very joyous, and treated her well, and asked who she was; but Bera
answered as before.
“The queen now made a great feast, and had the bear’s flesh cooked for
the banquet. The Carle’s daughter was in the bower of the queen, and
could not escape, for the queen had a suspicion who she was. Then she
came to Bera with a dish, quite unexpectedly, and on it was bear’s
flesh, and she bade Bera eat it. She would not do so. ‘Here is a
marvel!’ said the queen; ‘you reject the offer which a queen herself
deigns to make to you. Take it at once, or something worse will befall
you.’ She bit before her, and she ate of that bite; the queen cut
another piece, and looked into her mouth; she saw that one little grain
of the bite had gone down, but Bera spat out all the rest from her
mouth, and said she would take no more, though she were tortured or
killed.
“‘Maybe you have had sufficient,’ said the queen, and she
laughed.”—(Hrolfs Saga Kraka, c. 24-27, condensed.)
In the Faroëse song of Finnur hin friði, we have the following verse:—
Hegar íð Finnur hetta sær, When this peril Finn saw,
Mannspell var at meini, That witchcraft did him harm,
Skapti hann seg í varglíki: Then he changed himself into a were-wolf:
Hann feldi allvæl fleiri. He slew many thus.
The following is from the second Kviða of Helga Hundingsbana (stroph.
31):—
May the blade bite,
Which thou brandishest
Only on thyself,
when it Chimes on thy head.
Then avenged will be
The death of Helgi,
When thou, as a wolf,
Wanderest in the woods,
Knowing nor fortune
Nor any pleasure,
Haying no meat,
Save rivings of corpses.
In all these cases the change is of the form: we shall now come to
instances in which the person who is changed has a double shape, and
the soul animates one after the other.
The Ynglinga Saga (c. 7) says of Odin, that “he changed form; the
bodies lay as though sleeping or dead, but he was a bird or a beast, a
fish, or a woman, and went in a twinkling to far distant lands, doing
his own or other people’s business.” In like manner the Danish king
Harold sent a warlock to Iceland in the form of a whale, whilst his
body lay stiff and stark at home. The already quoted Saga of Hrolf
Krake gives us another example, where Bödvar Bjarki, in the shape of a
huge bear, fights desperately with the enemy, which has surrounded the
hall of his king, whilst his human body lies drunkenly beside the
embers within.
In the Vatnsdæla Saga, there is a curious account of three Finns, who
were shut up in a hut for three nights, and ordered by Ingimund, a
Norwegian chief, to visit Iceland and inform him of the lie of the
country, where he was to settle. Their bodies became rigid, and they
sent their souls the errand, and, on their awaking at the end of three
days, gave an accurate description of the Vatnsdal, in which Ingimund
was eventually to establish himself. But the Saga does not relate
whether these Finns projected their souls into the bodies of birds or
beasts.
The third manner of transformation mentioned, was that in which the
individual was not changed himself, but the eyes of others were
bewitched, so that they could not detect him, but saw him only under a
certain form. Of this there are several examples in the Sagas; as, for
instance, in the Hromundar Saga Greypsonar, and in the Fostbræðra Saga.
But I will translate the most curious, which is that of Odd, Katla’s
son, in the Eyrbyggja Saga.—(c. 20.)
“Geirrid, housewife in Mafvahlið, sent word into Bolstad, that she was
ware of the fact that Odd, Katla’s son, had hewn off Aud’s hand.
“Now when Thorarinn and Arnkell heard that, they rode from home with
twelve men. They spent the night in Mafvahlið, and rode on next morning
to Holt: and Odd was the only man in the house.
“Katla sat on the high seat spinning yarn, and she bade Odd sit beside
her; also, she bade her women sit each in her place, and hold their
tongues. ‘For,’ said she, ‘I shall do all the talking.’ Now when
Arnkell and his company arrived, they walked straight in, and when they
came into the chamber, Katla greeted Arnkell, and asked the news. He
replied that there was none, and he inquired after Odd. Katla said that
he had gone to Breidavik. ‘We shall ransack the house though,’ quoth
Arnkell. ‘Be it so,’ replied Katla, and she ordered a girl to carry a
light before them, and unlock the different parts of the house. All
they saw was Katla spinning yarn off her distaff. Now they search the
house, but find no Odd, so they depart. But when they had gone a little
way from the garth, Arnkell stood still and said: ‘How know we but that
Katla has hoodwinked us, and that the distaff in her hand was nothing
more than Odd.’ ‘Not impossible!’ said Thorarinn; ‘let us turn back.’
They did so; and when those at Holt raw that they were returning, Katla
said to her maids, ‘Sit still in your places, Odd and I shall go out.’
“Now as they approached the door, she went into the porch, and began to
comb and clip the hair of her son Odd. Arnkell came to the door and saw
where Katla was, and she seemed to be stroking her goat, and
disentangling its mane and beard and smoothing its wool. So he and his
men went into the house, but found not Odd. Katla’s distaff lay against
the bench, so they thought that it could not have been Odd, and they
went away. However, when they had come near the spot where they had
turned before, Arnkell said, ‘Think you not that Odd may have been in
the goat’s form?’ ‘There is no saying,’ replied Thorarinn; ‘but if we
turn back we will lay hands on Katla.’ ‘We can try our luck again,’
quoth Arnkell; ‘and see what comes of it.’ So they returned.
“Now when they were seen on their way back, Katla bade Odd follow her;
and she lea him to the ash-heap, and told him to lie there and not to
stir on any account. But when Arnkell, and his men came to the farm,
they rushed into the chamber, and saw Katla seated in her place,
spinning. She greeted them and said that their visits followed with
rapidity. Arnkell replied that what she said was true. His comrades
took the distaff and cut it in twain. ‘Come now!’ said Katla, ‘you
cannot say, when you get home, that you have done nothing, for you have
chopped up my distaff.’ Then Arnkell and the rest hunted high and low
for Odd, but could not find him; indeed they saw nothing living about
the place, beside a boar-pig which lay under the ash-heap, so they went
away once more.
“Well, when they got half-way to Mafvahlið, came Geirrid to meet them,
with her workmen. ‘They had not gone the right way to work in seeking
Odd,’ she said, ‘but she would help them.’ So they turned back again.
Geirrid had a blue cloak on her. Now when the party was seen and
reported to Katla, and it was said that they were thirteen in number,
and one had on a coloured dress, Katla exclaimed, ‘That troll Geirrid
is come! I shall not be able to throw a glamour over their eyes any
more.’ She started up from her place and lifted the cushion of the
seat, and there was a hole and a cavity beneath: into this she thrust
Odd, clapped the cushion over him, and sat down, saying she felt sick
at heart.
“Now when they came into the room, there were small greetings. Geirrid
cast of her the cloak and went up to Katla, and took the seal-skin bag
which she had in her hand, and drew it over the head of Katla.[1] Then
Geirrid bade them break up the seat. They did so, and found Odd. Him
they took and carried to Buland’s head, where they hanged him. . . .
But Katla they stoned to death under the headland.”
[1] A precaution against the “evil eye.” Compare _Gisla Saga
Surssonnar_, p. 34. _Laxdæla Saga_, cc. 37, 38.
CHAPTER IV.
THE ORIGIN OF THE SCANDINAVIAN WERE-WOLF.
Advantage of the Study of Norse Literature—Bear and Wolf-skin
Dresses—The Berserkir—Their Rage—The Story of Thorir—Passages from the
Aigla—The Evening Wolf—Skallagrim and his Son—Derivation of the Words
Hamr and Vargr—Laws affecting Outlaws—“To become a
Boar”—Recapitulation.
One Of the great advantages of the study of old Norse or Icelandic
literature is the insight given by it into the origin of world-wide
superstitions. Norse tradition is transparent as glacier ice, and its
origin is as unmistakable.
Mediæval mythology, rich and gorgeous, is a compound like Corinthian
brass, into which many pure ores have been fused, or it is a full
turbid river drawn from numerous feeders, which had their sources in
remote climes. It is a blending of primæval Keltic, Teutonic,
Scandinavian, Italic, and Arab traditions, each adding a beauty, each
yielding a charm, bat each accretion rendering the analysis more
difficult.
Pacciuchelli says:—“The Anio flows into the Tiber; pure as crystal it
meets the tawny stream, and is lost in it, so that there is no more
Anio, but the united stream is all Tiber.” So is it with each tributary
to the tide of mediæval mythology. The moment it has blended its waters
with the great and onward rolling flood, it is impossible to detect it
with certainty; it has swollen the stream, but has lost its own
identity. If we would analyse a particular myth, we must not go at once
to the body of mediæval superstition, but strike at one of the
tributaries before its absorption. This we shall proceed to do, and in
selecting Norse mythology, we come upon abundant material, pointing
naturally to the spot whence it has been derived, as glacial moraines
indicate the direction which they have taken, and point to the
mountains whence they have fallen. It will not be difficult for us to
arrive at the origin of the Northern belief in were-wolves, and the
data thus obtained will be useful in assisting us to elucidate much
that would otherwise prove obscure in mediæval tradition.
Among the old Norse, it was the custom for certain warriors to dress in
the skins of the beasts they had slain, and thus to give themselves an
air of ferocity, calculated to strike terror into the hearts of their
foes.
Such dresses are mentioned in some Sagas, without there being any
supernatural qualities attached to them. For instance, in the Njála
there is mention of a man _i geitheðni_, in goatskin dress. Much in the
same way do we hear of Harold Harfagr having in his company a band of
berserkir, who were all dressed in wolf-skins, _ulfheðnir_, and this
expression, wolf-skin coated, is met with as a man’s name. Thus in the
Holmverja Saga, there is mention of a Björn, “son of _Ulfheðin_,
wolfskin coat, son of _Ulfhamr_, wolf-shaped, son of _Ulf_, wolf, son
of _Ulfhamr_, wolf-shaped, who could change forms.”
But the most conclusive passage is in the Vatnsdæla Saga, and is as
follows:—“Those berserkir who were called _ulfheðnir_, had got
wolf-skins over their mail coats” (c. xvi.) In like manner the word
_berserkr_, used of a man possessed of superhuman powers, and subject.
to accesses of diabolical fury, was originally applied to one of those
doughty champions who went about in bear-sarks, or habits made of
bear-skin over their armour. I am well aware that Björn Halldorson’s
derivation of berserkr, bare of sark, or destitute of clothing, has
been hitherto generally received, but Sveibjörn Egilsson, an
indisputable authority, rejects this derivation as untenable, and
substitutes for it that which I have adopted.
It may be well imagined that a wolf or a bear-skin would make a warm
and comfortable great-coat to a man, whose manner of living required
him to defy all weathers, and that the dress would not only give him an
appearance of grimness and ferocity, likely to produce an unpleasant
emotion in the breast of a foe, but also that the thick fur might prove
effectual in deadening the blows rained on him in conflict.
The berserkr was an object of aversion and terror to the peaceful
inhabitants of the land, his avocation being to challenge quiet country
farmers to single combat. As the law of the land stood in Norway, a man
who declined to accept a challenge, forfeited all his possessions, even
to the wife of his bosom, as a poltroon unworthy of the protection of
the law, and every item of his property passed into the hands of his
challenger. The berserkr accordingly had the unhappy man at his mercy.
If he slew him, the farmer’s possessions became his, and if the poor
fellow declined to fight, he lost all legal right to his inheritance. A
berserkr would invite himself to any feast, and contribute his quota to
the hilarity of the entertainment, by snapping the backbone, or
cleaving the skull, of some merrymaker who incurred his displeasure, or
whom he might single out to murder, for no other reason than a desire
to keep his hand in practice.
It may well be imagined that popular superstition went along with the
popular dread of these wolf-and-bear-skinned rovers, and that they were
believed to be endued with the force, as they certainly were with the
ferocity, of the beasts whose skins they wore.
Nor would superstition stop there, but the imagination of the trembling
peasants would speedily invest these unscrupulous disturbers of the
public peace with the attributes hitherto appropriated to trolls and
jötuns.
The incident mentioned in the Völsung Saga, of the sleeping men being
found with their wolf-skins hanging to the wall above their heads, is
divested of its improbability, if we regard these skins as worn over
their armour, and the marvellous in the whole story is reduced to a
minimum, when we suppose that Sigmund and Sinfjötli stole these for the
purpose of disguising themselves, whilst they lived a life of violence
and robbery.
In a similar manner the story of the northern “Beauty and Beast,” in
Hrolf’s Saga Kraka, is rendered less improbable, on the supposition
that Björn was living as an outlaw among the mountain fastnesses in a
bearskin dress, which would effectually disguise him—_all but his
eyes_—which would gleam out of the sockets in his hideous visor,
unmistakably human. His very name, Björn, signifies a bear; and these
two circumstances may well have invested a kernel of historic fact with
all the romance of fable; and if divested of these supernatural
embellishments, the story would resolve itself into the very simple
fact of there having been a King Hring of the Updales, who was at
variance with his son, and whose son took to the woods, and lived a
berserkr life, in company with his mistress, till he was captured and
slain by his father.
I think that the circumstance insisted on by the Saga-writers, of the
eyes of the person remaining unchanged, is very significant, and points
to the fact that the skin was merely drawn over the body as a disguise.
But there was other ground for superstition to fasten on the berserkir,
and invest them with supernatural attributes.
No fact in connection with the history of the Northmen is more firmly
established, on reliable evidence, than that of the berserkr rage being
a species of diabolical possession. The berserkir were said to work
themselves up into a state of frenzy, in which a demoniacal power came
over them, impelling them to acts from which in their sober senses they
would have recoiled. They acquired superhuman force, and were as
invulnerable and as insensible to pain as the Jansenist convulsionists
of S. Medard. No sword would wound them, no fire would barn them, a
club alone could destroy them, by breaking their bones, or crushing in
their skulls. Their eyes glared as though a flame burned in the
sockets, they ground their teeth, and frothed at the mouth; they gnawed
at their shield rims, and are said to have sometimes bitten them
through, and as they rushed into conflict they yelped as dogs or howled
as wolves.[1]
[1] Hic (Syraldus) septem filios habebat, tanto veneficiorum usu
callentes, ut sæpe subitis furoris viribus instincti solerent ore
torvum infremere, scuta morsibus attrectare, torridas fauce prunas
absumere, extructa quævis incendia penetrare, nec posset conceptis
dementiæ motus alio remedii genere quam aut vinculorum injuriis aut
cædis humanæ piaculo temperari. Tantam illis rabiem site sævitia
ingenii sive furiaram ferocitas inspirabat.—_Saxo Gramm_. VII.
According to the unanimous testimony of the old Norse historians, the
berserkr rage was extinguished by baptism, and as Christianity
advanced, the number of these berserkir decreased.
But it must not be supposed that this madness or possession came only
on those persons who predisposed themselves to be attacked by it;
others were afflicted with it, who vainly struggled against its
influence, and who deeply lamented their own liability to be seized
with these terrible accesses of frenzy. Such was Thorir Ingimund’s son,
of whom it is said, in the _Vatnsdæla Saga_, that “at times there came
over Thorir berserkr fits, and it was considered a sad misfortune to
such a man, as they were quite beyond control.”
The manner in which he was cured is remarkable; pointing as it does to
the craving in the heathen mind for a better and more merciful creed:—
“Thorgrim of Kornsá had a child by his concubine Vereydr, and, by order
of his wife, the child was carried out to perish.
“The brothers (Thorsteinn and Thorir) often met, and it was now the
turn of Thorsteinn to visit Thorir, and Thorir accompanied him
homeward. On their way Thorsteinn asked Thorir which he thought was the
first among the brethren; Thorir answered that the reply was easy, for
‘you are above us all in discretion and talent; Jökull is the best in
all perilous adventures, but I,’ he added, ‘I am the least worth of us
brothers, because the berserkr fits come over me, quite against my
will, and I wish that you, my brother, with your shrewdness, would
devise some help for me.’
“Thorsteinn said,—‘I have heard that our kinsman, Thorgrim, has just
suffered his little babe to be carried out, at the instigation of his
wife. That is ill done. I think also that it is a grievous matter for
you to be different in nature from other men.’
“Thorir asked how he could obtain release from his affliction . . . .
Then said Thorsteinn, ‘Now will I make a vow to Him who created the
sun, for I ween that he is most able to take the ban of you, and I will
undertake for His sake, in return, to rescue the babe and to bring it
up for him, till He who created man shall take it to Himself-for this I
reckon He will do!’ After this they left their horses and sought the
child, and a thrall of Thorir had found it near the Marram river. They
saw that a kerchief had been spread over its face, but it had rumpled
it up over its nose; the little thing was all but dead, but they took
it up and flitted it home to Thorir’s house, and he brought the lad up,
and called him Thorkell Rumple; as for the berserkr fits, they came on
him no more.” (c. 37)
But the most remarkable passages bearing on our subject will be found
in the _Aigla_.
There was a man, Ulf (the wolf) by name, son of Bjálfi and Hallbera.
Ulf was a man so tall and strong that the like of him was not to be
seen in the land at that time. And when he was young he was out viking
expeditions and harrying . . . He was a great landed proprietor. It was
his wont to rise early, and to go about the men’s work, or to the
smithies, and inspect all his goods and his acres; and sometimes he
talked with those men who wanted his advice; for he was a good adviser,
he was so clear-headed; however, every day, when it drew towards dusk,
he became so savage that few dared exchange a word with him, for he was
given to dozing in the afternoon.
“People said that he was much given to changing form (_hamrammr_), so
he was called the evening-wolf, _kveldúlfr_.”—(c. 1.) In this and the
following passages, I do not consider _hamrammr_ to have its primary
signification of actual transformation, but simply to mean subject to
fits of diabolical possession, under the influence of which the bodily
powers were greatly exaggerated. I shall translate pretty freely from
this most interesting Saga, as I consider that the description given in
it of Kveldulf in his fits greatly elucidates our subject.
“Kveldulf and Skallagrim got news during summer of an expedition.
Skallagrim. was the keenest-sighted of men, and he caught sight of the
vessel of Hallvard and his brother, and recognized it at once. He
followed their course and marked the haven into which they entered at
even. Then he returned to his company, and told Kveldulf of what he had
seen . . . . Then they busked them and got ready both their boats; in
each they put twenty men, Kveldulf steering one and Skallagrim the
other, and they rowed in quest of the ship. Now when they came to the
place where it was, they lay to. Hallvard and his men had spread an
awning over the deck, and were asleep. Now when Kveldulf and his party
came upon them, the watchers who were seated at the end of the bridge
sprang up and called to the people on board to wake up, for there was
danger in the wind. So Hallvard and his men sprang to arms. Then came
Kveldulf over the bridge and Skallagrim with him into the ship.
Kveldulf had in his hand a cleaver, and he bade his men go through the
vessel and hack away the awning. But he pressed on to the quarter-deck.
It is said the were-wolf fit came over him and many of his companions.
They slow all the men who were before them. Skallagrim did the same as
he went round the vessel. He and his father paused not till they had
cleared it. Now when Kveldulf came upon the quarter-deck he raised his
cleaver, and smote Hallvard through helm and head, so that the haft was
buried in the flesh; but he dragged it to him so violently that he
whisked Hallvard into the air., and flung him overboard. Skallagrim
cleared the forecastle and slew Sigtrygg. Many men flung themselves
overboard, but Skallagrim’s men took to the boat and rowed about,
killing all they found. Thus perished Hallvard with fifty men.
Skallagrim and his party took the ship and all the goods which had
belonged to Hallvard . . . and flitted it and the wares to their own
vessel, and then exchanged ships, lading their capture, but quitting
their own. After which they filled their old ship with stones, brake it
up and sank it. A good breeze sprang up, and they stood out to sea.
It is said of these men in the engagement who were were-wolves, or
those on whom came the berserkr rage, that as long as the fit was on
them no one could oppose them, they were so strong; but when it had
passed off they were feebler than usual. It was the same with Kveldulf
when the were-wolf fit went off him—he then felt the exhaustion
consequent on the fight, and he was so completely ‘done up,’ that he
was obliged to take to his bed.”
In like manner Skallagrim had his fits of frenzy, taking after his
amiable father.
“Thord and his companion were opposed to Skallagrim in the game, and
they were too much for him, he wearied, and the game went better with
them. But at dusk, after sunset, it went worse with Egill and Thord,
for Skallagrim became so strong that he caught up Thord and cast him
down, so that he broke his bones, and that was the death of him. Then
he caught at Egill. Thorgerd Brák was the name of a servant of
Skallagrim, who had been foster-mother to Egill. She was a woman of
great stature, strong as a man and a bit of a witch. Brák
exclaimed,—‘Skallagrim! are you now falling upon your son?’ (hamaz þú
at syni þínum). Then Skallagrim let go his hold of Egill and clutched
at her. She started aside and fled. Skallagrim. followed. They ran out
upon Digraness, and she sprang off the headland into the water.
Skallagrim cast after her a huge stone which struck her between the
shoulders, and she never rose after it. The place is now called Brak’s
Sound.”—(c. 40.)
Let it be observed that in these passages from the _Aigla_, the words
að hamaz, hamrammr, &c. are used without any intention of conveying the
idea of a change of bodily shape, though the words taken literally
assert it. For they are derived from _hamr_, a skin or habit; a word
which has its representatives in other Aryan languages, and is
therefore a primitive word expressive of the skin of a beast.
The Sanskrit ### _carmma_; the Hindustanee ### _cam_, hide or skin; and
### _camra_, leather; the Persian ### _game_, clothing, disguise; the
Gothic _ham_ or _hams_, skin; and even the Italian _camicia_, and the
French _chemise_, are cognate words.[2]
[2] I shall have more to say on this subject in the chapter on the
Mythology of Lycanthropy.
It seems probable accordingly that the verb _að hamaz_ was first
applied to those who wore the skins of savage animals, and went about
the country as freebooters; but that popular superstition soon invested
them with supernatural powers, and they were supposed to assume the
forms of the beasts in whose skins they were disguised. The verb then
acquired the significance “to become a were-wolf, to change shape.” It
did not stop there, but went through another change of meaning, and was
finally applied to those who were afflicted with paroxysms of madness
or demoniacal possession.
This was not the only word connected with were-wolves which helped on
the superstition. The word _vargr_, a wolf, had a double significance,
which would be the means of originating many a were-wolf story. _Vargr_
is the same as _u-argr_, restless; _argr_ being the same as the
Anglo-Saxon _earg_. _Vargr_ had its double signification in Norse. It
signified a wolf, and also a godless man. This _vargr_ is the English
_were_, in the word were-wolf, and the _garou_ or _varou_ in French.
The Danish word for were-wolf is _var-ulf_, the Gothic _vaira-ulf_. In
the _Romans de Garin_, it is “Leu warou, sanglante beste.” In the _Vie
de S. Hildefons_ by Gauthier de Coinsi,—
Cil lou desve, cil lou garol,
Ce sunt deable, que saul
Ne puent estre de nos mordre.
Here the loup-garou is a devil. The Anglo-Saxons regarded him as an
evil man: _wearg_, a scoundrel; Gothic _varys_, a fiend. But very often
the word meant no more than an outlaw. Pluquet in his _Contes
Populaires_ tells us that the ancient Norman laws said of the criminals
condemned to outlawry for certain offences, _Wargus esto_: be an
outlaw!
In like manner the Lex Ripuaria, tit. 87, “Wargus sit, hoe est
expulsus.” In the laws of Canute, he is called verevulf. (_Leges
Canuti_, Schmid, i. 148.) And the Salic Law (tit. 57) orders: “Si quis
corpus jam sepultum effoderit, aut expoliaverit, _wargus_ sit.” “If any
one shall have dug up or despoiled an already buried corpse, let him be
a varg.”
Sidonius Apollinaris. says, “Unam feminam quam forte _vargorum_, hoc
enim nomine indigenas latrunculos nuncupant,”[3] as though the common
name by which those who lived a freebooter life were designated, was
varg.
[3] SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS: Opera, lib. vi. ep. 4.
In like manner Palgrave assures us in his _Rise and Progress of the
English Commonwealth_, that among the Anglo, Saxons an _utlagh_, or
out-law, was said to have the head of a wolf. If then the term _vargr_
was applied at one time to a wolf, at another to an outlaw who lived
the life of a wild beast, away from the haunts of men “he shall be
driven away as a wolf, and chased so far as men chase wolves farthest,”
was the legal form of sentence—it is certainly no matter of wonder that
stories of out-laws should have become surrounded with mythical
accounts of their transformation into wolves.
But the very idiom of the Norse was calculated to foster this
superstition. The Icelanders had curious expressions which are
sufficiently likely to have produced misconceptions.
Snorri not only relates that Odin changed himself into another form,
but he adds that by his spells he turned his enemies into boars. In
precisely the same manner does a hag, Ljot, in the Vatnsdæla Saga, say
that she could have turned Thorsteinn and Jökull into boars to run
about with the wild beasts (c. xxvi.); and the expression _verða at
gjalti_, or at _gjöltum_, to become a boar, is frequently met with in
the Sagas.
“Thereupon came Thorarinn and his men upon them, and Nagli led the way;
but when he saw weapons drawn he was frightened, and ran away up the
mountain, and became a boar. . . . And Thorarinn and his men took to
run, so as to help Nagli, lest he should tumble off the cliffs into the
sea” (Eyrbyggja Saga, c. xviii.) A similar expression occurs in the
Gisla Saga Surssonar, p. 50. In the Hrolfs Saga Kraka, we meet with a
troll in boar’s shape, to whom divine honours are paid; and in the
Kjalnessinga Saga, c. xv., men are likened to boars—“Then it began to
fare with them as it fares with boars when they fight each other, for
in the same manner dropped their foam.” The true signification of
_verða at gjalti_ is to be in such a state of fear as to lose the
senses; but it is sufficiently peculiar to have given rise to
superstitious stories.
I have dwelt at some length on the Northern myths relative to
were-wolves and animal transformations, because I have considered the
investigation of these all-important towards the elucidation of the
truth which lies at the bottom of mediæval superstition, and which is
nowhere so obtainable as through the Norse literature. As may be seen
from the passages quoted above at length, and from an examination of
those merely referred to, the result arrived at is pretty conclusive,
and may be summed up in very few words.
The whole superstructure of fable and romance relative to
transformation into wild beasts, reposes simply on this basis of
truth—that among the Scandinavian nations there existed a form of
madness or possession, under the influence of which men acted as though
they were changed into wild and savage brutes, howling, foaming at the
mouth, ravening for blood and slaughter, ready to commit any act of
atrocity, and as irresponsible for their actions as the wolves and
bears, in whose skins they often equipped themselves.
The manner in which this fact became invested with supernatural
adjuncts I have also pointed out, to wit, the change in the
significance of the word designating the madness, the double meaning of
the word _vargr_, and above all, the habits and appearance of the
maniacs. We shall see instances of berserkr rage reappearing in the
middle ages, and late down into our own times, not exclusively in the
North, but throughout France, Germany, and England, and instead of
rejecting the accounts given by chroniclers as fabulous, because there
is much connected with them which seems to be fabulous, we shall be
able to refer them to their true origin.
It may be accepted as an axiom, that no superstition of general
acceptance is destitute of a foundation of truth; and if we discover
the myth of the were-wolf to be widely spread, not only throughout
Europe, but through the whole world, we may rest assured that there is
a solid core of fact, round which popular superstition has
crystallized; and that fact is the existence of a species of madness,
during the accesses of which the person afflicted believes himself to
be a wild beast, and acts like a wild beast.
In some cases this madness amounts apparently to positive possession,
and the diabolical acts into which the possessed is impelled are so
horrible, that the blood curdles in reading them, and it is impossible
to recall them without a shudder.
CHAPTER V.
THE WERE-WOLF IN THE MIDDLE-AGES.
Stories from Olaus Magnus of Livonian Were-wolves—Story from Bishop
Majolus—Story of Albertus Pericofcius—Similar occurrence at
Prague—Saint Patrick—Strange incident related by John of
Nüremberg—Bisclaveret—Courland Were-wolves—Pierre Vidal—Pavian
Lycanthropist—Bodin’s Stories—Forestus’ Account of a
Lycanthropist—Neapolitan Were-wolf
Olaus Magnus relates that—“In Prussia, Livonia, and Lithuania, although
the inhabitants suffer considerably from the rapacity of wolves
throughout the year, in that these animals rend their cattle, which are
scattered in great numbers through the woods, whenever they stray in
the very least, yet this is not regarded by them as such a serious
matter as what they endure from men turned into wolves.
“On the feast of the Nativity of Christ, at night, such a multitude of
wolves transformed from men gather together in a certain spot, arranged
among themselves, and then spread to rage with wondrous ferocity
against human beings, and those animals which are not wild, that the
natives of these regions suffer more detriment from these, than they do
from true and natural wolves; for when a human habitation has been
detected by them isolated in the woods, they besiege it with atrocity,
striving to break in the doors, and in the event of their doing so,
they devour all the human beings, and every animal which is found
within. They burst into the beer-cellars, and there they empty the tuns
of beer or mead, and pile up the empty casks one above another in the
middle of the cellar, thus showing their difference from natural and
genuine wolves. . . . Between Lithuania, Livonia, and Courland are the
walls of a certain old ruined castle. At this spot congregate
thousands, on a fixed occasion, and try their agility in jumping. Those
who are unable to bound over the wall, as; is often the case with the
fattest, are fallen upon with scourges by the captains and slain.”[1]
Olaus relates also in c. xlvii. the story of a certain nobleman who was
travelling through a large forest with some peasants in his retinue who
dabbled in the black art. They found no house where they could lodge
for the night, and were well-nigh famished. Then one of the peasants
offered, if all the rest would hold their tongues as to what he should
do, that he would bring them a lamb from a distant flock.
[1] OLAUS MAGNUS: _Historia de Vent. Septent_. Basil. 15, lib. xviii.
cap. 45.
He thereupon retired into the depths of the forest and changed his form
into that of a wolf, fell upon the flock, and brought a lamb to his
companions in his mouth. They received it with gratitude. Then he
retired once more into the thicket, and transformed himself back again
into his human shape.
The wife of a nobleman in Livonia expressed her doubts to one of her
slaves whether it were possible for man or woman thus to change shape.
The servant at once volunteered to give her evidence of the
possibility. He left the room, and in another moment a wolf was
observed running over the country. The dogs followed him, and
notwithstanding his resistance, tore out one of his eyes. Next day the
slave appeared before his mistress blind of an eye.
Bp. Majolus[2] and Caspar Peucer[3] relate the following circumstances
of the Livonians:—
[2] MAJOLI _Episc. Vulturoniensis Dier. Canicul._ Helenopolis, 1612,
tom. ii. colloq. 3.
[3] CASPAR PEUCER: _Comment. de Præcipuis Divin. Generibus_, 1591, p.
169.
At Christmas a boy lame of a leg goes round the country summoning the
devil’s followers, who are countless, to a general conclave. Whoever
remains behind, or goes reluctantly, is scourged by another with an
iron whip till the blood flows, and his traces are left in blood. The
human form vanishes, and the whole multitude become wolves. Many
thousands assemble. Foremost goes the leader armed with an iron whip,
and the troop follow, “firmly convinced in their imaginations that they
are transformed into wolves.” They fall upon herds of cattle and flocks
of sheep, but they have no power to slay men. When they come to a
river, the leader smites the water with his scourge, and it divides,
leaving a dry path through the midst, by which the pack may go. The
transformation lasts during twelve days, at the expiration of which
period the wolf-skin vanishes, and the human form reappears. This
superstition was expressly forbidden by the church. “Credidisti, quod
quidam credere solent, ut illæ quæ a vulgo Parcæ vocantur, ipsæ, vel
sint vel possint hoc facere quod creduntur, id est, dum aliquis homo
nascitur, et tunc valeant illum designare ad hoc quod velint, ut
quandocunque homo ille voluerit, in lupum transformari possit, quod
vulgaris stultitia, _werwolf_ vocat, aut in aliam aliquam figuram?”—Ap.
Burchard. (d. 1024). In like manner did S. Boniface preach against
those who believed superstitiously in it strigas et fictos lupos.”
(_Serm_. apud Mart. et Durand. ix. 217.)
In a dissertation by Müller[4] we learn, on the authority of Cluverius
and Dannhaverus (_Acad. Homilet._ p. ii.), that a certain Albertus
Pericofcius in Muscovy was wont to tyrannize over and harass his
subjects in the most unscrupulous manner. One night when he was absent
from home, his whole herd of cattle, acquired by extortion, perished.
On his return he was informed of his loss, and the wicked man broke out
into the most horrible blasphemies, exclaiming, “Let him who has slain,
eat; if God chooses, let him devour me as well.”
[4] De {Greek _Lukanðrwpía_}. Lipsiæ, 1736.
As he spoke, drops of blood fell to earth, and the nobleman,
transformed into a wild dog, rushed upon his dead cattle, tore and
mangled the carcasses and began to devour them; possibly he may be
devouring them still (_ac forsan hodie que pascitur_). His wife, then
near her confinement, died of fear. Of these circumstances there were
not only ear but also eye witnesses. (_Non ab auritis tantum, sed et
ocidatis accepi, quod narro_). Similarly it is related of a nobleman in
the neighbourhood of Prague, that he robbed his subjects of their goods
and reduced them to penury through his exactions. He took the last cow
from a poor widow with five children, but as a judgment, all his own
cattle died. He then broke into fearful oaths, and God transformed him
into a dog: his human head, however, remained.
S. Patrick is said to have changed Vereticus, king of Wales, into a
wolf, and S. Natalis, the abbot, to have pronounced anathema upon an
illustrious family in Ireland; in consequence of which, every male and
female take the form of wolves for seven years and live in the forests
and career over the bogs, howling mournfully, and appeasing their
hunger upon the sheep of the peasants.[5] A duke of Prussia, according
to Majolus, had a countryman brought for sentence before him, because
he had devoured his neighbour’s cattle. The fellow was an ill-favoured,
deformed man, with great wounds in his face, which he had received from
dogs’ bites whilst he had been in his wolf’s form. It was believed that
he changed shape twice in the year, at Christmas and at Midsummer. He
was said to exhibit much uneasiness and discomfort when the wolf-hair
began to break out and his bodily shape to change.
[5] PHIL. HARTUNG: _Conciones Tergeminæ_, pars ii. p. 367.
He was kept long in prison and closely watched, lest he should become a
were-wolf during his confinement and attempt to escape, but nothing
remarkable took place. If this is the same individual as that mentioned
by Olaus Magnus, as there seems to be a probability, the poor fellow
was burned alive.
John of Nüremberg relates the following curious story.[6] A priest was
once travelling in a strange country, and lost his way in a forest.
Seeing a fire, he made towards it, and beheld a wolf seated over it.
The wolf addressed him in human-voice, and bade him not fear, as “he
was of the Ossyrian race, of which a man and a woman were doomed to
spend a certain number of years in wolf’s form. Only after seven years
might they return home and resume their former shapes, if they were
still alive.” He begged the priest to visit and console his sick wife,
and to give her the last sacraments. This the priest consented to do,
after some hesitation, and only when convinced of the beasts being
human beings, by observing that the wolf used his front paws as hands,
and when he saw the she-wolf peel off her wolf-skin from her head to
her navel, exhibiting the features of an aged woman.
[6] JOHN EUS. NIERENBERG _de Miracul. in Europa_, lib. ii. cap. 42.
Marie de France says in the _Lais du Bisclaveret:_—[7]
Bisclaveret ad nun en Bretan
Garwall Papelent li Norman.
* * * *
Jadis le poet-hum oir
Et souvent suleit avenir,
Humes pluseirs Garwall deviendrent
E es boscages meisun tindrent
[7] An epitome of this curious were-wolf tale will be found in Ellis’s
_Early English Metrical Romances_.
There is an interesting paper by Rhanæus, on the Courland were-wolves,
in the _Breslauer Sammlung_.[8] The author says,—“There are too many
examples derived not merely from hearsay, but received on indisputable
evidence, for us to dispute the fact, that Satan—if we do not deny that
such a being exists, and that he has his work in the children of
darkness—holds the Lycanthropists in his net in three ways:—
[8] Supplement III. _Curieuser_ und nutzbarer Anmerkungen von Natur
und Kunstgeschichten, gesammelt von Kanold. 1728.
“1. They execute as wolves certain acts, such as seizing a sheep, or
destroying cattle, &c., not changed into wolves, which no scientific
man in Courland believes, but in their human frames, and with their
human limbs, yet in such a state of phantasy and hallucination, that
they believe themselves transformed into wolves, and are regarded as
such by others suffering under similar hallucination, and in this
manner run these people in packs as wolves, though not true wolves.
“2. They imagine, in deep sleep or dream, that they injure the cattle,
and this without leaving their conch; but it is their master who does,
in their stead, what their fancy points out, or suggests to him.
“3. The evil one drives natural wolves to do some act, and then
pictures it so well to the sleeper, immovable in his place, both in
dreams and at awaking, that he believes the act to have been committed
by himself.”
Rhanæus, under these heads, relates three stories, which he believes be
has on good authority. The first is of a gentleman starting on a
journey, who came upon a wolf engaged in the act of seizing a sheep in
his own flock; he fired at it, and wounded it, so that it fled howling
to the thicket. When the gentleman returned from his expedition he
found the whole neighbourhood impressed with the belief that he had, on
a given day and hour, shot at one of his tenants, a publican, Mickel.
On inquiry, the man’s Wife, called Lebba, related the following
circumstances, which were fully corroborated by numerous
witnesses:—When her husband had sown his rye he had consulted with his
wife how he was to get some meat, so as to have a good feast. The woman
urged him on no account to steal from his landlord’s flock, because it
was guarded by fierce dogs. He, however, rejected her advice, and
Mickel fell upon his landlord’s sheep, but he had suffered and had come
limping home, and in his rage at the ill success of his attempt, had
fallen upon his own horse and had bitten its throat completely through.
This took place in the year 1684.
In 1684, a man was about to fire upon a pack of wolves, when he heard
from among the troop a voice exclaiming—“Gossip! Gossip! don’t fire. No
good will come of it.”
The third story is as follows:—A lycanthropist was brought before a
judge and accused of witchcraft, but as nothing could be proved against
him, the judge ordered one of his peasants to visit the man in his
prison, and to worm the truth out of him, and to persuade the prisoner
to assist him in revenging himself upon another peasant who had injured
him; and this was to be effected by destroying one of the man’s cows;
but the peasant was to urge the prisoner to do it secretly, and, if
possible, in the disguise of a wolf. The fellow undertook the task, but
he had great difficulty in persuading the prisoner to fall in with his
wishes: eventually, however, he succeeded. Next morning the cow was
found in its stall frightfully mangled, but the prisoner had not left
his cell: for the watch, who had been placed to observe him, declared
that he had spent the night in profound sleep, and that he had only at
one time made a slight motion with his head and hands and feet.
Wierius and Forestus quote Gulielmus Brabantinus as an authority for
the fact, that a man of high position had been so possessed by the evil
one, that often during the year he fell into a condition in which he
believed himself to be turned into a wolf, and at that time he roved in
the woods and tried to seize and devour little children, but that at
last, by God’s mercy, he recovered his senses.
Certainly the famous Pierre Vidal, the Don Quixote of Provençal
troubadours, must have had a touch of this madness, when, after having
fallen in love with a lady of Carcassone, named Loba, or the Wolfess,
the excess of his passion drove him over the country, howling like a
wolf, and demeaning himself more like an irrational beast than a
rational man.
He commemorates his lupine madness in the poem _A tal Donna_:—[9]
[9] BRUCE WHYTE: _Histoire des Langues Romaines_, tom. ii. p. 248.
Crowned with immortal joys I mount
The proudest emperors above,
For I am honoured with the love
Of the fair daughter of a count.
A lace from Na Raymbauda’s hand
I value more than all the land
Of Richard, with his Poïctou,
His rich Touraine and famed Anjou.
When _loup-garou_ the rabble call me,
When vagrant shepherds hoot,
Pursue, and buffet me to boot,
It doth not for a moment gall me;
I seek not palaces or halls,
Or refuge when the winter falls;
Exposed to winds and frosts at night,
My soul is ravished with delight.
Me claims my she-wolf (_Loba_) so divine:
And justly she that claim prefers,
For, by my troth, my life is hers
More than another’s, more than mine.
Job Fincelius[10] relates the sad story of a farmer of Pavia, who, as a
wolf, fell upon many men in the open country and tore them to pieces.
After much trouble the maniac was caught, and he then assured his
captors that the only difference which existed between himself and a
natural wolf, was that in a true wolf the hair grew outward, whilst in
him it struck inward. In order to put this assertion to the proof, the
magistrates, themselves most certainly cruel and bloodthirsty wolves,
cut off his arms and legs; the poor wretch died of the mutilation. This
took place in 1541. The idea of the skin being reversed is a very
ancient one: _versipellis_ occurs as a name of reproach in Petronius,
Lucilius, and Plautus, and resembles the Norse _hamrammr_.
[10] FINCELIUS _de Mirabilibus_, lib. xi.
Fincelius relates also that, in 1542, there was such a multitude of
were-wolves about Constantinople that the Emperor, accompanied by his
guard, left the city to give them a severe correction, and slew one
hundred and fifty of them.
Spranger speaks of three young ladies who attacked a labourer, under
the form of cats, and were wounded by him. They were found bleeding in
their beds next morning.
Majolus relates that a man afflicted with lycanthropy was brought to
Pomponatius. The poor fellow had been found buried in hay, and when
people approached, he called to them to flee, as he was a were wolf,
and would rend them. The country-folk wanted to flay him, to discover
whether the hair grew inwards, but Pomponatius rescued the man and
cured him.
Bodin tells some were-wolf stories on good authority; it is a pity that
the good authorities of Bodin were such liars, but that, by the way. He
says that the Royal Procurator-General Bourdin had assured him that he
had shot a wolf, and that the arrow had stuck in the beast’s thigh. A
few hours after, the arrow was found in the thigh of a man in bed. In
Vernon, about the year 1566, the witches and warlocks gathered in great
multitudes, under the shape of cats. Four or five men were attacked in
a lone place by a number of these beasts. The men stood their ground
with the utmost heroism, succeeded in slaying one puss, and in wounding
many others. Next day a number of wounded women were found in the town,
and they gave the judge an accurate account of all the circumstances
connected with their wounding.
Bodin quotes Pierre Marner, the author of a treatise on sorcerers, as
having witnessed in Savoy the transformation of men into wolves.
Nynauld[11] relates that in a village of Switzerland, near Lucerne, a
peasant was attacked by a wolf, whilst he was hewing timber; he
defended himself, and smote off a fore-leg of the beast. The moment
that the blood began to flow the wolf’s form changed, and he recognized
a woman without her arm. She was burnt alive.
[11] NYNAULD, _De la Lycanthropie_. Paris, 1615, p. 52.
An evidence that beasts are transformed witches is to be found in their
having no tails. When the devil takes human form, however, he keeps his
club-foot of the Satyr, as a token by which he may be recognized. So
animals deficient in caudal appendages are to be avoided, as they are
witches in disguise. The Thingwald should consider the case of the Manx
cats in its next session.
Forestus, in his chapter on maladies of the brain, relates a
circumstance which came under his own observation, in the middle of the
sixteenth century, at Alcmaar in the Netherlands. A peasant there was
attacked every spring with a fit of insanity; under the influence of
this he rushed about the churchyard, ran into the church, jumped over
the benches, danced, was filled with fury, climbed up, descended, and
never remained quiet. He carried a long staff in his hand, with which
he drove away the dogs, which flew at him and wounded him, so that his
thighs were covered with scars. His face was pale, his eyes deep sunk
in their sockets. Forestus pronounces the man to be a lycanthropist,
but he does not say that the poor fellow believed himself to be
transformed into a wolf. In reference to this case, however, he
mentions that of a Spanish nobleman who believed himself to be changed
into a bear, and who wandered filled with fury among the woods.
Donatus of Altomare[12] affirms that he saw a man in the streets of
Naples, surrounded by a ring of people, who in his were-wolf frenzy had
dug up a corpse and was carrying off the leg upon his shoulders. This
was in the middle of the sixteenth century.
[12] _De Medend. Human. Corp_. lib. i. cap. 9.
CHAPTER VI.
A CHAMBER OF HORRORS.
Pierre Bourgot and Michel Verdung—’Me Hermit of S. Bonnot—The Gandillon
Family—Thievenne Paget—The Tailor of Châlons—Roulet.
In December, 1521, the Inquisitor-General for the diocese of Besançon,
Boin by name, heard a case of a sufficiently terrible nature to produce
a profound sensation of alarm in the neighbourhood. Two men were under
accusation of witchcraft and cannibalism. Their names were Pierre
Bourgot, or Peter the Great, as the people had nicknamed him from his
stature, and Michel Verdung. Peter had not been long under trial,
before he volunteered a full confession of his crimes. It amounted to
this:—
About nineteen years before, on the occasion of a New Year’s market at
Poligny, a terrible storm had broken over the country, and among other
mischiefs done by it, was the scattering of Pierre’s flock. “In vain,”
said the prisoner, “did I labour, in company with other peasants, to
find the sheep and bring them together. I went everywhere in search of
them.
“Then there rode up three black horsemen, and the last said to me:
‘Whither away? you seem to be in trouble?’
“I related to him my misfortune with my flock. He bade me pluck up my
spirits, and promised that his master would henceforth take charge of
and protect my flock., if I would only rely upon him. He told me, as
well, that I should find my strayed sheep very shortly, and he promised
to provide me with money. We agreed to meet again in four or five days.
My flock I soon found collected together. At my second meeting I
learned of the stranger that he was a servant of the devil. I forswore
God and our Lady and all saints and dwellers in Paradise. I renounced
Christianity, kissed his left hand, which was black and ice-cold as
that of a corpse. Then I fell on my knees and gave in my allegiance to
Satan. I remained in the service of the devil for two years, and never
entered a church before the end of mass, or at all events till the holy
water had been sprinkled, according to the desire of my master, whose
name I afterwards learned was Moyset.
“All anxiety about my flock was removed, for the devil had undertaken
to protect it and to keep off the wolves.
“This freedom from care, however, made me begin to tire of the devil’s
service, and I recommenced my attendance at church, till I was brought
back into obedience to the evil one by Michel Verdung, when I renewed
my compact on the understanding that I should be supplied with money.
“In a wood near Chastel Charnon we met with many others whom I did not
recognize; we danced, and each had in his or her hand a green taper
with a blue flame. Still under the delusion that I should obtain money,
Michel persuaded me to move with the greatest celerity, and in order to
do this, after I had stripped myself, he smeared me with a salve, and I
believed myself then to be transformed into a wolf. I was at first
somewhat horrified at my four wolf’s feet, and the fur with which I was
covered all at once, but I found that I could now travel with the speed
of the wind. This could not have taken place without the help of our
powerful master, who was present during our excursion, though I did not
perceive him till I had recovered my human form. Michel did the same as
myself.
“When we had been one or two hours in this condition of metamorphosis,
Michel smeared us again, and quick as thought we resumed our human
forms. The salve was given us by our masters; to me it was given by
Moyset, to Michel by his own master, Guillemin.”
Pierre declared that he felt no exhaustion after his excursions, though
the judge inquired particularly whether he felt that prostration after
his unusual exertion, of which witches usually complained. Indeed the
exhaustion consequent on a were-wolf raid was so great that the
lycanthropist was often confined to his bed for days, and could hardly
move hand or foot, much in the same way as the berserkir and _ham
rammir_ in the North were utterly prostrated after their fit had left
them.
In one of his were-wolf runs, Pierre fell upon a boy of six or seven
years old, with his teeth, intending to rend and devour him, but the
lad screamed so loud that he was obliged to beat a retreat to his
clothes, and smear himself again, in order to recover his form and
escape detection. He and Michel, however, one day tore to pieces a
woman as she was gathering peas; and a M. de Chusnée, who came to her
rescue, was attacked by them and killed.
On another occasion they fell upon a little girl of four years old, and
ate her up, with the exception of one arm. Michel thought the flesh
most delicious.
Another girl was strangled by them, and her blood lapped up. Of a third
they ate merely a portion of the stomach. One evening at dusk, Pierre
leaped over a garden wall, and came upon a little maiden of nine years
old, engaged upon the weeding of the garden beds. She fell on her knees
and entreated Pierre to spare her; but he snapped the neck, and left
her a corpse, lying among her flowers. On this occasion he does not
seem to have been in his wolf’s shape. He fell upon a goat which he
found in the field of Pierre Lerugen, and bit it in the throat, but he
killed it with a knife.
Michel was transformed in his clothes into a wolf, but Pierre was
obliged to strip, and the metamorphosis could not take place with him
unless he were stark naked.
He was unable to account for the manner in which the hair vanished when
he recovered his natural condition.
The statements of Pierre Bourgot were fully corroborated by Michel
Verdung.
Towards the close of the autumn of 1573, the peasants of the
neighbourhood of Dôle, in Franche Comté, were authorized by the Court
of Parliament at Dôle, to hunt down the were-wolves which infested the
country. The authorization was as follows:— “According to the
advertisement made to the sovereign Court of Parliament at Dole, that,
in the territories of Espagny, Salvange, Courchapon, and the
neighbouring villages, has often been seen and met, for some time past,
a were-wolf, who, it is said, has already seized and carried off
several little children, so that they have not been seen since, and
since he has attacked and done injury in the country to some horsemen,
who kept him of only with great difficulty and danger to their persons:
the said Court, desiring to prevent any greater danger, has permitted,
and does permit, those who are abiding or dwelling in the said places
and others, notwithstanding all edicts concerning the chase, to
assemble with pikes, halberts, arquebuses, and sticks, to chase and to
pursue the said were-wolf in every place where they may find or seize
him; to tie and to kill, without incurring any pains or penalties. . .
. Given at the meeting of the said Court, on the thirteenth day of the
month September, 1573.” It was some time, however, before the
loup-garou was caught.
In a retired spot near Amanges, half shrouded in trees, stood a small
hovel of the rudest construction; its roof was of turf, and its walls
were blotched with lichen. The garden to this cot was run to waste, and
the fence round it broken through. As the hovel was far from any road,
and was only reached by a path over moorland and through forest, it was
seldom visited, and the couple who lived in it were not such as would
make many friends. The man, Gilles Garnier, was a sombre, ill-looking
fellow, who walked in a stooping attitude, and whose pale face, livid
complexion, and deep-set eyes under a pair of coarse and bushy brows,
which met across the forehead, were sufficient to repel any one from
seeking his acquaintance. Gilles seldom spoke, and when he did it was
in the broadest patois of his country. His long grey beard and retiring
habits procured for him the name of the Hermit of St. Bonnot, though no
one for a moment attributed to him any extraordinary amount of
sanctity.
The hermit does not seem to have been suspected for some time, but one
day, as some of the peasants of Chastenoy were returning home from
their work, through the forest, the screams of a child and the deep
baying of a wolf, attracted their notice, and on running in the
direction whence the cries sounded, they found a little girl defending
herself against a monstrous creature, which was attacking her tooth and
nail, and had already wounded her severely in five places. As the
peasants came up, the creature fled on all fours into the gloom of the
thicket; it was so dark that it could not be identified with certainty,
and whilst some affirmed that it was a wolf, others thought they had
recognized the features of the hermit. This took place on the 8th
November.
On the 14th a little boy of ten years old was missing, who had been
last seen at a short distance from the gates of Dole.
The hermit of S. Bonnot was now seized and brought to trial at Dole,
when the following evidence was extracted from him and his wife, and
substantiated in many particulars by witnesses.
On the last day of Michaelmas, under the form of a wolf, at a mile from
Dole, in the farm of Gorge, a vineyard belonging to Chastenoy, near the
wood of La Serre, Gilles Gamier had attacked a little maiden of ten or
twelve years old, and had slain her with his teeth and claws; he had
then drawn her into the wood, stripped her, gnawed the flesh from her
legs and arms, and had enjoyed his meal so much, that, inspired with
conjugal affection, he had brought some of the flesh home for his wife
Apolline.
Eight days after the feast of All Saints, again in the form of a
were-wolf, he had seized another girl, near the meadow land of La
Pouppe, on the territory of Athume and Chastenoy, and was on the point
of slaying and devouring her, when three persons came up, and he was
compelled to escape. On the fourteenth day after All Saints, also as a
wolf, he had attacked a boy of ten years old, a mile from Dôle, between
Gredisans and Menoté, and had strangled him. On that occasion he had
eaten all the flesh off his legs and arms, and had also devoured a
great part of the belly; one of the legs he had rent completely from
the trunk with his fangs.
On the Friday before the last feast of S. Bartholomew, he had seized a
boy of twelve or thirteen, under a large pear-trees near the wood of
the village Perrouze, and had drawn him into the thicket and killed
him, intending to eat him as he had eaten the other children, but the
approach of men hindered him from fulfilling his intention. The boy
was, however, quite dead, and the men who came up declared that Gilles
appeared as a man and not as a wolf. The hermit of S. Bonnot was
sentenced to be dragged to the place of public execution, and there to
be burned alive, a sentence which was rigorously carried out.
In this instance the poor maniac fully believed that actual
transformation into a wolf took place; he was apparently perfectly
reasonable on other points, and quite conscious of the acts he had
committed.
We come now to a more remarkable circumstance, the affliction of a
whole family with the same form of insanity. Our information is derived
from Boguet’s _Discours de Sorciers_, 1603-1610.
Pernette Gandillon was a poor girl in the Jura, who in 1598 ran about
the country on all fours, in the belief that she was a wolf. One day as
she was ranging the country in a fit of lycanthropic madness, she came
upon two children who were plucking wild strawberries. Filled with a
sudden passion for blood, she flew at the little girl and would have
brought her down, had not her brother, a lad of four years old,
defended her lustily with a knife. Pernette, however, wrenched the
weapon from his tiny hand, flung him down and gashed his throat, so
that he died of the wound. Pernette was tom to pieces by the people in
their rage and horror.
Directly after, Pierre, the brother of Pernette Gandillon, was accused
of witchcraft. He was charged with having led children to the sabbath,
having made hail, and having run about the country in the form of a
wolf. The transformation was effected by means of a salve which he had
received from the devil. He had on one occasion assumed the form of a
hare, but usually he appeared as a wolf, and his skin became covered
with shaggy grey hair. He readily acknowledged that the charges brought
against him were well founded, and he allowed that he had, during the
period of his transformation, fallen on, and devoured, both beasts and
human beings. When he desired to recover his true form, he rolled
himself in the dewy grass. His son Georges asserted that he had also
been anointed with the salve, and had gone to the sabbath in the shape
of a wolf. According to his own testimony, he had fallen upon two goats
in one of his expeditions.
One Maundy-Thursday night he had lain for three hours in his bed in a
cataleptic state, and at the end of that time had sprung out of bed.
During this period he had been in the form of a wolf to the witches’
sabbath.
His sister Antoinnette confessed that she had made hail, and that she
had sold herself to the devil, who had appeared to her in the shape of
a black he-goat. She had been to the sabbath on several occasions.
Pierre and Georges in prison behaved as maniacs, running on all fours
about their cells and howling dismally. Their faces, arms, and legs
were frightfully scarred with the wounds they had received from dogs
when they had been on their raids. Boguet accounts for the
transformation not taking place, by the fact of their not having the
necessary salves by them.
All three, Pierre, Georges, and Antoinnette, were hung and burned.
Thievenne Paget, who was a witch of the most unmistakable character,
was also frequently changed into a she-wolf, according to her own
confession, in which state she had often accompanied the devil over
hill and dale, slaying cattle, and falling on and devouring children.
The same thing may be said of Clauda Isan Prost, a lame woman, Clauda
Isan Guillaume, and Isan Roquet, who owned to the murder of five
children.
On the 14th of December, in the same year as the execution of the
Gandillon family (1598), a tailor of Châlons was sentenced to the
flames by the Parliament of Paris for lycanthropy. This wretched man
had decoyed children into his shop, or attacked them in the gloaming
when they strayed in the woods, had torn them with his teeth, and
killed them, after which he seems calmly to have dressed their flesh as
ordinary meat, and to have eaten it with great relish. The number of
little innocents whom he destroyed is unknown. A whole cask full of
bones was discovered in his house. The man was perfectly hardened, and
the details of his trial were so full of horrors and abominations of
all kinds, that the judges ordered the documents to be burned.
Again in 1598, a year memorable in the annals of lycanthropy, a trial
took place in Angers, the details of which are very terrible.
In a wild and unfrequented spot near Caude, some countrymen came one
day upon the corpse of a boy of fifteen, horribly mutilated and
bespattered with blood. As the men approached, two wolves, which had
been rending the body, bounded away into the thicket. The men gave
chase immediately, following their bloody tracks till they lost them;
when suddenly crouching among the bushes, his teeth chattering with
fear, they found a man half naked, with long hair and beard, and with
his hands dyed in blood. His nails were long as claws, and were clotted
with fresh gore, and shreds of human flesh.
This is one of the most puzzling and peculiar cases which come under
our notice.
The wretched man, whose name was Roulet, of his own accord stated that
he had fallen upon the lad and had killed him by smothering him, and
that he had been prevented from devouring the body completely by the
arrival of men on the spot.
Roulet proved on investigation to be a beggar from house to house, in
the most abject state of poverty. His companions in mendicity were his
brother John and his cousin Julien. He had been given lodging out of
charity in a neighbouring village, but before his apprehension he had
been absent for eight days.
Before the judges, Roulet acknowledged that he was able to transform
himself into a wolf by means of a salve which his parents had given
him. When questioned about the two wolves which had been seen leaving
the corpse, he said that he knew perfectly well who they were, for they
were his companions, Jean and Julian, who possessed the same secret as
himself. He was shown the clothes he had worn on the day of his
seizure, and he recognized them immediately; he described the boy whom
he had murdered, gave the date correctly, indicated the precise spot
where the deed had been done, and recognized the father of the boy as
the man who had first run up when the screams of the lad had been
heard. In prison, Roulet behaved like an idiot. When seized, his belly
was distended and hard; in prison he drank one evening a whole pailful
of water, and from that moment refused to eat or drink.
His parents, on inquiry, proved to be respectable and pious people, and
they proved that his brother John and his cousin Julien had been
engaged at a distance on the day of Roulet’s apprehension.
“What is your name, and what your estate?” asked the judge, Pierre
Hérault.
“My name is Jacques Roulet, my age thirty-five; I am poor, and a
mendicant.”
“What are you accused of having done?”
“Of being a thief—of having offended God. My parents gave me an
ointment; I do not know its composition.”
“When rubbed with this ointment do you become a wolf?”
“No; but for all that, I killed and ate the child Cornier: I was a
wolf.”
“Were you dressed as a wolf?”
“I was dressed as I am now. I had my hands and my face bloody, because
I had been eating the flesh of the said child.”
“Do your hands and feet become paws of a wolf?”
“Yes, they do.”
“Does your head become like that of a wolf-your mouth become larger?”
“I do not know how my head was at the time; I used my teeth; my head
was as it is to-day. I have wounded and eaten many other little
children; I have also been to the sabbath.”
The _lieutenant criminel_ sentenced Roulet to death. He, however,
appealed to the Parliament at Paris; and this decided that as there was
more folly in the poor idiot than malice and witchcraft, his sentence
of death should be commuted to two years’ imprisonment in a madhouse,
that he might be instructed in the knowledge of God, whom he had
forgotten in his utter poverty.[1]
[1] “La cour du Parliament, par arrêt, mist l’appellation et la
sentence dont il avoit esté appel au néant, et, néanmoins, ordonna que
le dit Roulet serait mis à l’hospital Saint Germain des Prés, où on a
accoustumé de mettre les folz, pour y demeurer l’espace de deux ans,
afin d’y estre instruit et redressé tant de son esprit, que ramené à
la cognoissance de Dieu, que l’extrême pauvreté lui avoit fait
mescognoistre.”
CHAPTER VII.
JEAN GRENIER
On the Sand-dunes—A Wolf attacks Marguerite Poirier—Jean Grenier
brought to Trial—His Confessions—Charges of Cannibalism proved—His
Sentence—Behaviour in the Monastery—Visit of Del’ancre.
One fine afternoon in the spring, some village girls were tending their
sheep on the sand-dunes which intervene between the vast forests of
pine covering the greater portion of the present department of _Landes_
in the south of France, and the sea.
The brightness of the sky, the freshness of the air puffing up off the
blue twinkling Bay of Biscay, the hum or song of the wind as it made
rich music among the pines which stood like a green uplifted wave on
the East, the beauty of the sand-hills speckled with golden cistus, or
patched with gentian-blue, by the low growing _Gremille couchée_, the
charm of the forest-skirts, tinted variously with the foliage of
cork-trees, pines, and acacia, the latter in full bloom, a pile of
rose-coloured or snowy flowers,—all conspired to fill the peasant
maidens with joy, and to make their voices rise in song and laughter,
which rung merrily over the hills, and through the dark avenues of
evergreen trees.
Now a gorgeous butterfly attracted their attention, then a flight of
quails skimming the surface.
“Ah!” exclaimed Jacquiline Auzun,” ah, if I had my stilts and bats, I
would strike the little birds down, and we should have a fine supper.”
“Now, if they would fly ready cooked into one’s mouth, as they do in
foreign parts!” said another girl.
“Have you got any new clothes for the S. Jean?” asked a third; “my
mother has laid by to purchase me a smart cap with gold lace.”
“You will turn the head of Etienne altogether, Annette!” said Jeanne
Gaboriant. “But what is the matter with the sheep?”
She asked because the sheep which had been quietly browsing before her,
on reaching a small depression in the dune, had started away as though
frightened at something. At the same time one of the dogs began to
growl and show his fangs.
The girls ran to the spot, and saw a little fall in the ground, in
which, seated on a log of fir, was a boy of thirteen. The appearance of
the lad was peculiar. His hair was of a tawny red and thickly matted,
falling over his shoulders and completely covering his narrow brow. His
small pale-grey eyes twinkled with an expression of horrible ferocity
and cunning, from deep sunken hollows. The complexion was of a dark
olive colour; the teeth were strong and white, and the canine teeth
protruded over the lower lip when the mouth was closed. The boy’s hands
were large and powerful, the nails black and pointed like bird’s
talons. He was ill clothed, and seemed to be in the most abject
poverty. The few garments he had on him were in tatters, and through
the rents the emaciation of his limbs was plainly visible.
The girls stood round him, half frightened and much surprised, but the
boy showed no symptoms of astonishment. His face relaxed into a ghastly
leer, which showed the whole range of his glittering white fangs.
“Well, my maidens,” said he in a harsh voice, “which of you is the
prettiest, I should like to know; can you decide among you?”
“What do you want to know for?” asked Jeanne Gaboriant, the eldest of
the girls, aged eighteen, who took upon herself to be spokesman for the
rest.
“Because I shall marry the prettiest,” was the answer.
“Ah!” said Jeanne jokingly; “that is if she will have you, which is not
very likely, as we none of us know you, or anything about you.”
“I am the son of a priest,” replied the boy curtly.
“Is that why you look so dingy and black?”
“No, I am dark-coloured, because I wear a wolf-skin sometimes.”
“A wolf-skin!” echoed the girl; “and pray who gave it you?”
“One called Pierre Labourant.”
“There is no man of that name hereabouts. Where does he live?”
A scream of laughter mingled with howls, and breaking into strange
gulping bursts of fiendlike merriment from the strange boy.
The little girls recoiled, and the youngest took refuge behind Jeanne.
“Do you want to know Pierre Labourant, lass? Hey, he is a man with an
iron chain about his neck, which he is ever engaged in gnawing. Do you
want to know where he lives, lass? Ha., in a place of gloom and fire,
where there are many companions, some seated on iron chairs, burning,
burning; others stretched on glowing beds, burning too. Some cast men
upon blazing coals, others roast men before fierce flames, others again
plunge them into caldrons of liquid fire.”
The girls trembled and looked at each other with scared faces, and then
again at the hideous being which crouched before them.
“You want to know about the wolf-skin cape?” continued he. “Pierre
Labourant gave me that; he wraps it round me, and every Monday, Friday,
and Sunday, and for about an hour at dusk every other day, I am a wolf,
a were-wolf. I have killed dogs and drunk their blood; but little girls
taste better, their flesh is tender and sweet, their blood rich and
warm. I have eaten many a maiden, as I have been on my raids together
with my nine companions. I am a were-wolf! Ah, ha! if the sun were to
set I would soon fall on one of you and make a meal of you!” Again he
burst into one of his frightful paroxysms of laughter, and the girls
unable to endure it any longer, fled with precipitation.
Near the village of S. Antoine de Pizon, a little girl of the name of
Marguerite Poirier, thirteen years old, was in the habit of tending her
sheep, in company with a lad of the same age, whose name was Jean
Grenier. The same lad whom Jeanne Gaboriant had questioned.
The little girl often complained to her parents of the conduct of the
boy: she said that he frightened her with his horrible stories; but her
father and mother thought little of her complaints, till one day she
returned home before her usual time so thoroughly alarmed that she had
deserted her flock. Her parents now took the matter up and investigated
it. Her story was as follows:—
Jean had often told her that he had sold himself to the devil, and that
he had acquired the power of ranging the country after dusk, and
sometimes in broad day, in the form of a wolf. He had assured her that
he had killed and devoured many dogs, but that he found their flesh
less palatable than the flesh of little girls, which he regarded as a
supreme delicacy. He had told her that this had been tasted by him not
unfrequently, but he had specified only two instances: in one he had
eaten as much as he could, and had thrown the rest to a wolf, which had
come up during the repast. In the other instance he had bitten to death
another little girl, had lapped her blood, and, being in a famished
condition at the time, had devoured every portion of her, with the
exception of the arms and shoulders.
The child told her parents, on the occasion of her return home in a fit
of terror, that she had been guiding her sheep as usual, but Grenier
had not been present. Hearing a rustle in the bushes she had looked
round, and a wild beast bad leaped upon her, and torn her clothes on
her left side with its sharp fangs. She added that she had defended
herself lustily with her shepherd’s staff, and had beaten the creature
off. It had then retreated a few paces, had seated itself on its hind
legs like a dog when it is begging, and had regarded her with such a
look of rage, that she had fled in terror. She described the animal as
resembling a wolf, but as being shorter and stouter; its hair was red,
its tail stumpy, and the head smaller than that of a genuine wolf.
The statement of the child produced general consternation in the
parish. It was well known that several little girls had vanished in a
most mysterious way of late, and the parents of these little ones were
thrown into an agony of terror lest their children had become the prey
of the wretched boy accused by Marguerite Poirier. The case was now
taken up by the authorities and brought before the parliament of
Bordeaux.
The investigation which followed was as complete as could be desired.
Jean Grenier was the son of a poor labourer in the village of S.
Antoine do Pizon, and not the son of a priest, as he had asserted.
Three months before his seizure he had left home, and had been with
several masters doing odd work, or wandering about the country begging.
He had been engaged several times to take charge of the flocks
belonging to farmers, and had as often been discharged for neglect of
his duties. The lad exhibited no reluctance to communicate all he knew
about himself, and his statements were tested one by one, and were
often proved to be correct.
The story he related of himself before the court was as follows:—
“When I was ten or eleven years old, my neighbour, Duthillaire,
introduced me, in the depths of the forest, to a M. de la Forest, a
black man, who signed me with his nail, and then gave to me and
Duthillaire a salve and a wolf-skin. From that time have I run about
the country as a wolf.
“The charge of Marguerite Poirier is correct. My intention was to have
killed and devoured her, but she kept me off with a stick. I have only
killed one dog, a white one, and I did not drink its blood.”
When questioned touching the children, whom he said he had killed and
eaten as a wolf, he allowed that he had once entered an empty house on
the way between S. Coutras and S. Anlaye, in a small village, the name
of which he did not remember, and had found a child asleep in its
cradle; and as no one was within to hinder him, he dragged the baby out
of its cradle, carried it into the garden, leaped the hedge, and
devoured as much of it as satisfied his hunger. What remained he had
given to a wolf. In the parish of S. Antoine do Pizon he had attacked a
little girl, as she was keeping sheep. She was dressed in a black
frock; he did not know her name. He tore her with his nails and teeth,
and ate her. Six weeks before his capture he had fallen upon another
child, near the stone-bridge, in the same parish. In Eparon he had
assaulted the hound of a certain M. Millon, and would have killed the
beast, had not the owner come out with his rapier in his hand.
Jean said that he had the wolf-skin in his possession, and that he went
out hunting for children, at the command of his master, the Lord of the
Forest. Before transformation he smeared himself with the salve, which
be preserved in a small pot, and hid his clothes in the thicket.
He usually ran his courses from one to two hours in the day, when the
moon was at the wane, but very often he made his expeditions at night.
On one occasion he had accompanied Duthillaire, but they had killed no
one.
He accused his father of having assisted him, and of possessing a
wolf-skin; he charged him also with having accompanied him on one
occasion, when he attacked and ate a girl in the village of Grilland,
whom he had found tending a flock of geese. He said that his stepmother
was separated from his father. He believed the reason to be, because
she had seen him once vomit the paws of a dog and the fingers of a
child. He added that the Lord of the Forest had strictly forbidden him
to bite the thumb-nail of his left hand, which nail was thicker and
longer than the others, and had warned him never to lose sight of it,
as long as he was in his were-wolf disguise.
Duthillaire was apprehended, and the father of Jean Grenier himself
claimed to be heard by examination.
The account given by the father and stepmother of Jean coincided in
many particulars with the statements made by their son.
The localities where Grenier declared he had fallen on children were
identified, the times when he said the deeds had been done accorded
with the dates given by the parents of the missing little ones, when
their losses had occurred.
The wounds which Jean affirmed that he had made, and the manner in
which he had dealt them, coincided with the descriptions given by the
children he had assaulted.
He was confronted with Marguerite Poirier, and he singled her out from
among five other girls, pointed to the still open gashes in her body,
and stated that he had made them with his teeth, when he attacked her
in wolf-form, and she had beaten him off with a stick. He described an
attack he had made on a little boy whom he would have slain, had not a
man come to the rescue, and exclaimed, “I’ll have you presently.”
The man who saved the child was found, and proved to be the uncle of
the rescued lad, and he corroborated the statement of Grenier, that he
had used the words mentioned above.
Jean was then confronted with his father. He now began to falter in his
story, and to change his statements. The examination had lasted long,
and it was seen that the feeble intellect of the boy was wearied out,
so the case was adjourned. When next confronted with the elder Grenier,
Jean told his story as at first, without changing it in any important
particular.
The fact of Jean Grenier having killed and eaten several children, and
of his having attacked and wounded others, with intent to take their
life, were fully established; but there was no proof whatever of the
father having had the least hand in any of the murders, so that he was
dismissed the court without a shadow of guilt upon him.
The only witness who corroborated the assertion of Jean that he changed
his shape into that of a wolf was Marguerite Poirier.
Before the court gave judgment, the first president of assize, in an
eloquent speech, put on one side all questions of witchcraft and
diabolical compact, and bestial transformation, and boldly stated that
the court had only to consider the age and the imbecility of the child,
who was so dull and idiotic—that children of seven or eight years old
have usually a larger amount of reason than he. The president went on
to say that Lycanthropy and Kuanthropy were mere hallucinations, and
that the change of shape existed only in the disorganized brain of the
insane, consequently it was not a crime which could be punished. The
tender age of the boy must be taken into consideration, and the utter
neglect of his education and moral development. The court sentenced
Grenier to perpetual imprisonment within the walls of a monastery at
Bordeaux, where he might be instructed in his Christian and moral
obligations; but any attempt to escape would be punished with death.
A pleasant companion for the monks! a promising pupil for them to
instruct! No sooner was he admitted into the precincts of the religious
house, than he ran frantically about the cloister and gardens upon all
fours, and finding a heap of bloody and raw offal, fell upon it and
devoured it in an incredibly short space of time.
Delancre visited him seven years after, and found him diminutive in
stature, very shy, and unwilling to look any one in the face. His eyes
were deep set and restless; his teeth long and protruding; his nails
black, and in places worn away; his mind was completely barren; he
seemed unable to comprehend the smallest things. He related his story
to Delancre, and told him how he had run about formerly in the woods as
a wolf, and he said that he still felt a craving for raw flesh,
especially for that of little girls, which he said was delicious, and
he added that but for his confinement it would not be long before he
tasted it again. He said that the Lord of the Forest had visited him
twice in the prison, but that he had driven him off with the sign of
the cross. The account be then gave of his murders coincided exactly
with what had come out in his trial; and beside this, his story of the
compact he had made with the Black One, and the manner in which his
transformation was effected, also coincided with his former statements.
He died at the age of twenty, after an imprisonment of seven years,
shortly after Delancre’s visit.[1]
[1] DELANCRE: _Tableau de l’Inconstance_, p 305.
In the two cases of Roulet and Grenier the courts referred the whole
matter of Lycanthropy, or animal transformation, to its true and
legitimate cause, an aberration of the brain. From this time medical
men seem to have regarded it as a form of mental malady to be brought
under their treatment, rather than as a crime to be punished by law.
But it is very fearful to contemplate that there may still exist
persons in the world filled with a morbid craving for human blood,
which is ready to impel them to commit the most horrible atrocities,
should they escape the vigilante of their guards, or break the bars of
the madhouse which restrains them.
CHAPTER VIII.
FOLK-LORE RELATING TO WERE-WOLVES.
Barrenness of English Folk-lore—Devonshire Traditions—Derivation of
Were-wolf—Cannibalism in Scotland—The Angus Robber—The Carle of
Perth—French Superstitions—Norwegian Traditions—Danish Tales of
Were-wolves—Holstein Stories—The Werewolf in the Netherlands—Among the
Greeks; the Serbs; the White Russians; the Poles; the Russians—A
Russian Receipt for becoming a Were-wolf—The Bohemian Vlkodlak—Armenian
Story—Indian Tales—Abyssinian Budas—American Transformation Tales—A
Slovakian Household Tale—Similar Greek, Béarnais, and Icelandic Tales.
English folk-lore is singularly barren of were-wolf stories, the reason
being that wolves had been extirpated from England under the
Anglo-Saxon kings, and therefore ceased to be objects of dread to the
people. The traditional belief in were-wolfism must, however, have
remained long in the popular mind, though at present it has
disappeared, for the word occurs in old ballads and romances. Thus in
Kempion—
O was it _war-wolf_ in the wood?
Or was it mermaid in the sea?
Or was it man, or vile woman,
My ain true love, that mis-shaped thee?
There is also the romance of _William and the Were-wolf_ in
Hartshorn;[1] but this professes to be a translation from the French:—
[1] HARTSHORN: _Ancient Metrical Tales_, p. 256. See also “The Witch
Cake,” in CRUMEK’S _Remains of Nithsdale Song_.
For he of Frenche this fayre tale ferst dede translate,
In ese of Englysch men in Englysch speche.
In the popular mind the cat or the hare have taken the place of the
wolf for witches’ transformation, and we hear often of the hags
attending the devil’s Sabbath in these forms.
In Devonshire they range the moors in the shape of black dogs, and I
know a story of two such creatures appearing in an inn and nightly
drinking the cider, till the publican shot a silver button over their
heads, when they were instantly transformed into two ill-favoured old
ladies of his acquaintance. On Heathfield, near Tavistock, the wild
huntsman rides by full moon with his “wush hounds;” and a white hare
which they pursued was once rescued by a goody returning from market,
and discovered to be a transformed young lady.
Gervaise of Tilbury says in his _Otia Imperalia_—
“Vidimus frequenter in Anglia, per lunationes, homines in lupos mutari,
quod hominum genus _gerulfos_ Galli vocant, Angli vero _wer-wlf,_
dicunt: _wer_ enim Anglice virum sonat, _wlf_, lupum.” Gervaise may be
right in his derivation of the name, and were-wolf may mean man-wolf,
though I have elsewhere given a different derivation, and one which I
suspect is truer. But Gervaise has grounds for his assertion that _wér_
signifies man; it is so in Anglo-Saxon, _vair_ in Gothic, _vir_ in
Latin, _verr_, in Icelandic, _vîra_, Zend, _wirs_, old Prussian,
_wirs_, Lettish, _vîra_, Sanskrit, _bîr_, Bengalee.
There have been cases of cannibalism in Scotland, but no bestial
transformation is hinted at in connection with them.
Thus Bœthius, in his history of Scotland, tells us of a robber and his
daughter who devoured children, and Lindsay of Pitscottie gives a full
account.
“About this time (1460) there was ane brigand ta’en with his haill
family, who haunted a place in Angus. This mischievous man had ane
execrable fashion to take all young men and children he could steal
away quietly, or tak’ away without knowledge, and eat them, and the
younger they were, esteemed them the mair tender and delicious. For the
whilk cause and damnable abuse, he with his wife and bairns were all
burnt, except ane young wench of a year old who was saved and brought
to Dandee, where she was brought up and fostered; and when she came to
a woman’s years, she was condemned and burnt quick for that crime. It
is said that when she was coming to the place of execution, there
gathered ane huge multitude of people, and specially of women, cursing
her that she was so unhappy to commit so damnable deeds. To whom she
turned about with an ireful countenance, saying:—‘Wherefore chide ye
with me, as if I had committed ane unworthy act? Give me credence and
trow me, if ye had experience of eating men and women’s flesh, ye wold
think it so delicious that ye wold never forbear it again.’ So, but any
sign of repentance, this unhappy traitor died in the sight of the
people.”[2]
[2] LINDSAY’S _Chronicles of Scotland_, 1814, p. 163.
Wyntoun also has a passage in his metrical chronicle regarding a
cannibal who lived shortly before his own time, and he may easily have
heard about him from surviving contemporaries. It was about the year
1340, when a large portion of Scotland had been devastated by the arms
of Edward III.
About Perth thare was the countrie
Sae waste, that wonder wes to see; For intill well-great space thereby,
Wes nother house left nor herb’ry.
Of deer thare wes then sic foison (profusion),
That they wold near come to the town,
Sae great default was near that stead,
That mony were in hunger dead.
A carle they said was near thereby,
That wold act settis (traps) commonly,
Children and women for to slay,
And swains that he might over-ta;
And ate them all that he get might;
Chwsten Cleek till name behight.
That sa’ry life continued he,
While waste but folk was the countrie.[3]
[3] WYNTOUN’S _Chronicle_, ii. 236.
We have only to compare these two cases with those recorded in the last
two chapters, and we see at once how the popular mind in Great Britain
had lost the idea of connecting change of form with cannibalism. A man
guilty of the crimes committed by the Angus brigand, or the carle of
Perth, would have been regarded as a were-wolf in France or Germany,
and would have been tried for Lycanthropy.
S. Jerome, by the way, brought a sweeping charge against the Scots. He
visited Gaul in his youth, about 880, and he writes:—“When I was a
young man in Gaul, I may have seen the Attacotti, a British people who
live upon human flesh; and when they find herds of pigs, droves of
cattle, or flocks of sheep in the woods, they cut off the haunches of
the men and the breasts of the women, and these they regard as great
dainties;” in other words they prefer the shepherd to his flock. Gibbon
who quotes this passage says on it: “If in the neighbourhood of the
commercial and literary town of Glasgow, a race of cannibals has really
existed, we may contemplate, in the period of the Scottish history, the
opposite extremes of savage and civilized life. Such reflections tend
to enlarge the circle of our ideas, and to encourage the pleasing hope
that New Zealand may produce in a future age, the Hume of the Southern
hemisphere.”
If traditions of were-wolves are scanty in England, it is quite the
reverse if we cross the water.
In the south of France, it is still believed that fate has destined
certain men to be lycanthropists—that they are transformed into wolves
at full moon. The desire to run comes upon them at night. They leave
their beds, jump out of a window, and plunge into a fountain. After the
bath, they come out covered with dense fur, walking on all fours, and
commence a raid over fields and meadows, through woods and villages,
biting all beasts and human beings that come in their way. At the
approach of dawn, they return to the spring, plunge into it, lose their
furry skins, and regain their deserted beds. Sometimes the loup-garou
is said to appear under the form of a white dog, or to be loaded with
chains; but there is probably a confusion of ideas between the
were-wolf and the church-dog, bar-ghest, pad-foit, wush-hound, or by
whatever name the animal supposed to haunt a churchyard is designated.
In the Périgord, the were-wolf is called louléerou. Certain men,
especially bastards, are obliged at each full moon to transform
themselves into these diabolic beasts.
It is always at night that the fit comes on. The lycanthropist dashes
out of a window, springs into a well, and, after having struggled in
the water for a few moments, rises from it, dripping, and invested with
a goatskin which the devil has given him. In this condition, the
louléerous run upon four legs, pass the night in ranging over the
country, and in biting and devouring all the dogs they meet. At break
of day they lay aside their goatskins and return home. Often they are
ill in consequence of having eaten tough old hounds, and they vomit up
their undigested paws. One great nuisance to them is the fact that they
may be wounded or killed in their louléerou state. With the first
effusion of blood their diabolic covering vanishes, and they are
recognized, to the disgrace of their families.
A were-wolf may easily be detected, even when devoid of his skin; for
his hands are broad, and his fingers short, and there are always some
hairs in the hollow of his hand.
In Normandy, those who are doomed to be loups-garoux, clothe themselves
every evening with a skin called their _hère_ or _hure_, which is a
loan from the devil. When they run in their transformed state, the evil
one accompanies them and scourges them at the foot of every cross they
pass. The only way in which a werewolf can be liberated from this cruel
bondage, is by stabbing him three times in the forehead with a knife.
However, some people less addicted to allopathic treatment, consider
that three drops of blood drawn by a needle, will be sufficient to
procure release.
According to an opinion of the vulgar in the same province, the
loup-garou is sometimes a metamorphosis forced upon the body of a
damned person, who, after having been tormented in his grave, has torn
his way out of it. The first stage in the process consists in his
devouring the cerecloth which enveloped his face; then his moans and
muffled howls ring from the tomb, through the gloom of night, the earth
of the grave begins to heave, and at last, with a scream, surrounded by
a phosphorescent glare, and exhaling a fœtid odour, he bursts away as a
wolf.
In Le Bessin, they attribute to sorcerers the power of metamorphosing
certain men into beasts, but the form of a dog is that principally
affected by them.
In Norway it is believed that there are persons who can assume the form
of a wolf or a bear (Huse-björn), and again resume their own; this
property is either imparted to them by the Trollmen, or those
possessing it are themselves Trolls.
In a hamlet in the midst of a forest, there dwelt a cottager named
Lasse, and his wife. One day he went out in the forest to fell a tree,
but had forgot to cross himself and say his paternoster, so that some
troll or wolf-witch (varga mor) obtained power over him and transformed
him into a wolf. His wife mourned him for many years, but, one
Christmas-eve, there came a beggar-woman, very poor and ragged, to the
door, and the good woman of the house took her in, fed her well, and
entreated her kindly. At her departure the beggar-woman said that the
wife would probably see her husband again, as he was not dead, but was
wandering in the forest as a wolf. Towards night-fall the wife went to
her pantry to place in it a piece of meat for the morrow, when, on
turning to go out, she perceived a wolf standing before her, raising
itself with its paws on the pantry steps, regarding her with sorrowful
and hungry looks. Seeing this she exclaimed, “If I were sure that thou
wert my own Lasse, I would give thee a bit of meat.” At that instant
the wolf-skin fell off, and her husband stood before her in the clothes
he wore on the unlucky morning when she had last beheld him.
Finns, Lapps, and Russians are held in particular aversion, because the
Swedes believe that they have power to change people into wild beasts.
During the last year of the war with Russia, when Calmar was overrun
with an unusual number of wolves, it was generally said that the
Russians had transformed their Swedish prisoners into wolves, and sent
them home to invest the country.
In Denmark the following stories are told:—
A man, who from his childhood had been a were-wolf, when returning one
night with his wife from a merrymaking, observed that the hour was at
hand when the evil usually came upon him; giving therefore the reins to
his wife, he descended from the vehicle, saying to her, “If anything
comes to thee, only strike at it with thine apron.” He then withdrew,
but immediately after, the woman, as she was sitting in the vehicle,
was attached by a were-wolf. She did as the man had enjoined her, and
struck it with her apron, from which it rived a portion, and then ran
away. After some time the man returned, holding in his mouth the rent
portion of his wife’s apron, on seeing which, she cried out in
terror,—“Good Lord, man, why, thou art a were-wolf!” “Thank thee,
wife,” said he, “now I am free.” And from that time he was no more
afflicted.
If a female at midnight stretches between four sticks the membrane
which envelopes the foal when it is brought forth, and creeps through
it, naked, she will bear children without pain; but all the boys will
be were-wolves, and all the girls maras. By day the were-wolf has the
human form, though he may be known by the meeting of his eyebrows above
the nose. At a certain time of the night he has the form of a dog on
three legs. It is only when another person tells him that he is a
were-wolf, or reproaches him with being such, that a man can be freed
from the ban.
According to a Danish popular song, a hero transformed by his
step-mother into a bear, fights with a knight:—
For ’tis she who hath bewitched me,
A woman false and fell,
Bound an iron girdle round me,
If thou can’st not break this belt,
Knight, I’ll thee destroy!
* * * *
The noble made the Christian sign,
The girdle snapped, the bear was changed,
And see! he was a lusty knight,
His father’s realm regained.
_Kjæmpeviser_, p. 147.
When an old bear in Ofodens Priestegjeld was killed, after it had
caused the death of six men und sixty horses, it was found to be girded
with a similar girdle.
In Schleswig and Holstein they say that if the were-wolf be thrice
addressed by his baptismal name, he resumes his human form.
On a hot harvest day some reapers lay down in the field to take their
noontide sleep, when one who could not sleep observed that the fellow
next to him rose softly, and having girded himself with a strap, became
a were-wolf.
A young man belonging to Jägerup returning late one night from Billund,
was attacked, when near Jägerup, by three were-wolves, and would
probably have been torn to pieces, had he not saved himself by leaping
into a rye-field, for there they had no more power over him.
At Caseburg, on the isle of Usedom, a man and his wife were busy in the
field making hay, when after some time the woman said to the man that
she had no more peace, she could stay no longer, and went away. But she
had previously desired her husband to promise, that if perchance a wild
beast should come that way, he would cast his hat at it and then run
away, and it would do him no injury. She had been gone but a short
while, when a wolf came swimming across the Swine, and ran directly
towards the haymakers. The man threw his hat at it, which the animal
instantly tore to rags. But in the meantime a boy had run up with a
pitchfork, and he dabbed the wolf from behind: in the same moment it
became changed, and all saw that the boy had killed the man’s wife.
Formerly there were individuals in the neighbourhood of Steina, who, by
putting on a certain girdle, could transform themselves into
were-wolves. A man of the neighbourhood, who had such a girdle, forgot
one day when going out to lock it up, as was his wont. During his
absence, his little son chanced to find it; he buckled it round him.,
and was instantaneously turned into an animal, to all outward
appearance like a bundle of peat-straw, and he rolled about like an
unwieldy bear. When those who were in the room perceived this, they
hastened in search of the father, who was found in time to come and
unbuckle the belt, before the child had done any mischief. The boy
afterwards said, that when he had put on the girdle, he was seized with
such a raging hunger, that he was ready to tear in pieces and devour
all that came in his way.
The girdle is supposed to be made of human skin, and to be three
finger-breadths wide.
In East Friesland, it is believed, when seven girls succeed each other
in one family, that among them one is of necessity a were-wolf, so that
youths are slow in seeking one of seven sisters in marriage.
According to a curious Lithuanian story related by Schleicher in his
_Litauische Märchen_, a person who is a were-wolf or bear has to remain
kneeling in one spot for one hundred years before he can hope to obtain
release from his bestial form.
In the Netherlands they relate the following tale:—A man had once gone
out with his bow to attend a shooting match at Rousse, but when about
half way to the place, he saw on a sudden, a large wolf spring from a
thicket, and rush towards a young girl, who was sitting in a meadow by
the roadside watching cows. The man did not long hesitate, but quickly
drawing forth an arrow, took aim, and luckily hit the wolf in the right
side, so that the arrow remained sticking in the wound, and the animal
fled howling to the wood.
On the following day he heard that a serving-man of the burgomaster’s
household lay at the point of death, in consequence of having been shot
in the right side, on the preceding day. This so excited the archer’s
curiosity, that he went to the wounded man, and requested to see the
arrow. He recognized it immediately as one of his own. Then, having
desired all present to leave the room, he persuaded the man to confess
that he was a were-wolf and that he had devoured little children. On
the following day he died.
Among the Bulgarians and Sloyakians the were-wolf is called _vrkolak_,
a name resembling that given it by the modern Greeks {Greek
_brúkolakas_}. The Greek were-wolf is closely related to the vampire.
The lycanthropist falls into a cataleptic trance, during which his soul
leaves his body, enters that of a wolf and ravens for blood. On the
return of the soul, the body is exhausted and aches as though it had
been put through violent exercise. After death lycanthropists become
vampires. They are believed to frequent battlefields in wolf or hyæna
shapes, and to suck the breath from dying soldiers, or to enter houses
and steal the infants from their cradles. Modern Greeks call any
savage-looking man, with dark complexion, and with distorted, misshapen
limbs, a {Greek _brúkolakas_}, and suppose him to be invested with
power of running in wolf-form.
The Serbs connect the vampire and the were-wolf together, and call them
by one name _vlkoslak_. These rage chiefly in the depths of winter:
they hold their annual gatherings, and at them divest themselves of
their wolf-skins, which they hang on the trees around them. If any one
succeeds in obtaining the skin and burning it, the vlkoslak is
thenceforth disenchanted.
The power to become a were-wolf is obtained by drinking the water which
settles in a foot-print left in clay by a wolf.
Among the White Russians the _wawkalak_ is a man who has incurred the
wrath of the devil, and the evil one punishes him by transforming him
into a wolf and sending him among his relations, who recognize him and
feed him well. He is a most amiably disposed were-wolf, for he does no
mischief, and testifies his affection for his kindred by licking their
hands. He cannot, however, remain long in any place, but is driven from
house to house, and from hamlet to hamlet, by an irresistible passion
for change of scene. This is an ugly superstition, for it sets a
premium on standing well with the evil one.
The Sloyakians merrily term a drunkard a vlkodlak, because, forsooth,
he makes a beast of himself. A Slovakian household were-wolf tale
closes this chapter.
The Poles have their were-wolves, which rage twice in the year—at
Christmas and at midsummer.
According to a Polish story, if a witch lays a girdle of human skin on
the threshold of a house in which a marriage is being celebrated, the
bride and bridegroom, and bridesmaids and groomsmen, should they step
across it, are transformed into wolves. After three years, however, the
witch will cover them with skins with the hair. turned outward;
immediately they will recover their natural form. On one occasion, a
witch cast a skin of too scanty dimensions over the bridegroom, so that
his tail was left uncovered: he resumed his human form, but retained
his lupine caudal appendage {_i.e. tail—jbh_}.
The Russians call the were-wolf _oborot_, which signifies “one
transformed.” The following receipt is given by them for becoming one.
“He who desires to become an oborot, let him seek in the forest a
hewn-down tree; let him stab it with a small copper knife, and walk
round the tree, repeating the following incantation:—
On the sea, on the ocean, on the island, on Bujan,
On the empty pasture gleams the moon, on an ashstock lying
In a green wood, in a gloomy vale.
Toward the stock wandereth a shaggy wolf.
Horned cattle seeking for his sharp white fangs;
But the wolf enters not the forest,
But the wolf dives not into the shadowy vale,
Moon, moon, gold-horned moon,
Cheek the flight of bullets, blunt the hunters’ knives,
Break the shepherds’ cudgels,
Cast wild fear upon all cattle,
On men, on all creeping things,
That they may not catch the grey wolf,
That they may not rend his warm skin
My word is binding, more binding than sleep,
More binding than the promise of a hero!
“Then he springs thrice over the tree and runs into the forest,
transformed into a wolf.”[4]
[4] SACHAROW: _Inland_, 1838, No. 17.
In the ancient Bohemian Lexicon of Vacerad (A. D. 1202) the were-wolf
is called vilkodlak, and is explained as faunus. Safarik says under
that head,-
“Incubi sepe improbi existunt mulieribus, et earum peragunt concubitum,
quos demones Galli _dusios_ nuncupant.” And in another place:
“Vilkodlaci, incubi, sive invidi, ab inviando passim cum animalibus,
unde et incubi dicuntur ab incubando homines, i. e. stuprando, quos
Romani faunos ficarios dicunt.”
That the same belief in lycanthropy exists in Armenia is evident from
the following story told by Haxthausen, in his _Trans-Caucasia_
(Leipzig, i. 322):—“A man once saw a wolf, which had carried off a
child, dash past him. He pursued it hastily, but was unable to overtake
it. At last he came upon the hands and feet of a child, and a little
further on he found a cave, in which lay a wolf-skin. This he cast into
a fire, and immediately a woman appeared, who howled and tried to
rescue the skin from the flames. The man, however, resisted, and, as
soon as the hide was consumed, the woman had vanished in the smoke.”
In India, on account of the prevalence of the doctrine of
metempsychosis, the belief in transformation is widely diffused. Traces
of genuine lycanthropy are abundant in all regions whither Buddism has
reached. In Ceylon, in Thibet, and in China, we find it still forming a
portion of the national creed.
In the Pantschatantra is a story of an enchanted Brahmin’s son, who by
day was a serpent, by night a man.
Vikramâditya’s father, the son of Indra, was condemned to be an ass by
day and a man by night.
A modern Indian tale is to this effect:—A prince marries a female ape,
but his brothers wed handsome princesses. At a feast given by the queen
to her stepdaughters, there appears an exquisitely beautiful lady in
gorgeous robes. This is none other than the she-ape, who has laid aside
her skin for the occasion: the prince slips out of the room and burns
the skin, so that his wife is prevented from resuming her favourite
appearance.
Nathaniel Pierce[5] gives an account of an Abyssinian superstition very
similar to that prevalent in Europe.
[5] _Life and Adventures of Nathaniel Pierce_, written by himself
during a residence in Abyssinia from 1810-19. London, 1831.
He says that in Abyssinia the gold. and silversmiths are highly
regarded, but that the ironworkers are looked upon with contempt, as an
inferior grade of beings. Their kinsmen even ascribe to them the power
of transforming themselves into hyænas, or other savage beasts. All
convulsions and hysterical disorders are attributed to the effect of
their evil eye. The Amhara call them _Buda_, the Tigré, _Tebbib_. There
are also Mahomedan and Jewish Budas. It is difficult to explain the
origin of this strange superstition. These Budas are distinguished from
other people by wearing gold ear-rings, and Coffin declares that he has
often found hyænas with these rings in their ears, even among the
beasts which he has shot or speared himself. But how the rings got into
their ears is more than Coffin was able to ascertain.
Beside their power to transform themselves into hyænas or other wild
beasts, all sorts of other strange things are ascribed to them; and the
Abyssinians are firmly persuaded that they rob the graves by midnight,
and no one would venture to touch what is called _quanter_, or dried
meat in their houses, though they would not object to partake of fresh
meat, if they had seen the animal, from which it came, killed before
them. Coffin relates, as eye-witness of the fact, the following story:—
Among his servants was a Buda, who, one evening, whilst it was still
light, came to his master and asked leave of absence till the following
morning. He obtained the required leave and departed; but scarcely had
Coffin turned his head, when one of his men exclaimed,—“Look! there he
is, changing himself into hyæna,” pointing in the direction taken by
the Buda. Coffin turned to look, and although he did not witness the
process of transformation, the young man had vanished from the spot on
which he had been standing, not a hundred paces distant, and in his
place was a hyæna running away. The place was a plain without either
bush or tree to impede the view. Next morning the young man returned,
and was charged by his companions with the transformation: this he
rather acknowledged than denied, for he excused himself on the plea
that it was the habit of his class. This statement of Pierce is
corroborated by a note contributed by Sir Gardner Wilkinson to
Rawlinson’s _Herodotus_ (book iv. chap. 105). “A class of people in
Abyssinia are believed to change themselves into hyænas when they like.
On my appearing to discredit it, I was told by one who lived for years
there, that no well-informed person doubted it, and that he was once
walking with one of them, when he happened to look away for a moment,
and on turning again towards his companion, he saw him trotting off in
the shape of a hyæna. He met him afterwards in his old form. These
worthies are blacksmiths.—G. W.”
A precisely similar superstition seems to have existed in America, for
Joseph Acosta (_Hist. Nat. des Indes_) relates that the ruler of a city
in Mexico, who was sent for by the predecessor of Montezuma,
transformed himself, before the eyes of those who were sent to seize
him, into an eagle, a tiger, and an enormous serpent. He yielded at
last, and was condemned to death. No longer in his own house, he was
unable to work miracles so as to save his life. The Bishop of Chiapa, a
province of Guatemala, in a writing published in 1702, ascribes the
same power to the Naguals, or national priests, who laboured to bring
back to the religion of their ancestors, the children brought up as
Christians by the government. After various ceremonies, when the child
instructed advanced to embrace him, the Nagual suddenly assumed a
frightful aspect, and under the form of a lion or tiger, appeared
chained to the young Christian convert.—(_Recueil de Voyages_, tom. ii.
187.)
Among the North American Indians, the belief in transformation is very
prevalent. The following story closely resembles one very prevalent all
over the world.
“One Indian fixed his residence on the borders of the Great Bear lake,
taking with him only a dog big with young. In due time, this dog
brought forth eight pups. Whenever the Indian went out to fish, he tied
up the pups, to prevent the straying of the litter. Several times, as
he approached his tent, he heard noises proceeding from it, which
sounded like the talking, the laughing, the crying, the wail, and the
merriment of children; but, on entering it, he only perceived the pups
tied up as usual. His curiosity being excited by the noises he had
heard, he determined to watch and learn whence these sounds proceeded,
and what they were. One day he pretended to go out to fish, but,
instead of doing so, he concealed himself in a convenient place. In a
short time he again heard -voices, and, rushing suddenly into the tent,
beheld some beautiful children sporting and laughing, with the
dog-skins lying by their side. He threw the dog-skins into the fire,
and the children, retaining their proper forms, grew up, and were the
ancestors of the dog-rib nation.”—(_Traditions of the North American
Indians_, by T. A. Jones, 1830, Vol. ii. p. 18.)
In the same work is a curious story entitled _The Mother of the World_,
which bears a close analogy to another world-wide myth: a woman marries
a dog, by night the dog lays aside its skin, and appears as a man. This
may be compared with the tale of Björn and Bera already given.
I shall close this chapter with a Slovakian household tale given by T.
T. Hanush in the third volume of _Zeitschrift für Deutsche Mythologie_.
_The Daughter of the Vlkolak._
“There was once a father, who had nine daughters, and they were all
marriageable, but the youngest was the most beautiful. The father was a
were-wolf. One day it came into his head: ‘What is the good of having
to support so many girls?’ so he determined to put them all out of the
way.
“He went accordingly into the forest to hew wood, and he ordered his
daughters to let one of them bring him his dinner. It was the eldest
who brought it.
“‘Why, how come you so early with the food?’ asked the woodcutter.
“‘Truly, father, I wished to strengthen you, lest you should fall upon
us, if famished!’
“‘A good lass! Sit down whilst I eat.’ He ate, and whilst he ate he
thought of a scheme. He rose and said: I My girl, come, and I will show
you a pit I have been digging.’
“‘And what is the pit for?’
“‘That we may be buried in it when we die, for poor folk will not be
cared for much after they are dead and gone.’
“So the girl went with him to the side of the deep pit. ‘Now hear,’
said the were-wolf, ‘you must die and be cast in there.’
“She begged for her life, but all in vain, so he laid hold of her and
cast her into the grave. Then he took a great stone and flung it in
upon her and crushed her head, so the poor thing breathed out her soul.
When the were-wolf had done this he went back to his work, and as dusk
came on, the second daughter arrived, bringing him food. He told her of
the pit, and brought her to it, and cast her in, and killed her as the
first. And so he dealt with all his girls up to the last. The youngest
knew well that her father was a were-wolf, and she was grieved that her
sisters did not return; she thought, ‘Now where can they be? Has my
father kept them for companionship; or to help him in his work?’ So she
made the food which she was to take him, and crept cautiously through
the wood. When she came near the place where her father worked, she
heard his strokes felling timber, and smelt smoke. She saw presently a
large fire and two human heads roasting at it. Turning from the fire,
she went in the direction of the axe-strokes, and found her father.
“See,’ said she, ‘father, I have brought you food.’
“That is a good lass,’ said he. ‘Now stack the wood for me whilst I
eat.’
“‘But where are my sisters?’ she asked.
“‘Down in yon valley drawing wood,’ he replied ‘follow me, and I will
bring you to them.’
“They came to the pit; then he told her that he had dug it for a grave.
‘Now,’ said he, ‘you must die, and be cast into the pit with your
sisters.’
“‘Turn aside, father,’ she asked, ‘whilst I strip of my clothes, and
then slay me if you will.’
“He turned aside as she requested, and then—tchich! she gave him a
push, and he tumbled headlong into the hole he had dug for her.
“She fled for her life, for the were-wolf was not injured, and he soon
would scramble out of the pit.
“Now she hears his howls resounding through the gloomy alleys of the
forest, and swift as the wind she runs. She hears the tramp of his
approaching feet, and the snuffle of his breath. Then she casts behind
her her handkerchief. The were-wolf seizes this with teeth and nails,
and rends it till it is reduced to tiny ribands. In another moment he
is again in pursuit foaming at the mouth, and howling dismally, whilst
his red eyes gleam like burning coals. As he gains on her, she casts
behind her her gown, and bids him tear that. He seizes the gown and
rives it to shreds, then again he pursues. This time she casts behind
her her apron, next her petticoat, then her shift, and at last rums
much in the condition in which she was born. Again the were-wolf
approaches; she bounds out of the forest into a hay-field, and hides
herself in the smallest heap of hay. Her father enters the field, runs
howling about it in search of her, cannot find her, and begins to upset
the different haycocks, all the while growling and gnashing his
gleaming white fangs in his rage at her having escaped him. The foam
flakes drop at every step from his mouth, and his skin is reeking with
sweat. Before he has reached the smallest bundle of hay his strength
leaves him, he feels exhaustion begin to creep over him, and he retires
to the forest.
“The king goes out hunting every clay; one of his dogs carries food to
the hay-field, which has most unaccountably been neglected by the
hay-makers for three days. The king, following the dog, discovers the
fair damsel, not exactly ‘in the straw,’ but up to her neck in hay. She
is carried, hay and all, to the palace, where she becomes his wife,
making only one stipulation before becoming his bride, and that is,
that no beggar shall be permitted to enter the palace.
“After some years a beggar does get in, the beggar being, of course,
none other than her were-wolf father. He steals upstairs, enters the
nursery, cuts the throats of the two children borne by the queen to her
lord, and lays the knife under her pillow.
“In the morning, the king, supposing his wife to be the murderess,
drives her from home, with the dead princes hung about her neck. A
hermit comes to the rescue, and restores the babies to life. The king
finds out his mistake, is reunited to the lady out of the hay, and the
were-wolf is cast off a high cliff into the sea, and that is the end of
him. The king, the queen, and the princes live happily, and may be
living yet, for no notice of their death has appeared in the
newspaper.”
This story bears some resemblance to one told by Von Hahn in his
_Griechische und Albanesische Märchen_; I remember having heard a very
similar one in the Pyrenees; but the man who flies from the were-wolf
is one who, after having stripped off all his clothes, rushes into a
cottage and jumps into a bed. The were-wolf dares not, or cannot,
follow. The cause of his flight was also different. He was a freemason
who had divulged the secret, and the were-wolf was the master of his
lodge in pursuit of him. In the Bearnais story, there is nothing
similar to the last part of the Slovakian tale, and in the Greek one
the transformation and the pursuit are omitted, though the woman-eater
is called “dog’s-head,” much as an outlaw in the north of Europe was
said to be wolf-headed.
It is worthy of notice in the tale of _The Daughter of the Ulkolak_,
that the were-wolf fit is followed by great exhaustion,[6] and that the
wolf is given clothes to tear, much as in the Danish stories already
related. There does not seem to be any indication of his Laving changed
his shape, at least no change is mentioned, his hands are spoken of,
and he swears and curses his daughter in broad Slovakian. The fit very
closely resembles that to which Skallagrim, the Icelander, was subject.
It is a pity that the maid Bràk in the Icelandic tale did not fall upon
her legs like the young lady in the hay.
[6] Compare this with the exhaustion following a Berserkir fit, and
that which succeeded the attacks to which M. Bertrand was subject.
CHAPTER IX.
NATURAL CAUSES OF LYCANTHROPY.
Innate Cruelty—Its Three Forms—Dumollard—Andreas Bichel—A Dutch
Priest—Other instances of Inherent Cruelty—Cruelty united to
Refinement—A Hungarian Bather in Blood—Suddenness with which the
Passion is developed—Cannibalism; in pregnant Women; in
Maniacs—Hallucination; how Produced—Salves—The Story of
Lucius—Self-deception.
What I have related from the chronicles of antiquity, or from the
traditional lore of the people, is veiled under the form of myth or
legend; and it is only from Scandinavian descriptions of those
afflicted with the wolf-madness, and from the trials of those charged
with the crime of lycanthropy in the later Middle Ages, that we can
arrive at the truth respecting that form of madness which was invested
by the superstitious with so much mystery.
It was not till the close of the Middle Ages that lycanthropy was
recognized as a disease; but it is one which has so much that is
ghastly and revolting in its form, and it is so remote from all our
ordinary experience, that it is not surprising that the casual observer
should leave the consideration of it, as a subject isolated and
perplexing, and be disposed to regard as a myth that which the feared
investigation might prove a reality.
In this chapter I purpose briefly examining the conditions under which
men have been regarded as werewolves.
Startling though the assertion may be, it is a matter of fact, that
man, naturally, in common with other carnivora, is actuated by an
impulse to kill, and by a love of destroying life.
It is positively true that there are many to whom the sight of
suffering causes genuine pleasure, and in whom the passion to kill or
torture is as strong as any other passion. Witness the number of boys
who assemble around a sheep or pig when it is about to be killed, and
who watch the struggle of the dying brute with hearts beating fast with
pleasure, and eyes sparkling with delight. Often have I seen an eager
crowd of children assembled around the slaughterhouses of French towns,
absorbed in the expiring agonies of the sheep and cattle, and hushed
into silence as they watched the flow of blood.
The propensity, however, exists in different degrees. In some it is
manifest simply as indifference to suffering, in others it appears as
simple pleasure in seeing killed, and in others again it is dominant as
an irresistible desire to torture and destroy.
This propensity is widely diffused; it exists in children and adults,
in the gross-minded and the refined., in the well-educated and the
ignorant, in those who have never had the opportunity of gratifying it,
and those who gratify it habitually, in spite of morality, religion,
laws, so that it can only depend on constitutional causes.
The sportsman and the fisherman follow a natural instinct to destroy,
when they make wax on bird, beast, and fish: the pretence that the
spoil is sought for the table cannot be made with justice, as the
sportsman cares little for the game he has obtained, when once it is
consigned to his pouch. The motive for his eager pursuit of bird or
beast must be sought elsewhere; it will be found in the natural craving
to extinguish life, which exists in his soul. Why does a child
impulsively strike at a butterfly as it flits past him? He cares
nothing for the insect when once it is beaten down at his feet, unless
it be quivering in its agony, when he will watch it with interest. The
child strikes at the fluttering creature because it has _life_ in it,
and he has an instinct within him impelling him to destroy life
wherever he finds it.
Parents and nurses know well that children by nature are cruel, and
that humanity has to be acquired by education. A child will gloat over
the sufferings of a wounded animal till his mother bids him “put it out
of its misery.” An unsophisticated child would not dream of terminating
the poor creature’s agonies abruptly, any more than he would swallow
whole a bon-bon till he had well sucked it. Inherent cruelty may be
obscured by after impressions, or may be kept under moral restraint;
the person who is constitutionally a Nero, may scarcely know his own
nature, till by some accident the master passion becomes dominant, and
sweeps all before it. A relaxation of the moral check, a shock to the
controlling intellect, an abnormal condition of body, are sufficient to
allow the passion to assert itself.
As I have already observed, this passion exists in different persons in
different degrees.
In some it is exhibited in simple want of feeling for other people’s
sufferings. This temperament may lead to crime, for the individual who
is regardless of pain in another, will be ready to destroy that other,
if it suit his own purposes. Such an one was the pauper Dumollard, who
was the murderer of at least six poor girls, and who attempted to kill
several others. He seems not to have felt much gratification in
murdering them, but to have been so utterly indifferent to their
sufferings, that he killed them solely for the sake of their clothes,
which were of the poorest description. He was sentenced to the
guillotine, and executed in 1862.[1]
[1] A full account of this man’s trial is given by one who was
present, in _All the Year Round_, No. 162.
In others, the passion for blood is developed alongside with
indifference to suffering.
Thus Andreas Bichel enticed young women into his house, under the
pretence that he was possessed of a magic mirror, in which he would
show them their future husbands; when he had them in his power he bound
their hands behind their backs, and stunned them with a blow. He then
stabbed them and despoiled them of their clothes, for the sake of which
he committed the murders; but as he killed the young women the passion
of cruelty took possession of him, and he hacked the poor girls to
pieces whilst they were still alive, in his anxiety to examine their
insides. Catherine Seidel he opened with a hammer and a wedge, from her
breast downwards, whilst still breathing. “I may say,” he remarked at
his trial, “that during the operation I was so eager, that I trembled
all over, and I longed to rive off a piece and eat it.”
Andreas Bichel was executed in 1809.[2]
[2] The case of Andreas Bichel is given in Lady Duff Gordon’s
_Remarkable Criminal Trials_.
Again, a third class of persons are cruel and bloodthirsty, because in
them bloodthirstiness is a raging insatiable passion. In a civilized
country those possessed by this passion are forced to control it
through fear of the consequences, or to gratify it upon the brute
creation. But in earlier days, when feudal lords were supreme in their
domains, there have been frightful instances of their excesses, and the
extent to which some of the Roman emperors indulged their passion for
blood is matter of history.
Gall gives several authentic instances of bloodthirstiness.[3] A Dutch
priest had such a desire to kill and to see killed, that he became
chaplain to a regiment that he might have the satisfaction of seeing
deaths occurring wholesale in engagements. The same man kept a large
collection of various kinds of domestic animals, that he might be able
to torture their young. He killed the animals for his kitchen, and was
acquainted with all the hangmen in the country, who sent him notice of
executions, and he would walk for days that he might have the
gratification of seeing a man executed.
[3] GALL: _Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau_, tom. iv.
In the field of battle the passion is variously developed; some feel
positive delight in slaying, others are indifferent. An old soldier,
who had been in Waterloo, informed me that to his mind there was no
pleasure equal to running a man through the body, and that he could lie
awake at night musing on the pleasurable sensations afforded him by
that act.
Highwaymen are frequently not content with robbery, but manifest a
bloody inclination to torment and kill. John Rosbeck, for instance, is
well known to have invented and exercised the most atrocious cruelties,
merely that he might witness the sufferings of his victims, who were
especially women and children. Neither fear nor torture could break him
of the dreadful passion till he was executed.
Gall tells of a violin-player, who, being arrested, confessed to
thirty-four murders, all of which he had committed, not from enmity or
intent to rob, but solely because it afforded him an intense pleasure
to kill.
Spurzheim[4] tells of a priest at Strasbourg, who, though rich, and
uninfluenced by envy or revenge, from exactly the same motive, killed
three persons.
[4] _Doctrine of the Mind_, p. 158.
Gall relates the case of a brother of the Duke of Bourbon, Condé, Count
of Charlois, who, from infancy, had an inveterate pleasure in torturing
animals: growing older, he lived to shed the blood of human beings, and
to exercise various kinds of cruelty. He also murdered many from no
other motive, and shot at slaters for the pleasure of seeing them fall
from the roofs of houses.
Louis XI. of France caused the death of 4,000 people during his reign;
he used to watch their executions from a neighbouring lattice. He had
gibbets placed outside his own palace, and himself conducted the
executions.
It must not be supposed that cruelty exists merely in the coarse and
rude; it is quite as frequently observed in the refined and educated.
Among the former it is manifest chiefly in insensibility to the
sufferings of others; in the latter it appears as a passion, the
indulgence of which causes intense pleasure.
Those bloody tyrants, Nero and Caligula, Alexander Borgia, and
Robespierre, whose highest enjoyment consisted in witnessing the
agonies of their fellow-men, were full of delicate sensibilities and
great refinement of taste and manner.
I have seen an accomplished young woman of considerable refinement and
of a highly strung nervous temperament, string flies with her needle on
a piece of thread, and watch complacently their flutterings. Cruelty
may remain latent till, by some accident. it is aroused, and then it
will break forth in a devouring flame. It is the same with the passion
for blood as with the passions of love and hate; we have no conception
of the violence with which they can rage till circumstances occur which
call them into action. Love or hate will be dominant in a breast which
has been in serenity, till suddenly the spark falls, passion blazes
forth, and the serenity of the quiet breast is shattered for ever. A
word, a glance, a touch, are sufficient to fire the magazine of passion
in the heart, and to desolate for ever an existence. It is the same
with bloodthirstiness. It may lurk in the deeps of some heart very dear
to us. It may smoulder in the bosom which is most cherished by us, and
we may be perfectly unconscious of its existence there. Perhaps
circumstances will not cause its development; perhaps moral principle
may have bound it down with fetters it can never break.
Michael Wagener[5] relates a horrible story which occurred in Hungary,
suppressing the name of the person, as it was that of a still powerful
family in the country. It illustrates what I have been saying, and
shows how trifling a matter may develope the passion in its most
hideous proportions.
[5] _Beitrage zur philosophischen Anthropologie_, Wien, 1796.
“Elizabeth ——— was wont to dress well in order to please her husband,
and she spent half the day over her toilet. On one occasion, a
lady’s-maid saw something wrong in her head-dress, and as a recompence
for observing it, received such a severe box on the ears that the blood
gushed from her nose, and spirted on to her mistress’s face. When the
blood drops were washed off her face, her skin appeared much more
beautiful—whiter and more transparent on the spots where the blood had
been.
“Elizabeth formed the resolution to bathe her face and her whole body
in human blood so as to enhance her beauty. Two old women and a certain
Fitzko assisted her in her undertaking. This monster used to kill the
luckless victim, and the old women caught the blood, in which Elizabeth
was wont to bathe at the hour of four in the morning. After the bath
she appeared more beautiful than before.
“She continued this habit after the death of her husband (1604) in the
hopes of gaining new suitors. The unhappy girls who were allured to the
castle, under the plea that they were to be taken into service there,
were locked up in a cellar. Here they were beaten till their bodies
were swollen. Elizabeth not unfrequently tortured the victims herself;
often she changed their clothes which dripped with blood, and then
renewed her cruelties. The swollen bodies were then cut up with razors.
“Occasionally she had the girls burned, and then cut up, but the great
majority were beaten to death.
“At last her cruelty became so great, that she would stick needles into
those who sat with her in a carriage, especially if they were of her
own sex. One of her servant-girls she stripped naked, smeared her with
honey, and so drove her out of the house.
“When she was ill, and could not indulge her cruelty, she bit a person
who came near her sick bed as though she were a wild beast.
“She caused, in all, the death of 650 girls, some in Tscheita, on the
neutral ground, where she had a cellar constructed for the purpose;
others in different localities; for murder and bloodshed became with
her a necessity.
“When at last the parents of the lost children could no longer be
cajoled, the castle was seized, and the traces of the murders were
discovered. Her accomplices were executed, and she was imprisoned for
life.”
An equally remarkable example will be found in the account of the
Mareschal de Retz given at some length in the sequel. He vas an
accomplished man, a scholar, an able general, and a courtier; but
suddenly the impulse to murder and destroy came upon him whilst sitting
in the library reading Suetonius; he yielded to the impulse, and became
one of the greatest monsters of cruelty the world has produced.
The case of Sviatek, the Gallician cannibal, is also to the purpose.
This man was a harmless pauper, till one day accident brought him to
the scene of a conflagration. Hunger impelled him to taste of the roast
fragments of a human being who had perished in the fire, and from that
moment he ravened for man’s flesh.
M. Bertrand was a French gentleman of taste and education. He one day
lounged over the churchyard wall in a quiet country village and watched
a funeral. Instantly an overwhelming desire to dig up and rend the
corpse which he had seen committed to the ground came upon him, and for
years he lived as a human hyæna, preying upon the dead. His story is
given in detail in the fifteenth chapter.
An abnormal condition of body sometimes produces this desire for blood.
It is manifest in certain cases of pregnancy, when the constitution
loses its balance, and the appetite becomes diseased. Schenk[6] gives
instances.
[6] _Observationes Medic_. lib. iv. De Gravidis.
A pregnant woman saw a baker carrying loaves on his bare shoulder. She
was at once filled with such a craving for his flesh that she refused
to taste any food till her husband persuaded the baker, by the offer of
a large sum, to allow his wife to bite him. The man yielded, and the
woman fleshed her teeth in his shoulder twice; but he held out no
longer. The wife bore twins on three occasions, twice living, the third
time dead.
A woman in an interesting condition, near Andernach on the Rhine,
murdered her husband, to whom she was warmly attached, ate half his
body, and salted the rest. When the passion left her she became
conscious of the horrible nature of her act, and she gave herself up to
justice.
In 1553, a wife cut her husband’s throat, and gnawed the nose and the
left arm, whilst the body was yet warm. She then gutted the corpse, and
salted it for future consumption. Shortly after, she gave birth to
three children, and she only became conscious of what she had done when
her neighbours asked after the father, that they might announce to him
the arrival of the little ones.
In the summer of 1845, the Greek papers contained an account of a
pregnant woman murdering her husband for the purpose of roasting and
eating his liver.
That the passion to destroy is prevalent in certain maniacs is well
known; this is sometimes accompanied by cannibalism.
Gruner[7] gives an account of a shepherd who was evidently deranged,
who killed and ate two men. Marc[8] relates that a woman of Unterelsas,
during the absence of her husband, a poor labourer, murdered her son, a
lad fifteen months old. She chopped of his legs and stewed them with
cabbage. She ate a portion, and offered the rest to her husband. It is
true that the family were very poor, but there was food in the house at
the time. In prison the woman gave evident signs of derangement.
[7] _De Anthropophago Bucano_. Jen. 1792.
[8] _Die Geistes Krankheiten_. Berlin, 1844.
The cases in which bloodthirstiness and cannibalism are united with
insanity are those which properly fall under the head of Lycanthropy.
The instances recorded in the preceding chapter point unmistakably to
hallucination accompanying the lust for blood. Jean Grenier, Roulet,
and others, were firmly convinced that they had undergone
transformation. A disordered condition of mind or body may produce
hallucination in a form depending on the character and instincts of the
individual. Thus, an ambitious man labouring under monomania will
imagine himself to be a king; a covetous man will be plunged in
despair, believing himself to be penniless, or exult at the vastness of
the treasure which he imagines that he has discovered.
The old man suffering from rheumatism or gout conceives himself to be
formed of china or glass, and the foxhunter tallyhos! at each new moon,
as though he were following a pack. In like manner, the naturally cruel
man, if the least affected in his brain, will suppose himself to be
transformed into the most cruel and bloodthirsty animal with which he
is acquainted.
The hallucinations under which lycanthropists suffered may have arisen
from various causes. The older writers, as Forestus and Burton, regard
the were-wolf mania as a species of melancholy madness, and some do not
deem it necessary for the patient to believe in his transformation for
them to regard him as a lycanthropist.
In the present state of medical knowledge, we know that very different
conditions may give rise to hallucinations.
In fever cases the sensibility is so disturbed that the patient is
often deceived as to the space occupied by his limbs, and he supposes
them to be preternaturally distended or contracted. In the case of
typhus, it is not uncommon for the sick person, with deranged nervous
system, to believe himself to be double in the bed, or to be severed in
half, or to have lost his limbs. He may regard his members as composed
of foreign and often fragile materials, as glass, or he may so lose his
personality as to suppose himself to have become a woman.
A monomaniac who believes himself to be some one else, seeks to enter
into the feelings, thoughts, and habits of the assumed personality, and
from the facility with which this is effected, he draws an argument,
conclusive to himself, of the reality of the change. He thenceforth
speaks of himself under the assumed character, and experiences all its
needs, wishes, passions, and the like. The closer the identification
becomes, the more confirmed is the monomaniac in his madness, the
character of which varies with the temperament of the individual. If
the person’s mind be weak, or rude and uncultivated, the tenacity with
which he clings to his metamorphosis is feebler, and it becomes more
difficult to draw the line between his lucid and insane utterances.
Thus Jean Grenier, who laboured under this form of mania, said in his
trial much that was true, but it was mixed with the ramblings of
insanity.
Hallucination may also be produced by artificial means, and there are
evidences afforded by the confessions of those tried for lycanthropy,
that these artificial means were employed by them. I refer to the salve
so frequently mentioned in witch and were-wolf trials. The following
passage is from the charming _Golden Ass of Apuleius_; it proves that
salves were extensively used by witches for the purpose of
transformation, even in his day:—
“Fotis showed me a crack in the door, and bade me look through it, upon
which I looked and saw Pamphile first divest herself of all her
garments, and then, having unlocked a chest, take from it several
little boxes, and open one of the latter, which contained a certain
ointment. Rubbing this ointment a good while previously between the
palms of her hands, she anointed her whole body, from the very nails of
her toes to the hair on the crown of her head, and when she was
anointed all over, she whispered many magic words to a lamp, as if she
were talking to it. Then she began to move her arms, first with
tremulous jerks, and afterwards by a gentle undulating motion, till a
glittering, downy surface by degrees overspread her body, feathers and
strong quills burst forth suddenly, her nose became a hard crooked
beak, her toes changed to curved talons, and Pamphile was no longer
Pamphile, but it was an owl I saw before me. And now, uttering a harsh,
querulous scream, leaping from the ground by little and little, in
order to try her powers, and presently poising herself aloft on her
pinions, she stretched forth her wings on either Side to their full
extent, and flew straight away.
“Having now been actually a witness of the performance of the magical
art, and of the metamorphosis of Pamphile, I remained for some time in
a stupefied state of astonishment. . . . At last, after I had rubbed my
eyes some time, had recovered a little from the amazement and
abstraction of mind, and begun to feel a consciousness of the reality
of things about me, I took hold of the hand of Fotis and said,—‘Sweet
damsel, bring me, I beseech thee, a portion of the ointment with which
thy mistress hath just now anointed, and when thou hast made me a bird,
I will be thy slave, and even wait upon thee like a winged Cupid.’
Accordingly she crept gently into the apartment, quickly returned with
the box of ointment, hastily placed it in my hands, and then
immediately departed.
“Elated to an extraordinary degree at the sight of the precious
treasure, I kissed the box several times successively; and uttering
repeated aspirations in hopes of a prosperous flight, I stripped off my
clothes as quick as possible, dipped my fingers greedily into the box,
and having thence extracted a good large lump of ointment, rubbed it
all over my body and limbs. When I was thoroughly anointed, I swung my
arms up and down, in imitation of the movement of a bird’s pinions, and
continued to do so a little while, when instead of any perceptible
token of feathers or wings making their appearance, my own thin skin,
alas! grew into a hard leathern hide, covered with bristly hair, my
fingers and toes disappeared, the palms of my hands and the soles of my
feet became four solid hoofs, and from the end of my spine a long tail
projected. My face was enormous, my mouth wide, my nostrils gaping, my
lips pendulous, and I had a pair of immoderately long, rough, hairy
ears. In short, when I came to contemplate my transformation to its
full extent, I found that, instead of a bird, I had become—an ASS.”[9]
[9] APULEIUS, Sir George Head’s translation, bk. iii.
Of what these magical salves were composed we know. They were composed
of narcotics, to wit, _Solanum somniferum_, aconite, hyoscyamus,
belladonna, opium, _acorus vulgaris_, _sium_. These were boiled down
with oil, or the fat of little children who were murdered for the
purpose. The blood of a bat was added, but its effects could have been
_nil_. To these may have been added other foreign narcotics, the names
of which have not transpired.
Whatever may have been the cause of the hallucination, it is not
surprising that the lycanthropist should have imagined himself
transformed into a beast. The cases I have instanced are those of
shepherds, who were by nature of their employment, brought into
collision with wolves; and it is not surprising that these persons, in
a condition liable to hallucinations, should imagine themselves to be
transformed into wild beasts, and that their minds reverting to the
injuries sustained from these animals, they should, in their state of
temporary insanity, accuse themselves of the acts of rapacity committed
by the beasts into which they believed themselves to be transformed. It
is a well-known fact that men, whose minds are unhinged, will deliver
themselves up to justice, accusing themselves of having committed
crimes which have actually taken place, and it is only on investigation
that their self-accusation proves to be false; and yet they will
describe the circumstances with the greatest minuteness, and be
thoroughly convinced of their own criminality. I need give but a single
instance.
In the war of the French Revolution, the _Hermione_ frigate was
commanded by Capt. Pigot, a harsh man and a severe commander. His crew
mutinied, and carried the ship into an enemy’s port, having murdered
the captain and several of the officers, under circumstances of extreme
barbarity. One midshipman escaped, by whom many of the criminals, who
were afterwards taken and delivered over to justice, one by one, were
identified. Mr. Finlayson, the Government actuary, who at that time
held an official situation in the Admiralty, states:—“In my own
experience I have known, on separate occasions, _more than six sailors_
who voluntarily confessed to having struck the first blow at Capt.
Pigot. These men detailed all the horrid circumstances of the mutiny
with extreme minuteness and perfect accuracy; nevertheless, not one of
them had ever been in the ship, nor had so much as seen Capt. Pigot in
their lives. They had obtained by tradition, from their messmates, the
particulars of the story. When long on a foreign station, hungering and
thirsting for home, their minds became enfeebled; at length they
actually believed themselves guilty of the crime over which they had so
long brooded, and submitted with a gloomy pleasure to being sent to
England in irons, for judgment. At the Admiralty we were always able to
detect and establish their innocence, in defiance of their own solemn
asseverations.”—(_London Judicial Gazette_, January, 1803.)
CHAPTER X.
MYTHOLOGICAL ORIGIN OF THE WERE-WOLF MYTH.
Metempsychosis—Sympathy between Men and Beasts—Finnbog and the
Bear—Osage and the Beaver—The Connexion of Soul and Body—Buddism—Case
of Mr. Holloway—Popular ideas concerning the Body—The derivation of the
German Leichnam—Feather Dresses—Transmigration of Souls—A Basque
Story—Story from the Pantschatantra—Savage ideas regarding Natural
Phenomena—Thunder, Lightning, and Cloud—The origin of the Dragon—John
of Bromton’s Dragon a Waterspout—The Legend of Typhoeus—Allegorizing of
the Effects of a Hurricane—Anthropomorphosis—The Cirrus Cloud, a
Heavenly Swan—Urvaci—The Storm-cloud a Daemon—Vritra and
Rakschasas—Story of a Brahmin and a Rakschasas
Transformation into beasts forms an integral portion of all
mythological systems. The gods of Greece were wont to change themselves
into animals in order to carry out their designs with greater speed,
security, and secrecy, than in human forms. In Scandinavian mythology,
Odin changed himself into the shape of an eagle, Loki into that of a
salmon. Eastern religions abound in stories of transformation.
The line of demarcation between this and the translation of a beast’s
soul into man, or a man’s soul into a beast’s (metempsychosis) is very
narrow.
The doctrine of metempsychosis is founded on the consciousness of
gradation between beasts and men. The belief in a soul-endowed animal
world was present among the ancients, and the laws of intelligence and
instinct were misconstrued, or were regarded as a puzzle, which no man
might solve.
The human soul with its consciousness seemed to be something already
perfected in a pre-existing state, and, in the myth of metempsychosis,
we trace the yearnings and gropings of the soul after the source whence
its own consciousness was derived, counting its dreams and
hallucinations as gleams of memory, recording acts which had taken
place in a former state of existence.
Modern philosophy has resumed the same thread of conjecture, and thinks
to see in man the perfected development of lower organisms.
After death the translation of the soul was supposed to continue. It
became either absorbed into the _nous_, into Brahma, into the deity, or
it sank in the scale of creation, and was degraded to animate a brute.
Thus the doctrine of metempsychosis was emphatically one of rewards and
punishments, for the condition of the soul after death depended on its
training during life. A savage and bloodthirsty man was exiled, as in
the case of Lycaon, into the body of a wild beast: the soul of a
timorous man entered a hare, and drunkards or gluttons became swine.
The intelligence which was manifest in the beasts bore such a close
resemblance to that of man, in the childhood and youth of the world,
that it is not to be wondered at, if our forefathers failed to detect
the line of demarcation drawn between instinct and reason. And failing
to distinguish this, they naturally fell into the belief in
metempsychosis.
It was not merely a fancied external resemblance between the beast and
man, but it was the perception of skill, pursuits, desires, sufferings,
and griefs like his own, in the animal creation, which led man to
detect within the beast something analogous to the soul within himself;
and this, notwithstanding the points of contrast existing between them,
elicited in his mind so strong a sympathy that, without a great stretch
of imagination, he invested the beast with his own attributes, and with
the full powers of his own understanding. He regarded it as actuated by
the same motives, as subject to the same laws of honour, as moved by
the same prejudices, and the higher the beast was in the scale, the
more he regarded it as an equal. A singular illustration of this will
be found in the Finnboga Saga, c. xi.
“Now we must relate about Finnbog. Afterward in the evening, when men
slept, he rose, took his weapons, and went forth, following the tracks
which led to the dairy farm. As was his wont, he stepped out briskly
along the spoor till he came to the dairy. There he found the bear
lying down, and he had slain the sheep, and he was lying on them
lapping their blood. Then said Finnbog: ‘Stand up, Brain! make ready
against me; that becomes you more than crouching over those sheep’s
carcases.’
“The bear sat up, looked at him, and lay down again. Finnbog said, ‘If
you think that I am too fully armed to match with you, I will do this,’
and he took of his helmet and laid aside his shield. Then he said,
Stand up now, if you dare!’
“The bear sat up, shook his head, and then cast himself down again.
“Finnbog exclaimed, ‘I see, you want us both to be _boune_ alike!’ so
he flung aside his sword and said, ‘Be it as you will; now stand up if
you have the heart that I believe you have, rather than one such as was
possessed by these rent sheep.’
“Then Bruin stood up and prepared to fight.”
The following story taken from the mouth of an Osage Indian by J. A.
Jones, and published in his _Traditions of the North American Indians_,
shows how thoroughly the savage mind misses the line of demarcation
between instinct and reason, and how the man of the woods looks upon
beasts as standing on an equality with himself.
An Osage warrior is in search of a wife: he admires the tidy and shrewd
habits of the beaver. He accordingly goes to a beaver-hut to obtain one
of that race for a bride. “In one corner of the room sat a beaver-woman
combing the heads of some little beavers, whose ears she boxed very
soundly when they would not lie still. The warrior, _i. e._ the
beaver-chief, whispered the Osage that she was his second wife, and was
very apt to be cross when there was work to be done, which prevented
her from going to see her neighbours. Those whose heads she was combing
were her children, he said, and she who had made them rub their noses
against each other and be friends, was his eldest daughter. Then
calling aloud, ‘Wife,’ said he, ‘what have you to eat? The stranger is
undoubtedly hungry; see, he is pale, his eye has no fire, and his step
is like that of a moose.’
“Without replying to him, for it was a sulky day with her, she called
aloud, and a dirty-looking beaver entered. ‘Go,’ said she, ‘and fetch
the stranger something to eat.’ With that the beaver girl passed
through a small door into another room, from which she soon returned,
bringing some large pieces of willow-bark, which she laid at the feet
of the warrior and his guest. While the warrior-beaver was chewing the
willow, and the Osage was pretending to do so, they fell to talking
over many matters, particularly the wars of the beavers with the
otters, and their frequent victories over them. He told our father by
what means the beavers felled large trees, and moved them to the places
where they wished to make dams; how they raised to an erect position
the poles for their lodges, and how they plastered them so as to keep
out rain. Then he spoke of their employments when they had buried the
hatchet; of the peace and happiness and tranquillity they enjoyed when
gathered into companies, they rested from their labours, and passed
their time in talking and feasting, and bathing, and playing the game
of bones, and making love. All the while the young beaver-maiden sat
with her eyes fixed upon the Osage, at every pause moving a little
nearer, till at length she was at his side with her forepaw upon his
arm; a minute more and she had placed it around his neck, and was
rubbing her soft furry cheek against his. Our ancestor, on his part,
betrayed no disinclination to receive her caresses, but returned them
with equal ardour. The old beaver seeing what was going on, turned his
back upon them, and suffered them to be as kind to each other as they
pleased. At last, turning quickly round, while the maiden, suspecting
what was coming, and pretending to be abashed, ran behind her mother,
he said, ‘To end this foolery, what say you to marrying my daughter?
She is well brought up, and is the most industrious girl in the
village. She will flap more wall with her tail in a day than any maiden
in the nation; she will gnaw down a larger tree betwixt the rising of
the sun and the coming of the shadows than many a smart beaver of the
other sex. As for her wit, try her at the game of the dish, and see who
gets up master; and for cleanliness, look at her petticoat?’ Our father
answered that he did not doubt that she was industrious and cleanly,
able to gnaw down a very large tree, and to use her tail to very good
purpose; that he loved her much, and wished to make her the mother of
his children. And thereupon the bargain was concluded.”
These two stories, the one taken from Icelandic saga, the other from
American Indian tradition, shew clearly the oneness which the
uncultivated mind believes to exist between the soul of man and the
soul of beast. The same sentiments actuate both man and brute, and if
their actions are unlike, it is because of the difference in their
formation. The soul within is identical, but the external accidents of
body are unlike.
Among many rude as well as cultivated people, the body is regarded as a
mere garment wrapped around the soul. The Buddist looks upon identity
as existing in the soul alone, and the body as no more constituting
identity, than the clothes he puts on or takes off. He exists as a
spirit; for convenience he vests himself in a body; sometimes that body
is human, sometimes it is bestial. As his soul rises in the spiritual
scale, the nobler is the animal form which it tenants. Budda himself
passed through various stages of existence; in one he was a hare, and
his soul being noble, led him to immolate himself, in order that he
might offer hospitality to Indra, who, in the form of an old man,
craved of him food and shelter. The Buddist regards animals with
reverence; an ancestor may be tenanting the body of the ox he is
driving, or a descendant may be running at his side barking, and
wagging his tail. When he falls into an ecstasy, his soul is leaving
his body for a little while, it is laying aside its raiment of flesh
and blood and bone, to return to it once more when the trance is over.
But this idea is not confined to Buddists, it is common everywhere. The
spirit or soul is supposed to be imprisoned in the body, the body is
but the lantern through which the spirit shines, “the corruptible body”
is believed to “press down the soul,” and the soul is unable to attain
to perfect happiness till it has shuffled off this earthy coil. Butler
regards the members of the body as so many instruments used by the soul
for the purpose of seeing, hearing, feeling, &c., just as we use
telescopes or crutches, and which may be rejected without injury to our
individuality.
The late Mr. J. Holloway, of the Bank of England, brother to the
engraver of that name, related of himself that, being one night in bed,
and unable to sleep, he had fixed his eyes and thoughts with uncommon
intensity on a beautiful star that was shining in at the window, when
he suddenly found his spirit released from his body and soaring into
space. But instantly seized with anxiety for the anguish of his wife,
if she discovered his body apparently dead beside her, he returned, and
re-entered it with difficulty. He described that returning as a
returning from light into darkness, and that whilst the spirit was
free, he was alternately in the light or the dark, accordingly as his
thoughts were with his wife or with the star. Popular mythology in most
lands regards the soul as oppressed by the body, and its liberation is
considered a deliverance from the “burden” of the flesh. Whether the
soul is at all able to act or express itself without a body, any more
than a fire is able to make cloth without the apparatus of boiler and
machinery, is a question which has not commended itself to the popular
mind. But it may be remarked that the Christian religion alone is that
which raises the body to a dignity equal to that of the soul, and gives
it a hope of ennoblement and resurrection never dreamed of in any
mythological system.
But the popular creed, in spite of the most emphatic testimony of
Scripture, is that the soul is in bondage so long as it is united to a
body, a creed entirely in accordance with that of Buddism.
If the body be but the cage, as a poet[1] of our own has been pleased
to call it, in which dwells the imprisoned soul, it is quite possible
for the soul to change its cage. If the body be but a vesture clothing
the soul, as the Buddist asserts, it is not improbable that it may
occasionally change its vesture.
[1] VAUGHN, _Sitex Scintillans_.
This is self-evident, and thus have arisen the countless tales of
transformation and transmigration which are found all over the world.
That the same view of the body as a mere clothing of the soul was taken
by our Teutonic and Scandinavian ancestors, is evident even from the
etymology of the words _leichnam_, _lîkhama_, used to express the
soulless body.
I have already spoken of the Norse word _hamr_, I wish now to make some
further remarks upon it. _Hamr_ is represented in Anglo-Saxon by
_hama_, _homa_, in Saxon by _hamo_, in old High German by _hamo_, in
old French by _homa_, _hama_, to which are related the Gothic
_gahamon_, _ufar-hamon_, _ana-hamon_, {Greek _e?ndúesðai_}, {Greek
_e?pendúesðai_}; _and-hamon_, _af-hamon_, {Greek _a?pekdúein_} {Greek
_e?kdúesðai?_} thence also the old High German _hemidi_, and the modern
_Hemde_, garment. In composition we find this word, as _lîk-hagnr_, in
old Norse; in old High German _lîk-hamo_, Anglo-Saxon _lîk-hama_, and
_flæsc-hama_, Old Saxon, _lîk-hamo_, modern German _Leich-nam_, a body,
_i. e._ a garment of flesh, precisely as the bodies of birds are called
in old Norse _fjaðr-hamr_, in Anglo-Saxon _feðerhoma_, in Old Saxon
_fetherhamo_, or feather-dresses and the bodies of wolves are called in
old Norse _ûlfshamr_, and seals’ bodies in Faroëse _kôpahamr_. The
significance of the old verb _að hamaz_ is now evident; it is to
migrate from one body to another, and _hama-skipti_ is a transmigration
of the soul. The method of this transmigration consisted in simply
investing the body with the skin of the animal into which the soul was
to migrate. When Loki, the Northern god of evil, went in quest of the
stolen Idunn, he borrowed of Freyja her falcon dress, and at once
became, to all intents and purposes, a falcon. Thiassi pursued him as
he left Thrymheimr, having first taken upon him an eagle’s dress, and
thereby become an eagle.
In order to seek Thor’s lost hammer, Loki borrowed again of Freyja her
feather dress, and as be flew away in it, the feathers sounded as they
winnowed the breeze (_fjaðrhamr dunði_).
In like manner Cædmon speaks of an evil spirit flying away in
feather-dress: “þät he mid feðerhomon fleôgan meahte, windan on wolkne”
(Gen. ed. Gr. 417), and of an angel, “þuo þar suogan quam engil þes
alowaldon obhana fun radure faran an feðerhamon” (Hêlj. 171, 23), the
very expression made use of when speaking of a bird: “farad an
feðarhamun” (Hêlj. 50,11).
The soul, in certain cases, is able to free itself from the body and to
enter that of beast or man—in this form stood the myth in various
theological systems.
Among the Finns and Lapps it is not uncommon for a magician to fall
into a cataleptic condition, and during the period his soul is believed
to travel very frequently in bodily form, having assumed that of any
animal most suitable for its purpose. I have given instances in a
former chapter. The same doctrine is evident in most cases of
lycanthropy. The patient is in a state of trance, his body is watched,
and it remains motionless, but his soul has migrated into the carcase
of a wolf, which it vivifies, and in which it runs its course. A
curious Basque story shows that among this strange Turanian people, cut
off by such a flood of Aryan nations from any other members of its
family, the same superstition remains. A huntsman was once engaged in
the chase of it bear among the Pyreneean peaks, when Bruin turned
suddenly on him and hugged him to death, but not before he had dealt
the brute its mortal wound. As the huntsman expired, he breathed his
soul into the body of the bear, and thenceforward ranged the mountains
as a beast.
One of the tales of the Sanskrit book of fables, the _Pantschatantra_,
affords such a remarkable testimony to the Indian belief in
metempsychosis, that I am tempted to give it in abstract.
A king was one day passing through the marketplace of his city, when he
observed a hunchbacked merryandrew, whose contortions and jokes kept
the bystanders in a roar of laughter. Amused with the fellow, the king
brought him to his palace. Shortly after, in the hearing of the clown,
a necromancer taught the monarch the art of sending his soul into a
body not his own.
Some little while after this, the monarch, anxious to put in practice
his newly acquired knowledge, rode into the forest accompanied by his
fool, who, he believed, had not heard, or, at all events comprehended,
the lesson. They came upon the corpse of a Brahmin lying in the depth
of the jungle, where he had died of thirst. The king, leaving his
horse, performed the requisite ceremony, and instantly his soul had
migrated into the body of the, Brahmin, and his own lay
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