Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  The werewolf stories from northern Europe typically were more robust, adventurous, and inventive than these classical Greek and Roman stories. Olaus Magnus writes in his History of the Goths that at Christmas werewolves gathered together for drinking bouts and forcefully entered houses for the purpose of raiding the wine cellar. The element of debauchery he introduced into the lore of the werewolf was probably adapted from the Teutonic legend of the Wild Horde that rode out at night astride wolves. Or from tales of the Berserker. That it took place at Christmas could mean Magnus’s story was based on wild tales of the pagan midwinter festivals celebrating the return of the sun, or that it was Christianized so that the wolves were drunk on Christ’s birthday, thus adding to the sacrilege.

  Magnus also wrote that the werewolves of Livonia gathered at Christmas and, like the Arcadian werewolves, swam across a body of water to effect their transformation. They remained werewolves for twelve days, until the Epiphany, drank heavily, and at some point, says Magnus, gathered at the walls of an old castle where they engaged in leaping contests. The ones who couldn’t jump the wall were beaten by the Devil.

  Debauchery and sacrilege, which became common in werewolf stories later, are not the themes of early Teutonic werewolf tales. Violence is, however. In the Icelandic saga of the Volsungs, King Volsung’s daughter Signy marries a king named Siggeir. Siggeir, whose mother is a werewolf, turns around and kills Volsung and puts his ten sons into stocks to feed his mother. The tenth son, Sigmund, escapes and Signy later bears him a son. One day Sigmund and his son come on a house in the woods where two men are sleeping. Hung on the wall over the head of each is a wolfskin. Sigmund believes the men are werewolves and that by donning the skins he and his son will be transformed for nine days. They put the skins on, agree not to kill more than seven men each, and go their separate ways. But the son kills eleven men and his angry father, still in wolf form, attacks and wounds him. His anger abated, filled with remorse, the father nurses his son’s wounds. On the ninth day they regain human form, throw the wolf skins on a fire, and agree never to do such a thing again.

  The Livonian wolves at the leaping wall.

  Marie de France, writing in the latter part of the twelfth century, created the prototype of the sympathetic werewolf in a romantic narrative poem, or lay, called Lai du Bisclavret, “Bisclavret” being the name by which the werewolf was known in Brittany. In the story a French baron, besieged by his anxious wife, finally tells her that when he disappears for three days every week it is to roam the woods as a werewolf. Terrified, the wife induces her lover to follow the baron into the woods and steal his clothes. Without the clothes her husband cannot return to human form. This the lover does, and he and the wife are married while the baron’s friends mourn his disappearance.

  A year later the king is out hunting when his dogs overtake Bisclavret. The big wolf takes the king’s stirruped boot in his paws and implores with his eyes for the dogs to be called off. The king orders the dogs away and returns home with the wolf, who becomes his tame and loving companion. Later, traveling in the vicinity of the baron’s old castle with the wolf and his retinue, he is visited by the baron’s wife. The wolf goes mad when he sees the woman, biting off her nose. The story of her betrayal comes out. She and her lover are banished and, with the return of his clothes, the baron regains his form and returns to his castle. The werewolf of Marie de France’s story is an involuntary one, a human being under a curse. By the time of the werewolf trials in the Middle Ages, an amalgamation of folklore and superstition had created such distinctions among types of werewolves and a body of lore on how transformations were affected and reversed. By then, too, a curtain of evil separated werewolves from their relatively benign origins. The imitative magic of the Pawnee wolf scouts had been reduced, to voodoo.

  An Irish priest was on his way from Ulster to Meath when he was approached by a wolf who spoke to him. The wolf assured him that there was nothing to fear, it was just that his wife was dying and he wished the Last Rites for her. They were both victims of a curse pronounced on the people of Ossory by Saint Natalis, according to which every seven years two people had to don wolfskins and live as wolves. The priest was terrified but he followed the wolf into the woods. At some distance he found a female wolf lying ill beneath a tree. The priest stood frozen, unable to act. The wolf reached down and rolled back the female’s wolf skin and the priest saw underneath the bony torso of an old woman. No longer afraid, he heard her confession and gave her the Last Rites.

  The wolf accompanied the priest back to the highway, thanked him profusely and told him that if he lived out his seven years he would search the priest out and thank him properly.

  The priest went on his way, satisfied that he had done right.

  —GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS, 1188

  Some werewolves became so voluntarily. A voluntary werewolf was a sorcerer who, typically, got the power of transformation from the Devil in a Faustian exchange. His transformation could be effected by donning a wolf skin or magic belt, by sipping water from the print of a wolf, by ingesting roots, by applying ointments, by drinking from certain streams, by charms, or by some action, such as swimming across a certain body of water or rolling around on the ground (epileptics were often taken for werewolves). An involuntary werewolf came to his form as the result of a family curse or a spell cast by a sorcerer—out of hate, for pay, or at the Devil’s behest. A person also became a werewolf when he was born to a certain tribe, like the Seiar of Hadramaut, a Semitic people, or the residents of Ossory in Ireland. There is a Polish belief that a belt of human skin laid across the threshold of a house where a wedding is taking place will change all who step over it into wolves. And it was a general belief in Europe that those unfortunate enough to be born on Christmas Eve would be werewolves. Slavs believed those born feet first became werewolves, Scandinavians that the seventh girl born in a row to a family did. According to a legend from the Caucasus, a woman who committed adultery became a werewolf for seven years.

  Elliot O’Donnell, a modern English author, writes in his book Werwolves that werewolves could be told “by the long, straight, slanting eyebrows, which meet in an angle over the nose, sometimes by the hands the third finger of which is a trifle longer; or by the fingernails, which are red, almond shaped and curved; sometimes by the ears, which are set low and rather far back on their head; and sometimes by a noticeably long, swinging stride, which is strongly suggestive of some animal.” In human form the werewolf might show a vestigial tail between his shoulder blades and the Russians believed he had bristles under his tongue. In wolf form the werewolf was supposed to be tailless.

  A werewolf regained human form by putting his clothes back on, taking the wolf skin off, or slipping the buckle of his wolf belt to the ninth hole. A werewolf could be cured if his wolfskin were burned, if he were slashed across the forehead three times and bled in a prescribed manner, or if he were addressed by his Christian name while being denounced as a tool of Satan. A werewolf named Peter Andersen in Denmark was apparently cured when his wife threw her apron in his face as he attacked her, as he had instructed her to do. Another was cured when his son threw a hat at him. They could also be caught and bound and exorcised with potions. According to O’Donnell, a common one was one-half ounce of sulfur, one-half ounce of asafetida or devil’s dung, and one-quarter ounce of castor in clear spring water. Another was one-quarter ounce of hypericum compounded with three ounces of vinegar. These mixtures were used in sabbatlike settings by priests or friends of the victim, who was burned and beaten by young girls with ash switches in the process. Mountain ash, along with rye and mistletoe, were considered protection against werewolves.

  The werewolf phenomenon might have languished in the folklore of the countryside but for two things: the wolf, Canis lupus, posed both a real and an imagined threat of major proportions in the medieval mind; and the legend of the werewolf suited the needs of the Inquisition, which did more to sustain the belief by fanatical persecution than any
other agent or institution.

  The Christian Church was historically embattled from the beginning. Without an enemy to fight, it had no identity. Until the time of the Christian emperors, the enemy was the state. Then it was the paganism of northern Europe. Then came the Crusades and the war against the infidel. After the reign of Charlemagne, the enemy was increasingly heresy, particularly reformism. By the time the Inquisition begins in the thirteenth century the perception of the Church about the enemy is clear: he is the heretic. Behind the heretic, like a puppet master, is the Devil. The wolf in the sheepfold. Once only a vague idea for theologians, the Devil has by now become a full-blown personality. As the Middle Ages begin he is a superhuman presence, as real as hogs tearing a child apart in a pigsty. The heretic is the means to destroy Christ’s Church on earth. Only by destroying the heretic could the enemy be vanquished. Witches, sorcerers, and social reformers became the most visible enemies of the Church, and the most dangerous, because they could galvanize the ecclesiastical and political revolt incipient in the malaise of the Middle Ages. Witches, sorcerers, and the so-called possessed were brought before a mock court, which denounced them as heretics and killed them.

  Allegations of witchcraft and sorcery—running around the countryside in a wolf skin killing children, or sending a pack of wolves to decimate the flocks of a good Christian—were charges rather easily sustained. Fundamental nonsense was taken for irrefutable evidence. The idle word of a neighbor, the gibberish of a village idiot, a shaving cut that showed up the morning after someone claimed to have driven off a wolf with a sharp stick—for these reasons and less thousands died at the stake. The hysteria and intimidation generated by swift, absolute, and irrevocable condemnation on the basis of mere shreds of evidence is what kept the Inquisition alive—and fed it victims. People wanted society to work smoothly, to be rid of whatever ailed it. They were easily drawn to simplification, to believing that werewolves, tearing around the countryside on the Devil’s business, caused deformed children, disruptive harassment by the ruling classes, general ill fortune due to God’s wrath, grisly murders, and so on. It was no coincidence that simultaneously there was a drive to wipe the wolf out in Europe, mounted as “the crying need of a civilized people.”

  The wolf and the look-alike werewolf became everyone’s symbol of evil. (Oddly, the werewolf was hardly a concern of the Church before this time. The archbishop of Mainz had chided the Saxons in a sermon in 870 for a superstitious belief in shapeshifting. By 1270, however, the werewolf was the incarnation of the Devil and not to believe in the existence of werewolves was heretical.) The shepherds and the priests, with their respective flocks, hated wolves; the noble was bent on ridding his country of them to effect an air of civilization; Edgar of England imposed an annual tribute of three thousand wolves on the king of Wales; the landlord with his investments in livestock denounced them; the wives of the emerging middle class called the prostitutes wolves because they thought of them as wenches consuming the souls of their sons.

  Terrorized by the number of sorcerers and witches the Inquisition found in their very midst, people responded in an orgy of accusation and counteraccusation. Historians of the period write that the hysteria was simply epidemic.

  The excessive persecution of werewolves—where a witch might be hung, a werewolf was more often burned alive—had a formal basis. The supposition was, first, that sorcerers went about disguised as wolves because the wolf was the animal most hateful to good men; Church doctrine proclaimed that no sorcerer could harm men unless he were in contractual league with the Devil; the wolf, as the Devil’s dog, became the form to do his work in. This symbolic logic was formalized in one of the most odious documents in all human history, the Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1487. Its title, Hammer of Witches, derives from a title sometimes bestowed on Inquisitors, Hammer of Heretics. One of the purposes of the book was to refute in tedious scholastic fashion every objection to the existence of werewolves.

  The Malleus addressed itself mainly to proofs that those who became werewolves were in concert with the Devil and that the Church was acting properly in condemning them. From its pages superstition and folklore received an intellectual underpinning that made belief in werewolves not just a matter of Church doctrine but the intellectual fashion of the day. (Abjuring wolves, of course, had never really been out of fashion.) In a couple of places, the Malleus speaks directly about werewolves. Quoting both Leviticus (“If you don’t keep my commandments I will send the beast of the field against you, who will consume your flocks”) and Deuteronomy (“I will send the teeth of the beast down on them”), the Malleus states that wolves are either the agents of God, sent to punish the wicked, or agents of the Devil, sent with God’s permission to harass good men. (That there was no middle ground where the wolf was his own animal clearly reveals the perception of the time.) Witches can change men into wolves, though the transformation is actually an illusion in the eye of the beholder because only God Himself can transform. A real wolf (Canis lupus) possessed by the Devil commits the mayhem. This was scholastic hairsplitting; werewolves were as real as their dead victims—as real as the Devil as far as the Church was concerned. That the Devil could create illusions only with the permission of God was simply poignant theology; it maintained God’s supremacy over the Devil and gave purpose to human suffering. But, more importantly, to battle the werewolf brought one closer to God, and to burn the werewolf was to destroy a temple of evil in God’s name.

  One wonders if anyone shuddered at the fatuous logic—perhaps the Malleus would not have appeared if there were not terrible doubts to assuage. It is a commonplace of history that men condone violence for righteous causes and then feel guilty about it. It is also true that those who condemn violence most severely are sometimes its greatest voyeurs. Immediately after the execution of Peter Stump in Germany on March 31, 1590, for murder, incest, rape, and sodomy in the form of a werewolf, a pamphlet appeared describing his crimes in detail and dwelling on their perversity. Today we cannot judge what role such voyeurism played in the vigorous pursuit of werewolves in the Middle Ages.

  Werewolfry also gave the upper classes an excuse for a sort of general housecleaning of undesirables. The trial in the 1570s of a hermit named Giles Garnier, who lived in a cave outside Lyon, is a good example. A wolf had apparently killed some children in the area. Garnier was found one day scavenging a dead body in the woods to feed his family. In court, ignorant of his position at first, he was intimidated until he confessed to making a pact with the Devil, and to six or seven grisly child murders. He was burned alive without further ado at Dole, near Lyon, on January 18, 1573. Montague Summers, an eccentric pedant and modern apologist for the excesses of these witch-hunts, writes, “Hateful to God and loathed of man, what other end, what other reward could he look for than the stake, where they burned him quick, and scattered his ashes to the wind, to be swept away to nothingness and oblivion.” For all we know, this was the fortune of a man whose only crime was being a beggar.

  A tailor who sexually abused children, tortured them to death; and then powdered and dressed their bodies was burned as a werewolf in Paris in 1598. Michel Verdun and Pierre Burgot were accused of sexual relations with wolves in 1521 and executed. Another famous French case involved a fourteen-year-old boy named Jean Grenier. He confessed to being a werewolf, indicting also his father and a friend of his father. His formal confession is gory, full of religious and sexual perversion. Condemned to death on September 6, 1603, he was transferred instead by recommendation of clemency to a Franciscan friary in Bordeaux where he spent the next eight years running around on all fours, completely demented, physically deformed, and pathologically attached to wolf lore.

  Of what, exactly, he was a victim is a question that hurts the human soul.

  Among all the heretics and political enemies of state who were marched through the courts and condemned as werewolves were an unending number of the wildly insane, the epileptic, the simple-minded, the pathologically
disturbed, and the neurotically guilt-ridden. They were condemned as society’s enemies, but their connection with wolves was tenuous in the extreme and that with werewolves highly imagined.

  The point of examining all this is that these very same trials, this period of hysteria, fixed in the human imagination the ghoulish and sexually perverse picture of the wolf/man that turns up hundreds of years later in such pulp novels as The Werewolf of Paris and worse. Montague Summers, immersed in the imagery of that time, writes: “The werewolf loved to tear human flesh. He lapped the blood of his mangled victims, and with gorged reeking belly he bore the warm offal of their palpitating entrails to the sabbat to present in homage and foul sacrifice to the Monstrous Goat who sat upon the throne of worship and adoration. His appetites were depraved beyond humanity. In bestial rut he covered the fierce she-wolves… .” It is this twisted view from the Middle Ages that still feeds the human imagination, that preserves an image of the wolf that is not only without foundation in the natural world but almost completely a projection of human anxiety.

  The werewolf has no counterpart in the sense that there is no strongly pervasive image of the wolf as a force for good. But the body of folk belief and folklore bearing on wolf children—human beings raised by nurturing female wolves after they have been abandoned by their parents—is, in a sense, the complementary image.

  The history of wild, or feral, or wolf, children is long in legend and fact. The most famous, Romulus and Remus, are an enigma. Plutarch in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans tells us that the most widely believed story of that time (the first century) was that they were the twin sons of a woman named Ilia, or Rhea, or Silvia. She was a Vestal Virgin, and when the children were born—Mars is supposed to have been their father—they were banished to the wilderness. A swineherd named Faustulus who was charged with taking them away took them home instead. His wife was rumored to be a loose woman (the Latin for both “prostitute” and “she-wolf” being lupa is given as the possible source of confusion). Other versions have the twins spending some time with wolves before Faustulus rescues them. The founder of the Turkish nation was also supposed to have been raised by wolves.