by Brown Robert
The Savage Truth
In the 2007 werewolf-themed, horror-romance film Blood and Chocolate, the female lead character’s name is Vivian Gandillon. This name refers to the most famous family of alleged werewolves in history, the infamous Gandillon clan, which was known as the “Werewolves of St. Cloud.”
Pernette’s brother Pierre was soon arrested, along with his son, under the suspicion that he was also involved in lycanthropy. Officially, he was accused of being both a werewolf and a witch. While in custody, both Pierre and his son confessed to using a special ointment that, when rubbed on their bodies, gave them the power to shapeshift. It is written that both men removed their shirts to expose a multitude of scars, which they claimed to have received in fights with other canines while in the form of werewolves.
When the two men were placed in a cell, they began to walk around on all fours, howl, and growl at their jailors. The two men were sentenced to hang. However, before their executions, authorities also arrested and tried Pierre’s daughter. She was accused and quickly convicted of being a witch and was sentenced to hang alongside her father and brother. All three were executed by hanging, and their remains were then burned to ashes. The entire family was executed, it would appear, for the crimes of one. Only Pernette Gandillon, when all is said and done, could be proven guilty of murder. She remains the only member of the family, which from that day came to be called the “Werewolves of St. Cloud,” known to have ever killed anyone. It would appear that Pierre Gandillon, his son, and his daughter were executed for nothing more than being related to Pernette.
The Trial of Theiss
Of all the werewolf trials discussed in this chapter, this one is by far the most unique (not to mention creative). In 1692, in the village of Jurgenburg in Livonia, which is today a part of Russia, an 80-year-old man by the name of Theiss was put on trial as a werewolf. As seems to be the norm in these cases, Theiss did not try to deny that he was indeed a werewolf. However, he did offer to the presiding authorities what was then an unprecedented (and exceedingly brilliant) explanation for what he claimed werewolves truly were. His argument was so convincing, in fact, that he was temporarily set free and later avoided execution.
He may have been old, but Theiss wasn’t at all feeble or weak. Under threat of torture, he refused to confess to having committed any crimes against human beings. However, he fully agreed with the accusation that he was a werewolf. This is where this particular story gets really interesting.
Theiss explained that human beings did not understand the truth regarding the natural role of werewolves in the whole “good vs. evil” dynamic. Werewolves, Theiss explained to the court, were actually the servants of almighty God himself. Apparently, his story was so convincingly told that, when he was sent back to his cell, authorities did not immediately sentence him. In fact, some folklore accounts claim that his jailors (probably not wanting to risk the wrath of hell’s army) actually turned him loose. If this is true, Theiss did not appear to have stayed free. He was soon brought back to the court for further questioning.
Theiss elaborated further that he was a member of a pack of holy werewolves called the Benandanti. Interestingly enough, during this same time period, a group of men in Italy also confessed to being the werewolf servants of God, members of the same Benandanti, and they also claimed that their role was to battle witches and demons. (They, however, did not manage to escape their execution.) You see, Theiss testified that ever since God had given Lucifer domain over the earth, the demonic legions of hell had been relatively free to cross over into the human world (though only on certain nights of the year), and werewolves were the only ones capable of guarding the gates. Both the witches of Earth and the demons of hell, he explained, were stealing grain from farms (which he offered as the cause of a recent famine) and bringing it into hell. If not for werewolves, he told the court, the armies of hell would soon starve out and then overrun the area and soon after all of humankind.
Beastly Words
History explains that the Benandanti were originally an ancient religious order of northern Italy, primarily responsible for performing rites that ensured agricultural fertility. This might explain why Theiss and the members of the Italian werewolf pack picked the name since they were claiming to protect farms from thefts by witches and demons.
The old man explained that, many years ago, he’d become a part of this battle when a dark sorcerer named Skeistan (who was well known in the region, especially for being long dead) had broken Theiss’s nose with a broom handle wrapped in hair from a horse’s tail. In a chance encounter, Theiss had stumbled upon their dark scheme. He was saved by werewolves, given an iron bar (the primary weapon against the forces of evil), and initiated by the Benandanti werewolves. Theiss told the court that the gates opened their widest on the three nights of the year that marked the changing of the seasons—the eves of Pentecost (winter to spring), St. Lucia (spring to summer), and St. John (summer to winter).
The local church authorities, it seemed, were completely dumbfounded as to what they should do. If Theiss was lying, of course, then it would be no harm, no foul on their part. However, if Theiss was telling the truth … by executing him, they would be personally responsible for unleashing hell on Earth (not to mention killing a divine servant of heaven). Apparently, this wasn’t a risk they were willing to take. Rather than execute Theiss for openly confessing to lycanthropy (which, according to church law, was a capital offense), they sentenced him to receive 10 lashes. For a charge of lycanthropy, this was a very lenient punishment for the time period.
Antoine Leger
In June of 1823, a 29-year-old Frenchman by the name of Antoine Leger decided to separate himself from the world. Leger had once been a soldier, after which he had worked briefly in a vineyard as a vine-dresser. He journeyed into the woods to assume a life as a hermit and even took up residence in a natural cave. His choice may have been influenced by the common occurrence of famines in France (the country had already been experiencing frequent and extreme famines for nearly 1,000 years), and Leger may have thought that he could live off the land by foraging and hunting. There are some who now firmly believe that Leger may have been exhibiting symptoms of a delusional mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, and that this is what led him to take up a life in the woods.
By the year 1824, however, something went terribly awry with Antoine Leger’s new lifestyle. Some believe he went stark raving mad as a result of his long solitude. Others theorize that hunting and foraging ceased to offer a plentiful-enough bounty to sustain him. Whatever the case, it is safe to say that something in the mind of Antoine Leger had altogether snapped.
Leger somehow snatched a little girl who had wandered near the edge of the woods from a nearby village and dragged her to his cave. Once there, he killed the child, drank her blood, and ate some of her flesh. Some believe he tore her body apart using only his teeth and bare hands, while others say he used a blade or some other edged weapon. The records are sketchy on the details. When the girl did not return home, a search party combed the woods and happened upon Leger’s cave. At the ghastly sight of the girl’s mutilated corpse, the mob immediately fell upon Leger and handed him over to the Versailles magistrates.
Leger was tried for the girl’s murder. In the magistrate’s investigation, it was discovered that Leger had eaten of his victim’s flesh. Leger admitted that he’d long supped on the raw flesh of rabbits, but that he had become consumed by an urge to taste human flesh. He also openly admitted to every gruesome detail of his crime. He was sentenced to death for crimes associated to lycanthropy (which was still considered an actual crime in France at the time).
After his execution, Leger’s corpse was handed over for scientific examination. His head and brain were thoroughly examined, and the acting physicians discovered that he had in fact suffered from an unidentified brain disorder that had caused extreme deterioration of his neural tissue. This is significant because it marked the first occurrence in a werew
olf trial where the beliefs offered by traditional superstitions were challenged by new advances in the arenas of science and medicine.
Bark vs. Bite
In all actuality, Leger likely exhibited symptoms of what is now referred to as “clinical lycanthropy.” A century and a half later, in 1975, there would be another case strikingly similar to Leger’s. In that case, the affected man was also suffering from an unidentified condition of brain deterioration, simply labeled “walnut brain.” For more information on this case and clinical lycanthropy, see Chapter 18.
The Least You Need to Know
• History is full of documents that record the trials of alleged werewolves.
• Many convicted werewolves were more than likely just scapegoats, serial killers, or the mentally ill.
• An old man named Theiss, possibly one of the greatest geniuses of his day, is the only confessed werewolf ever to have talked his way out of being executed.
Chapter 7
Werewolves, Wolves, and Religion
In This Chapter
• The historic account of one priest’s conversation with a man turned wolf
• The Vargamor, the frightening wolf witches of Scandinavia
• The significance of wolves in the demonology of the Christian church
• The widespread perceptional shifts that led to a reversal of wolf symbolism
• King John’s personal crusade to destroy any wolves found within the borders of his empire
Both werewolves and wolves alike have had a long but turbulent relationship with the organized religions of humanity. While they have at times been worshipped, they have far more often been persecuted by the religions and governments of the past. In many religions, wolves are associated with certain demonic figures, quite often portrayed as shadowy and deceptive agents of evil or as symbols of violence and greed. Wolves had little to redeem them from such views in the medieval world. They were neither beasts of burden nor a source of food and therefore had no value to humans. They were seen as a burden and a threat to livestock, so most farmers were more than happy to participate in the Christian church’s demonization of the wolf, which had once been highly revered by a number of European cultures.
The Priest and the Wolf
In 1187, Giraldus Cambrensis provided an account of one priest’s rather unusual encounter with a wolf. According to the story, the priest was traveling from Ulster to Meath. When the hour grew late, the priest and his young attendant set up camp for the night in the woods along the road. They had no sooner built a fire than a wolf stepped calmly into their campsite from the surrounding woods.
Needless to say, the priest and his attendant were terrified by the sight. The wolf then began to speak in a male human voice and told the men they had nothing to fear from him (which does not seem to have helped very much). Trembling, the priest begged the wolf in the name of God not to harm them. The wolf replied with words of a Christian nature, which seemed to at least somewhat convince the priest that he was not evil.
The wolf explained that he was a member of a clan from Ossiry that was cursed to follow a particular ritual. He went on to say that every seven years two members of the clan, one man and one woman, were chosen by lots and sent into the woods to live as wolves. If they managed to survive this period without doing evil to humans, then they would be allowed to return to human form, and two new clan members would again be chosen to take their place in the woods. However, the wolf told them, his female counterpart was in the woods, very near to death. Being that they were Catholics, the wolf begged the priest to follow him to the she-wolf and perform the proper religious rites.
The Curse
You may have noticed the similarity between this story and the seven-year “wolf period” of the Greek Lycaeans. It is entirely possible that this story of the priest’s is a fabrication. It may have been written in an attempt to integrate the preexisting myth into a more “Christian-friendly” form. Then again, maybe the priest really did have a conversation with a pair of talking wolves.
More out of fear than any sense of spiritual obligation, the priest followed the wolf into the woods. They soon came upon the form of a dying she-wolf, who was moaning and sighing with the voice of a human woman. Upon seeing them, she greeted the priest in a polite human fashion. The priest then began giving her the rites of a last communion. When she asked the priest to place the Eucharist wafer in her mouth, he told her he did not come equipped with any. The priest apparently lied because he was afraid to put his hand near her mouth, out of concern that she might bite him.
The male he-wolf, however, now approached the priest and pointed with his muzzle to a small missal book the clergyman carried. Somehow, perhaps by scent, the he-wolf knew that the priest had several wafers in this book. The he-wolf then reached toward the she-wolf with his paw and pulled back her wolf-skin from her head to her navel, which exposed the torso of a human woman (basically, exposing her breasts). He again implored the priest not to deny her the gift of Heaven by failing to administer the proper death rites. He then returned the wolf-skin, and she resumed her beastly form. Finding himself rather disturbed by this, and being out of excuses, the priest now removed the wafer and completed the final rites for the she-wolf. They then left her and returned to the campsite.
The he-wolf remained with the priest and his attendant through the rest of the night. In the morning, he escorted them to the road and pointed them in the proper direction. The he-wolf then returned to the woods to complete his seven-year trial.
It would seem that this account sparked some debate as to the nature of certain living things. The question was raised by some as to whether or not these particular wolves should be thought of as humans or as beasts. For example, if a hunter was to kill one of these human-wolves, would he have committed murder in the eyes of God? It was partially concluded that since these wolves were intelligent, then at the least they could not be considered “brutes.” However, since it was also believed that God himself had imposed these wolf-forms upon them, they could not be considered fully human in their form either.
Wolfy Witches
One of the primary reasons that wolves and werewolves became targets of the Christian church was that both eventually came to be associated with witchcraft. What the medieval church called “witchcraft,” however, was usually nothing more than the traditional practices of Europe’s pre-Christian nature religions. In order to speed the acceptance of Christianity throughout the region, the Christian church actively demonized such practices by denouncing them as devil worship. Suddenly, the practice of any religion aside from Christianity would make one an outlaw. In Scandinavia, for example, women who practiced wolf rites (likely of a pre-Christian nature religion) were called Vargamor, meaning “wolf-crones.”
After the rise of Christianity, the Vargamor were labeled a coven of devil-worshipping witches. The folklore soon changed to fit this new label, and it came to be said that the Vargamor would first lure unsuspecting men into their dens with promises of sex, then feed them alive to their demonic wolves. Some lore claimed that the Vargamor served these wolves, while others claim that they had the power to command the wolves at will.
In the myths of the Norse (which includes the ancestors of the Scandinavians), female warrior spirits called Valkyries were often depicted as riding on the backs of wolves. The Vargamor may have been responsible for some form of religious rite that meant to invoke the powers of the Valkyries. When this idea later encountered Christianity, however, it probably gave rise to the view that the Vargamor were witches. In much of Europe’s later “pro-Christian” folklore, witches are often described as riding through the night on the backs of wolves (just as the Valkyries once were).
Beastly Words
In Norse myths, Valkyries were beautiful, female warrior spirits tasked with retrieving from battlefields the souls of fallen warriors who had died bravely and with honor. They would then escort the soul to Valhalla, a heavenly utopia of food, drink, sex,
and battle, which was reserved only for the brave.
Demon Wolves
A number of religions, not just Christianity, have their own demonic or negative wolf figures. In the dialects of the Hindus, for example, the word meaning “wolf” is used interchangeably to also mean “criminal/ outlaw.” From the Hindus to the Europeans to the ancient Aramaeans, they all have their own forms of such wolf-demons.
In Romanian folklore, the wolf-demon Varcolac may have been a reinvention of older Norse myths of the titanic wolf Fenrir (who was believed to be able to trigger the apocalypse called Ragnarok by swallowing the sun). Varcolac is said to be the eternal enemy of light, and he seeks to devour the moon and sun. There are rare times when he nearly succeeds, causing solar and lunar eclipses. In some legends about Varcolac (namely those that claim he is a wolf-demon), it is said that he takes physical form by emerging from the corpse of any infant that has not been baptized.
Bark vs. Bite
The Romanian myths about the wolf-demon Varcolac were also likely an attempt to reshape a pre-Christian myth into a more church-acceptable form. For example, there is the claim that Varcolac can assume a physical form by emerging from the corpse of a baby that isn’t baptized. This element would have encouraged the uneducated peasantry to have their children baptized into Christianity at birth. Since infant mortality rates were very high, a good many infants did not survive their first year of life.
