12 - Lycanthropy: Werewolves and Their Kin

The subjects of werewolves and vampires are so closely related in the public's mind that they are often regarded as interchangeable, which they are not; indeed, far from it. Both are associated with witchcraft, but from there on, the line of demarcation is very sharp indeed.

While the vampire is supposedly a corpse that is animated or enlivened by the undead entity that formerly controlled it, a werewolf is a living person plagued by the unhappy faculty of frequently changing his bodily form from that of a man into a wolf, and vice versa. Such a change may be voluntary or involuntary; and while usually of a temporary nature, it may sometimes become permanent.

Confusion between vampires and werewolves is due partly to the fact that a vampire reputedly has the power of transforming itself into a wolf; hence it could easily be mistaken for a werewolf while in such a transitory state. And since both are vicious and bloodthirsty, their actions might also be similar.

However, vampires seldom retain their lupine shapes very long, and are more apt to dissolve into mist or moonbeams when bound upon their nefarious missions, assuming their human forms later. Conversely, werewolves avoid frequent or hurried changes, unless they are being pursued; and they are said to revert to human form automatically if injured - a decided handicap to say the least. In all, werewolves are far more vulnerable than vampires, but that does not make them any more human. Where vampires usually are only out for blood, werewolves like to tear people apart and devour them completely. You're not likely to have a second chance to meet a werewolf.

Another distinctive feature to remember is that a person can be transformed by witchery into a wolf, instead of some other animal; and in that case, the change remains immutable until the spell is broken, as was described in the legend of Sir Marrok.

Werewolves, of course, are hardly benign, though they might fool you by pretending to be. In contrast, a person transformed into a wolf by witchcraft might become cantakerous indeed, through sheer frustration. Finally, real wolves can be bad enough, according to the authors of Malleus Maleficarum, who declared in 1486: "There is a great power in the eyes and this appears even in natural things. For if a wolf see a man first, the man is struck dumb."

To explain why that happened, the authors cited the long-established legend of a fabled monster called the basilisk, generally classed as a species of dragon.

If a basilisk sees a man first, its glance is fatal, but if he sees it fast, he may be able to kill it. The reason a basilisk can kill a man by its glare is that when it sees him, its anger sets in motion a terrible poison throughout its body, which it darts from its eyes, infusing the air with deadly venom. Thus the man breathes in the infected atmosphere and is overpowered and dies.

But when the basilisk is fast seen by the man, who wishes to kill it, he should be supplied with mirrors; and the creature, seeing itself in the mirrors, darts poison toward its reflection, which recoils upon the basilisk and causes it to die.

Having treated the situation so convincingly and scientifically, the authors tied it in with their pet theme that witches, too, could fascinate or bind people with a mere glance; and from that, they backtracked to the question of wolves and how witchcraft could apply in their case:

There is a question about wolves, which sometimes snatch people out of their houses and eat them and run about so craftily that they cannot be hurt or captured. This sometimes has a natural cause; but it can also be due to a glamor effected by witches. ...

As to whether they are real wolves, or devils appearing in that form, we say that they are real wolves, but that they are possessed by devils, which may happen without the operation of witches - but in another way, may be an illusion caused by witches.

For it is told of a man who thought that he was turned into a wolf and at times went into hiding among caves. Though he remained there constantly immobile, he believed that he was a wolf that went about devouring children. The Devil, having possessed a wolf, was actually doing this, but the man mistakenly thought that he was prowling while asleep.

So long was he thus out of his right mind that he was eventually found raving in the woods. The Devil delights in things of this sort, which proves that it was the Devil who caused the illusion of the old pagans who believed that men and women were changed into beasts.

In these opinions, the authors of Malleus Maleficarum were for once ahead of their time, at least to a noteworthy degree. Reginald Scot, the hard-headed skeptic of a century later, left the Devil out of it and classed such imaginary transformations as a disease called Lycanthropy, which for a while was attributed to the bite of a mad wolf. But many people still believed that werewolves were real, and with good reason - the gruesome deeds charged to suspected werewolves transcended anything human.

In 1521, a man traveling through the French department of Jura, near the Swiss border, was attacked by a ferocious wolf, but managed to beat it off and wound it. Following its bloody trail, he reached a lonely cottage where a woman was giving first aid to her husband, a peasant named Michel Verdun, who had been badly injured. Suspicious, the traveler reported the occurrence to the authorities in the town of Poligny, who were prompt to investigate because at intervals, several persons, including children, had been killed and horribly mangled by wolves that had shown almost human cunning.

Under questioning, Michel Verdun confessed that he was a werewolf and that he had initiated a shepherd named Pierre Bourgot into the ways and wiles of such dreadful creatures. By smearing themselves with two types of ointment provided by a familiar demon, they were able to change themselves into wolves and back again, in the meantime tearing out the throats of human beings, lapping up their blood and sometimes devouring their bodies.

Bourgot was tortured into corroborating Verdun's confession and added some juicy details of his own. Between them, they implicated another peasant, Philibert Mentot, who made similar admissions. All three described how their hands and feet would become hairy and turn into paws. When the transformation was complete, they would race across the countryside at such speed that it was more fun to be wolves than men. Eventually they found themselves running, living and mating with the wolf pack for extended periods.

From then on, the Jura district became a notorious habitat of the loup-garou, as the French termed a werewolf. By 1573, the menace was so great that a proclamation was issued calling upon the peasantry to turn out and pursue, bind and kill all such horrendous creatures. They finally caught up with a fiendish hermit named Gilles Gamier, who lived near the town of Dole, and who admitted attacking four children, with intent of killing, dismembering and devouring them.

Twice, Gamier had been completely successful; he even described how, in the shape of a wolf, he had used his clawed paws and sharp fangs to eat his victims piecemeal, reserving portions for later repasts. Once, after he had seized a small girl, some men came to her rescue and he was forced to drop his prey and lope away as a loup-garou. On another occasion, he was so eager for the kill that he couldn't wait to change into a wolf. Still in human guise, he strangled a boy, then abandoned the body when some peasants approached. Later, they identified Gamier as the killer, and he was burned forthwith.

A still more fantastic case cropped up in the same area in 1598, when a sixteen-year-old boy tried to save his younger sister from the attack of a ferocious wolf, only to have it turn on him instead. Men who rushed to the youth's aid found him dying from wounds inflicted by a knife which he himself carried, indicating that the wolf had snatched it from him and stabbed him with it. That meant that the wolf must have had hands instead of forepaws.

The men overtook the wolf and had all but killed it when it managed to flounder off into the brush. Positive that the creature was mortally wounded, they made a search for it and instead of finding a wolf, they came across the body of a half-witted woman named Perrenette Gandillon. By the equally half-witted logic of that era, the searchers rejected the idea that the wolf might have killed the woman earlier. Instead, finding Perrenette where they should have found the wolf, they decided that the two must be one and that Perrenette was a werewolf who had reverted to human form, as werewolves invariably do in death.

So they rounded up three members of the Gandillon family for such intensive questioning that soon all were implicating themselves on a variety of counts, such as raising storms by witchcraft, attending Sabbats where the Devil presided as a goat, and frequently becoming werewolves by using the customary ointment. The Gandillons were fortunate in being tried by a judge who wondered if these things could really happen; so in their stupid way, they hopped about on all fours, giving appropriate howls. When they didn't turn into wolves, they blamed it on lack of ointment, but decided that it wouldn't work if they had it, as imprisonment had dulled their devil-given powers. However, their impersonations were good enough to convince the skeptical judge that they really had roved as werewolves, so he sent them to the stake.

So it continued on through the years, not only in France, but throughout Europe, up to comparatively modern times. In Portugal, a mere century or so ago, the story was told of a serving-maid who came from a mountain region and took a job with a family living in a town near Ponte de Lima. Soon afterward, a baby boy was born in the family and someone noted that the infant had a "Devil's Mark" in the form of a crescent between its shoulders. This, according to a still current superstition, meant that the child should be watched carefully whenever the moon was at that crescent phase. The new maid heard of this and told the family of a method used by mountain-folk to counteract such evil. That was to smear the mark with the blood of a white pigeon and place the child on a hillside where its body would be exposed to the glow of the new moon, which would efface the sinister mark.

That was done, but the father of the child, fearful that some animal might molest it, remained nearby with a loaded gun. Hardly had the moon risen when he fancied he heard a child's cry and he rushed to the spot to find a huge wolf glaring from above the infant's body, with gore dripping from its snarling mouth. Too late to save the baby, the man fired point blank at the wolf, and a boy who accompanied the father, managed to strike its right forepaw with a club as it rolled over and then tried to dart away.

The dead child's throat was horribly torn and mangled; and after they carried the body back to the house, they discovered that the new maid was no longer there. Suddenly suspicious, they began a search of the woods into which the wolf had run. There, they found the maid, dying from gunshot wounds, gripping a broken right wrist. She gasped that she had been worried about the baby's safety, so she had watched from behind a tree and had seen a wolf attack it. As she rushed to the rescue, the wolf leaped away and she had received the gunshot instead. But the glare in her dying eyes was too much like the wolf's for the child's father to believe her; and she didn't live long enough to explain the broken wrist that could obviously have resulted from the stroke of the boy's club.

The maid's breast also bore the Devil's Mark and a checkup proved that werewolves had long been rampant in the district where she had lived. Apparently, she had been trying to shake off the curse, for according to an old legend, that could only be done by killing an infant and imbibing its blood.

It is much easier to become a werewolf than a vampire. The trait is said to be hereditary, but others can become werewolves by eating a wolf's brains, or drinking from the same stream as wolves. But the best way of all is by burning certain substances, particularly poppy seeds. Here, skeptics see a subtle clue to the possible explanation of werewolfery: Such fumigations produce hallucinations, causing people to think they have become wolves, or at least gained wolfish desires. The same could apply to the ointments used in such transformations; as with the so-called flying ointments, the results could be purely imaginary.

But that raises other questions: Why just werewolves? Why don't people change themselves into other dangerous creatures through sheer power of witchcraft? The answer is twofold. They don't limit themselves to wolves; and they do change themselves into other creatures. But they follow a consistent pattern. Whatever bestial guise is assumed through witchcraft, it invariably combines strength with cunning to a degree that the average human not only fears, but envies. Through much of Europe, the wolf took top rating in that category. A wolf howl at night could scare even the folk who dwelt in marble halls; while those who starved in hovels could very well wish that they were out howling with the wolf-pack and getting their share of whatever it was, if only to help scare those who dwelt in marble halls.

But in the more northern climes, witches and warlocks were supposed to assume the shape of bears, which were more formidable than wolves and also showed remarkable intelligence. In India and Malaysia, were-tigers were regarded as the products of fiendish witchcraft that preyed on humans in inhuman style. In Japan, the ninko, or man-fox, made up in craftiness for what it lacked in size. In Africa, leopards and hyenas were the equivalent of European werewolves; and occasionally crocodiles were granted a similar status.

The Human Leopard Society, which flourished in the former British colony of Sierra Leone, was one of the most remarkable animal cults on record. It was used by witch doctors to extort tribute from the wealthier members of the native villages, but with a promise of profitable return that developed into a fantastic racket. The witch doctor began by providing a client with a borfima, or "medicine bag," which contained various gruesome ingredients, the most important being human fat and blood.

The fortunate owner of a borfima could count on it to bring him riches and power, to protect him in a colonial court, and to implement any curses or misfortunes that he wished upon his enemies. Naturally, borfimas were costly, but worth their price when they functioned as expected. Contrarily, when they failed, which they often did, customers wanted their money back. That wasn't possible with a borfima, an illegal product to begin with; but in buying it, the purchaser automatically gained membership in the Human Leopard Society, which solved the problem.

At the next meeting, in a secret rendezvous deep in the African bush, the principal witch doctor told disgruntled members that the parent borfima, from which theirs had been taken, needed to be freshly bloodied and supplied with enough human fat to restore its potency. That done, their individual borfimas could be replenished from the main source. They then chose a suitable victim - often a member of one of their own families - and decoyed him to his doom. Chosen members of the cult garbed themselves in leopard skins, sneaked up on their quarry and killed him with three-pronged knives designed to resemble leopard's claws.

This was not done to lull the unsuspecting victim, who by then not only suspected something, but knew that he wasn't going to come out of it alive enough to tell. It was designed to mislead any witnesses, by making them think that leopards, not people, had been responsible for the victim's death, in case the killers were unable to carry away their prey. Otherwise, they took the body to the meeting place, added its blood and fat to the parent borfima and carved up what was left and ate it, thus topping off the evening in true cannibalistic style.

Why they did this doesn't matter. It may have been a reversion to an ancient rite. It could have been an effort to outdo one another in bravado. Maybe they thought they were digesting some of the virility of the victim whose body they devoured. Maybe they were just crazy enough to think they were human leopards. Or they could have felt that it did increase the potency of their individual borfimas that were finally dished out from the main mess. Anyway, the cult members were willing to go along with the presiding witch doctors until they saw how well the new "medicine" worked.

If it worked well for most of the members, fine; it not, it merely meant another sacrificial rite to replenish the parent borfima still further. What the human leopards didn't realize was that they, in their way, were almost as badly hooked as their victims. Once in the clutches of the cult, there was no escaping it; and as it grew in size and power, the increase in deaths attributed to leopards invariably roused the suspicions of the authorities. From 1903 to 1912, 17 cases were tried before a circuit court, involving 186 suspects charged with murder, 87 of whom were convicted and sentenced to death as human leopards.

Then, the cracking of a sensational case against the Human Leopard Society produced leads to some 30 murders so far overlooked, involving nearly 400 suspects. Though many were released due to lack of corroborative evidence, the power of the Human Leopard Society apparently was broken, along with that of an offshoot known as the Human Alligator Society, whose members lurked near streams, snugly clad in alligator hides. But after several years, the outrages of these sinister societies flared anew, spreading from Sierra Leone to Nigeria; and again they were curtailed, continuing only intermittently until the time of World War II.

Then the hideous slayings were renewed with new fury, with reported cases averaging one a week over a two-year period ending early in 1948, when 73 suspected human leopards were held on murder charges; and of these, 39 were found guilty and executed.

Fakery of this sort, far from discrediting werewolves and their ilk, may be taken as prima facie evidence of their existence, in accordance with an oft-quoted claim that unless something is real to start with, it can't be counterfeited. Unquestionably, many members of the Sierra Leone cult must have believed that their leaders could actually transform themselves into leopards and that they, the followers, were being taught the trade by putting on their masquerade.

In many lands far from Sierra Leone, witch doctors were going through such transformations regularly, without organizing cults to help. A vivid account of such witchcraft was reported in 1948, from the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil. There, two Brazilian officers were sent to investigate the murder of the head man of a village on the Bolivian border, only to find that the natives blamed it on a huge jaguar that roamed the area at nights and was responsible for other previous deaths. But the head man happened to be the village's best hunter as well, so by all rights, he should have slain the jaguar, rather than vice versa. By jungle logic, the fact that the jaguar had won out simply verified a rumor that the dreaded beast was actually a local witch doctor, whose powers the villagers feared even more.

To confirm local superstitions, the witch doctor invariably had been absent from the village when the phantom jaguar prowled in search of anything from goats to human prey. So rather than argue with the natives, the officers decided to dispel the dual menace with the aid of a double-barreled shotgun, a weapon totally unknown in those parts. They tethered a goat near the village and attached cords to the gun, planting it so that any prowling animal would trip the triggers and receive both blasts. If that eliminated the jaguar, they could deal with the witch doctor alone, later on.

That night, the well-laid booby trap went off in perfect one-two style. The officers ran out and found the goat dead at the end of its tether, mangled by deep claw marks that could only be a jaguar's. From there, a bloody trail led off through the jungle, proving that at least one blast had crippled the jaguar. With morning, the two men tried to follow it, but the foliage proved too thick. The trail's end, however, proved closer than they expected.

Excited villagers informed the officers that the local witch doctor had returned from one of his clandestine trips so badly injured that he was practically dying in his hut. The government men went there, but were unable to talk with him before he expired because one side of his lower jaw had been practically shot away. Only a shotgun could have inflicted such a wound, and the two officers had the only shotgun within hundreds of miles.

Reports of a prowling jaguar ended with that night, which to the villagers was further proof that the animal and the witch doctor were one and the same. Thus are the legendary claims of witchcraft continually renewed.