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THE NEW IMPROVED BEAST

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Jean
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« on: December 28, 2008, 03:47:22 am »

WOLVES IN THE FOLD

"Throughout the ages [the wolf] was known as the savage plunderer and swift pitiless marauder of the shepherd's grazing flocks, not sparing to attack child and maid or even the solitary wayfarer by the wood ... the wolf has ever been the inevitable, remorseless enemy of man." So wrote the excitable Reverend Montague Summers in his massive 1933 volume The Werewolf, an exhaustive nonfiction study of furry people through the ages.

THE ANCIENT WEREWOLF: Summers and other scholars have shown that in ancient times wolves were a big deal all over Europe, most of Asia, and the Americas. In Greece and the Baltic region, cults worshipped the wolf as a powerful but fickle deity. Germans believed that after death, honorable ancestors became wolves. But other cultures wouldn't come near a wolf, even in the afterlife. As Summers says, "In classical authors the wolf is the eternal symbol of ferocity and inordinate evil appetite, hard by which rides cruel devouring lust."

Actually, little evidence survives that wolves ever attacked humans, except during hard, hungry winters. But humans certainly believed in wolf attacks, and in the heady realm of folklore, belief amounts to reality. Throughout the ancient world voracious wolves inspired legends of the werewolf, a human who transforms into a wolf (were means "man" in Old English).

The ancient legends share only two points: The werewolf is evil, and it has a taste for human flesh. Other than these certainties, nobody got their stories straight. A werewolf could be male or female. It might become a wolf permanently, through enchantment, or assume wolf form at will. The werewolf might or might not need a wolf skin to change. In Germany, the skin of a hanged man worked just as well. Europeans believed that sunrise forced the werewolf to resume human form by taking off the skin. If he hid it in a cold place, he shivered all day, and if anybody found and destroyed the skin, this would destroy the werewolf.

Did the werewolf need a full moon to change? No. Did he fear silver? No. These beliefs came later -- much later. Some cultures had it that werewolves fear clear or running water, but again, no one agreed on anything.

Well then, if you couldn't scare the wolf, could you cure it? Unfortunately, werewolf cures sound about as convincing as those for hiccups. Elliott O'Donnell passed along a Belgian exorcism recipe in his 1912 book Werwolves (note the older spelling of "werewolves"):


"[A] werwolf is sprinkled with a compound either of 1/2 ounce of sulphur, 4 drachms of asafoetida, 1/4 ounce of castoreum; or of 3/4 ounce of hypericum in 3 ounces of vinegar; or with a solution of carbolic acid further diluted with a pint of clear spring water. The sprinkling must be done over the head and shoulders, and the werwolf must at the same time be addressed in his Christian name."

If you find little worth in the prospect of sprinkling water on and chatting with a frenzied man-eating beast who is about to disembowel you, O'Donnell agrees: "[A]s to the success or non-success of these various methods of exorcism I cannot make any positive statement.... As far as I know, once a werwolf always a werwolf is the inviolable rule."

THE MIDDLE AGES: When Christianity arrived in Europe, priests condemned pagan wolf worship and equated werewolves with Satan. Theologians, fresh from the important argument over the number of angels that can shimmy on a pinhead, debated long and hard whether the werewolf actually assumed literal wolf form, or whether Satan merely deluded his victims with illusion. No less an authority than St. Augustine announced the consensus, "that the Devil creates no new nature, but that he is able to make something appear to be which in reality is not."

Once the Church said werewolves were Satanically evil, that must have pretty much shut down the werewolf legends, right? Quite the opposite -- it opened the floodgates. Werewolf scares spread across Europe like the plague. Unlike people in our own enlightened time, medieval Europeans had no Communists, Islamic terrorists, or malevolent hackers to get hysterical over, so they made do with witches and werewolves. In central France between 1520 and 1630 there were thirty thousand reports of loups-garoux (the French term for werewolves), often followed by lynchings or confessions under torture. Weirdest of all are the many accused people who confessed freely, without torture, to all kinds of horrible wolfy acts that proved they were evil and could they please, please be punished.

Werewolf epidemics continued in the Renaissance. The biggest headliner in werewolf history is undoubtedly Peter Stubbe, whose sensational story obsessed Europe like a sixteenth-century version of the OJ Trial. In 1589 in the duchy of Westphalia outside Cologne (now northwestern Germany) a series of wolf attacks led hunters to a man named Peter Stubbe, who happened to be walking in the area where the wolf had supposedly vanished. Under torture Stubbe confessed to having made a pact with Satan, who gave him a belt that turned him into a wolf. Stubbe said he'd spent 25 years killing his son, other children, and livestock, eating the bodies, and committing incest with his sister and daughter. The authorities broke him on the wheel, pulled off his flesh with hot pincers, and then -- just to make sure -- cut off his head. They burned the sister and daughter. No one ever found the belt.

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