A History Of Werewolves

The ability to shape shift continues on into mythology, probably the oldest known source in world literature for a human transforming into a wolf is found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the ancient Roman poet Ovid’s classic work ‘Metamorphoses’ is also devoted to themes of shape shifting.

In one of Ovid’s stories, Jupiter the king of the gods, descends to earth disguised as a mortal to visit the Arcadian king Lycaon. However the cruel tyrant king decides he wants to humiliate Jupiter, and he makes the decision to do this by secretly serving him human flesh, to see if he can deceive the god into eating it without noticing. He kills a young boy, chops up his body, boils the parts, and then serves them to Jupiter. Jupiter of course sees straight through the deception and as a punishment turns Lycaon into a wolf. As a result Lycaon becomes one of the first recorded werewolves, and his name is the root of the word ‘lycanthrope’ meaning one who transforms into a wolf. 

Jupiter and Lycaon - Jan Cossiers [1636-8]

In the 5th century, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, often referred to as the ‘father of history’, also writes of werewolves and tells of a nomadic tribe of shapeshifting men called the Neurians, who would transform into werewolves once a year for several days, before resuming human form. 

The ability to shape shift was not just confined to the ancient Romans and Greeks, Native American Indian culture also contains many shape shifters and Werewolves. The Navajo tribe referred to such shifters as ‘Skin walkers’. They were said to have large glowing eyes, even in daylight, and if a person looked directly into their eyes, the Skinwalker could absorb them and ‘steal their skin'. Apparently they could take on many different animal forms such as owls, crows and coyotes…. but the most common was the wolf! A Skinwalkers tongue was said to be black to show the darkness of it’s soul, and they were known to lure people away from their homes and into the woods by imitating the voices of their loved ones.

In addition to this there is also the Hopi Indian shapeshifting tradition, in which wearing the skin of an animal during a sacred ceremony allows the participant to turn into the animal he or she wishes to become. 

A Native American ‘Skinwalker’

Interestingly the Vikings also claimed this shapeshifting ability. The Viking warriors known as the ‘Berserkr’ would put on wolf or bear skins and work themselves into an animalistic frenzy before going into battle. ‘Berserkr’ which literally means ‘the ones who wear bear shirts’, is the root of the word ‘berserk’.

There were also a group of berserkers known as the Ulfheðnar, referred to as ‘wolf warriors’ because they chose to wear the skins of wolves. By taking on the spirit of the the bear or the wolf, the viking ‘berserkers’ acted as if they were no longer human. They were known for being completely fearless, losing all control in battle, and committing random acts of animalistic savagery.

The earliest surviving reference to the term berserker is in Haraldskvaeoi a skaldic poem composed by Thorbiorn Hornklofi in the late 9th century-

“I'll ask of the berserks, you tasters of blood,

Those intrepid heroes, how are they treated,

Those who wade out into battle?

Wolf-skinned they are called. In battle

They bear bloody shields.

Red with blood are their spears when they come to fight.

They form a closed group.

The prince in his wisdom puts trust in such men

Who hack through enemy shields.”

In fact it turns out ‘Wolf warriors’ commonly appear throughout legends of the many indo-European peoples, from the Turks and the Monguls to the Native Americans.

Moving on to Europe in the middle ages, as Christianity began to expand and spread, the ability to shape shift came to be seen as a sin and a form of blasphemy against God, from the 1400’s up until the late 1700’s witchcraft hysteria spread across Europe and there were many witch trials initiated by the church. Life was hard and it was the peasants who mostly bore the brunt of the poverty, disease and famine that affected Europe. In this time of desperation and struggle scapegoats were needed, witchcraft was blamed for most of society’s ills, and a great societal purge began.

What is less well known is that during this period there were also a large quantity of werewolf trials and many unfortunate people were tortured into confessing and then burnt alive. In fact in this era there was not a huge amount of distinction between the witch and the werewolf, as witches were also considered to be able to transform into werewolves. So if you were an unfortunate peasant up against the church inquisitors, it didn’t matter if you were a man or a woman, either way you were probably going to fry!

The werewolf also gradually evolved through European folklore and superstition, there was the commonly held folk belief that the seventh son of a seventh son would be cursed by becoming a werewolf. Another common idea was that people became werewolves after making a pact with the devil. Werewolves were also believed to have hair growing out of the palms of their hands, as well as eyebrows that meet in the middle.

The fear of wolf attacks was a common part of peasant life in medieval Europe, and so unsurprisingly even ended up creeping into children’s stories, perhaps as a form of cautionary warning. Little Red Riding hood as featured in the tales collected by the brothers Grimm is certainly one of the most werewolf themed stories. Angela Carter’s brilliant adult retelling of classic folktales ‘The Bloody Chamber’ capitalised on this underlying theme, as did the film version ‘The Company of Wolves’ directed by Neil Jordan.

Little red Riding Hood- illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith [1910]

In Germanic folklore, from about the 17th century onwards the idea that werewolves are vulnerable to silver weapons also began to appear, and in the 19th century novel Dracula, Bram Stoker depicts Dracula as being able to change into a wolf at will during the night Dracula also hints early on in the novel that his Romanian ‘Szekely’ bloodline were able to transform into werewolves.  

In addition to this, throughout the centuries, there have been many werewolf serial killers, In 1589 Peter Stumpp known as ‘The Werewolf of Bedburg’ was tried for ‘werewolfery, witchcraft and cannibalism’ and eventually executed. He confessed to being a werewolf and explained the devil had given him a magical belt or girdle that allowed him to transform into a wolf. Stumpp confessed to killing and eating 14 children and 2 pregnant women, whose fetuses he tore from their wombs and then consumed, describing them as ‘dainty morsels’. He also allegedly ate the brain of his own son.

There is also Manuel Blanco Romasanta considered to be Spains first serial killer. At his trial in 1853, Romasanta claimed that he had been cursed to transform into a werewolf and would go on killing sprees for several days before returning to human form. The court asked him to prove it by turning himself into a werewolf before them, but he explained that the curse lasted for 13 years, and had just expired the previous week. 

A wood cut depicting the execution of Peter Stump- ‘The Werewolf of Bedburg’

Moving on to the 20th and 21st-century, it turns out our modern conceptions of the werewolf, although owing a certain amount to folklore, have largely been shaped by Hollywood movies. Ideas such as a werewolf transforming at the full moon, the use of silver bullets to kill a werewolf, and that being bitten by a werewolf meant you’d turn in to one, had appeared somewhat inconsistently before in earlier forms, but it was the 1941 movie ‘The Wolf Man’ starring Lon Chaney that finally codified these concepts, and layed down what has become modern werewolf lore. 

Lon Cheney in the Wolfman

Other more modern explanations for the werewolf phenomenon include the psychiatric condition ‘clinical lycanthropy’, a rare form of psychosis in which the patient believes they are actually transforming into a wolf. There is also the rare genetic condition ‘porphyria’, in which symptoms include mental disturbances and extreme sensitivity to sunlight.

In addition there is the medical condition ‘hypertrichosis’ sometimes referred to as ‘werewolf syndrome’ where the entire body surface is completely covered in hair. The 16th century spanish nobleman Petrus Gonsalves famously suffered from the condition as did several of his children who are all depicted in portraits. There is also a theory that the marriage between Petrus Gonsalvus and Lady Catherine may have been part of the inspiration for the fairy tale ‘Beauty and the beast’. 

Petrus Gonsalves and Lady Catherine

So now we’ve covered the history, the question still remains, why is it that we humans are still so fascinated by werewolves, from ancient cave paintings right up to the splatter and gore of modern werewolf movies?. 

It may be that for some, this stems from the simple fantastical desire to take on the superior strength, speed and freedom of a wild animal, qualities that we humans desire but do not posses in such abundance.

Conversely it may also be the need for werewolves stems from civilised man’s unwillingness to accept the animal side of his nature, particularly when faced with the senseless savagery that some humans are capable of, the acts of murder, torture, infanticide, and so on that are tragically found in every period of human history. Could it be that throughout the ages, when confronted by the complexity of human behaviour, people have found it easier to create a supernatural explanation instead? A creature that can be blamed for the atrocities of man, a creature that is part human, part savage beast, and motivated by evil and destruction. 

There are after all many modern thinkers who have held a very bleak view of human nature, and concluded we think a bit to highly of our selves as civilised creatures. The dystopian science fiction author JG Ballard famously said of his books- 

“I wanted to rub humanities face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror” .

Freud also viewed the basic fundamental drives of humans as being self interest, sex and aggression.

More modern thinkers such as the neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky view human nature in far more complex and less simplistic terms, in Sapolsky’s view humans are cooperative, reciprocal and sometimes altruistic, but given the right set of circumstances also equally capable of committing savagery, atrocities and genocide. 

Sigmund Freud

There is also a particular kind of human present in every population who is not capable of empathy and altruism. Robert Hare one of the world’s leading experts on psychopathy has stated that Psychopaths represent approximately 1- 4 % of the human population and move freely among us. These individuals with extraordinarily low, or even zero empathy, are viewed by Hare as a kind of ‘interspecies predator’. Kevin Dutton a professor of psychology at Oxford university believes one of the reasons psychopath genes have survived is that they are useful to human populations, particularly when it comes to things like fighting wars. Dutton has spoken of a theory that viking Berserker’s may have in fact been selected from the psychopaths among the viking population.

The reasons why werewolf stories are still abundant, are clearly many and varied, but essentially they speak to our essence as human beings, our dualistic nature and the moral complexity of our deepest longings and desires.  As humans we are capable of complex reasoning and also the gift of self consciousness and introspective thought, but because we are also animals, this can be a burden. We live in a sanitised and civilised world of order, moral boundaries and constraints, a world full of manners and complex codes of social interaction. Because of this we often feel the tension of our animal nature, which we know must be controlled in order to fit in to society. As a result the desire is strong to shake off these societal constraints of self consciousness and civilised routine, and fully experience the freedom, spontaneity and wildness of being an animal, to lose ourselves in nature, to run with the wolves, to be truly free. To hunt, to dance, to kill, to worship, to howl at the moon. 

So in conclusion it would appear as long as we continue to exist as human beings, it’s very likely the werewolf will also be part of us…….…

Hhhhhhhooooooowwwwwllllllllllllllllllllll !!!!!! . 

Thanks for reading, good night, sleep well.