I was hoping to post this for Halloween, but I have just been too busy to write. I’m considering a biweekly posting schedule versus my current weekly schedule, as I am just too swamped at the moment to keep up. So, here is my belated, somewhat rushed, Halloween-themed post ;-) This is in no way a comprehensive discussion of ancient werewolf origins or lore, nor are these examples all-inclusive. While this subject interests me, it’s not something I’ve devoted much energy to. Maybe someday…. While researching my fictional series, I’ve come across quite a bit about the weird and wild history of werewolves and I thought I’d pass some of it along. Hope you enjoy!
Also, I was recently honored to be interviewed by Winston Malone over at The Storyletter. Winston’s interviews are always thoughtful, personal, and a lot of fun—I’m flattered to be among them! Check it out if you’re interested.
Moeris himself gave me these herbs and poisons
gathered from Pontus (many grow there in Pontus),
I’ve often seen Moeris, with these, change to a wolf and hide
in the woods, often call ghosts from the depths of the grave,
and draw sown corn into other men’s fields.
-Virgil, Eclogues, 8.75 - ca. 38 BCE
Most of us know werewolves as the lycanthropic monsters of literature and film. They are humans cursed or compelled to transform at some appointed time, like under the full moon, sometimes against their will, into the form of a wolf. In this likeness (unless the story is a comedy), they commit savage atrocities and, like vampires, can often only be subdued by specific means: an incantation, a silver bullet, disposing of their corpse in just the right way.
This type of werewolf lore has deep roots but is essentially a product of the medieval Christian period, which saw an effort to demonize any remnants of the older heathen religious traditions, linking them with witchcraft and other supposedly satanic practices. I don’t think we need to rehash the witchcraft panics across Europe at various periods which mainly targeted women. The werewolf phenomenon was a smaller-scale version that mainly targeted men, though there were apparently also female werewolves.
However, the remarkable thing about some werewolf cases is that many of the accused were indeed werewolves, just not of the variety imagined in the demon-haunted fever dreams of their inquisitors and judges. Werewolves were neither the discovery nor the invention of the Middle Ages or Christianity, but are a legacy of a far more ancient religious past.
Werewolf? There wolf!
Two forms predominate among the terms used for the general concept of “werewolf” across the Indo-European (IE) world. On the one hand, “wolf-man” is a frequent designation for the being who takes on the identity or characteristics of a wolf:
The Modern English werewolf descends from the Old English werewulf, which is a cognate (linguistic sibling of the same origin) of Middle Dutch weerwolf, Middle Low German werwulf, Middle High German werwolf, and West Frisian waer-ûl(e). These terms are generally derived from a Proto-Germanic form reconstructed as *wira-wulfaz (‘man-wolf’), itself from an earlier Pre-Germanic form *wiro-wulpos. (Wikipedia)
However, one frequently encounters, in both literature and as personal names, terms for one who dresses in a wolf skin or coat:
An alternative reconstruction, *wazi-wulfaz (‘wolf-clothed’), would bring the Germanic compound closer to the Slavic meaning, with other semantic parallels in Old Norse úlfheðnar (‘wolf-skinned’) and úlfheðinn (‘wolf-coat’), Old Irish luchthonn (‘wolf-skin’), and Sanskrit Vṛkājina (‘Wolf-skin’). (Wikipedia)
This, of course, calls to mind the alleged etymology for “berserkr” (bear-shirt) and, by association, the one who wears it. Though I have some problems with this etymology that I won’t get into here, the same concept applies, and in the sagas, úlfheðinn/úlfhéðnar and berserkr/berserkir are used almost interchangeably. In other words, in the IE mind, the werewolf, the “man-wolf,” was a man in wolf’s clothing.
Why the wolfskin masquerade?
When we meet whole nations whose names are a form of ‘wolf’ or are derived from ‘wolf,’ or from another of the wolf-god’s animals, or from one of his cult names, this could very well be a sign that, as Eliade suggested in the case of the Dacians, the nation grew out of the wolf-warrior band which had successfully established itself as an independent unit. (Gershenson 173)
When we speak about anything “Indo-European,” we are talking specifically about the widespread linguistic and cultural diffusion that originated from a hypothetical Proto-Indo-European (PIE) cultural center. As with so many linguistic, conceptual, and cultural artifacts that persisted in the resulting cultures, a deep reverence for the wolf as a totem animal appears to have been almost universal across these cultures, from India to Ireland, from ancient Rome to Viking Scandinavia. This is especially true regarding the wolf’s central role in the rites of passage preparing boys and young men (kóryos) to become respected members of their societies through compulsory service in specialized military fraternities.
Eliade wrote that ‘the essential part of the military initiation consisted in ritually transforming the young warrior into some species of predatory wild animal.’ This is not only a question of assimilating the animal’s fearsomeness and fearlessness, its strength and endurance; it is ‘a magic-religious experience that radically changed the young warrior’s mode of being. He had to transmute his humanity by an access of aggressive and terrifying fury that made him like a raging carnivore.’ (Kershaw 118)
Identification of warriors with wolves may be as simple as wanting to relate to, mimic, or be associated with a ferocious and terrifying predator. However, the wolf represents an even deeper ancestral connection among IE peoples. When young warriors donned a wolf hide, they embodied the spirit of their ancestors and tapped into the forces of creation and destruction themselves.
Scholars will happily catalog, study, and even praise the totemism and ancestor worship of non-European cultures as somehow uniquely deep, meaningful, and in touch with the natural world, but will often have a blind spot when it comes to acknowledging such practices among pre-modern Europeans, even to the point of denying their existence. Yet, early IE peoples seem to have been deeply sensitive to the natural world, were attuned to their environment, and had a close affinity with animals, wild and domestic. Other animals were important, but among bands of young warriors, the wolf was preeminent.
Wolf-gods, warbands, and wizards
One of Apollo’s chief functions was as leader of bands of young Greek warriors, called ephéboi. The young warriors would eventually become the pillars of Greek society responsible for upholding and defending its values. According to Gershenson, “the ephebes, like so many other associations of young and old in the Indo-European linguistic sphere, have been shown to be identical to the werewolves.”
Typically, these young warriors-in-training would use their time separated from society in the wilderness to hunt, raid cattle, and steal other moveable goods from neighboring tribes as rites of passage into adulthood, wherein they would begin to hone their martial and survival skills and establish their reputations. In the off-season, they would continue their studies, which consisted of things like reciting and composing poetic verses containing the genealogies and epic traditions of their tribe.
However, this wasn’t strictly a pastime for the men. A later historical account from a confessed werewolf called Thiess informs us that women could be werewolves. And like Apollo Lykeios, Artemis had an epithet, “Lykeia.” There is even evidence in Greek myth of a possible female werewolf:
Vergil tells of the armored Thrakian maiden Harpalyce who could outrun steeds and the current of the swift river Hebrus (or, according to Ribbeck’s emanation of the passage, Eurus, the east wind). This Harpalyce was the daughter of Harpalycus, the king of the otherwise unknown Thrakian tribe of the Amymonii, or the Amymaei. The same sources go on the tell that her father fed her on the milk of cows, mares, and wild beasts, and trained her in masculine pursuits after she was orphaned of her mother. When he was murdered by his subjects in revenge for the severity with which he had ruled them she took to the forest in her grief and led the life of a hunter and a brigand, until the farmers set their nets for her, caught her like a beast of prey and put her to death. (Gershenson 74)
Harpalyce’s name, a feminine version of her father’s name, signifies a thief and she-wolf, the fierce things her father raised her to be, determined to make her his heir. Was this swift huntress and raider a “werewolf” in the manner we have been describing—an initiate in an ancient tradition based upon a belief in kinship with the wolf?
She would not be the first, as across Eurasia and in numerous accounts by ancient authors, descriptions of wolfish humans are surprisingly common, like this one from Herodotus:
The Neuroi [Neuri/Navari] practise the Scythian customs: and one generation before the expedition of Dareios it so befell them that they were forced to quit their land altogether by reason of serpents: for their land produced serpents in vast numbers, and they fell upon them in still larger numbers from the desert country above their borders; until at last being hard pressed they left their own land and settled among the Budinoi. These men it would seem are wizards [goêtes]; for it is said of them by the Scythians and by the Hellenes who are settled in the Scythian land that once in every year each of the Neuroi becomes a wolf for a few days and then returns again to his original form. For my part I do not believe them when they say this, but they say it nevertheless, and swear it moreover. (Herodotus, 4.105)
Herodotus is rightly credulous that humans literally become wolves a few nights a year. But what he’s reporting appears to be some ritual enactment or lycanthropic masquerade whose ends are not revealed. Because he claims that each member of the group makes the transformation, it’s possible both men and women participate, unless “Neuri” is a designation for one of these wolf-warrior bands.
What’s more, he suggests that these Neuri werewolves are wizards or magicians. Arcane ritual, divination, ecstasy, and magic will figure prominently in conjunction with these man-wolf transformations. For instance, Pliny the Elder relates with disbelief a ritual in which a particular family casts lots to choose individuals who will go into a marsh and, upon hanging up their clothes on an oak tree and swimming across the waters, be transformed into a wolf:
We are bound to pronounce with confidence that the story of men being turned into wolves and restored to themselves again is false — or else we must believe all the tales that the experience of so many centuries has taught us to be fabulous; nevertheless we will indicate the origin of the popular belief, which is so firmly rooted that it classes werewolves among persons under a curse. Evanthes, who holds no contemptible position among the authors of Greece, writes that the Arcadians have a tradition that someone chosen out of the clan of a certain Anthus by casting lots among the family is taken to a certain marsh in that region, and hanging his clothes on an oak-tree swims across the water and goes away into a desolate place and is transformed into a wolf and herds with the others of the same kind for nine years; and that if in that period he has refrained from touching a human being, he returns to the same marsh, swims across it and recovers his shape, with nine years’ age added to his former appearance; Evanthes also adds the more fabulous detail that he gets back the same clothes. (Pliny the Elder, Natural History 1-11, 8.34.1)
This has all the hallmarks of a sanitized rite of passage, a ritual in which a young initiate sets aside the vestiges (and vestments) of his human life and form, traverses some literal or symbolic boundary into a liminal realm (marsh), and effects a transformation into a new role and (otherworldly) phase of existence. That his stay in this new form or role is nine years is curious, as the number nine crops up repeatedly in IE settings as it consists of the sacred number three multiplied by itself and therefore seems to hold special significance.
After completing his service (which the squeamish Greeks rationalized as a punishment and probation), the initiate is ready to enter society for the first time as a man and take his place, which is achieved by traversing the marsh once again and reclaiming his human clothes.
This more explicit account of the fate of werewolves is read as refracting a rite of passage in which Arcadian youths were relegated to the territorial borders to patrol them, in an institution parallel to that of the Spartan krypteria and the Athenian ephêbeia. The myth of Dolon, who goes spying by night in a wolf-skin (Homer Iliad 10 and Pseudo-Euripides Rhesus), is also thought to reflect such an institution. (Ogden 178)
But to what end? The magical transformation of the werewolf, the raiding of grain and stock performed by these warriors, and the embodiment of ancestral spirits they claimed to perform had to serve some larger purpose. Was it simply a way to magnify the violence the men could achieve? Or was there something more at stake in these rituals?
Ghost stories
As for the other tribes, the Harii not only exceed those mentioned in strength but are innately fierce, enhancing their ferocity with art and timing: blackening their shields and dyeing their bodies, they choose dark nights for battle, and awful in the shadows, a deathly army, they bring terror, a novel and hellish vision no enemy dare face, for in every battle defeat first enters through the eyes. —Tacitus
It is no coincidence that across the spectrum of ancient IE cultures, there is a remarkable similarity among the patron gods of warrior confraternities like Apollo, Odin, and Rudra. They usually embody one or more seemingly contradictory traits like an association with storms and fertility, status as hunters and protectors of animals, plague and healing, battle-fury and reason, destruction and creativity.
Far from monsters, the wolf-warriors were heroes and mystic figures with a sacred role in their societies. One of the less apparent elements of the werewolf cult is its connection to ancestor worship. However, if one allows that the wolf was a kind of totem animal for these tribes and served as a link between living warriors, the god who was patron of the warband, and spirits of the ancestors, a connection begins to come into focus.
One place such ancestor worship was on full display was during the many diverse traditions known as “wild hunts,” carnivals of the dead usually celebrated around the winter solstice and probably arising from the same source as Halloween. Although they have been reduced to purely supernatural folk memories, scholars like Kershaw and Gershenson have suggested they were originally enacted by warrior troops in costume:
Thus there exists a middle term in Germanic tradition (and elsewhere as well) connecting the idea of death with the wolf figure. The term is ‘wütender Heer,” the ‘raging army, or the wilder Jagd, the ‘wild hunt, a social phenomenon known from all over Northern Europe, and elsewhere, and called in England “the devil and his pack of Yeth-hounds,” the Devil and his Dandy Dogs,’ or ‘the Gabriel Ratchets.’… Moreover, no doubt ‘Hell’ and ‘the devil’ find their place in the names given to these groups because the participants in the ‘hunt’ represent the dead, and the members of the wütender Heer act out the part, or assume the very nature, of spirits of their ancestors who have passed on to the other world. (Gershenson 115)
The ancestors were thought to care for and take an active interest in the well-being of their descendants, to whom they bequeathed the present world. They would bestow blessings and fertility on home, herd, and crop if they were honored adequately with remembrances and sacrifices (and withhold benefits if they were dissatisfied). Part of these rites seem to have included allowing the ancestors to embody the young wolf-warrior—to live in him for a time.
During the “hunt,” the dead would consume sacrifices (beer, food, treats) left for them by the living via the young costumed warriors who rampaged through villages glutting themselves on offerings. In return for these gifts, the ancestral spirits who controlled the land were meant to ensure good harvests the following year.
This is why the Hunt was believed propitious, and why people welcomed it despite the chaos and even danger that came with it, an attitude that persisted long after religious practice had become mere folk custom…. The *koryos brings increase for the same reason it brings order: because it makes the Ancestors present among their people. (Kershaw 34)
It also provided the youths with a personal investment in their heritage and the continuation of their society’s values and traditions. It’s easy to see why they were such a powerful force across so many cultures for so long. The wolf confraternities certainly had their rowdy but positive aspects; however, they also seem to have engaged in far darker rites. Many of the Greek myths surrounding lycanthropy involve human sacrifice.
The Greeks were among the first in the ancient world to renounce human sacrifice (though they have some explaining to do regarding Maenads and Dionysian rites), and as part of this newfound moral framework, they reinterpreted the werewolf’s condition as curse—punishment for the crime of sacrificing a human or engaging in cannibalism. The human’s reentry into society was contingent upon his ability to abstain from further depredations for a predetermined period (e.g., as outlined in Pliny) after which the guilty party could be released from his curse and allowed back into human form and society.
All of this suggests that the initiatory rites or practices of the early ephebes or similar groups once contained elements of sacrifice or even cannibalism, which were later abolished.
Ecstasy was attained through emotional frenzy generated by the terrible rites themselves. Later, animal victims were substituted for human, and the inebriating drink gained in importance. Finally the drink itself became the divine ambrosia which allowed men to escape death and become as gods. As part of this process ‘the wolf-god and his faithful lost their animal nature and kept only the human form.’ (Kershaw 104)
But, in the case of the Greek tradition, the damage to the werewolf reputation may have already been dealt a fatal blow. Where once transgressive—but nearly universal—acts like human sacrifice and perhaps even cannibalism might have been part of a dark and complicated ritual landscape alongside the wolf-warrior cults, now all are made taboo. The nine-year period in the wilderness from puberty to adulthood that young initiates might have celebrated with honor is recast as punishment. And introduction into society is described not in terms of welcoming a fully-fledged citizen but of forgiving a fallen one. The Greek myths preserve hints of the old tradition but also the seeds of its demise. So many salacious stories involve murder, cannibalism, and sex crimes that it’s difficult to weed out which are actual occurrences and which are trumped-up charges.
It is fascinating to think that there was a time when young men, in preparation for the harsh rigors of a life defending their tribe, their families, and the valuable resources of all, would have been subjected to years of almost unimaginable trials and hardship to forge them into adults and make them worthy members of their tribes. In a world as immature, irresponsible, and coddled as ours, such a thing can only seem monstrous.
Enemies are enemies, whether seen or unseen. But the sodalities… which guard against enemies seen and unseen and further the prosperity of the tribe are cultic brotherhoods which are one with, and represent, the immortal ancestors; it is because—ritually, sacrally—they are the Ancestors, that they are able to protect the tribe from all enemies and bring great blessings to home and flock and field. (Kershaw 93)
What makes the wolf so special?
Our hypothesis is that ‘wolf’ is a name for the wind, and hence for a complex of ideas that played an important role in the ideology of werewolves, such as are attested by Philostephanos at Athens. This complex of ideas involves the supposed influence of the wind. That influence was perceived as an arcane extra-terrestrial force, manifesting itself as breath, which emanates from the earth and is also found hidden inside the human body. This force was thought to originate and sustain life and growth, as well as being responsible for blocking and annihilating life and growth; the same force reveals and conceals, and so brings to light those who recognize the relationship between the manifest and the hidden and those who do not. The prophetic role of Apollo is therefore not foreign to his wolf-name. (Gershenson 24)
According to Gershenson’s hypothesis (or my interpretation), the wolf was inextricably linked to the indefinable spiritual qualities essential to the wind. Not strictly the weather phenomenon, but breath, the animating principle that gives life to all things. Wind was believed to emanate from caves in the earth, from within the body, etc., and the howling of wolves, akin to the howling of winds, gave it voice. The gods of winds and storms became the keepers of this potent, tempestuous, life-giving force. Wolves, who lived in dens beneath the earth where the winds were born, had a connection with its otherworldly source. Life and death for animals and plants relied on this wind-breath. Arbiter of life and death, the wolf was known as “the strangler,” a servant of this divine will.
It’s appealing to see a wolf-warrior-magician attempting to embody or incarnate and control some of that capricious power of life and death. The wolf represented an elemental force, a totem animal, an ancestral being, a life-giving and life-taking power, and more:
The wolf, like the wind, is a messenger from outside, from the chaotic world, to the world of order. Eliade gives these two realms other names as well, and using his terminology we may term the wolf a messenger between the “sacred” and the “profane,” in many cases, although far from universally. (Gershenson 7)
Historical Werewolf
As with other ancient practices, the advent of Christianity meant that old heathen religious beliefs and practices had to be abandoned, driven underground, or rebranded as either Good or Evil in the new religion. The warrior-shaman traditions of the past in which men (and worse, women!) sometimes gave themselves over to ecstatic frenzies in the wilderness, engaged in violence and theft, envisioned themselves shapeshifting into animal forms, and communing with the spirits of dead ancestors in hopes of promoting fertility were not likely to win champions among churchgoers. Those who wanted to drive the final nail in the coffin of the heathens no doubt found much fodder in the werewolf cults to link with their brand of devilry.
However, a fascinating case helps illustrate the historical and religious basis for belief in the werewolf as more than a mere monster who stalked the countryside in folklore and fantasy. Old Thiess was an openly confessed werewolf from Livonia in the Baltic region. Although his story is quite convoluted, essentially, the 80-year-old arrives in court for different reasons and decides to confess, after years of rumors, to being a werewolf, despite the danger this posed to him. He described in sometimes contradictory detail the responsibilities of being a werewolf, and his tale shocks the judges for what it denies.
He claims he and his werewolf brethren have never been the servants of Satan but of God and that on three holidays a year, they transform by donning wolfskins. They then descend to hell not to conspire with demonic forces but to battle them and defend the community’s grain supply and the fertility of the crops.
The werewolves did not serve the Devil, but rather carried off what the sorcerer brought him. This was the reason the Devil was so hostile towards them that he could not bear them, but had them driven out with iron whips like dogs; for they were the hounds of God, but the sorcerers served the Devil and followed his will in all things, so that their souls belonged to him as well. Everything the werewolves did was for the benefit of mankind; for if they were not there to rob or steal the stolen blessing back again, all blessings would be gone from the world. He affirmed this under oath, adding that last year the Russian werewolves had come first and carried off their country’s blessing, which is why they had a good harvest in their country, something we lack in this country because on this side they came too late, as we said. But this year they got there before the Russians and it would be a good year, for flax too. Why then shouldn’t God take his soul even though he did not go to church or partake of Mass? He had never been taken or taught to go when he was a child, but otherwise he had not done anything wrong either.” —From the trial transcripts of Old Thiess (Gershenson 137)
In addition to these magical battles, some physical altercations occurred, as Thiess had his nose broken by a sorcerer’s broomstick. He also implies that, in a contest for seed with Russian werewolves, his band was victorious, and the year’s harvest would be good because of it. The werewolves also occasionally killed and ate livestock while out and about defending the land. Based on his testimony, the judges sentenced the old man to be flogged and banished.
Some scholars, such as Carlo Ginzburg, have suggested that werewolves like Thiess were engaging in spiritual combat as shamans, battling metaphorically with supernatural and cosmic forces of chaos rather than fighting physical battles with human enemies. It’s an intriguing hypothesis, though there is also clearly a material element to their activities. Thiess in no way views his role as being directed by demonic forces, and he thoroughly believes himself to be on the side of the angels. He’s trying to help his community and perhaps even effect an outcome others are incapable of supplying. He seems to see himself as a spiritual warrior.
The clothes make the man
Recalling that one of the main designations for “werewolf” refers to wearing a wolf-coat, as do the úlfhéðnar. Part of the magic seems bound up in the clothing itself—in the wolfskin, of course, but in human clothing. Removing ones clothing and replacing it with the hide of a wolf becomes a recurring theme in the stories of werewolf transformations—and vice versa. This may be linked to the custom common among many of these cultures, attested by ancient writers, for warriors to go into battle essentially naked. Allowance is sometimes made for a helmet, belt, ring, body paint, or some other ornamentation like animal skins that aid in identification with one’s tribe, deity, or ancestors. But many warriors seemingly eschewed armor and entrusted their fates to their prowess, and the spiritual forces they believed protected and possessed them.
Several ancient and medieval folktales seem to revolve around the werewolf divesting himself of the superficial trappings of human culture—his clothes—and entering into a state of nature in the wilderness. Pliny’s werewolves hung their clothes on the oak tree before swimming across the marsh and could retrieve them and rejoin society only after nine years in wolf form. The following story related by Petronius is narrated by a freed slave who, after a night out, is horrified to discover his friend is a werewolf:
I seized my opportunity, and persuaded a guest in our house to come with me as far as the fifth milestone. He was a soldier, and as brave as Hell. So we trotted off about cockcrow; the moon shone like high noon. We got among the tombstones: my man went aside to look at the epitaphs, I sat down with my heart full of song and began to count the graves. Then when I looked round at my friend, he stripped himself and put all his clothes by the roadside. My heart was in my mouth, but I stood like a dead man. He made a ring of water round his clothes and suddenly turned into a wolf. Please do not think I am joking; I would not lie about this for any fortune in the world. But as I was saying, after he had turned into a wolf, he began to howl, and ran off into the woods. At first I hardly knew where I was, then I went up to take his clothes; but they had all turned into stone. (Petronius, 62)
The setting of a graveyard is interesting for its connection to the dead, and here we have an early example of the full moon, if not inducing the transformation, at least playing a role. A warrior again sets aside the trappings of his human life—his clothes—and in this case, pees a sort of magic circle around them with the power to turn them to stone, probably to protect them so he can later reclaim his human form.
And there is the 12th c. lay “Bisclavret,” about a knight in Arthur’s court who confesses to his horrified wife that he is a werewolf and is betrayed by her when she steals his clothes as he prowls the woods in wolf form, leaving him trapped in his wolfish state and unable to transform back into a knight as she runs off with another man. A related lay, Melion, has a similar premise. It is a motif that recurs throughout the werewolf literature.
This divestment has shamanic connotations, and there is good reason to believe that these warriors, either by circumstance or design, existed in or accessed an altered state of consciousness through their lifestyle and rituals. But also, on a psychological level, it suggests that, without the thin façade of culture, we might all be beasts beneath. Strip away the mask of society, and animal nature is not far below the surface, waiting to be set free. The clothes do indeed make the man.
Conclusion
Certain patterns emerge in nearly all of these stories that link them with the oldest rites of the wolf-warriors of the hypothetical koryos of the ancient Proto-Indo-European people. To effect the transformation from man to wolf-man, one had to strip himself of human clothing, put on some form of wolf-skin garment, and cross the boundary from the orderly—but profane—inhabited realm into the chaotic—but sacred—wilderness where he was free to hunt or fight as the circumstances dictated under the protection of his patron deity. He could only return to his human form by removing his wolfskin and dressing again in his original clothing—in a way, putting on his human skin—which appears to symbolize the stability of society and the social status of the individual within that order, both of which might be shed when the naked wolf-man enters the wilderness as a mystic warrior.
In the beginning, the werewolf was a heroic figure filled with spiritual significance—part of an ancient, honored tradition based upon a belief in spiritual kinship with the wolf. Over time, the tradition seems to have lost some of its relevance until, in the Christian era, it became associated with satanic practices and persecuted.
The members of these werewolf brotherhoods likely did not commit the atrocities they were accused of (or were tortured into confessing) to justify the horrific punishments set out for them. Like so many accused and tortured witches, it’s very likely they were scapegoats and served as examples and warnings to anyone who might have considered transgressing or challenging the new religious authority and order of the day. That message was received because the ancient werewolf societies, already driven underground, apparently died out and have been lost to history. These are some of the last remaining accounts of their faded existence.
It’s no surprise that the last vestiges of a society of warrior-mystics whose totem was the wolf and whose purpose was no less than a cosmic battle with the very forces of life and death for the preservation, health, and fertility of livestock and crops, would run afoul of church authorities. The two philosophies could never coexist, and the more ruthless faction was bound to complete its conquest. Ironic that it wasn’t the wild wolf-warriors who proved most merciless in the end.
The wolf-bands and their reason for being would gradually succumb, victim to the persecution that drove them underground and finally smashed the last frail relics of an ancient tradition, leaving a parody of their once heroic heritage in its wake. Now, only B movie reels and Halloween costumes pay tribute to their once-hallowed legacy.
Do you have a favorite pop culture or fictional werewolf?
Gershenson, Daniel E. Apollo The Wolf-god. Institute for the Study of Man, 1991.
Ginsburg, Carlo; Lincoln, Bruce; Höfler, Otto. Old Thiess, a Livonian werewolf: a classic case in comparative perspective. University of Chicago Press, 2020.
Herodotus. The Histories, translated by George Campbell Macaulay (1852-1915), from the 1890 Macmillan edition now in the public domain.
Kershaw, Kris. The One-eyed God: Odin and the (Indo-)Germanic Männerbünde. Institute for the Study of Man, 2000.
Ogden, Daniel. Magic, witchcraft, and ghosts in the Greek and Roman worlds: a sourcebook. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Petronius, Satyricon, The Satyricon Of Titus Petronius Arbiter, translated by Michael Heseltine. London. William Heinemann. 1913. A text in the public domain.
Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, Books 1-11, translated by Henry T. Riley (1816-1878) and John Bostock (1773-1846), first published 1855.
Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Germania, translated by A.S. Kline, 2015
Virgil. The Eclogues, translated by A.S. Kline, 2001.
I really enjoyed this, JM! A lot to unpack here. I'll reread.
Very interesting read. The Wolfman is probably one of my favorite monsters. I recently read the 2010 novelization of the film by the same name featuring Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins. It was okay, very gory. I hadn’t read too much lore behind werewolves so this was really eye-opening. It’s still spooky season 👻