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Wolf Dreams and Nightmares
Werewolves Talk
This piece is based on a presentation I did at Swancon, which was quite well attended for an 8pm panel but since a lot of people had other things to do at the time, I decided to put the notes, tidied up somewhat, on my LJ, plus other things I thought of since to make myself look intelligent. Writers do this all the time. It doesn’t matter if you have the brilliant idea 12 hours late if you are fitting it into text rather than conversation :-)
The program notes for the Swancon panel read:
Where the Wild Things Are
Werewolves and other shapeshifters may not have attracted the same cult following as vampires but they’re just as well-known. A look at the possible origins of the myth, its most recent incarnations and the reasons for its endurance.
My focus was the first part of that panel description; the origins of the myth in Europe, which gave rise to a lot of very bad and a couple of decent werewolf movies and also a changing selection of books. The oldest werewolf stories are pure horror: monsters attacking the virtuous. They changed as our worldview changed, into stories where werewolves are the victims, the heroes and sometimes the romantic interest. It became cool to be a wolf. Jack Nicholson found that out in his movie Wolf and the same theme happens in books such as Whitley Strieber’s The Wild and Saint Peter’s Wolf, where the characters turn to the world of the wolves and abandon the world of humans.
This is precisely what the medieval Roman Catholic Christian church did not want the people to do. It encouraged the belief in monsters of the night from which only prayer could save the faithful. If you were not one of the faithful, nothing could save you and you were possibly one of the monsters yourself. I would like to make the case that the werewolf myths were one of the weapons in the Church’s arsenal to ensure its control of the people.
There were wolves in Europe during the entirety of human settlement and the stories of shapeshifters existed alongside them. Shamans with the power to change into wolves. Norse berserkers. Shapeshifting gods. It took the Christian church to link shapeshifters with demonism and by the year 1270, wherever the Inquisition held power, it was illegal not to believe in werewolves, the servants of Satan. The centre of these beliefs was France, Germany and surrounding countries, including Britain which did not admit the Inquisition but did have its own werewolf myths which were often quite different to the bloodier myths of the rest of Europe. I believe the myth of families with a werewolf protector is unique to Britain. Here one member in each generation would have the ability to change into a wolf when the family was under threat.
Dr Sabine Baring-Gould wrote The Book of Werewolves in 1865 which is a very scholarly, very bloodthirsty text featuring lycanthropy in all its forms from ancient Greece to Rome to the Norse myths of beserkers and skinchangers. In one of the earliest werewolf stories, the god Zeus punishes King Lycaon of Arcadia for not showing respect to the gods – he served Zeus-in-disguise human flesh at a banquet – by changing Lycaon and his family into wolves.
One of the greatest taboos of humanity is that of eating human flesh and the horror of that act persists from the Greek myths where the gods regularly change themselves into wolves, cattle, swans, stags and anything else which took their fancy, through to the medieval stories of werewolves where the emphasis was on religion. There was much confusion between wolves, murderers, cannibals and people believed to be possessed by the Devil. In many of the trials held by the Inquisition, shapeshifting is not even a factor. Those under trial would admit, under rigorous questioning, to murdering people and eating their flesh but they would usually not say anything about changing their physical shape unless prompted.
In 1598 a French beggar was charged with lycanthropy. The prosecuting lawyer could have given lessons to the best Queen’s Counsels of our day. The accused is asked his name – Jacques Roulet – and his estate. Once Jacques admits that he is a beggar, the questions come like arrows.
“What are you accused of having done?”
“Of being a thief – of having offended God. My parents gave me an ointment; I do not know its composition.”
“When rubbed with this ointment do you become a wolf?”
“No but for all that, I killed and ate the child Cornier. I was a wolf.”
On and on, with the proposed confession clearly laid out before the witness, whose guilt is assumed.
Werewolves were a fact of life for many centuries in Europe. They were the embodiment of all that was terrifying about the night and they combined human intelligence and malice with the deadly strength of the most dangerous animal predator of the day. All that remains of that belief now are some cute sayings about wolves, such as saying you have to “keep the wolf from the door” when you’re worried about the rent. Outlaws were called wolf’s heads meaning anyone could kill them. Any threat to daily life was “the wolf.”
There were detailed guidelines on how a person might become a werewolf and these show the overriding power of religion over the people. Werewolves = demonic attack, being outside the faith, bad things will happen to you if you do not obey. Good Christian folk will not do such a thing as kill somebody and eat their flesh so if someone does, the Devil has got to him, he has been transformed into a monster. Wolves were not just wolves, they were the servants of the devil. The Catholic Church encouraged fear and hate of wolves and superstition about them as a way of producing real devils in the human world.
If a particular wolf seemed to show unusual bloodthirstiness and intelligence, there would be suspicion that he was in fact a werewolf. One wolf in 1450s France was believed to be a human sorcerer for this reason. During a severe winter and famine this wolf, who had only half a tail and was called Courtaud by the people, led his pack through the walls of Paris and supposedly killed at least forty people before the wolves were lured by bait and killed outside Notre Dame Cathedral. A mere animal could not do such a thing, therefore the Devil must be involved. The people could feel that they were doing something about their fear by prayer.
The European myths gave rise to the details of lycanthropy which most of the modern stories seem to follow. These are the signs by which you can know a werewolf in human shape:
Meeting eyebrows
Third finger longer than the second finger
Hair in a widow’s peak
Having a tail
Having hair in the centre of his palms
Being found with a certain injury after a wolf is given the exact same injury the night before
Being hairy on the inside
[When I mentioned this detail to an audience of junior fans at the ’99 Melbourne Worldcon, I was afraid it would be too gory but they only wanted to know exactly where on the inside the hair could be found…]
You ran the risk of becoming a werewolf if you were:
A bastard
One of seven daughters. [As a result, young men might be slow in seeking to marry one of seven sisters because they feared they might choose the werewolf.]
Born on Christmas Eve [ taking the perogative of Christ?]
Born to a family of werewolves. Greek legends, also a British tradition.
Other possible causes included:
Drinking water that had collected in wolf footprints.
Offending a sorcerer.
Wearing a girdle of human skin.
Applying ointments supplied to you by a witch
Being bitten by a werewolf.
Making a deal with the devil.
But never fear, you could be helped! These are some of the things a werewolf’s family and good friends could do if there was suspicion.
Burning his wolf skin when he is not in it
Slashing him across the forehead three times with a knife
Calling him by his full name three times when he’s in wolf shape
Exorcising him
Throwing an apron in his face
Stealing his clothes when he is a wolf.
Shooting him with a silver bullet.
The friends were supposed to do most of these while actually under attack by a wolf which could present a problem. Or you could give the Inquisition a call.
The basic fact of lycanthropy in medieval Europe was that it was against the law. Inquisitional law. The penalties were the same as for witchcraft, with which lycanthropy was closely allied. Yet then, as now, there were people who would willingly confess to horrific crimes for the attention it brought them. There was a pattern; they were usually accused of or caught committing cannibalism or murder and in the courtrooms of the Inquisition, would give details. Some were indeed prompted by torture but not always. Perhaps they knew they were doomed and determined to have their day in court anyway.
Being a werewolf might be the only power these peasants could ever have but they had picked the wrong subject to empower themselves before the courts of the Inquisition. It was primarily a charge brought against men as opposed to that of witchcraft, which was primarily though not exclusively aimed at women. I found no cases involving a female werewolf and they are few even among modern stories and books. Barry Holstun Lopez, author of Of Wolves And Men writes:
Werewolfry also gave the upper classes an excuse for a sort of general housecleaning of undesirables. The trial in the 1570s of a hermit named Giles Garnier, who lived in a cave outside Lyon, is a good example. A wolf had apparently killed some children in the area. Garnier was found one day scavenging a dead body in the woods to feed his family. In court, ignorant of his position at first, he was intimidated until he confessed to making a pact with the Devil and to six or seven grisly child murders. He was burned alive without further ado at Dole, near Lyon, on January 18, 1573.
One of my favourite and most ironic “werewolf” stories is that of the Beasts of Gevaudan, who terrorised villagers in France in the late 1700s. This is the only example of a pair of so-called werewolves, who killed some 64 people over three years. They were called werewolves because as with Courtaud, the people did not believe that an ordinary wolf could be so deadly and so cunning. All efforts to trap them failed, including by the military, until an aged hunter named Antoine de Bauterne did the job, using his lifetime knowledge of animals rather than the superstitions encouraged by religious authorities. The wolves were found to be huge and oddly coloured, with white markings, indicating that they were probably part domestic dog and as such, had little fear of humans.
This is also one of the latest stories I’ve read. Beyond this time, with the development of effective firearms, the threat of the wolf was gone and the werewolf with it.
The lycanthropy myths of medieval Europe are the stories which gave rise to the monster movies and books and much later, a complete turnaround where the werewolf is a spirit of the wild and even a subject of romance novels. It is no coincidence that the attitude towards the wolf has also undergone a complete turnaround, as the numbers of wild wolves in Europe dropped dramatically and they were in no way a threat to humanity. The power of the Church and the Inquisition also faded. It took a long time; from the first trials I’ve read about in the 1200s to the last convictions for lycanthropy which were probably in the 1600s. Baring-Gould writes of the Jean Grenier case in 1603 France, where a 14-year-old boy was charged with lycanthropy but had his sentence commuted to imprisonment at a friary:
The courts referred the whole matter of lycanthropy or animal transformation to its true and legitimate cause, an aberration of the brain . . .But it is very fearful to contemplate that there may still exist persons in the world filled with a morbid craving for human blood, which is ready to impel them to commit the most horrible atrocities, should they escape the vigilance of their guards or break the bars of the madhouse which restrains them.
References
Baring Gould, Dr Sabine. The Book of Werewolves [1865]
This edition Senate, an imprint of Studio Editions Ltd, London UK, 1995.
Lopez, Barry Holstun. Of Wolves and Men
Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York USA, 1978
Isle, Sue [yours truly] Wolf Children
Omnibus Books, South Australia, 1998
My book is available at Fantastic Planet, Perth WA
Examples of readable werewolf fiction include:
Blood and Chocolate – Annette Curtis Klause [Teen romance!]
Prince of Wolves – Susan Krinard
Nadya – Pat Murphy [A werewolf western]
The Dark Cry of the Moon – Charles L. Grant
Blood of the Wolf – Jeffrey Goddin
Saint Peter’s Wolf – Michael Cadnum
The Wild – Whitley Strieber
The Wolf’s Hour – Robert McCammon [Werewolf as WWII spy]
This piece is based on a presentation I did at Swancon, which was quite well attended for an 8pm panel but since a lot of people had other things to do at the time, I decided to put the notes, tidied up somewhat, on my LJ, plus other things I thought of since to make myself look intelligent. Writers do this all the time. It doesn’t matter if you have the brilliant idea 12 hours late if you are fitting it into text rather than conversation :-)
The program notes for the Swancon panel read:
Where the Wild Things Are
Werewolves and other shapeshifters may not have attracted the same cult following as vampires but they’re just as well-known. A look at the possible origins of the myth, its most recent incarnations and the reasons for its endurance.
My focus was the first part of that panel description; the origins of the myth in Europe, which gave rise to a lot of very bad and a couple of decent werewolf movies and also a changing selection of books. The oldest werewolf stories are pure horror: monsters attacking the virtuous. They changed as our worldview changed, into stories where werewolves are the victims, the heroes and sometimes the romantic interest. It became cool to be a wolf. Jack Nicholson found that out in his movie Wolf and the same theme happens in books such as Whitley Strieber’s The Wild and Saint Peter’s Wolf, where the characters turn to the world of the wolves and abandon the world of humans.
This is precisely what the medieval Roman Catholic Christian church did not want the people to do. It encouraged the belief in monsters of the night from which only prayer could save the faithful. If you were not one of the faithful, nothing could save you and you were possibly one of the monsters yourself. I would like to make the case that the werewolf myths were one of the weapons in the Church’s arsenal to ensure its control of the people.
There were wolves in Europe during the entirety of human settlement and the stories of shapeshifters existed alongside them. Shamans with the power to change into wolves. Norse berserkers. Shapeshifting gods. It took the Christian church to link shapeshifters with demonism and by the year 1270, wherever the Inquisition held power, it was illegal not to believe in werewolves, the servants of Satan. The centre of these beliefs was France, Germany and surrounding countries, including Britain which did not admit the Inquisition but did have its own werewolf myths which were often quite different to the bloodier myths of the rest of Europe. I believe the myth of families with a werewolf protector is unique to Britain. Here one member in each generation would have the ability to change into a wolf when the family was under threat.
Dr Sabine Baring-Gould wrote The Book of Werewolves in 1865 which is a very scholarly, very bloodthirsty text featuring lycanthropy in all its forms from ancient Greece to Rome to the Norse myths of beserkers and skinchangers. In one of the earliest werewolf stories, the god Zeus punishes King Lycaon of Arcadia for not showing respect to the gods – he served Zeus-in-disguise human flesh at a banquet – by changing Lycaon and his family into wolves.
One of the greatest taboos of humanity is that of eating human flesh and the horror of that act persists from the Greek myths where the gods regularly change themselves into wolves, cattle, swans, stags and anything else which took their fancy, through to the medieval stories of werewolves where the emphasis was on religion. There was much confusion between wolves, murderers, cannibals and people believed to be possessed by the Devil. In many of the trials held by the Inquisition, shapeshifting is not even a factor. Those under trial would admit, under rigorous questioning, to murdering people and eating their flesh but they would usually not say anything about changing their physical shape unless prompted.
In 1598 a French beggar was charged with lycanthropy. The prosecuting lawyer could have given lessons to the best Queen’s Counsels of our day. The accused is asked his name – Jacques Roulet – and his estate. Once Jacques admits that he is a beggar, the questions come like arrows.
“What are you accused of having done?”
“Of being a thief – of having offended God. My parents gave me an ointment; I do not know its composition.”
“When rubbed with this ointment do you become a wolf?”
“No but for all that, I killed and ate the child Cornier. I was a wolf.”
On and on, with the proposed confession clearly laid out before the witness, whose guilt is assumed.
Werewolves were a fact of life for many centuries in Europe. They were the embodiment of all that was terrifying about the night and they combined human intelligence and malice with the deadly strength of the most dangerous animal predator of the day. All that remains of that belief now are some cute sayings about wolves, such as saying you have to “keep the wolf from the door” when you’re worried about the rent. Outlaws were called wolf’s heads meaning anyone could kill them. Any threat to daily life was “the wolf.”
There were detailed guidelines on how a person might become a werewolf and these show the overriding power of religion over the people. Werewolves = demonic attack, being outside the faith, bad things will happen to you if you do not obey. Good Christian folk will not do such a thing as kill somebody and eat their flesh so if someone does, the Devil has got to him, he has been transformed into a monster. Wolves were not just wolves, they were the servants of the devil. The Catholic Church encouraged fear and hate of wolves and superstition about them as a way of producing real devils in the human world.
If a particular wolf seemed to show unusual bloodthirstiness and intelligence, there would be suspicion that he was in fact a werewolf. One wolf in 1450s France was believed to be a human sorcerer for this reason. During a severe winter and famine this wolf, who had only half a tail and was called Courtaud by the people, led his pack through the walls of Paris and supposedly killed at least forty people before the wolves were lured by bait and killed outside Notre Dame Cathedral. A mere animal could not do such a thing, therefore the Devil must be involved. The people could feel that they were doing something about their fear by prayer.
The European myths gave rise to the details of lycanthropy which most of the modern stories seem to follow. These are the signs by which you can know a werewolf in human shape:
Meeting eyebrows
Third finger longer than the second finger
Hair in a widow’s peak
Having a tail
Having hair in the centre of his palms
Being found with a certain injury after a wolf is given the exact same injury the night before
Being hairy on the inside
[When I mentioned this detail to an audience of junior fans at the ’99 Melbourne Worldcon, I was afraid it would be too gory but they only wanted to know exactly where on the inside the hair could be found…]
You ran the risk of becoming a werewolf if you were:
A bastard
One of seven daughters. [As a result, young men might be slow in seeking to marry one of seven sisters because they feared they might choose the werewolf.]
Born on Christmas Eve [ taking the perogative of Christ?]
Born to a family of werewolves. Greek legends, also a British tradition.
Other possible causes included:
Drinking water that had collected in wolf footprints.
Offending a sorcerer.
Wearing a girdle of human skin.
Applying ointments supplied to you by a witch
Being bitten by a werewolf.
Making a deal with the devil.
But never fear, you could be helped! These are some of the things a werewolf’s family and good friends could do if there was suspicion.
Burning his wolf skin when he is not in it
Slashing him across the forehead three times with a knife
Calling him by his full name three times when he’s in wolf shape
Exorcising him
Throwing an apron in his face
Stealing his clothes when he is a wolf.
Shooting him with a silver bullet.
The friends were supposed to do most of these while actually under attack by a wolf which could present a problem. Or you could give the Inquisition a call.
The basic fact of lycanthropy in medieval Europe was that it was against the law. Inquisitional law. The penalties were the same as for witchcraft, with which lycanthropy was closely allied. Yet then, as now, there were people who would willingly confess to horrific crimes for the attention it brought them. There was a pattern; they were usually accused of or caught committing cannibalism or murder and in the courtrooms of the Inquisition, would give details. Some were indeed prompted by torture but not always. Perhaps they knew they were doomed and determined to have their day in court anyway.
Being a werewolf might be the only power these peasants could ever have but they had picked the wrong subject to empower themselves before the courts of the Inquisition. It was primarily a charge brought against men as opposed to that of witchcraft, which was primarily though not exclusively aimed at women. I found no cases involving a female werewolf and they are few even among modern stories and books. Barry Holstun Lopez, author of Of Wolves And Men writes:
Werewolfry also gave the upper classes an excuse for a sort of general housecleaning of undesirables. The trial in the 1570s of a hermit named Giles Garnier, who lived in a cave outside Lyon, is a good example. A wolf had apparently killed some children in the area. Garnier was found one day scavenging a dead body in the woods to feed his family. In court, ignorant of his position at first, he was intimidated until he confessed to making a pact with the Devil and to six or seven grisly child murders. He was burned alive without further ado at Dole, near Lyon, on January 18, 1573.
One of my favourite and most ironic “werewolf” stories is that of the Beasts of Gevaudan, who terrorised villagers in France in the late 1700s. This is the only example of a pair of so-called werewolves, who killed some 64 people over three years. They were called werewolves because as with Courtaud, the people did not believe that an ordinary wolf could be so deadly and so cunning. All efforts to trap them failed, including by the military, until an aged hunter named Antoine de Bauterne did the job, using his lifetime knowledge of animals rather than the superstitions encouraged by religious authorities. The wolves were found to be huge and oddly coloured, with white markings, indicating that they were probably part domestic dog and as such, had little fear of humans.
This is also one of the latest stories I’ve read. Beyond this time, with the development of effective firearms, the threat of the wolf was gone and the werewolf with it.
The lycanthropy myths of medieval Europe are the stories which gave rise to the monster movies and books and much later, a complete turnaround where the werewolf is a spirit of the wild and even a subject of romance novels. It is no coincidence that the attitude towards the wolf has also undergone a complete turnaround, as the numbers of wild wolves in Europe dropped dramatically and they were in no way a threat to humanity. The power of the Church and the Inquisition also faded. It took a long time; from the first trials I’ve read about in the 1200s to the last convictions for lycanthropy which were probably in the 1600s. Baring-Gould writes of the Jean Grenier case in 1603 France, where a 14-year-old boy was charged with lycanthropy but had his sentence commuted to imprisonment at a friary:
The courts referred the whole matter of lycanthropy or animal transformation to its true and legitimate cause, an aberration of the brain . . .But it is very fearful to contemplate that there may still exist persons in the world filled with a morbid craving for human blood, which is ready to impel them to commit the most horrible atrocities, should they escape the vigilance of their guards or break the bars of the madhouse which restrains them.
References
Baring Gould, Dr Sabine. The Book of Werewolves [1865]
This edition Senate, an imprint of Studio Editions Ltd, London UK, 1995.
Lopez, Barry Holstun. Of Wolves and Men
Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York USA, 1978
Isle, Sue [yours truly] Wolf Children
Omnibus Books, South Australia, 1998
My book is available at Fantastic Planet, Perth WA
Examples of readable werewolf fiction include:
Blood and Chocolate – Annette Curtis Klause [Teen romance!]
Prince of Wolves – Susan Krinard
Nadya – Pat Murphy [A werewolf western]
The Dark Cry of the Moon – Charles L. Grant
Blood of the Wolf – Jeffrey Goddin
Saint Peter’s Wolf – Michael Cadnum
The Wild – Whitley Strieber
The Wolf’s Hour – Robert McCammon [Werewolf as WWII spy]
no subject
very interesting read. and i was very happy to see of wolves and men in there. it's on of my favorite books.
no subject
You have a fascinating interests list; must have a look at some of those things. I have peripheral interests in things Japanese, I guess you'd say; don't speak the language and am definitely not an anime fan but I appreciate the gardens, esp bonsai, very much and also the old-style designs in houses, futons, mats, paper walls and so on.
Thanks again
Ratfan
no subject
it is a hard book. it's one of that (large) class of books that makes me want to live in pre-columbian america.