The End of Edward II, Part One: The Iron Virago

In September of 1327, the anointed King of England, Edward II, son of the great Edward Longshanks, Hammer of the Scots, had been languishing in prison for the better part of a year after his wife, Queen Isabella, and her counselor, Roger Mortimer, seized power, forcing him to abdicate to his son, Edward III. Then, he turned up dead, with no apparent mark of physical harm on his royal person. Strangely, rather than sending for the royal physician, a commoner was secretly engaged to disembowel and embalm the deposed king. News of Edward II’s death reached Queen Isabella and soon was spread, calling it a fatal accident, suggesting a fall had killed him. Strangely, many months later, after the embalmed corpse had been entombed, records show that the Queen had the local wise woman who had embalmed her late husband brought to her for a private discussion. Just what information passed between them is lost to time, but years later, it became clear that Edward II’s end was far more mysterious than was at first believed.

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In this edition, we look at the figure of Edward II, remembered by many a historian as a failure, especially as seen beside the imposing figure cut by his father, the warrior monarch Edward I. Edward Longshanks ruled with an eye to a unified kingdom, conquering Wales and keeping it under his thumb through the power of his barons, established in castles across these borderlands. He tried to do the same to Scotland, but was frustrated by the defiance of such famous figures was William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. Not only a fighter but a statesman as well, historians credit Edward I with developing a parliament with genuine power, whom he consulted on financial matters and to ensure that his rule was looked on as wise by all. Little did Edward Longshanks realize that these institutions, a politically powerful baronage and parliament as well as the queen whose marriage to his son he himself had arranged, would eventually exert their power to depose his heir. And he could not possibly have anticipated the mystery that would surround Edward II’s fate.

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Even if he couldn’t have predicted the fate of his son, Edward I may have harbored some doubts about the boy’s fitness to rule. While he labored in his wars against Scotland, his son grew up without a parental figure, becoming something of a scamp, more interested in music and dancing and gambling than statecraft. For his part, Edward Longshanks treated his son more as a political pawn than as an apprentice. Across the Channel, one of his greatest rivals, Philip IV, King of France, held similar aspirations for his kingdom and dynasty, and the two kings had come into conflict over the Duchy of Gascony, a region of southwestern France over which the French and English had fought since it first came into the hands of a Plantagenet when Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine. You may have heard of the central Gascon town of Bordeaux; that’s because it is a major center for wine production today, and such was the case even back then. The fertile region and its vineyards provided tidy profits for the English crown, and Philip IV had seized it and refused to give it back. Embroiled in a war with the Scots, Edward Longshanks could neither afford to go to war with France over the duchy nor to lose its wealth. So he sought a diplomatic solution. In the 1303 Treaty of Paris, Edward took back Gascony on the agreement that his son and heir would wed Philip’s only surviving daughter, Isabella. Philip saw this as a way to eventually put his own grandson on the English throne, thereby in effect extending his dynasty’s power, while Edward really was just biding his time until he could find a way to extricate his son from the arranged marriage. Within less than a century, the conflict over Gascony would lead to the Hundred Years War, but long before that, it would lead to much strife and double-dealing. 

Meanwhile, Edward Longshanks’ son seemed to be developing into more of a kingly figure, attending councils, training to fight in his father’s wars. On the question of his marriage to Isabella of France, he and his father appeared to be in agreement. Edward of Caernarvon, Longshanks’ son, had been 19 years old when he was promised to the eight-year-old daughter of Philip IV and showed no interest in going through with the arrangement. However, Edward of Caernarvon may have had other reasons for resenting the match, reasons that created further discord between himself and his father. Six years earlier, Edward I had introduced a young man from Gascony named Piers Gaveston to his son, and thereafter, the two were inseparable. It is unsurprising that a boy of 13 years old, whose mother was dead, whose father was distant, and whose sisters were married off, would seek some kind of substitute family and develop an intimate relationship with another boy in his household whom he would come to refer to as his “sweet brother,” but as the boys grew into young men, it seemed that the irreverent Gaveston proved to be a corrupting influence on the prince, encouraging him in his pursuit of pleasure and in treating his father’s ministers disrespectfully. The king tried to inhibit his son’s frivolous lifestyle by limiting his spending, which only further rankled the prince, now in his early twenties, and made him even closer with his bosom friend Gaveston. Indeed, the prince’s relationship with Gaveston was deemed inappropriate by many. In the histories that would afterward be written, it is asserted that Prince Edward loved Gaveston above all others, that theirs was a romantic or sexual love, and even that Gaveston had used sorcery to bewitch the future king into doing his bidding. Some have pointed to the prince’s sexual orientation as a reason that he recoiled from his arranged marriage with Isabella. However, there is little evidence of a sexual aspect to his relationship with Gaveston, whereas there is ample evidence that both of them engages in heterosexual acts in that both eventually fathered children with their wives. Of course, this is also no indication that their relationship was not romantic or physical either. Indeed, the surpassing intimacy and astonishing loyalty of their relationship, and the position of esteem and favor that Gaveston enjoyed, does seem to indicate something more than friendship or even brotherhood, but it is enough for our story simply to call him the prince’s favorite. King Edward I recognized this, and when the prince requested that lands be given to Gaveston, Longshanks physically attacked his son, ripping out his hair, throwing him to the ground, calling him a whoreson, and thereafter banishing Gaveston to France. 

The painting Edward II. and his Favourite, Piers Gaveston by Marcus Stone, via Wikimedia Commons

This altercation would be one of the last quarrels the prince had with his father, who died suddenly one morning while arming himself to make war on the Scots. Suddenly Edward of Caernarvon found himself proclaimed King Edward II, and he immediately brought Gaveston back from France and raised him up as if he were an equal, giving his favorite his own niece in marriage and thereby making him a member of the royal family. The two of them ruled together, young and physically attractive, showing a lack of respect for the barons that Longshanks had made so powerful, and openly disdaining to fulfill the obligations Edward II had inherited, such as his arranged marriage to Isabella of France. However, his council warned him that to ignore the treaty his father had signed with Philip IV would mean the loss of Gascony and war with France, and eventually he gave in, marrying Isabella in 1308. At just 13 years old, Queen Isabella was said to be a great beauty, but it is clear that King Edward II preferred the company of his favorite and even for some time slighted his young wife. For example, at his coronation, he displayed his own arms and Gaveston’s arms, but not hers, and instead of sitting with his queen, he sat with his favorite. At the same event, he further insulted the highest nobles of the land by allowing Gaveston to perform the solemn duties of bearing his crown and sword, demonstrating that he considered his friend to be of higher status. And so it went. He gave no lands or money to his wife, and instead took castles that belonged to Isabella’s family and gifted them to Gaveston. Thus, he made enemies not only among his powerful baronage, but also abroad, as Philip IV observed his daughter being dishonored and grew resentful. The focus of everyone’s resentment was the king’s favorite, and eventually, Philip IV declared Gaveston an enemy, and Edward had no choice but to exile his favorite for fear of his baronial opposition receiving French support. Thereafter, Edward II mended his relationship with Isabella and her father. He began to treat her with the respect she was due, and as the Queen grew into a young woman, she proved to be a loyal wife, growing closer to her husband and supporting him in all his decisions. When her father relented in his opposition to Gaveston and the king’s favorite returned to court, she seems to have shrewdly secured her position and come to some agreement with her husband, for she lived in peace and mutual respect with her husband and also became an ally of Gaveston and his family, such that some historians have posited some sort of three-way relationship in which she and Gaveston agreed to share the king’s affections. But as I said before, this is only speculation. 

Unfortunately, this hard won domestic bliss was not to last. In 1312, Thomas of Lancaster, the king’s own cousin and the earl who most vociferously opposed his rule and his relationship with Gaveston, rallied the barons Edward had made enemies of and gathered an army. Between this rebellion and the ongoing war against Scotland, Edward, Isabella, and Gaveston eventually became fugitives, fleeing from castle to castle with their households in tow, seeking refuge until the king could restore himself to a position of authority. In May, Edward was forced to leave his favorite behind at Scarborough Castle, thinking him safe behind its walls. However, the rebel lords laid siege to Scarborough, and Gaveston, running short on supplies, surrendered. Before long, these earls organized an impromptu trial, convicted him of treason, and executed him. Gaveston asked that they not mar his good looks by cutting off his head, which of course was exactly what they did, sending it to the Earl of Lancaster, their leader, for his approval. Edward II was devastated by the loss of his friend, confidant, ally, and perhaps lover, of some fifteen years. He took solace in his wife, and in November of that year, Isabella bore him an heir. Seeking to avoid civil war, Edward was forced to prostrate himself before the Queen’s father, asking Philip IV for help in quelling the rebellion. After they traveled to France and allowed Philip to see his grandson, the heir to the English throne and the culmination of much of his dynastic scheming, he obliged, sending them back home with French support to negotiate a peace with his nobility. Thereafter, in an uneasy alliance with his barons, Edward invaded Scotland and was roundly defeated by Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn. In the wake of this defeat, his greatest enemy, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, took control of the government for a time, proving that Edward’s troubles with baronial opposition were not over. 

The head of Piers Gaveston, 1st Earl of Cornwall, is delivered to Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster, via Wikimedia Commons

For years after Gaveston’s death, Edward and Isabella grew closer and more strongly allied. She bore him more children, and she helped him restore his authority and parry the political thrusts of Lancaster and the rest of his enemies. But she was not alone in aiding him. Hugh Despenser, a courtier and constant ally was always looking out for the king, and Despenser’s son, Hugh the Younger, himself a shrewd politician and seasoned knight, slowly grew in the king’s regard, until eventually he had become the new favorite, clearly enjoying every privilege the king might provide him and exerting significant influence on him. This predictably roused Lancaster and his supporters once again, prompting them to arm their men in London and demand that Hugh Despenser the Younger, and all the Despenser family, be exiled. However, this time, the Queen too appears to have opposed her husband’s favorite. There is some indication that she and Despenser were engaged in a dispute over some minor unpaid debts, but likely it was more than this. Since Gaveston’s death, she had enjoyed the favor of the king, served as his confidant in all matters, and seemingly enjoyed his physical affections as well. It would stand to reason that taking her husband’s attention and favor away from her would be enough to make an enemy of her, to say nothing of the rumors that the king had begun to make Despenser the object of his physical affections. Thus when even his queen demanded that Despenser be exiled, Edward II grudgingly agreed in 1321, and Hugh Despenser the Younger took up the life of a pirate, plying the waters of the English Channel. However, Edward remained in contact with the Despensers and plotted with them to do away with the pesky barons who had opposed him for his entire reign. Within a couple months, he struck at certain strategic positions, and before his dissident earls even realized it, Edward was waging a war that became a reign of terror. After the Battle of Boroughbridge in early spring the next year, he finally captured Lancaster and had his revenge for the death of Gaveston, the man he had loved. The executioner did a poor job on the rebel baron, taking numerous whacks before he managed to separate his head from his shoulders. 

Isabella of France, the Queen of England, found herself embroiled in this Civil War with no clear side to take. She had long taken her husband’s side against the rebellious earls, but she had taken the earls’ side against her husband’s new favorite, Hugh Despenser, who was now returned from his exile and restored to his position as favorite in the king’s court. Moreover, she was given ample further reason to resent Despenser. At one point in 1322, as Edward and Despenser, emboldened after having emerged victorious against the rebel barons, invaded Scotland and were driven back, Isabella found herself nearly captured by Scotsmen, and she blamed Despenser. Then, after her father Philip IV had died and her brother was crowned King Charles IV, Despenser drove Edward II toward war with France, and as an opening salvo, Edward confiscated all of Isabella’s lands and arrested every Frenchman in the country, including members of her household and retinue. There may, of course, have been further reasons for Isabella’s relationship with her husband to deteriorate. The simple fact that she no longer had Edward’s ear might have been enough to stoke her envy, or the possibility that she was aware of some infidelity between Edward and his favorite might have kindled a righteous anger in her. Paul Doherty, author of my principal source, Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II, even suggests that Isabella may have been the victim of some sexual misconduct from Despenser that Edward II failed to censure, a theory arrived at by reading between the lines of some primary sources. However, the last straw was likely when by royal order her children were taken away from her and given into the care of Despenser’s wife. After that, her brother Charles IV invaded Gascony, demanding that Edward II sail to France and talk things out. Fearing for his safety outside London, Edward instead sent Isabella, and it may have been the biggest mistake he ever made. 

Isabella of France welcomed to Paris, via Wikimedia Commons

Here we see Isabella become the “She-Wolf” of legend, the virago ferrea, or Iron Virago, which sobriquet itself encapsulates the different ways she has been viewed, for a virago, in common usage, may have meant an impudent, overbearing, or domineering woman, but the original Latin word denotes a proud, strong, and courageous female warrior. Which definition one thought of in relation to Isabella of France likely depended on one’s opinion of Edward II and his treatment of her. In 1325, she went home to France as her husband’s representative. True to her word, she negotiated a truce, but when it was time to return to England, she claimed that there were further diplomatic matters to resolve, urging him to come there instead and meet with her brother. Still wary of travel, Edward instead agreed to send their son, his heir, a decision that would prove to be Edward’s next great error. As soon as the young prince was in France with her, Isabella made her feelings about her marriage clear. She donned black and declared that she had been made a widow by Despenser, who had come between her and her husband and thereby broken their bond of marriage. With the heir to the throne of England in her power, she held court in France, and by her side, scandalously, appeared a certain advisor whose presence indicated that she had turned entirely against Edward II. His name was Roger Mortimer, formerly one of Edward II’s generals who had risen in rebellion during the Despenser War. Mortimer had been imprisoned in the Tower of London, and fearing an imminent execution, he had made a daring escape, climbing down a rope ladder and swimming across the River Thames. Now this traitor appeared at Isabella’s side, and what was worse, seemed to be involved with her romantically, making a very public cuckold of King Edward II. The Iron Virago’s retaliation could not have been more dramatic than this, and it was only the beginning. 

In 1326, Isabella and Mortimer landed a small army in England, and before long, to Edward and Despenser’s shock, their numbers swelled with the forces of the dissident earls that Isabella had long helped her husband fight against. Edward’s half-brother, the Earl of Norfolk, joined her, as did the new Earl of Lancaster, brother of the cousin that Edward had beheaded. More than that, the merchants, the university scholars, and church bishops all welcomed her progress, and after her promise to punish those loyal to Despenser, a mob of common Londoners stormed the Tower and killed Despenser’s men. Edward tried to rally support and fight this coup, but he simply no longer had the support he needed. Hugh Despenser the Elder was captured at Bristol and was hanged, drawn and quartered, his corpse beheaded and fed to dogs, but a worse fate lay in store for the king’s favorite. Taken to Hereford after his capture, Hugh Despenser the Younger was stripped of clothing, and a crown of stinging nettles forced over his head. Verses of scripture detailing his sins were cut into his skin with knives, whereupon he was placed bleeding on a horse and made to ride slowly through the city of Hereford while a mob hurled whatever they could at him. Next, he was hanged from a fifty-foot gallows but was cut down before he died, disemboweled, and forced to watch his intestines burn before his eyes. Legend has it that, because of the accusations of sodomy made against him, his executioners also severed and burned his genitals in front of him. Only then did they decapitate him. And perhaps most disturbing in this pageant of horrors is the fact that Isabella and Mortimer watched it all and enjoyed a feast in celebration of their enemy’s demise. 

Hugh Despenser is hanged, drawn and quartered while Isabella and Mortimer look on, via Wikimedia Commons

Edward II surrendered to the new Earl of Lancaster, but unlike the others, the king could not simply be summarily executed. He was the anointed King of England, chosen by God to wear the Crown of St. Edward the Confessor. Indeed, there were some who had supported Isabella’s coup who believed she should set aside her paramour Mortimer and return to her husband’s side, seeing the vanquished Despensers as the only true villains. Even Edward’s captor, Henry of Lancaster, whose family had long opposed his favoritism of upstarts, balked at the idea of execution. After much debate, they reached a resolution to convene Parliament and depose the king. For the rest of his life, they determined, Edward II should be kept in relative comfort as a prisoner in a castle. In January 1327, the parliamentary proceedings began, and Edward supposedly refused to appear, though this may have been a lie from his captors to prevent him from speaking in public and eliciting sympathy. The Articles of Deposition included incompetence, reliance on poor counsel, and breaking the oath he took when he was crowned. This constitutional deposition serves as a striking example of how far the power of Parliament had come within a generation, from a tool used by the king for counsel and public relations to a branch of government empowered to dethrone a monarch. Eventually, in order to ensure the throne would go to his son and not Lancaster, or worse yet, Mortimer, Edward II abdicated, and the 15-year-old Prince of Wales was proclaimed Edward III. Soon Edward was released by Lancaster into the custody of Roger Mortimer’s son-in-law, Lord Thomas Berkeley, to be kept in his castle near the border of Wales. Together with his own brother-in-law, Sir John Maltravers, and a knight by the name of Thomas Gurney, Edward was successfully immured at Berkeley Castle, and six months later, Gurney reported to Parliament that the former king had expired due to a fatalis casus, or a deadly accident. 

Just what befell Edward II while at Berkeley Castle must have been a topic of much hushed discussion in those years. The official explanation was some sort of fall, but there was reportedly no mark on the king’s person. Within a few years, as King Edward III came into his majority and the stars of Isabella and Mortimer had begun to fall, investigations into foul play were undertaken. Chroniclers of the time put forth various versions of events. Some suggested that he had been so poorly treated, perhaps on the Queen’s orders, that he eventually died of illness or starvation. The chronicler Geoffrey le Baker of Swinbrook details this abuse, claiming Edward II was fed rotten food and that the carcasses of beasts were left to decompose in a pit by the king’s cell in hopes that Edward would become ill. However, the accuracy of Geoffrey le Baker’s chronicle has been challenged, and he doesn’t himself subscribe to the idea that Edward II died of illness. Rather, he is one of the numerous historians who records a version of events in which orders were given to murder the king in his cell. A few years after Edward’s death, accusations began to fly, and from among them, we find the common threads present in most contemporaneous chronicles. It is said that Roger Mortimer, likely with Queen Isabella’s knowledge, dispatched assassins to Berkeley Castle. Different versions implicate different players as having issued the order, such as Lord Berkeley himself, or his man Maltravers, or even a bishop known to serve Mortimer, but most agree that it came down the chain of command from Mortimer. Others were named as the actual assassins, specifically Thomas Gurney and one William Ockle, both of them Queen Isabella’s men. So the story goes that the former king was smothered, which of course would leave no mark. The more gruesome accounts of Geoffrey le Baker of Swinbrook and others have it that the assassins heated a metal poker and thrust it up the king’s anus and into his intestines, a ghastly fate that one supposes also would not leave an easily discernible mark on the body.

Portrait of Edward II with depiction of his gruesome murder inset, via Wikimedia Commons

There are clear reasons to doubt some of the chroniclers, such as Geoffrey le Baker, who includes in his version that the orders to kill, written in Latin, could be interpreted two ways, as saying “Do not fear to kill Edward, it is a good thing,” or as saying “Do not kill Edward, it is good to be afraid.” A very dramatic wrinkle in the tale that suggests perhaps the entire assassination could have been a mistake, the result of a misconstrued sentence. The problem is this detail appears to be plagiarized from another chronicler’s account of a Hungarian queen’s murder. We do have other chroniclers that report the same grisly manner of death, but this may be something of a rumor, a kind of urban legend. Edward being impaled in the anus appears to have been viewed by many at the time as a symbolic punishment for his supposed sexual proclivities, which sounds very much like a tale that might have been fabricated after the fact. If he had been murdered that way, it would seem the only person that might have seen evidence of it would have been the local wise woman who had disemboweled the body to embalm it. It stands to reason that she would have been able to observe any damage done by a red hot poker thrust into the intestines. This might actually explain why she was engaged to perform the task rather than a royal physician. Was it some kind of cover-up? The story goes that Queen Isabella met with the embalmer because she had asked to receive her husband’s heart, but what if the queen wanted a further report on her husband’s body, kind of like an autopsy report. If that were the case, is it possible that the Iron Virago had had no knowledge of her husband’s murder? That she suspected foul play herself as early as the funeral and was looking for evidence? And what did the embalmer tell her? Was Edward II even murdered? Or were these mere rumors lobbed years later as political barbs. Or… was there some other possibility? Might the queen have been questioning the embalmer based on some other suspicion? For example, might she have been concerned that the body this wise woman examined in secret did not even belong to Edward II? 

This is the question that we’ll explore further in Part 2 of The End of Edward II, and it will crack this story open in new directions you won’t anticipate.

Further Reading

Doherty, Paul. “Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II.” Carroll & Graf, 2003.

Weir, Alison. “Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England.” Ballantine, 2006.

A Very Historically Blind Christmas II: Father Christmas

Allow me to place this furry hat on your head, fill your hand with a warm cup of either mulled cider or eggnog, and lead you into the drunken revelry. Once you’ve had your fill of merry-making, let us warm ourselves by the fire and watch the snow fall outside the window. Settle in a comfortable chair as I share a remembrance of times long past and of the Christmases of yore. Those of you who joined me last year at this time may remember that we spoke of the ancient origins of this holiday. We spoke of midwinter festivities, of Saturnalia and the Kalends, as the origin of many traditions such as gift giving and decorating with greenery, and we looked back on Mithra and the celebration of Sol Invictus as the original December 25th holy day, long before Christianity placed Jesus Christ’s birth on the same day and made it a central part of their liturgical calendar, a day when the faithful are obliged to attend Mass. For much of the Middle Ages, the Christmas season was a time of conflict between ancient revelry customs and modern religious observance, with images of the Divine Infant, Santo Niño, the Christ Child, personifying the innocence and purity to which all should be aspiring in that time of debauched and licentious carousal. But the Christ Child was not not the only incarnation of the holiday. There is a long and rich tradition of the concept of Christmas being personified, of a figure embodying the holiday, whether it be a real person or a fictional figure, like a mascot, which of course we have today in the rotund and cherry-nosed character we all think of as Father Christmas. So refill your cup, cut yourself a slice of pie, and follow me back to Christmases past.

Stare into the flickering candle flame and follow it back to dawn of Christmas, to the midwinter celebrations of antiquity. Recall our discussions of Saturnalia, the mid-December Roman festival in honor of Saturn, which itself may have evolved from even older solstice traditions among farmers, and the Kalends, a kind of New Year’s festival that followed. We see the decoration of homes and public places with greenery, and the giving of gifts in the form of cerei candles. And as today, it was a time of merrymaking, but the way we think of making merry during the season today may be a bit more tame than Romans thought of it then. As the celebration represented the death inherent in winter followed by the rebirth of light and warmth and hope, as symbolized by the common sight of lit candles, it was a true carnival, in the sense of the word meaning “a farewell to the flesh.” It was an occasion of wild and riotous excess, with not only feasting and music and dancing, but drunkenness and gambling and promiscuity. Saturnalia and the Kalends were times when the norms of society were rescinded and social order upended. Slaves not only ceased their work; they sat at the head of their masters’ tables, raised briefly to a station in life they could never enjoy on any other day of the year. This tradition of inebriation and topsy-turvy social order persisted in midwinter seasonal celebrations long after the Fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity, with not only the rich and poor trading places, but also men dressing as women. Mid-December remained a time for debauchery and reversing the social order all through the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period. In England, the custom of wassailing appeared, the word evolving from a Middle English toast to one’s health or wholeness. Wassail bowls were popular for communal drinking, and as wassailers often went house to house singing and offering drinks from their bowls or asking that their bowls be filled, it appears to be a forerunner of Christmas caroling. But eventually wassailing became for some an opportunity for thuggery in this topsy-turvy season, and wassailers were sometimes known to force their way drunkenly into homes demanding to be given food and drink. Considering this, as well as the wanton behavior that resulted in a boom of bastard September children every year, it is perhaps no surprise that Puritans outlawed Christmas celebrations in the mid-1600s, both in England under Cromwell and in New England, under the Puritan government of Massachusetts.

Photogravure of a drawing depicting a drunken reveler being carried away by his friends during the Saturnalia, c. 1884, via Wikimedia Commons

To better understand why Puritans might reject such Christmas traditions as further examples of the Catholic Church’s decadence, it must be clarified that such customs were not only practiced by pagans or the godless. The church also took part in these bacchanals, in the form of the Feast of Fools, a tradition among medieval clergy in Western Europe in which low-ranking clerics took over their churches, holding mock services in which they dressed as choir women, sang indecent songs, burned old shoes as if they were incense, gambled danced among the pews, drank themselves silly, and even went out upon the town making lewd gestures, laughing drunkenly, and generally raising hell and making spectacles of themselves. Beyond the debauchery, one particular tradition hearkens clearly back to Saturnalia, and it is here where we first begin to see the Christmas season embodied in a figure. At Saturnalia, a mock king was sometimes raised up to preside over the festivities, and we see this custom echoed throughout history. During the Feast of Fools, on December 28th, Holy Innocent’s Day, a choirboy was chosen to take over as bishop for the day, complete with small robes and jewelry made specifically for this so-called Boy Bishop. Likewise, during festivities of Twelfth Night, the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas, a cake was shared by all, and he who received the slice into which a bean had been baked was pronounced the Bean King and would then preside over the party, choosing a queen and naming other party goers to positions in his mock court. This tradition of mock kings at Christmas time is again further echoed in the late medieval and Renaissance custom of appointing a Christmas Lord to preside over the seasonal merrymaking. This Master of Merry Disports, as he was called, or otherwise, this Abbot of Unreason, or most commonly, Lord of Misrule, acted as a kind of host for all the dancing and mummery, the masquerades and feasts, leading motley groups of merrymakers through the streets and into churches, ringing bells and singing. These roles, filled by random men or children from a variety of socioeconomic classes, represent perfectly the embodiment of the old ways of Christmas, of topsy-turvy role reversal and reckless jollification. But for the history of the character that embodies Christmas as it is celebrated today, we must look at far more recent history.

Feast of the Bean King, c. 1640-45, via Wikimedia Commons

Today, when one thinks of Christmas personified, one doubtless thinks of Santa Claus, that jolly old gift giver with his own elaborate mythos. Now parents, if your children happen to be within earshot, you may want to put in earbuds so that they don’t learn all the secrets of Santa before he wants them to. ...OK, if the little ones are no longer listening, I’ll continue. To fully grasp how the fictional character of Santa Claus was invented, and what historical basis there may have been for him, we must actually begin in early 19th-century America and that inventor of enduring myths, Washington Irving. Many know Irving for his composition of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a perennial Halloween favorite, and I spoke last year, around Columbus Day, about his role in creating some of the myths surrounding Christopher Columbus as well. Some may not be as aware, however, of his part in mythologizing the figure of Santa Claus. In 1809, Irving wrote A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, a satirical look at New York life narrated by a fictional Dutch historian. It was through this book that he introduced a character from Dutch folklore to American culture, the figure of Saint Nicholas, called Sinter Claas by the Dutch, a much venerated and mythologized Greek miracle worker whose cult had spread across numerous European countries since his death in the 4th century CE. Across most of Europe, he was the patron saint of childhood, but in Irving’s History of New-York, Knickerbocker presented him as the patron saint of New York, and thereafter, others took the idea and ran with it. The next year, 1810, one John Pintard, the founder of the New-York Historical Society and a big proponent of public holidays commemorating history, having helped establish the 4th of July, Washington’s birthday, and Columbus Day as holidays, decided to observe St. Nicholas Day, the feast day of the Saint, on December 6th. New York was an economically divided place that saw class unrest during the holidays, and he envisioned his banquet as an opportunity to resurrect the ancient topsy-turvy traditions, when the poor and the rich dined side by side. Pintard commissioned a poster for his banquet that depicted “Sancte Claus,” but St. Nicholas had not yet taken the form of Santa as we know it today, looking more like an ascetic clergyman, slender and barefoot in a tabard.

Broadsheet depicting St. Nicholas as “Sancte Claus,” by John Pintard, 1810, via Wikimedia Commons

Some eleven years later, in 1821, Irving revisited his History of New-York, and its second edition shows either some new inventions of Irving’s or reflects the changing image of St. Nicholas in America during the intervening years. Irving describes him smoking a pipe and bringing presents to children in a magical flying wagon that soars over the treetops. Then, St. Nicholas took his essential and final form a couple years later, with the December 1823 publication of the poem “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” in an upstate New York newspaper. For more than 150 years, this classic poem, originally titled “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” was attributed to Clement Clark Moore, who legend has it composed the piece during a sleigh ride into lower Manhattan to buy a turkey for Christmas dinner. A literary poet and classical scholar, Moore thought it mere doggerel and wouldn’t have his name attached to it for twenty years. However, in 1996, the literary sleuth Don Foster made the convincing argument that it was actually penned by judge and amateur poet Henry Livingston, Jr., whose surviving work far better matches, in tone as well as meter, the poem in question. But regardless of who wrote the poem, Santa Claus had arrived in all his particulars. Irving’s flying wagon full of gifts had become a sleigh, and it now was hitched to reindeer, each with a name. St. Nicholas descended through the chimney to enter homes by the hearth, where stockings had been hung for him to fill with gifts. Here we see the universal modern image etched forever in verse: the rosy cheeks and red nose, the droll smile and white beard, the rotund figure dressed all in furs. Only one particular seems to have been ignored in subsequent iterations: in the poem, he is a small elf, his conveyance a “miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer.” As his legend grew, so too did his size, and the elfin element of the legend does survive, of course, in Santa’s army of elf tinkerers at the North Pole. With the small exception of his stature, the figure of Santa Claus seems to have leaped from the imagination of 19th century New Yorkers fully formed. But that is not in fact the case. They built upon an existing mythos surrounding the figure of St. Nicholas, and they incorporated elements from traditions surrounding other seasonal figures in European folklore, all of which we must explore in order to fully grasp the origins of the character we call Santa Claus.

The notion of St. Nicholas as an elf, and later of elves toiling in his service at the North Pole, seems to have been a clear syncretism of folkloric traditions. Elves and faeries have long been associated with Christmastime, stretching all the way back to Scandinavian antiquity. Icelandic tradition holds that the thirteen Jola-Sveinar, sons of a troll named Gryla, arrived in households one at a time during the Yuletide and departed just as slowly, playing pranks and stealing food and sometimes abducting naughty children. These Christmas elves are mirrored by the Swedish Jultomten, the Danish Julnissen, and the Finnish Joulutonttuja, Yuletide elves known to either reward or punish, for whom householders left out offerings of milk and porridge, as well as tobacco and booze. Over time these Christmas elves came to be represented much like modern day garden gnomes, white-bearded with a pointed hat, which seems to be a clear inspiration not only for the diminutive stature of the “jolly old elf” in the famous aforementioned poem, but also for the modern image of Santa Claus and our annual offerings of milk and cookies. Another influence on the image of Santa Claus was the English folkloric character of Father Christmas, also called Sir Christmas, a robust and bearded character dressed in a fur-trimmed robe that appeared in the late Middle Ages as a symbol of the season. Perhaps the most famous iteration of this character was the Ghost of Christmas Present in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. But not all the folkloric and mythological characters from which Santa Claus evolved were so recognizable. For example, much of his legend appears to have been borrowed from ancient winter goddess traditions out of Northern Europe. Longtime listeners may remember one of the digressions I took while discussing white lady ghosts in Germany years ago. That rabbit hole led me to the goddess tradition of Berchta, or Perchta, the spinner, a spirit who took great interest in matters of the household, a disheveled witch-like character who inspected homes for cleanliness, rewarding the diligent children who kept houses neat and punishing the indolent and naughty children who made messes. Berchta flew through the night skies during the Twelve Days of Christmas, accompanied by phantom creatures and ghost children, entering homes to make her judgment on the family’s industriousness, and to rock babies in their cradles. If the members of a household did not placate her by leaving out the remnants of a special dish, then it was said she cut open their stomachs as they slept and ate her fill of their undigested meal. There were numerous versions of this winter goddess Berchta or Perchta, including Hertha, Bertha, Holde, Holda, Holle, and later iterations like the German Frau Gaude. In some variations, the goddess was said to gain entry into homes via the smoke of a hearthfire. Therefore, we have in her a figure who enters houses through the chimney, who expects a treat to be left out for her, and who rewards or punishes children based on naughtiness.

Depiction of Perchta accompanied by spirits, 1863, via Wikimedia Commons

While all of these elements give context for the idea of a gift-giving supernatural spirit, an elf or gnome or goddess or witch, that visits children at Christmastime, how did such pagan traditions come to be associated with St. Nicholas, the namesake of Santa Claus? We know very little of the figure called St. Nicholas. He was born sometime around the late 3rd century in southwest Asia Minor, probably in the city of Patara, in the district of Lycia, and eventually became the bishop of Myra, in what is today Demre, Turkey. He survived the persecution of Christians in the area during the first several years of the 4th century, and he was said to have attended the Council of Nicaea, although some historians have found that his name did not start appearing on lists of those who attended the Nicaean council until the Middle Ages, after he had become a popularly venerated figure. While at first and for a long time, his veneration as a saint was limited to only his homeland, eventually it spread across Europe, with his feast day of December 6th probably memorializing the day of his death. Today, because of the vast legendarium that has grown around his life, he is without doubt the most famous saint in existence, and in these legends can be seen some seeds for the legend of Santa Claus as we know it today, as well as influences from some of the pagan traditions that already existed in the countries where his legend spread. But not all the stories about St. Nicholas can be seen to connect to the Santa Claus story. Some were merely the acts of a godly man, and some miracles attributed to him by his cult seem like the common fodder of hagiographers. For example, Nicholas of Myra is said to have confronted a group of thieves and convinced them to return their stolen goods, a story that led to “clerks of St. Nicholas” becoming a medieval euphemism for thieves. Then there were multiple tales of St. Nicholas stopping innocent people from being executed for crimes they did not commit. One involved standing up to Emperor Constantine when he wanted to execute three soldiers for disloyalty, and another had Nicholas intervening by seizing the sword of a soldier who was about to behead an innocent man. Furthermore, Myra being a port town, many prayers were directed toward safe passage for their sailors and the grain they carried. Many of the older traditions surrounding St. Nicholas as a wonderworker have him performing miracles at sea, as a guardian of seafarers. One legend tells of Nicholas calming a storm during a voyage to the Holy Land, and others suggested that St. Nicholas saved the lives of sailors who called to him for help, making him something of a patron saint of sailors. Indeed, some depictions of Nicholas have him riding a white horse that symbolized the froth of a cresting wave, much like the pagan sea god Poseidon, leading to speculation that the cult of St. Nicholas was absorbing pagan traditions long before the Middle Ages.

Many have looked for connections to Christmas traditions in the legendarium of St. Nicholas, and some of the connections that have been made are dubious, such as the claim that Nicholas was so young upon becoming bishop of Myra that he was called “the Boy Bishop,” a claim for which there appears to be no support beyond the fact that boy bishops were customarily chosen on St. Nicholas Day. But one begins to get an inkling of the eventual course his legends would take when one hears the tales that cemented his reputation as a gift-giver and patron saint of children. The central story of his legendarium in which the tropes of Santa Claus can be seen is the story of the three maidens. In this tale, which seems to have originated in the 8th century, long after his death, a young Nicholas is said to have become aware that three virtuous young ladies faced a terrible fate. They were of age to marry, but because their father could afford no dowries, he intended to sell them as prostitutes instead. Springing into action, Nicholas, who apparently had plenty of money, secretly crept up to the man’s house at night and tossed a bag of gold through an open window. The gold made it possible for the man to marry off his eldest daughter, and the next night, he was surprised to see another bag of gold fly through his window, enabling the marriage of his middle daughter. On the third night, when a third bag of gold was thrown into the house, the father raced outside and caught Nicholas in the act. He thanked Nicholas profusely, but Nicholas asked him to keep his gifts secret. Later versions of this story claim that Nicholas climbed onto the roof and dropped the gold through the chimney, which may in fact be a syncretization of the Nicholas legend with that of Berchta entering homes through chimney smoke. Some variations have it that Nicholas’s gifts of gold fell into some stockings that had been placed by the fire to dry, thus resulting in the tradition of Christmas stockings, but this too may be the result of syncretism, as some scholars have pointed to ancient Norse Yuletide traditions as the origin of Christmas stockings. During the Yuletide, Odin was said to ride through the skies leading his Wild Hunt, and children who filled their shoes with straw or carrots to feed Odin’s horse Sleipnir might in the morning find their shoes full of candy and gifts to repay their kindness. But regardless of whether these particular traditions originated from legends about St. Nicholas or were incorporated from pagan traditions, we do know that Nicholas was associated with charitable and secret gift-giving, such that, after his death, it became common when any gift was received from an unknown source to attribute it to St. Nicholas.

“The Story of St Nicholas: Giving Dowry to Three Poor Girls” by Fra Angelico, c. 1447-48, via Wikimedia Commons

Indeed, death did not halt the growth of St. Nicholas’s legendarium, for some of his most famous miracles were said to have been performed from beyond the grave. In one story, when a Christian man swore by St. Nicholas to repay a loan to a Jewish moneylender but then tried to cheat him, St. Nicholas took notice. The moneylender took the Christian to court, and the debtor brought a hollow staff full of gold, which he handed to the moneylender before swearing he had given back all the money to the lender--a technical truth since he had given the lender his staff to hold. Afterward taking back his staff, he went on his way, but the spirit of St. Nicholas caused a cart to run him down in the street and break open the staff, revealing the gold. The Jewish moneylender refused to take the money, however, because he did not think the man deserved to die, but when St. Nicholas raised the cheating debtor back to life, the moneylender converted to Christianity. After this, Nicholas came to represent fairness in financial dealings and became a patron of moneylenders. The three bags of gold he gave for the three maidens became three balls of gold, a symbol taken up by the Medici banking family in Renaissance Italy, and an icon that can be seen even today decorating the establishments of that most common of modern moneylender: the pawnbroker. Thus St. Nicholas has as part of his character a sense of justice, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked. Then there is the legend that truly cemented his reputation as a guardian of children: the story of the Three Students. This medieval tradition out of 12th-century France holds that a wicked innkeeper received three young men who were traveling through his region, and while they slept, he murdered them so that he could take their money. The innkeeper chopped the students into pieces and packed their dismembered corpses into pickle barrels, and he would have surely escaped justice for this heinous crime if St. Nicholas had not been watching from on high. The story tells us that Nicholas made the students whole again and resurrected them. Over time, these young students were depicted more and more as children, just as the three maidens were depicted more and more as little girls, and St. Nicholas’s reputation as not only a bringer of gifts but as a protector of children was complete. All he needed now were Odin’s fur coat and hearty frame and the twinkling charm of an elf, both of which he collected as his legend spread through pagan northern Europe.

From La Légende du Grand Saint Nicolas, published by the Société de S. Augustin, Desclee, De Brouwer & Cie., Paris-Lille-Bruges, ca. early 1800s, via StNicholasCenter.org

Today, St. Nicholas enjoys an odd position. Through the evolution of his legend and the corruption of his name, he has become a universal symbol of Christmas as Santa Claus, and many still celebrate his name day to remember him as a saint. However, the Roman Catholic Church has always had a conflicted relationship with Nicholas. His veneration predated any official canonization process, and it has been suggested that some in the church are put off by the saint’s popularity, especially insofar as he seems to have eclipsed the Christ child in his embodiment of Christmas. Indeed, one of his names, Kris Kringle, appears to have derived from Christkindel, a word for the baby Jesus, so it seems the gravity of the legendarium of St. Nicholas is such that it pulls in not only pagan traditions but Christian ones a well. It is a snowball that started rolling in the 4th century and has grown to become a massive, unstoppable folkloric force that assimilates everything in its path. Perhaps in an attempt to resist this relentless legend, as part of a 1969 revision of its calendar of saints, the Roman Catholic Church made veneration of St. Nicholas optional, but the saint remains an important figure in both the Anglican Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. In fact, in 1972, after reducing St. Nicholas’s position, the Roman Catholic Church gave the bones and other relics of the saint to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Today, the supposed remains of the saint who became Santa are kept in New York, a fact that the myth-maker Washington Irving and his fictional narrator Diedrich Knickerbocker would truly appreciate.

Saturday Evening Post cover by Normal Rockwell, 1920, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

Elliott, Jock. Inventing Christmas: How Our Holiday Came to Be. Harry M. Abrams, 2002.

Flanders, Judith. Christmas: A Biography. St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Gulevich, Tanya. Encyclopedia of Christmas. Omnigraphics, 2000.

Kelly, Joseph F. The Origins of Christmas. Liturgical Press, 2004.

Shadow of the Werewolf, Part Two: The Salve and the Sabbat

In the conclusion of this Halloween series, the full moon exerts its influence on my diseased mind, and I consider making a pact with the devil, or at least that’s what my accusers tell me, as they stretch me on the rack….

In the previous edition, I discussed the notion that werewolfery, as a concept, originated from a metaphor likening savage murderers and outlaws to inhuman beasts like wolves, but I also showed how, in Early Modern Europe, the metaphor became literalized, when genuine wolf attacks were blamed on supernatural beasts, or when men committed murders so foul that people thought they could not possibly have been perpetrated by a human person. As I indicated, this connection between terrible murders and werewolfism survived to modern times, when numerous killers have been compared to werewolves. Some examples I didn’t mention are Albert Fish, notorious child rapist, murderer, and cannibal sometimes nicknamed the “Werewolf of Wysteria”; Mikhail Popkov, a Russian serial rapist and murderer called “The Werewolf”; Vasili Komaroff, another Russian serial killer known as “The Wolf of Moscow”; Manuel Blanco Romasanta, Spanish serial murderer called “The Werewolf of Allariz”; German pedophile and cannibalistic murderer Fritz Haarmaan, “The Wolf-Man of Hanover”; and Michael Lupo, a sadomasochist, coprophile, and murderer who called himself “Wolf Man.” The connection cannot be denied, but there is more to the legend of werewolfism, which itself transformed in Early Modern Europe, during the prevalent witch trials of the era, into more than a metaphor that made terrible crimes easier to comprehend and their perpetrators easy to dehumanize. In the werewolf trials of the 1500s to the 1700s, the accused confessed, whether by torture or under the threat of it and guided by their interrogators’ assumptions and leading questions, to actually having transformed, and to having been influenced by the devil, either through a witch’s curse or a pact with Satan. So to wrap our minds around this, we must consider the idea that these “werewolves” truly believed they turned into wolves, leading us to question their mental stability, and we must look at the culture of Early Modern witch hunts, which is all bound up with the legend of the lycanthrope.

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Long has the werewolf’s transformation been supposed to be governed by the cycles of the moon. While the origin of this element of the werewolf legend is not so easily ascertained, the fact that the lunar cycles have been associated with mental instability since antiquity may lead us to conclude that lycanthropy was considered a mental illness long before our modern clinical conception of it as a delusion. This stretches all the way back to ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who compared the mind to the moon, suggesting it influenced the blood as the moon does the tide, and Roman naturalist and encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, who asserted that the moon moistened the brain through a kind of nocturnal dew. Eventually, the idea evolved that the moon held sway over the fluids of that moist organ, the brain, in the same way as it influences the tides. Thus one word for insanity, “lunacy,” from which we get “lunatic,” as well as more informal terms like “looney,” as in “looney bin” and “looney tunes,” is derived from the name of the Roman goddess of the moon, Luna. This appears to be our best explanation for the addition of lunar cycles to the legend of werewolves, which would suggest that our modern understanding of clinical lycanthropy, characterized by the irrational belief that one transforms into an animal, may not have been that far from what constituted a werewolf during the monster’s Early Modern heyday. After all, many werewolf stories and accounts of werewolf trials spoke of the accused taking on the “likeness” of a wolf, which after all might not have been so great a likeness as we assume in today’s era of movie special effects makeup and computer generated imagery. Take, for example, the modern case of Bill Ramsey, a famous werewolf from 1980s England. A classic case of clinical lycanthropy, Bill Ramsey checked himself into a hospital believing himself to be experiencing come kind of medical emergency, but when he attacked the nurses, and later the responding police officers, he ended up in a jail cell, where he snarled and gnashed his teeth and reached out of his cell with hands forming claws, trying mindlessly to rake his fingers over his captors, as though he could slash them with his nails. If one looks at photos of Ramsey when in his lycanthropic state, one cannot deny a certain animalistic quality to his face: the snarling lip baring the teeth, the prominent brow low over the eyes, the hunching back and clawing hands. Might not such a transformation have been called a likeness, warranting the label of a werewolf? 

Various images of Bill Ramsey portraying his animalistic behavior.

Now add to such beastlike posturing the fur or pelt of a wolf, draped over the shoulders and head like a cloak, for often it was said that werewolves put on the the skin of a wolf in order to transform. One might think of this as metaphor, wearing a thing’s skin meaning putting on their form, but the stories are clear. Some werewolves claimed to have been given magical wolf hides, which they donned when they wanted to transform and doffed when they wanted to be themselves again. Take for an apt example the story of Jean Grenier, a 13-year-old, red-headed pauper known to beg around villages in the south of France who in 1603 was sometimes hired to tend sheep. Some children had recently gone missing, and Grenier came to the attention of authorities in the matter after some young shepherdesses reported his strange remarks. Two girls came forward to say that on different occasions, Jean Grenier had frightened them by telling them he sometimes went about in the skin of a wolf. By their telling, he was toying with them, saying that he killed and ate dogs while in the form of a wolf, but that he much preferred to kill other children and would eat them too. He said that the wolf-skin cape he wore in order to transform had first been wrapped around him by a mysterious black man named Pierre Labourant, whom he called the Gentleman of the Forest. When the girls he told about Labourant and his wolf-skin gift scoffed, he laughed menacingly and described him; he wore an iron chain round his neck, which he perpetually gnawed upon, and he lived in a land of darkness and fire, where everyone burned. One of the girls to whom he said these things afterward was attacked by an unusually small and reddish wolf. When questioned by authorities regarding his supposed crimes, Jean Grenier described falling upon and eating numerous children, and even stealing a baby from its crib and devouring it. The authorities checked the details of his confession, apparently given freely and not under torture, against the particulars from testimony by the children he had attacked and not killed and the families whose children had disappeared, and though they were entirely satisfied that Grenier had indeed committed the heinous crimes to which he confessed, even they considered his transformation a hallucination and believed he was not of sound enough mind to be executed, remarking on how dull-witted he was for a boy his age. Instead of the punishment usually accorded the dreaded loup-garou, they merely gave him over to the care of monks to be tutored in the ways of godliness. After seven years of life in the monastery, he confided that he still felt the urge to consume the raw flesh of young girls.

Now, think of a boy like Jean Grenier, declared intellectually challenged for his age. What is more likely? That a real man visited him and gave him a wolf-skin cape and told him that it would turn him into a wolf, or that his own imagination, encouraged by stories of the loup-garou, caused him to believe that when he put on a wolf pelt, he changed into a wolf, this delusion then leading to his ravenous and wild behavior? Like the other interpretation of the werewolf as a savage or outlaw, this idea of wearing a wolf’s skin making one a were-wolf also goes all the way back to ancient scandinavian folklore, as can be observed in the language of old Icelandic Sagas. As Sabine Baring-Gould shows, these often describe men wearing wolf-skins and thereby transforming into wolves in every way, except their eyes, which remained human. Indeed, some characters had the name Ulfhedin, which meant “wolf-skin coat,” while some were called Ulfhamr, meaning “wolf-shaped,” but this word hamr in other contexts also meant “skin or habit,” a word with cognates in French, Gothic, Persian, Sanskrit and Hindi, all meaning a leathery hide or some article of clothing. And we also see a link to madness or mental illness in this same place, for in old Norse mythology we see the berserkir, those legendary rage-filled warriors. Berserkers were said to be ulfhednir, meaning they wore wolf-skins over their chainmail, and the word berserker itself, which some scholars have argued means naked, or bare of sark—sark meaning shirt—may according to other scholars mean those who wore bear-sarks, or the skin of a bear. But whether they wore bear or wolf skins, it is clear that when a berserker put on the animal skin, he believed some transformation took place. Rage was a central aspect of the berserker; when in the habit of a wolf or bear, they went into wild frenzies and according to the folklore even developed supernatural strength and became somehow impervious to fire and sword. Descriptions of the berserker in his rage paint a clear picture of a wild man acting like a ferocious beast, his eyes glaring madly as he chewed on the shields of his enemies, frothing at the mouth. They are even said to have howled like wolves when rushing into battle. The fact that donning an animal skin appears to have initiated this descent into an animalistic state seems like a clear indication that the berserkir were very early examples of lycanthropes, as in ordinary men who acted under the delusion that they became animals. 

Woodcut depicting a berserker wearing the head and pelt of a wolf or bear, via Wikimedia Commons

The fact that even in 1603, at the height of Early Modern werewolf mania, a court suggested Jean Grenier wasn’t truly a werewolf and only believed he was stands as strong evidence for this explanation. And Grenier was not the only person put on trial for being a werewolf who confessed yet ended up not being believed or executed. Five years earlier, in a remote place in what is today the Touraine province in France, some men discovered two wolves feeding on something, which when the wolves fled into the woods turned out to be the horrifically mangled corpse of a 15-year-old boy. The men immediately went after the wolves, following their bloody paw prints, and just when they thought they had lost the trail, they found a frightened man hiding in the scrub. He had long hair and an unkempt beard, he was nearly bereft of clothing, and his hands, which had long and sharp nails like claws, were covered in blood and pieces of flesh. This man was Jacques Roulet, a beggar whose belly was hard and distended upon his capture. While in custody, he drank an entire bucket of water, and then he refused any food or drink. Before a court in Angers, he confessed freely that he had killed the boy, and that he had done so in the form of a wolf, which he took on by smearing a salve on himself. This salve had been given to him by his parents, he said, and the other wolves seen feasting on the poor child had been his brother and cousin, who also used the salve to become wolves. But his parents proved to be upstanding folk, and his brother and cousin had alibis. Moreover, his account of what happened when he used the salve was inconsistent. When asked whether or not, when he used the salve, he became a wolf, he answered, “No; but for all that, I killed and ate the child…; I was a wolf.” This response hearkens back to the metaphorical notion that “being a wolf” meant only acting like a ferocious animal, but upon further examination, Roulet indicated some transformation took place. To the leading question, “Do your hands and feet become paws of the wolf?” he answered yes, but when asked if his head and mouth became those of a wolf, he said first that he didn’t know, and then that his head remained as it was, but that he still used his teeth to eat children… for he claimed to have eaten many others beyond the boy they had found. While the court sentenced Roulet to death, an appeal based on his idiocy resulted in his sentence being commuted. In the end, Roulet spent only two years in an insane asylum. 

However, there was a further aspect to Roulet’s confession that begs exploration. He said that he had been to a sabbat, or a Black Sabbath, which during this era of witch-phobia and persecution of women accused of witchcraft meant he had been to a witches’ gathering. At such sabbats, it was claimed that witches danced naked, feasted and worshiped the Devil. According to the Compendium Maleficarum, sometimes the Devil came to them in the form of a goat and carried them bodily to the sabbat, while in other instances, the witch attended only in spirit, which they accomplished by smearing a salve on themselves and then lying down on their left sides. Here we see the element of the salve appear, a common thread throughout many werewolf tales, as we saw in the tale of the Gandillon family and Jacques Roulet, and also in the story of Jean Grenier. Though I didn’t mention it, Grenier claimed his Gentleman of the Forest gave him both a wolf-skin cape and a pot of salve, and that he used them together. So folklore or church propaganda about witchcraft is present everywhere in cases of accused werewolves, whether because the authorities led the accused, through torture or the threat of it, to give the kind of confession they expected, about sabbats and pacts with Satan and gifts of wolf skin and salves, or because the accused, who perhaps had committed some atrocity or were simply so unwell in their minds that they believed they had, incorporated the witch lore into their delusions. Looking at the works of demonologists of the day, as Montague Summers did in his book The Werewolf of Lore and Legend, we see authors trying to reconcile the notion of such a magical transformation with logic and reason. So in 1580, French demonologist Jean Bodin argued that having wounds like cuts or bruises on their bodies that correspond with those received in their other forms proved witches and werewolves made a physical transformation, while in the 15th century work Flagellum Maleficorum, it’s argued that no real transformation takes place, but rather that a demon would possess a wolf and then enchant the senses of a man to make him see the actions it took and believe he was doing those things himself. Likewise, in the Malleus Maleficarum, it is theorized that Satan took hold of a wolf, causing the wolf to do all that the witch wished to do in that form while transmitting the acts done into the mind of the witch, and then just to complete the illusion that the witch had actually transformed, placed wounds on the witch corresponding to those the wolf had received.  Similarly, theologian Bartolomeo Spina’s 1523 work Question of Witches suggests no actual physical transformation occurred, but that witches might curse a man to believe himself transformed by creating an illusory wolf form that covers his body, such that others see a wolf, and the victim sees himself as a wolf, but when attacked, weapons pass right through the illusion to harm the man within. 

Scene of nocturnal circle dance at a witches' sabbath, via Wikimedia Commons

One can see, by reading between the lines, that the culture of the witch-hunt pervaded thought in Early Modern Europe, not only among the uneducated and superstitious but among the learned as well, who struggled to make the concept of werewolf transformation conform to reason. Let us look to a further case of alleged werewolfism frequently held up by such writers as an apt example and apply their views in our analysis of it. In 1573, after a rash of wolf attacks on children that had been blamed on a loup-garou that some witnesses claimed to have seen, the Court of Parliament at Dole, in the Franche-Comté region of France, authorized the citizens of the affected villages to gather weapons and engage in a massive hunt for the werewolf that had carried off their children. It was some time, however, before they found a man to accuse. On a dark November night that year, some peasants returning home from their daily labors heard a child crying and a wolf baying in the woods, and investigating, they found what most thought was a wolf attacking a young girl, but some among them thought they recognized in this creature’s face the features of a certain hermit known to live with his wife in a hovel outside Amange, a stoop-backed man with deep-set eyes beneath bushy brows. His name was Gilles Garnier, and he was no friend to anyone, especially because he spoke in such a patois that few could understand him. After another little boy went missing in the area, the authorities brought in Garnier for questioning, and under torture, extracted the following confession. He said he had been out hunting for small game in the forest, upset because he could not provide for his family, when a figure approached him, some kind of spirit, he seemed to suggest, though his accusers took it to be a demon or the Devil. This figure offered to make hunting easier for him by giving him a salve that would turn him into a wolf. Thereafter, in the form of a wolf, rather than hunting small game, he chose to fall upon children, killing some four or five little girls and boys, eating their flesh and bringing some home to his wife for her own sustenance. With his confession in hand, the authorities had the hermit dragged through the streets to his very public execution, where he was bound to a wooden stake and burned alive.

Now, obviously the best explanation of the Garnier case is that the wolf seen was not Garnier at all, that it was just a wolf, that the witness was mistaken in recognizing him, and that this unpopular hermit was being persecuted, but let us for the sake of understanding the witch-hunt culture apply the logic of his contemporaries. Gilles Garnier could not be said to be asleep somewhere sharing the vision of a possessed wolf, for his face was recognized in the beast. This would seem to support a more physical transformation, but an incomplete one, in which there was no wolf’s head, even though the wolf’s jaws and teeth would seem to be necessary for such attacks. So perhaps this better supports the notion of a black magic illusion, an illusory form that for just a moment faltered, giving the briefest glimpse of Garnier’s face beneath. The fact that at least one of his victims was said to have been strangled to death before he was eaten would work with this conception of the transformation, for the wolfish form, including the claws, would only be an illusion obscuring the hermit’s own hands. But another instance raises further questions. Witnesses claimed and Garnier confirmed (under torture) that he had once seized a boy of about 12 or 13, killed him, and dragged him into the brush to eat him, but that he had been interrupted by some men. These men claimed that, when they happened upon him, he was simply a man and was in no way transformed. Now… another contemporary thinker, 16th century French poet Jean de Sponde, in his own discourse on werewolfism, occasioned by his analysis of Homer and the incident of Oddyseus’s men being transformed into pigs, raised a different kind of idea, rooted in the notion of herbalism as sorcery. He states that many in his time doubted that the physical frame of a man could be changed into that of an animal, and rather thought it more likely that their senses had been deceived, perhaps through the application of some kind of herb. He specifically mentions Haitian herbs that drive men mad. Jean de Sponde’s point is that if herbs can be used to control a mind, then perhaps they can be used to control a body, as well, and to physically change it. This may strike us as baseless and unscientific speculation today, but it raises the interesting notion that supposed werewolves like Gilles Garnier had merely been dosed with some kind of hallucinogen. 

A wood cut depicting a werewolf transformation or the hallucination of one, circa 1722, via Wikimedia Commons

In considering the idea that werewolves were perhaps not non compos mentis but rather under the influence, one must be drawn to the common denominator in so many of their stories: the salve, the ointment or unguent that is given to them by strangers who tell them to smear it upon themselves in order to transform. The lore and propaganda about witches in Early Modern Europe had it that witches themselves used such salve, and I’ve spoken about it before. It was called hexensalbe, or witch salve in German; also buhlsalbe, demon salve, and flugsalbe, flying salve, for this ointment, it was claimed, was what made it possible for witches to fly on their brooms, a claim that to a modern mind suggests that their “flights” were only ever hallucinations, if they indeed believed them to have occurred and weren’t merely coerced into confessing to them. In Latin, it was unguenta somnifera, sleeping unguent, and unguenta sabbati, or sabbat unguent, for this ointment, applied before sleep, allowed the witch to travel in spirit to the black sabbath, there to worship the devil. But of course, again, to a skeptical modern mind, this would suggest that any accused witch who really believed he or she had made a nocturnal spirit journey to a sabbat, who wasn’t just saying it had taken place because his or her accusers demanded it, was actually describing a vivid dream or hallucination. At the time, it was asserted that the main ingredient of witches’s ointment was the fat of dead babies, but today it is more commonly argued that it was a mixture of psychotropic herbs like jimson, hemlock, mandrake, belladonna, and wolfsbane, which applied as a salve to the skin could cause hallucination. The first mention of its use was by Homer in antiquity, when Hera smeared ambrosia on herself to enable her extraordinary flight and descended from Mount Olympus. This substance does not appear to be a myth. Rather, during Early Modern witch hunts, many of the women accused of sorcery and consorting with the Devil were actually herbalists, healers, practitioners of a naturalist folk tradition stretching back into antiquity, who may have also enjoyed the recreational or ritualistic use of psychotropic herbs. Now, of course, there were also many accused witches who did not fall into this category, but they still had some things in common: most of those accused of witchcraft were women with a power others didn’t understand or trust, who were disliked and feared because of it, and considered apostate or heretical by a church that didn’t recognize their practices. If such herbalists existed and gave pots of this ointment to others, telling them it had the power to transform them into animals, this could offer an alternative explanation for werewolfism.

In our final illustration, we will look to Besançon, France, where in 1521 the Inquisitor-General heard the testimony of two men from Poligny accused of being werewolves. Pierre Bourgot, a shepherd, told his story first, beginning on New Years Eve, 19 years earlier. He said a storm had scattered his flock, and while searching for them, three horsemen approached and assured him that their master had gathered his flock and would see to their safety and even give Pierre money if Pierre would serve him. Afterward, finding his flock nicely collected, Pierre was tempted by the offer and rendezvoused with them again, at which time he learned that their master was the Devil. Nevertheless, he rejected his faith and kissed the cold and corpse-like hand of this servant of Satan, whom he said was named Moyset. For two years, Pierre never entered a church, and he no longer had a fear of wolves preying on his flock, for the Devil protected them. Only when he had forgotten his pact and resumed attendance at church did he meet his fellow accused, Michel Verdun, who had also been initiated into the service of Satan, not by Moyset but by some other unearthly demon. Michel brought Pierre to the woods one night, where some others were dancing by the light of green tapers that burned with a blue light. Still foolishly believing that he might obtain the money promised him so long ago by Moyset, Pierre did as Michel said and smeared himself with an ointment, which caused him to grow fur and fall on all fours. His hands and feet were transformed into paws. He was a wolf, and his initial horror at the fact only subsided when replaced by his delight with the incredible speed at which he could travel. Afterward, when their masters gave him and Michel their own supplies of the ointment, they would frequently go together on nocturnal runs in their wolf forms. Eventually, the form of the wolf began to encourage savage behavior. Pierre attacked a boy of about six or seven, but the boy fought him off. Then he and Michel both attacked a woman who was out gathering peas and killed both her and a man who came to her aid. Thereafter, he claimed they began to attack and eat children, a girl of four and another of nine who was engaged in weeding her garden at the time and begged him to spare her. 

A woodcut of witches preparing their magic salve, circa 1571, via Wikimedia Commons

The story of the Werewolves of Poligny may be the best illustration of all our competing explanations. If they truly had been given a hallucinogenic salve, then it is reasonable that a shepherd who was afraid of wolves would in his mind transform himself into the creature he so feared. And as for who gave him the salve and why, perhaps it was not demons but rather herbalists who liked to dance in the woods by taperlight, who had seen his anxiety over his flock and sought to better his life through their folk healing. The fact that it went awry and that he thought he had become a wolf and then was driven to kill may indicate more of a psychological condition, such as clinical lycanthropy. And even their confessions showed an inconsistency regarding whether a real transformation had taken place; some of their victims had been strangled or had their necks broken by Pierre while in his natural human form. So perhaps, then, they were simply viewed as terrible murderers, as outlaws that should be killed as one would kill a savage wolf. Moreover, Pierre Bourgot and Michel Verdun confessed under torture, as did so many others, so their interrogators surely might have encouraged them to characterize those who gave them the salve as servants of Satan, or they may have coerced an entirely fabricated version, inventing the salve and the sabbat themselves through leading questions. Indeed, the legend has it that Michel Verdun was first arrested because, after a wolf attack in Poligny, someone followed a trail of blood to Verdun’s door and found him injured, his wife dressing his wound. Clearly this could have been a mistake, for if Michel was wounded for whatever reason, he may have left a trail of blood to his door, or it may have been a purposeful act of revenge by someone who disliked Verdun and wanted to see him stand trial as a werewolf. Either way, under torture, Verdun named two others, the aforementioned Pierre and a third, Philibert Montot, who, it is interesting to note, refused to confess to being a werewolf according to some tellings of the tale. This did little to help him, though, for all three were burned alive. So in the end, how should we view werewolves? Was it a superstition explaining the attack of a rogue wolf, a metaphor for criminal behavior, a mental illness, a vivid hallucination common among shepherds who used herbal folk remedies, or simply an extension of the mania of witchcraft trials in Early Modern Europe that claimed tens of thousands of lives?  One might argue it is all these things, but they do not all work logically in conjunction, some cancelling out others. Therefore, unsurprisingly, we are left with the by now quite familiar uncertainty that characterizes much of history.

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Further Reading

Baring-Gould, Sabine. The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition. Dover, 2006.

Summers, Montague. The Werewolf in Lore and Legend. Dover, 2003.

Shadow of the Werewolf, Part One: Killer on the Road

Even though they warned me at the tavern that I must not walk abroad this night, yet must I make my way across these misty fields… but what is that I hear, in the darkness beyond the treeline… snapping twigs… a quiet snarl? In this edition of Historical Blindness, the werewolf stretches the bristly fur upon its neck, digs its inhuman claws into the cold earth and lets loose an unearthly howl in the night. But wait, you may ask, how do werewolves fit into the theme of Historical Blindness? Well you may be surprised to learn that from the 15th to the 18th centuries, werewolves were not thought of as a horror trope or as just a scary story told to thrill children. They were considered a real evil, lurking on shadowy pastures and byways, killing women and eating children, especially in France, where the werewolf is known as a loup-garou. But where did this belief originate? How did the notion of a man transforming into a wolf enter folklore, and what about the other aspects of the lore, like its connection to the cycles of the moon and its vulnerability to silver bullets? And what basis in fact might there be for the myth, such as illnesses both physical and mental? And are werewolves a thing of the past, or do they continue to exist today?

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Mankind has always feared the wolf. If you’ve never seen a genuine wolf, and instead are picturing a big dog like a husky, it may be difficult to fathom the sheer size and speed and ferocity of the wolf. From the Middle Ages to modern times, gray wolves were, far more than any other animal, the worst enemy humanity had in the natural world—not the only creature to still prey upon us, but certainly the most successful of our predators. Let’s take France as an example, for as opposed to the British Isles, where wolves were long ago killed off, prior to the 19th century, France had as many as 15,000 wolves, one of the biggest feral wolf populations in Europe. And there is a reason that wolves were hunted in France to near annihilation by the mid-20th century. Children would go missing, grumblings would be heard of a large and shadowy creature seen loping through the night, and then an attack would be seen, the culprit revealed, such as the occurrence on the 8th of October 1749, when 7-year-old Marie was seen snapped up in her own doorway by a wolf, her remains found in a field, where the wolf had left only her stomach, one arm, and her head behind. And it seems that villages in every province of France likewise suffered from such awful wolf depredations. Little wonder, then, that they sought to wipe out the wolves at their doorsteps. But sometimes, it seems, fear of a wolf on the loose became more of a panic or mass hysteria, as can be seen in the case of the Beast of Gévaudan.

In 1764, in a rural area of southern France then called Gévaudan, 14-year-old girl Jeanne Boulet stood in a pasture tending her flock when something awful fell upon her and murdered her in a most gruesome manner. One month before, another shepherdess had been saved when her flock encircled her in defense against a lupine beast that appeared more interested in her than her livestock. And a month after Boulet’s death, another girl was attacked and grievously wounded, but survived to describe the beast that had set upon her: it was reddish brown with a dark stripe down its back, like a wolf if wolves could be as large as a donkey or a bull, but with claws and jaws unlike any wolf’s. Soon the number of dead attributed to the Beast skyrocketed, with a hundred killings blamed on the creature over the next few years. It was said the Beast ripped off the heads of the young children it took as victims, and then it drank their blood from the spouting stumps of their necks, leaving behind nothing but a jumble of bones. The tales and the mounting body count soon caught the attention of King Louis XV. His kingdom was in a shambles at the time. After defeats in the Seven Years’ War and the loss of its colonies abroad, the country’s economy was in the doldrums, and though as a sophisticated city dweller he may have thought the monster to be the product of the imaginations of backward provincial folk, he may have seen in the threat of the Beast a unifying cause, something to bring the country together. He offered a reward equal to a year’s salary for most men, and he organized a massive hunt, 30,000 men strong, some of whom were royal troops but the majority of whom were volunteers. They poisoned the corpses of the Beast’s victims and left them out as bait, and they dressed as women, the Beast’s favorite prey, to lure it out of hiding, and they had some few close encounters with a wolf that they shot but never killed, or at least never tracked down the body after it fled. Eventually, the king put his own Gun-Bearer and bodyguard in charge, who thereafter eventually slew a large wolf to great fanfare, and the attacks ceased, but only for two months, after which the deaths continued, with as many as 35 killings in 18 months.

Artist’s depiction of the Beast of according to eyewitness descriptions, via Wikimedia Commons

The king viewed the matter as having already been resolved and gave no further aid, so the locals found themselves alone in battling the Beast. Finally, in 1767, a farmer named Jean Chastel shot and killed another creature believed to be the Beast, and the bloody depredations ceased. Just what the Beast of Gévaudan was remains a mystery. The creature killed by the king’s Gun-Bearer was described as a large wolf, which doesn’t exactly match the descriptions given by the Beast’s victims. But the creature killed by the farmer Chastel was something different. Some suggest it was an African striped hyena, based on the fact that a stuffed specimen of such a creature appears to have been displayed in France’s National Museum of Natural History just after the time of the Gévaudan slayings. In fact, it appears that the farmer Jean Chastel’s son had kept a hyena in his menagerie, leading to suspicions that the Chastels had kept the Beast themselves and let it loose to terrorize the countryside, only to later kill it and play the part of the heroic Beast slayers. Then there is the theory that it was a lion, as a lion’s reddish coat and claws and tail would better match the descriptions given by victims. But the most plausible explanation is that the attacks were perpetrated by a pack of man-eating wolves, perhaps a wolf and its mate and whelps. So after all, is this even a werewolf story? Clearly the people of the region viewed the Beast as supernatural or preternatural, or at least thought it was unlike other wolves, and some claimed that it walked on two feet like a man. The tradition of the loup-garou was well-established by the late 17th century, so certainly among the many whispered legends of the Beast of Gévaudan, there must have been some that suggested it was a werewolf. But what makes this one of the most prominent werewolf stories in history is that it appears to be the origin of the legend that silver bullets kill werewolves.

In the many retellings of the story of the Beast of Gévaudan, different versions have it that Jean Chastel shot and killed the Beast with bullets cast from a holy silver amulet. While this an absurd embellishment, there is some primary source evidence that, among the many bullets fired at the Beast, some were made of silver. One Madame de Franquieres wrote in a letter to her daughter-in-law about the fear gripping the region, how no one dared to work alone tending sheep in the fields, how everyone traveled only in large groups, how the Beast eats only human flesh, preferring the heads and stomachs of men and the breasts of women but when hungry would consume a person entirely. She writes, “We essayed to shoot him with balls of iron, of lead, of silver. Nothing can penetrate.” Why might they have tried to shoot him with silver bullets? Either they were just trying every material at hand, or they believed it may be especially effective against a loup-garou. Historically, silver weapons have not been thought to be more effective than iron or steel. Some may argue by pointing to what the Oracle at Delphi told Philip of Macedon, father of  Alexander the Great, that “[w]ith silver weapons you may conquer the world,” but actually this appears to have been a suggestion to bribe rather than destroy those he wished to subjugate. But bullets of silver had long been established in folklore as artillery magically capable of killing a certain other bogeyman… or woman: the witch. Usually these were items with some sacred quality, such as a silver penny with a cross on the face of it, or a bullet cast from the silver of a church bell, but eventually, the Brothers Grimm had their protagonists killing a witch with normal silver buttons ripped from their garments. So this element of folklore surrounding witches seems to have migrated to that of the werewolf, and for good reason, since werewolf lore also has a strong connection to witch lore, but I’ll get to that. For now, let us focus on the element that is missing from the story of the Beast of Gévaudan: the actual transformation, a human being changing forms to become a wolf.

Another story may illustrate well this most central notion of werewolf lore. Some 80 years prior to the depredations of the Beast of Gévaudan, another wolf had turned from preying on livestock to carrying off and devouring children. In 1685, in the Principality of Ansbach, a city in modern day Bavaria, the wolf killed so many peasants that many believed it could be no ordinary animal, and some whispered that it was actually the new form taken by their old Bürgermeister, a cruel and universally hated man who had recently died. Thus, they viewed it as a man who had become a wolf in order to prey upon his fellow man, a loup-garou or werewolf. The townsfolk hunted the wolf with hounds and flushed it out of the forest, leaving it nowhere to hide but a well, into which it leapt and trapped itself. After killing it, the hunters dragged it through the streets of Ansbach and, gruesomely, attempted to make it transform back into its true form. They chopped off its snout and dressed it up like a man, complete with a wig and a mask and a false beard. Then they raised this dressed up animal carcass on a gibbet and scorned it as though it were the very Bürgermeister they despised. With this tale, we have a better sense of the French belief that the wolves preying upon them may have actually been men who had transformed into wolves, and yet we are still far from our modern day conception of a werewolf, which is not a reincarnation of a dead man, but rather a living man who changes back and forth—an all the more bothersome notion when one thinks of someone walking among us who is capable of killing as viciously and savagely as a marauding wolf. And if we were to take these two cases alone, the wolves of Ansbach and Gévaudan, we might be tempted to dismiss werewolves as nothing but simple gray wolves to which superstition had attached some further, paranormal attributes. But the Wolf of Ansbach was not the only time a supposed werewolf faced the unforgiving justice of European townsfolk, and in most cases, they were quite alive and had stories to tell.

The Wolf of Ansbach, dressed as the Bürgermeister and hanging from the gibbet, via Wikimedia Commons

Among living werewolves brought to trial, there was still this question of whether they entered and controlled the body of a wolf through some sort of possession of the spirit or whether their own bodies actually changed into that of a wolf. From the 16th to the early 18th centuries, in places such as Livonia and Estonia in the Baltic region of Europe, the common folk believed more in werewolves than they did in witches, but in order to put a person on trial for committing crimes in the shape of a wolf, they conformed to the established norms of witch trials, torturing defendants until they admitted to having made pacts with the devil. One such Baltic werewolf trial illustrates the distinction made between a werewolf who possesses a wolf and one who transforms into a wolf. In 1651, an 18-year-old boy named Hans confessed before an Estonian court to having preyed upon people as a werewolf for two years. In his confession, the authorities wished him to clarify if his soul was transmuted into the body of the beast, or if it was his body, and they had their answer when Hans told them that once, after having been attacked by a dog while he was the wolf, the dog’s bite mark remained on his human leg. Hans told them that a man clad in black had bitten him, which led to his eventual transformation and ability to shapeshift. For the court, this was tantamount to a confession of a pact with the devil, so they executed young Hans on no further evidence than this dubious confession. But for our purposes, we have here a human who turns physically into a werewolf, even carrying over to his natural form the injuries his wolf form sustains, and the fact that it was a bite that turned him makes this, perhaps the historical werewolf claim that conforms most with our idea of werewolves today.

But regardless of how we conceive of werewolves today, where did the notion of a man transforming into a wolf originate? To find this, of course, we must look to antiquity, but I think we can do without the tedious sifting through ancient writings that speak of men being transformed into other animals, for example, when Circe changes men into pigs in the Odyssey, and focus only on myths that seem more relevant to the werewolf legend. This allows us to home right in on Lycaon, the myth surrounding whom many claim is the origin of the werewolf legend. In Greek mythology, Lycaon was the human king in Arcadia, to whom Zeus made a visit in the form of a man. There are many versions of the myth, but in most, it is said that Lycaon doubted Zeus’s godhood and devised a test. He would kill a child, in some versions his own son, and mix some of the victim’s entrails into a dish that he would serve to Zeus, and if Zeus truly were omniscient, he would know what he was being served. As it turned out, Zeus did know and punished Lycaon by transforming him into a wolf. It is hard to view this myth as anything other than an instructive or cautionary fable, though, for the king’s very name, Lycaon, is derived from the Greek word for wolf, lýkos (λύκος), which is also the root for lycanthropy, our word for werewolf-ism. So clearly, the character of Lycaon was an invention named for the animal he would become later in the narrative. Or if based on any grain of truth, his name must have been changed to better suit his fate. And the lesson in his story seems to be one against barbarism, warning against the savage practice of cannibalism and the evil of murder, making his punishment apt, for men who murder and eat their victims surely are no better than wild wolves who creep through the woods at night. Elsewhere, when ancient writers mention people who transform into wolves, this allegorical reading can also provide some perspective. For example, Herodotus and Pomponius Mela both mention that the Greeks and Scythians believed that a certain remote tribe, the Neuri, were sorcerers who had the ability to change into wolves once a year. When interpreted in the same way as the Lycaon myth, these rumors about the Neurians could simply be suggesting that they were murderous savages, or even that they practiced cannibalism.

Zeus turning Lycaon into a wolf, via Wikimedia Commons

The notion that the entire idea of a werewolf evolved from this practice of labeling someone capable of barbarism or guilty of crimes against humanity as being like a wolf, or to literalize it, as being a wolf, is supported by the etymology of our words werewolves. Rather than give the impression that I’m playing the amateur etymologist, which I have so recently disparaged, I must credit 19th-century antiquarian scholar Sabine Baring-Gould for the following linguistic analysis. His monograph on werewolf folklore, The Book of Were-Wolves, being an account of a terrible superstition, has been an indispensable source for me.  According to Baring-Gould, the Anglo-Saxon root from which is derived the “were” in “werewolf,” as well as the “garou” in “loup-garou,” come from the Norse word vargr, which had a dual meaning, denoting both “a wolf” and “a godless man.” This Anglo-Saxon root, wearg, was also used to signify “a scoundrel,” and among Goths, their word varg meant “a fiend.” And Baring-Gould raises evidence that seems to indicate the same terms in different forms were long used to refer to anyone guilty of some crime which would see them cast out of society as an outlaw. He points to a passage in Sidonius Appolinaris that indicates aboriginal peoples in Europe had a certain name for roving bands of highwaymen who would attack; this name was vargorum. He raises as further evidence a passage from Frédéric Pluquet’s 1823 work Popular Tales, Prejudices, Patois, Proverbs, Names of Paces in the District of Bayeux, Followed by a Vocabulary of Rustic Words and the Most Remarkable Place Names of This Country, which tells us that according to ancient Norman custom, those cast out of society for their crimes were told wargus esto, meaning “be an outlaw!” Finally, Anglo-Saxon tradition had it that an outlaw, or utlaugh, had the head of a wolf, and their ancient law pronounced that outlaws must “be driven away as a wolf, and chased so far as men chase wolves.” So here we see a throughline, from antiquity to later legends. It tells us that when someone was accused of being a werewolf, it may not always have been a literal accusation but rather an accusation of some terrible crime, some especially awful act of violence or cannibalism, that seemed to make the perpetrator more animal than man.

While the accusation of lyanthropy, of being a werewolf, as in behaving so savagely and cruelly that one is no better than a vicious wolf and must be chased away from civilized places in the same way as wolves are driven off, may have started as a metaphor, throughout history, as mythology was formed, that metaphor must have become literalized, for in the European werewolf trials of the 15th to the 18th centuries, it is clear that they believed a literal transformation had taken place and wanted the accused to admit to it, even if they had to coerce a confession under torture. But the crimes attributed to these so-called werewolves, if they had indeed committed them, truly would have made them seem inhuman. Let us look to the story of the Demon Tailor of Châlons, a bare bones tale, if you’ll excuse the pun, because this serial killer’s crimes in late 16th century France were so horrific that, upon his conviction in 1598, all court records were thrown into the fire at the base of the stake on which he himself burned, so that this murderer’s terrible crimes might be forgotten, a damnation of memory, it was called, or damnatio memoriae. And today, we no longer remember this man’s name. We know only that he was a tailor in France during a time when children were going missing and rumors abounded of a loup-garou hunting in the woods at night. In his shop, authorities discovered a cask of bones, and after being tortured, he confessed to nearly 50 murders. He lured children to his shop, butchered them, dressed their flesh and cannibalized them. He is said to have been unrepentant for his crimes, admitting how much he enjoyed committing them, but tellingly, despite the torture, he appears to have never admitted to the other accusations that he transformed into a wolf to hunt his victims. Of course, that did not stop the public from calling him the Werewolf of Châlons.

Woodcut entitled The Werewolf or the Cannibal by Lucas Cranach the Elder, circa 1512, via Wikimedia Commons

Even today, it is common for murderers and serial killers to be called werewolves with the tacit assumption that the name is meant metaphorically. Brad Steiger makes this argument extensively in The Werewolf Book, pointing to the case of the “Werewolf of San Francisco,” a killer who cut up prostitutes with especial brutality in the late 1930s, but whom, despite the headlines, no one really thought was morphing into a wolfman and raking his claws over his victims. Likewise, Steiger profiles rapist and murderer Henry Lee Lucas and, perhaps the most horrifying serial killer of modern history, cannibal and necrophile Jeffrey Dahmer, suggesting that they too can be viewed as modern day werewolves. This conception of werewolves as mere men who have committed unthinkable crimes highlights our struggle to comprehend how such criminals can be capable of such incomprehensible atrocities, our inability to reconcile their behavior with our understanding of what it means to be a human being. But of course, today, we know enough about the diseases and aberrations of the human psyche not to dehumanize all those who murder, for mental illness, while it does not exonerate, does explain much of the behavior that terrifies and disgusts us. And indeed, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders still has an entry for Clinical Lycanthropy, a rare delusion in which the patient believes his or herself to transform into a beast. Clearly, this could have played some role in historical werewolf cases. If those accused of being werewolves really were guilty of the crimes attributed to them, it makes sense that they also might have been disturbed in some way and could have genuinely believed that they became wolves when they murdered. But this opens our study in a new direction, one which must wait for our next installment, for this understanding of the origin of werewolf lore only explains part of the legend. If werewolves were only ever killers, their transformation into animals but metaphors, perhaps encouraged by their own delusions that they were not themselves when they committed their crimes, then what of the further element that many of these stories share, that someone else was responsible for their transformations, someone evil, someone infernal.

As an example of the further places our study of werewolves must take us, look at the case of the Gandillon family, executed in France in 1598, the very same year as the Demon Tailor of Châlons. A girl named Pernette Gandillon was known to lope around the countryside on all fours, like an animal, a curious habit that turned ugly when one day she attacked another girl and boy who were out picking wild strawberries, killing the boy by gnashing out his throat with her teeth. The townspeople responded just how you might imagine, forming a mob and tearing the poor deluded girl apart in a fit of ferocity equal to her own. Soon after, the same townspeople accused Pernette’s brother, Pierre, of being a werewolf, and her sister, Antoinette, of witchcraft. To these crimes they confessed. Antoinette avowed that she had given herself to Satan, who came to her in the form of a black goat, and Pierre said that he had been given a magical ointment by the Devil himself, and when he rubbed it on himself, he transformed into a wolf and went out to hunt animals and people alike, until such time that he wished to return to his own form, when he would roll around in dewy grass and become himself once more. These could be easily dismissed as further delusions, like their sister Pernette’s belief that she was an animal—a case of mental illness that ran in the family—for after that, Pierre’s son Georges also said that he had been changed into a wolf by the salve his father was given, and that the family had together, in the form of wolves, attended a black sabbath to worship the devil. Or if a hereditary psychological condition doesn’t suit your fancy, one might be tempted to dismiss their confessions as false, for at least some of them had been given under torture, and any that had not been were then made under the threat of it. But then there is the description of Pierre and his son in their cells, where without their shapeshifting ointment, they appear to have gone quite mad, running in circles on all fours, their bodies covered in scratches. Pierre especially “was so much disfigured in this way that he bore hardly any resemblance to a man and struck all those who looked at him with horror.” But this description was given by their judge, a man who prided himself on convicting and executing witches and werewolves, which he thereafter did to the entire Gandillon family. So were the Gandillons murderers merely labeled werewolves? Was the entire family mentally disturbed? Did they really believe they did the things they’d been accused of? Or were they merely the victims of a witch hunt that forced them to confess according to a pattern from other witch and werewolf trials? Join me in the conclusion of this two-part series as we consider these other motifs in werewolf lore in order to reach a more holistic understanding of the legend.

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Further Reading

Baring-Gould, Sabine. The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition. Dover, 2006.

Steiger, Brad. The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings. Visible Ink, 2011.

The Chronological Revision Chronicles, Part Three: The Hardouin Conspiracy and the Newton Piracy

In this episode, I conclude my chronicles of those who make grand revisions to the timeline of history by going back, to the Renaissance and the dawn of historical chronology and on into the Enlightenment, to discuss some eminent and respectable minds who also proposed outrageous revisions to the accepted timeline. As I discussed in Part Two, Joseph Scaliger, the father of modern chronological science, can himself be considered a chronological revisionist akin to some of the other recent figures I’ve discussed. But there was not an absence of chronological revisionists from the time of Scaliger all the way to the 20th century when the Russians Morosov, Velikovsky, and Fomenko developed their theories. And indeed, as I indicated in my recent Blindside patron exclusive, The Phantom of the Dark Ages, about the German writer Heribert Illig and his claim that the Western European Dark Ages and King Charlemagne were fabrications, it has not been Russian scholars only that have had doubts about the timeline and have developed elaborate revisions of it. Before Scaliger, there had already been much debate over chronology in accordance with the Bible, and about a hundred years after Scaliger, some of the most respected minds in Europe would take on what they saw as errors, or even outright falsifications, in the chronology, producing two of the most fascinating revisions of history in history.  {Please join me next time} Thank your for joining me for Part Three of the Chronological Revision Chronicles: The Hardouin Conspiracy and the Newton Piracy

As discussed in Part Two, in the late 1500s, Joseph Scaliger sought to use philological and astronomical evidence to establish a cohesive and absolute timeline that differed dramatically from that which had been argued by church scholars before him, who reckoned time using dubious measures derived from scriptures, such as the extraordinarily long lifespans recorded in the Bible and other unreliable yardsticks. For example, pre-scientific chronologists looked to the prophetic data offered in the Book of Daniel, which lists numbers of days before the end times and the return of Christ, and since they couldn’t reasonably accept that Daniel had really meant them as days, since the prophecy would have long ago already failed to occur, they instead calculated these figures as numbers of years. Some forty years before Scaliger’s work, Martin Luther was writing his Reckoning of the Years of the World, which followed along these lines, and after Scaliger’s 1581 work De Emendatione Temporum, church scholars continued to tinker with their chronologies based on the Bible, computing all of history based on the notion that the world had been created only a few thousand years earlier and would come to an end within only couple more. Some of the religious chronologists to come around after the groundbreaking work of Scaliger and Petavius were English rabbinical scholar and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge John Lightfoot, who in the late 1640s proposed that the Earth had been created in the year 3929 B.C., and Irish Archbishop James Ussher, who in 1650, based on supposedly very precise calculations, published a book asserting that it had been created in 4004 B.C. on October 23rd, sometime in the evening. Now these weren’t revolutionary claims, for scholars had long thought the world began about 4,000 years before Christ, going all the way back to the Venerable Bede, who placed it in 3952 B.C., and even further, for it had long been understood that Abraham’s time was about 2,000 years after Creation, and 2,000 after that came Christ. Indeed, even the more scientific-minded Scaliger believed in a Creation date around this time, but his historical evidence also showed dynasties and events occurring long before the supposed time of Creation, a fact he struggled with and which provided his critics with their most effective ammunition against him, for here he was suggesting some history seemed to have occurred before anything actually existed!

Joseph Justus Scaliger, via Wikimedia Commons

But long before Scaliger’s time, there had been a different way of calculating history, using A.M. or anno mundi, the year of the world, a dating system derived from the Septuagint, the oldest Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, which reckoned time continuously since a date of Creation translatable to about 5500 BCE. Indeed, long before Dionysius Petavius popularized the use of B.C. and A.D. in his 1627 work De Doctrina Temporum, or On the Doctrine of Time, the reckoning of anno domini had first been coined in the 6th century by Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus, or Dionysius the Humble, mainly, it seems, in order to deal with the issue of Christ’s return. A certain line in the Talmud had long ago established that the world would only exist for 6,000 years, so if the anno mundi reckoning had been accurate, and the Earth had been created in 5500 BCE, then Christ would have returned and the world would have come to an end 500 years after Christ was born, which it was clear by Dionysius the Humble’s time was not going to happen. Thus, it seems the first major chronological revisionists  were churchmen, shifting the date of Creation by more than a millennium in order to give Jesus some more time to come back, and when Scaliger found himself dating events previous to 4000 B.C., it proved to be an insurmountable problem precisely because prophecy forbade the date of Creation from being any earlier. So we already see here that chronology has long been inextricably entangled with Judeo-Christian doctrine. And as we shall see, by looking at the fascinating cases of Jean Hardouin and Isaac Newton in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when science developed by leaps and bounds but had not yet properly divorced itself from the realm of faith, it would remain the same for a long time after Scaliger and Petavius invented scientific chronology. And this may shed light on our modern day, when evangelical fundamentalists and biblical literalists look to these historical thinkers, and to the science denial of more modern revisionists, to justify their belief in the young age of our world.

Although today Jean Hardouin is mostly remembered as a crank or madman, this characterization does not do him justice, for before he published his chronological revisionist theories, he was perhaps the most preeminent antiquarian scholar of his age. Born in 1646 in Brittany, he was introduced to letters and a life of scholarship young, for his father was a printer and bookseller. After proving himself an adept and brilliant student at a Jesuit college, he entered his novitiate period of training in the Society of Jesus at just 14 years old, and early in his career as a Jesuit priest earned himself a reputation for encyclopedic knowledge. He took a position as the librarian of the Jesuit College of Paris, and he taught many subjects, from theology to philosophy to belles-lettres, a style of literary criticism viewed itself as an aesthetic artform. And it was here he found his calling, penning a brilliant five-volume translation and commentary on Pliny the Elder in only one year, an almost superhuman undertaking that won him fame upon its 1685 publication. From that moment on he was a towering figure not only in literary and historical scholarship, but in antiquarian studies as well, for he wrote numerous well-respected works on numismatics, or the study of ancient coins, as well, and patristics, or the study of early church writings and history. Indeed, in the latter field, he produced a massive 22,000-page edition recording the acts and decrees of church councils throughout history. And here we begin to see Hardouin’s willingness to provoke controversy with his scholarship, for some in the church, not liking the implications that some passages in the work might have regarding church law, tried to suppress it, ending up only delaying its printing. But this controversy is largely forgotten whereas another scandal he stirred up still intrigues and outrages three hundred years later.

A frontispiece for one of Hardouin’s works, containing one of the only portraits of the scholar, from Grafton, pg. 246

In 1693, in a little piece of writing about coins from the dynasty of Herod the Great, Hardouin dropped a tantalizing hint that he was in the process of uncovering a vast conspiracy. He claimed that in 1690, he had begun to “scent fraud in Augustine and his contemporaries,” and as he further investigated, discovered the dimensions of this fraud to be vast, encompassing the work of all writers of antiquity. In short, he concluded, based on evidence he would slowly tease the public with for the rest of his life, that “a certain band of fellows existed, some centuries ago, who had undertaken the task of concocting ancient history…there being at that time none in existence” (qtd. in Grafton 248). Essentially, this “impious cohort” of forgers, as he called them, whom he would eventually suggest were monks, mostly of the Benedictine order, working in the 14th century, had used the only genuine works of ancient literature (the works of Homer, Pliny, Cicero, and some but not all of the works attributed to Virgil and Horace) along with information they had from ancient coins in their possession, and set about falsifying vast numbers of ancient documents on a variety of different styles of parchment, taking care to demonstrate a variation in scripts for documents meant to have been written in different times and places, building not only a canon of work by ancient masters but also innumerable ancillary works that referred to the other forgeries and thereby bolstered their credibility. In short, he claims this Impious Cohort pulled off the biggest hoax in the history of humankind… that in fact their hoax was the history of humankind. The Jesuits at first approved the work in which Hardouin first hinted at his theory, but 2 months later, after the first reactions of readers to the passage in question brought all of this to their attention, they rushed to the printer to seize every copy of it, lest it give the enemies of the Society of Jesus more fodder against them. However, this only increased interest in it, for Protestants accused the Jesuits of a stunt, trying to increase the rarity of the work and thereby inflate its value. Soon enough, despite much sharp criticism, interest encouraged Hardouin to fully develop his theories in further writings.

If the sheer magnitude of the fraud that Hardouin suspected was not enough to make his suspicions seem unreasonable, then the evidence he offered to prove his theories certainly paints a picture of a genius with a disturbed mind, one who today would perhaps be diagnosed with paranoid delusions. To illustrate, we shall look at his criticism of literary works that he claimed gave themselves away through clumsy writing. According to Hardouin, some works of Virgil and Horace were genuine, but others gave themselves away as forgeries because they were more clumsily written and simply could not have been the work of those brilliant writers. In the works of the monks of his Impious Cohort pretending to be Virgil and Horace, whom he called pseudo-Virgil and pseudo-Horace, he remarks with the cutting wit of a master critic on awkward turns of phrase in Latin, arguing that not only would the real Virgil and Horace never phrase something that way, but also that this showed the forgers were using a much different Latin than the true writers used. And he would pick apart the logic of writing, pointing to a part in the Aeneid when Aeneas retraces his own tracks in the night and objecting that Aeneas wouldn’t have been able to see the tracks in the dark, a mistake that he believes the real Virgil never would have made. Beyond “evidence” like this, he also searched for apparent anachronisms, finding, for example, that the mention of a military loss to a “Parthian despot” in the Aeneid proved everything, because it was a reference to the Battle of Carrhae, which Hardouin placed in 19 BC, the same year that Virgil died and therefore asserting that he couldn’t have written the line. The problem there is that the Battle of Carrhae actually took place in 53 BCE, about 34 years earlier than Virgil’s death. Hardouin claimed it was in 19 BC because, like many antiquarians at the time, he placed far more stock in numismatic evidence than in any documents, especially since he suspected all documents of being frauds, and there happened to be a coin depicting a Parthian holding a Roman banner that was minted in 19 BCE. In Hardouin’s mind, coins provided the only unimpeachable evidence, and since it had been minted in that year, then that was the closest date attributable to it, despite the fact that coins can obviously be minted years after the fact to commemorate events long passed.

Denarius struck c. 19 BCE that seems to have been the basis of Hardouin’s miscalculation, courtesy Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. , licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

We see this over-reliance on numismatic evidence throughout Hardouin’s arguments. For example, Josephus tells us that Herod the Great rebuilt the Temple at Jerusalem, but Hardouin claims this cannot be, for there exist no coins to celebrate the act. Thus we see the absurdity of his argumentation throughout. His literary evidence is largely a matter of style and aesthetics, and therefore entirely subjective, and his numismatic evidence overestimates what coins can and cannot tell us. Obviously events may have transpired that weren’t recorded on ancient coinage. But when Hardouin explores the motivation of his Impious Cohort, that’s when we really get to see the craziness of his conspiracy theory. He asserts that, while these devious monkish forgers made errors that reveal them, they also purposely seeded their forgeries with clues meant to be discerned. Here Hardouin practices the kind of fast and loose etymology and philology that we have seen before in the work of Anatoly Fomenko that I discussed in Part One, and that of Alexander Hislop, the author of The Two Babylons, whom I discussed earlier this year. While Hardouin was no slouch in the language analysis department, he made a lot of dubious linguistic claims, for example arguing that the language of the Talmud is not Aramaic but rather Hebrew or that he could discern Gallic peppered throughout the ancient Greek in some works. Most doubtful, though, are his claims to have found secret codes that only he has ever deciphered. He states that many of the proper names in the ancient works he says are forgeries are actually references to Jesus Christ, and that in seeding hints about Jesus throughout the supposed works of antiquity, they hoped to undermine Christianity, for when it was discovered that ancient pagans and Jews had known all along about the messiah’s coming sacrifice and had been hinting about it in all the works of ancient literature, that this would somehow reduce the importance of the Bible. Honestly, even trying to explain it now, it’s hard to make sense of these delusions, and clearly they were paranoid fantasies of the sort that might today lead a psychologist to diagnose with a personality disorder. Of course, that has not stopped chronological revisionists like Anatoly Fomenko and Heribert Illig from pointing to him as if his work provides reliable precedent or evidence for the idea of fabricated eras of history. As for Hardouin himself, he continued to write about his conspiracy until his death of natural causes in his mid-eighties in 1729, still teasing that he had the damning evidence that would prove everything and would soon be publishing it, though of course no such proof ever emerged after his passing.

Two years before Jean Hardouin’s death, another incredibly famous and respected scholar passed away in Kensington, England, and among his unpublished works was found a manuscript called The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, a detailed argument using astronomical evidence to show that Scaliger and Petavius had erroneously created entire periods of Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek history that never actually occurred. That man was none other than Sir Isaac Newton, and the following year, his amended chronology, which he had spent much time working on in his final years, would be among the first of his works to be published posthumously, and it would come very close to tarnishing the impressive legacy he left behind. But this was the culmination of Newton’s work on historical chronology, which he had taken an interest in early in his career, and he might have never made the effort of composing this extensive treatise had some of his earlier, far briefer writings on chronology not been pirated by unscrupulous sorts looking to make a name for themselves at his expense. Years earlier, Newton had entrusted a brief outline of his revised chronology with little indication of how he had arrived at his dates to the Princess of Wales. He called it “A Short Chronicle from the first memory of things in Europe to the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great,” and it soon found its way into the hands of a Venetian intellectual named Abbé Conti who liberally showed it to others. Soon a French scholar, Nicolas Fréret, translated it and composed some of his own arguments against Newton’s dates, and though Newton never gave his permission, Fréret’s Parisian publisher went ahead and printed the translation. Isaac Newton was livid and immediately penned an article defending his calculations for the Royal Society before getting to work composing the far more in-depth defense of his chronology in the volume that would be published after his death. In it, he showed himself to be brilliant, as expected, but the weaknesses of his argument invited much criticism. However, these weaknesses reveal perhaps less about Newton and more about the weaknesses of scientific chronology generally and how hopelessly entangled ancient history is with myth and religious faith.

Isaac Newton in old age, via Wikimedia Commons

To demonstrate Newton’s unfaltering genius, it should be noted that his work on chronology pioneered an astronomical dating technique that had never before been brought to bear. Scholars had been using astronomy to settle chronology since Mercator, but none before Newton had ever thought to use equinoctial precession to settle dates. Since the beginning of springtime comes a few minutes early every year, or in other words, the Vernal Equinox arrives a little earlier than it did the year before, then Newton realized that any ancient text that described the sun’s position in relation to the stars on the spring equinox could be accurately dated. It was a groundbreaking idea, but the problem, as we’ve seen before, is that it relied on descriptions from ancient texts, which could not be said to be very precise. For example, Newton looked to Hipparchus in the 2nd century CE, who describes the astronomical observations of Eudoxus in the 4th century BCE, so already it’s coming to the scholar secondhand, and Eudoxus maps meridians in the imagined celestial sphere on which solstices and equinoxes are tracked in relation to constellations, such as saying one curve passes through “the Tayl of the South Fish,” and “the middle of the great Bear.” It is clearly not an exact science when an astronomer is trying to place an exact meridian and the most precise direction they have is to place it somewhere “between the poop and the mast of the Argo” (qtd. in Diacu 74). But, as any dyed-in-the-wool mathematician would, Newton simply admits to some margin of error and then draws conclusions that he thereafter treats as though they are precise, when in fact they are anything but. Likewise, as with Scaliger and Petavius before him, his calculations often rely on estimates. When more definite records did not exist, Scaliger and Petavius reckoned much of their chronologies based on an average length of a king’s reign, which they reasoned would be about a generation, or 33 years. Newton, however, challenges this, arguing a better average would be about 20 years, which would mean Scaliger and Petavius added non-existent years all over their timelines. But the fact remains that all these arguments rely on best guesses and approximations, making it hard to justify calling this “scientific chronology.”

Even further demonstrating how unscientific this work sometimes was, we see that, even if Newton was not reckoning time according to scripture only, as had Ussher and the many religious scholars before him, he still based much of his understanding of ancient history on myth. He, like many in his era, accepted the ancient doctrine of Euhemerism, which asserted that the stories of mythology had some basis in truth, that the quests and adventures of Greek myth, for example, really occurred, and the major characters, including gods and monsters, had really existed, if only as normal human beings who had been deified or made monstrous in memory. So, when searching for a place to begin his chronology, Newton settled on the voyage of the Argonauts, arguing that the first Greek maps of constellations had been drawn by the first astronomer, whom he identified as Chiron, a wise and knowledgeable centaur in Greek mythology, in order to help the Argonauts navigate on their quest for the Golden Fleece. So, if he could date the first Greek celestial map based on constellation position, that would give him the date of the Argonautical expedition, and Herodotus writes that the Trojan War ended one generation later, so he could date the fall of Troy, which would then allow him to date the founding of Rome, and so on, all of it based on myth, speculation, and guesswork, but with a veneer of science. And lest one believe that Newton, known to be a very religious man, did not allow his faith to color his views on ancient history, think again, for it has been argued that his central motivation in rewriting ancient history was to minimize the contributions of pagans and give the Israelites primacy as the most important civilization of antiquity. Indeed, he does rearrange chronology to argue that there was no major Pharaonic kingdom in Egypt until after King Solomon’s time. While Scaliger and Petavius created their Egyptian timeline according to an ancient Egyptian history composed by a figure named Manetho, like Jean Hardouin, Newton dismissed Manetho’s work as a forgery and preferred to assemble his own chronology, in which Solomon was the world’s first king, and his Temple the first temple. According to his re-interpretation of myths, many figures could be identified as Judeo-Christian patriarchs; for example, Saturn was Noah, and Jupiter was Noah’s son, Shem. So after all, despite his innovation and his reputation as the father of modern science, when it came to trying to settle ancient chronology, Newton certainly relied on supposition and perhaps was driven by creed and prejudice.

A 1690 star chart used by Isaac Newton to reconstruct Chiron’s celestial sphere, from Diacu

Today we find that the most well-known and widely disputed aspect of our study of the past has to do not with human history so much, but rather with geological history and still stems from religious belief that the Earth was created about 6,000 years ago. Despite the fossil record, there are many biblical literalists who will argue that the earth cannot possibly be as old as science tells us it is, because the Bible tells us otherwise. Religious explanations usually run along the lines that God made our planet, 6,000 years ago, with inbuilt history, fossils included, so that our faith in His Word would be tested. And that is among the scriptural literalists who accept what science tells them, for there are many who don’t believe a word out of any academic’s mouth if he or she mentions dinosaurs or evolution. And this kind of science denial is common among chronological revisionists, as well, for there are methods of confirming dates and disproving revised chronologies that these revisionists must contend with. Invariably, they deal with them by casting doubt upon their accuracy. First, there is numismatic, or hard currency evidence, which in this edition we have seen can be misused or over-relied on, as was Hardouin’s mistake, but as we saw in the recent Blindside patron exclusive on Heribert Illig’s Phantom Time Hypothesis actually provides irrefutable evidence of Charlemagne’s existence, disproving the claim he was an invention. Then we have the two pillars of scientific dating: dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating. Dendrochronology consists of examining tree rings, which makes it possible to date a piece of wood found at an archaeological site, depending on its place of origin and the type of tree it’s from, by comparing it to a catalogue scientists have compiled that can determine dates based on shared attributes of certain rings, such as low growth in drought years. Some of these dendrochronological catalogues go back more than 10,000 years, exploding the notion of a 6,000-year-old earth.

Then there is radiocarbon dating or the carbon-14 method, which dates organic material based on the decay of a certain radioactive substance that all living organisms ingest by consuming food. This is the method that proved the Shroud of Turin was medieval, which of course led to a lot of objections about its accuracy. Then again, though, to a chronological revisionist, the Shroud being much younger than originally thought would not necessarily mean it wasn’t Christ’s shroud, if one were arguing that Christ lived not as long ago as traditionally believed. But I digress. Objections to both dendrochronology and carbon-14 dating almost always rely on suggestions that results depend on the sample used and the elaborate mathematics involved, suggesting that any date may be called into question by insinuating a mistake may have been made. And indeed, there have been plenty of errors made using these methods, but what these science denialists won’t point out is that they are almost all blunders made when the science was young, and today scientists check and double check using multiple samples and comparing radiocarbon evidence to dendrochronological evidence in order to reach verified conclusions. And beyond these foundational techniques of scientific dating we can now add mass spectroscopy, archaeomagnetic dating, collagen fiber analysis, fission tracking, and bioluminescence. The science of chronological dating is growing by leaps and bounds. It absolutely disproves young Earth dogma and can be relied on to refute the grand revisionist chronologies we’ve talked about. But can it settle each little disagreement about ancient history? Can it make firm every date in our timeline of antiquity? The answer is clearly no because it relies on objects that can be tested and identified as being associated with certain historical events or periods. While there may be many such samples, there is not a sample for every moment that we want dated. So while we may be able to refute these outrageous revisionist chronologies, are we ever able to finally be certain about dates in ancient times?

Andrew Ellicott Douglass, creator of the science of dendrochronology, from McGraw, pg. 441

As we have seen, revisionists like Fomenko and even Velikovsky actually had some shrewd criticisms of established chronology, even if their proposed revisions were even less believable. And looking at the basis and foundation of consensus chronology as received from Scaliger and Petavius, we see that much of it was tinged by Christian doctrine and built on conjecture and presumptions. One needs only look at the continuous disputes over Egyptian chronology to discern how uncertain we truly are about the order and placement of ancient history. In the 19th century, after the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone and the beginning of Egyptology as an academic field, many began to challenge the chronology of Egypt, which previously had always seemed ironclad because of Manetho’s list of pharaohs, heavily relied upon since Scaliger. In the 1890s Cecil Torr challenged some dates, suggesting the overlap of dynasties, and his work, as well as Newton’s, inspired a group of Egyptologists and archaeologists a hundred years later. In the 1990s, led by historian Peter James, they argued for an Egyptian chronology about 250 years shorter. And then one among them, Egyptologist David Rohl, using the kind of evidence that should sound familiar by now—a papyrus listing a certain number of generations of architects calculated into dates using Isaac Newton’s assumed generational timespan of 20 years—he shaved another century or so off of Egypt’s history. Interestingly, many of these later efforts seem to confirm Newton’s assertions, but as we see, they have the same unreliability at their foundation. So in the end, we come away flummoxed, not knowing what to believe and feeling much like Henry St. John, the first Viscount Bolingbroke, a political philosopher and Enlightenment thinker who, when he undertook studies in biblical chronology, expressed frustration and despair, writing, “Who can resolve to build with great cost and pain when he finds, how deep soever he digs, nothing but loose sand?” And this feeling, which I sadly come away with after my research in this taxing series, may be the most nihilistic expression of the theme of “historical blindness” that I have yet encountered.

Further Reading

Grafton, Anthony. “Jean Hardouin: The Antiquary as Pariah.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 62, 1999, pp. 241–267. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/751388.

McGraw, Donald J. “Andrew Ellicott Douglass and the Big Trees: The Giant Sequoia Was Fundamental to the Development of the Science of Dendrochronology—Tree-Ring Dating.” American Scientist, vol. 88, no. 5, 2000, pp. 440–447. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27858092.

Scott, James M. “Who Tried to Kill Nearly Everyone Else but Homer?” The Classical World, vol. 97, no. 4, 2004, pp. 373–383. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4352873.