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?

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.

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

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