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.

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.

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

Follow and Support Us!