Laura Wright 
Werewolves have been hunted almost as long as they have been feared.
Long before Hollywood gave the werewolf a full moon, silver bullets and a tragic transformation beneath the moonlight, European folklore described something considerably less predictable. The werewolf might be a sorcerer, a cursed human being, a servant of the Devil, a cannibal, a shapeshifter or simply a person possessed by an uncontrollable appetite for violence.
There was never one universal werewolf.
Perhaps that is why people spent centuries trying to determine exactly what one was.
The Werewolf Hunters
No discussion of historical werewolf lore is complete without Sabine Baring-Gould and Montague Summers.
Baring-Gould published The Book of Were-Wolves in 1865. A clergyman, antiquarian and extraordinarily prolific writer, he gathered historical cases, folklore, mythology and accounts of murder and cannibalism in an attempt to explore the origins of lycanthropy.
His werewolves were not always supernatural.
Some were criminals. Others were mentally disturbed people who believed themselves transformed into animals. Still others belonged entirely to folklore.
Decades later, Montague Summers approached the subject from a considerably more credulous direction.
Summers, an eccentric English scholar of witchcraft, vampires and the supernatural, published The Werewolf in 1933. He treated many old supernatural traditions with a seriousness that later scholars generally did not share.
Between them, Baring-Gould and Summers preserved an extraordinary amount of old werewolf lore.
They also demonstrate how difficult the subject can be.
Where does folklore end and history begin?
What Was a Werewolf?
Modern popular culture has given the werewolf a fairly rigid set of rules.
A person is bitten.
The full moon rises.
The transformation begins.
Silver kills the resulting monster.
Older traditions were nowhere near so orderly.
In some stories, transformation occurred through witchcraft. A person might wear an enchanted belt or animal skin, apply a magical ointment or perform a ritual.
Elsewhere, lycanthropy was a curse.
Some supposed werewolves deliberately transformed themselves. Others were condemned to become wolves against their will.
And sometimes the word described something closer to a human monster than a supernatural creature.
The underlying horror was simple.
A werewolf possessed the mind of a human and the ferocity of a beast.
That combination made it considerably more dangerous than an ordinary wolf.
Wolves, Sin and the Devil
European religious imagery gave the wolf a sinister reputation long before the great werewolf trials.
Wolves threatened livestock and occasionally people. Christian imagery also employed wolves as symbols of spiritual danger, false teachers and predatory evil.
The Devil himself could consequently be associated with the wolf.
This helped make lycanthropy particularly threatening during periods of intense fear surrounding witchcraft.
If witches could supposedly make agreements with Satan, perhaps they could also become animals.
The werewolf could therefore be interpreted not simply as a monster but as another manifestation of witchcraft.
And that belief had consequences for real people.
When Werewolves Went to Court
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European authorities prosecuted a number of people accused of lycanthropy.
Some cases involved horrific crimes committed by actual human beings. Others depended heavily upon confessions, accusations of witchcraft and beliefs about supernatural transformation.
The resulting records occupy an uncomfortable territory between criminal history and folklore.
People really were questioned.
Trials really occurred.
Confessions really survive.
Whether anyone actually became a wolf is, naturally, another matter.
Yet one of the strangest surviving cases turns the traditional werewolf completely upside down.
Old Thiess: The Werewolf Who Fought the Devil
In 1691, an elderly Livonian peasant known as Thiess of Kaltenbrun appeared before a court in Jürgensburg, in what was then Swedish Livonia.
Thiess was already locally reputed to be a werewolf.
Rather remarkably, he didn’t deny it.
He reportedly insisted that he was a werewolf.
But there was a problem with the court’s expectations.
Thiess wasn’t interested in being one of Satan’s monsters.
He claimed that werewolves were “Hounds of God.”
According to his extraordinary testimony, he and other werewolves periodically descended into Hell, where they fought the Devil’s witches and sorcerers. Their purpose was to recover grain and livestock stolen from the earth and thereby protect the fertility of the land.
The judges repeatedly attempted to fit Thiess’s beliefs into the familiar Christian framework of diabolical witchcraft.
Thiess refused.
His werewolves fought against the Devil.
The case remains one of the most remarkable surviving documents in the history of European werewolf belief. Scholars continue to debate what Thiess’s testimony actually represented, including possible connections with older folk traditions, agrarian beliefs and resistance to elite religious ideas.
Whatever Thiess believed, the important point is that the historical werewolf was considerably more complicated than the universally evil creature later folklore would suggest.
Sometimes the werewolf was apparently the hero.
The Language of the Wolf
The association between wolves, sexuality and dangerous behavior also found its way into language.
The Latin lupa meant a she-wolf, but the word also became associated with prostitutes. Lupanar referred to a brothel.
The connection is ancient and illustrates how thoroughly wolf imagery became associated with uncontrolled appetite and behavior outside accepted social boundaries.
Even today, calling a sexually aggressive man a wolf requires no explanation.
The animal has been carrying human sins for a very long time.
Ireland: The Land of Wolves
Ireland developed a particularly strong association with wolves.
For centuries, the island supported a substantial wolf population, and historical writers sometimes characterized Ireland as a land of wolves. The animals survived there longer than in England, where wolves had disappeared considerably earlier.
The famous Irish Wolfhound was associated with hunting wolves and other large game.
But Ireland also possessed its own traditions of human beings becoming wolves.
One of the most famous medieval accounts appears in the writings of Gerald of Wales, who described a priest encountering a pair of people from Ossory who had been transformed into wolves.
According to the story, the transformation was not voluntary.
The people had been cursed.
The tale is particularly fascinating because the wolf speaks to the priest and requests Christian rites for his dying companion.
Again, the medieval werewolf refuses to behave like its cinematic descendant.
The wolf may still be human inside.
Werewolves Without Wolves
There is another curious problem with werewolf folklore.
Not every culture had wolves.
Yet stories of humans becoming dangerous animals occur throughout the world.
Where wolves were absent, other predators frequently took their place.
Stories developed around humans becoming hyenas, leopards, tigers, bears and other animals.
That suggests that something deeper than fear of Canis lupus may lie behind the werewolf.
Perhaps the essential idea was never the wolf itself.
Perhaps it was the disturbing possibility that the boundary between human and animal was not as secure as people wanted to believe.
The Human Werewolf
Historical writers sometimes used lycanthropy to describe a psychological condition in which a person believed himself or herself transformed into an animal.
Modern medicine recognizes the rare phenomenon generally called clinical lycanthropy, in which a person may believe or report that they have become or are becoming an animal.
That offers a possible explanation for some historical accounts.
It cannot explain all werewolf folklore.
Neither can rabies, ergot poisoning, porphyria or any of the other medical conditions periodically offered as a universal solution to the werewolf legend.
They may help illuminate particular cases.
The legend itself is far older, broader and more culturally complicated.
Searching for the Werewolf
So where should we look for the historical werewolf?
In the forest?
In a courtroom?
In old medical records?
In witch trials?
In mythology?
Perhaps in all of them.
Some supposed werewolves were undoubtedly ordinary criminals whose brutality acquired supernatural dimensions in the retelling.
Some were people suffering from illnesses their contemporaries couldn’t understand.
Some existed only in folklore.
Others appear in historical records insisting, sometimes quite sincerely, that they actually possessed the ability to become wolves.
Old Thiess stood before a court and openly declared himself one.
He even explained where the werewolves went.
They went to Hell.
Not to serve the Devil.
To fight him.
More than three centuries later, we still don’t really know what lay behind Thiess’s extraordinary beliefs.
And perhaps that is the most interesting thing about searching for werewolves.
The deeper we venture into the old records, the less the creature resembles the monster we thought we were looking for.
About the Author
Thanks for having written this. That’s the most interesting article I have found about this.
It’s spooky how clveer some ppl are. Thanks!