WERE-WOLF (A ng.-Sax. wer, a man), a man-wolf, a man who, either periodically or for a time, is transformed, or transforms himself into a wolf, becoming possessed of all the powers and appetites of a wolf in addition to his own, and being especially remark able for his appetite for human flesh. The belief in the transformation of men into wolves or other beasts of Trey has been ,very widely diffused; there is perhaps no people among whom some evidence of its former prevalence does not exist. It is not vet extinct, even in Europe. In many of the rural districts of France, the latter part of the word is a corruption of the Teutonic still an object of dread. This superstition lingers too among the country-people of northern Europe, and a particular form of it flourishes vigorously among the Bulgarians, Slavonians, and Serbs, and even aniong the more intelligent inhabitants of Greece. . See VAMPIRE. Its details vary in differelit countries and districts. The definition given above includes only the commonest and the best marked of its incidents. Probably it has not yet entirely disappeared in any country whose rural districts are infested with wolves or other wild animals; and manifestations fitted to suggest it may be occasionally observed in the mad-houses of most countries. See LYCANTRROPIA. The animal whose shape is taken, as already stated, is not always, though usually, a wolf; it was probably always the animal most formidable, or considered most inimical to man. In Abyssinia it is the hyena.
Occasional notices of lyeanthropy, as it is called, are found in classical writers; and lycanthropy, as there described, was the change of a man or woman into a wolf, so as to enable the man or woman to gratify an appetite for human flesh, either by magical means, or through the judgment of the gods, as a punishment for some dire offense. Sometimes the transformation was into the shape of a dog or a bull. Ovid, in his Meta morphoses, tells the story of Lycaon, king of Arcadia, who, when entertaining Jupiter ut a banquet, resolved to test his omniscience by serving up to him a hash of human flesh.
The god, to punish him for this, transformed him into a wolf. Herodotus describes the Neurl as sorcerers who had the power of taking once a year, for several days, the shape of wolves; and the same account of them is given by Pomponius Mehl. Pliny relates that, in Arcadia, every year, at the festival of Jupiter Lyctaus, one of the family of Antieus was chosen by lot, and conducted to the brink of the Arcadian lake, into which, after having hung his garments upon a tree, he plunged, and was transformed into a wolf. Nine years after, if alive, he returned to his friends, looking nine years older than when he disappeared. Some notices of lycanthropy are tc be found in Pctronius; and allusion to it is also made by Virgil in the 8th Eclogue. Harcellus Sidetes tells us of men who, every winter, were seized with the notion that they were dogs or wolves, and lived precisely like these animals, spending the night in lone cemeteries. This, disorder attacked men chiefly in the beginning of the year, and was usually at its height in Feb ruary. It is worth while observing that the classical ,instances of lycanthropy mostly refer to Arcadia, a pastoral country, whose inhabitants suffered greatly from the ravages of wolves.
In Norway and Iceland, it used to.be believed that there were men who were "not of one skin." Such men could take upon themselves other shapes than that of man, and the natures corresponding to the shapes which they assumed; they had the strength and other powers of the animal whose shape they bore, as well as their own. It was believed ' that the change of shape might be effected in one of three ways: simply by putting on a skin of the animal ; by the soul of the man deserting the human body—leaving it for a time in a cataleptic state—and entering into a body borrowed or created for the pur pose; or, without any actual change of form, by means of a charm, which made all beholders see the man under the shape of the animal whose part he was sustaining.