LYCANTHRO'PIA (Gr. lycos, a wolf; anthropos, a man), wolf-madness. There has been, in various countries and times, a popular superstition and dread that men had been transmuted into wolves by Satanic agency, and roamed through forests and desert places actuated by the same appetites as the wild beast whose aspeet or name they bore. The panic thus inspired may have suggested the delusion now under consideration, where the process of transformation was purely su-bjective, and the transforming power dis e'ase. Many instances occur, and may be encountered in every asylum, in which the insane conceive themselves dogs (cynanthropia) and other animals, and even inanimate objects; but these are solitary cases, whereas this hallucination has appeared epidemi cally, and lyeanthropes have literally herded and hunted together in packs. In 1600 multitudes were attacked with the disease in the Jura, einulated the destructive habits of the wolf, murdered and devoured children; howled, walked, or attempted pro,crression upon all-fours, so that the palms of the hands became hard and horny; and admitted that they congregated in the mountains for a sort of cannibal or devil's `sabbath.
Imprisonment, burning, scarcely sufficed to check what grew into a source of public danger. Six hundred persons were executed on their own confession. Cases in which the sufferer boasts of being a wolf, creeps like a quadruped, barks, leaps, bites, and which in other respects are closely allied to these, still happen in sufficient frequency to suggest the lesson that we are chiefly protected from the prevalence of such a moral pestilence by education, the greater diffusion of knowledge and sound principle, and by attention to the laws of health.—Calmiel, Dela Polie; Arnold, On Insanity.