WERWOLF, or WEREWOLF (AS, wer W Ulf, man-wolf, from wrr, titan + waif, wolf). According to a widespread superstition. a man who, either periodic-ally or at any time, is trans formed or transforms himself into a wolf, be coming possessed of all the powers and appetites of a wolf in addition to his own. and being es pecially remarkable for his ?1rpetite for human flesh. There is perhaps no people among whom some evidence of its former prevalence does not exist. It is not yet extinct, even in Europe. although its details vary in different countries and districts. The animal whose shape is taken is not always, though usually. a wolf. The wolf appears most often as the animal most formidable, or considered most inimical to man.
Occasional notices of lyeauthropy are found in classical writers; and lyeanthropy, as there described. was the change of a man or a woman into a wolf. or, more rarely. into a dog or bull, 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 smile dire offense. According to Iferodotus, the Neuri were believed to be soreer ers who had the power of taking once a year, for several days. the shape of wolves; and Pliny relates that in Arcadia, every year, at the festi val of Jupiter Lyeams, one of the family of Antteus 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 lie had not eaten human flesh, he returned to his friends, looking nine years older than when he disappeared. One of the earliest werwolf stories of the modern type is found in the Solyricon of Petronius, in which a friend of the hero removes his clothing and immediately becomes a wolf. In this form he is wounded, runs away, and is later found in human form with a. knife-stab where he had been wounded as a wolf.
In Norway and Ireland it used to be be lieved that there were men were 'not of one skin.' Snell men could take upon them selves other shapes than that of mall, their natures then corresponding to the shapes which they assumed. and they also 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 for a time and entering into a body borrowed or created for the purpose: or.
without any actual change of the form, by means of a charm, which made all beholders see the man under the shape of the animal whose part he was sustaining. Nothing of the man remained unchanged except his eyes; by these only could he be recognized. Perhaps the best stories of werwolves which are to he found are contained in the northern sagas. Scarcely anywhere did the belief in them go so deep into the minds of the people as among the northern races, although the Lithuanians and Livonians also shared in this belief.
Instances of persons being changed into wolves by way of punishment were freely believed in the :Middle Ages: for example, Saint Patrick was believed to have changed Vereticus. King of Wales, into a wolf; and there was an illustrious Irish family which had incurred the curse of Saint Natal is, every member of which, male and female, according to the popular belief, had to take the shape of a wolf and live the life of a wolf for seven years. The werwolvcs, like the witches, were now regarded as servants of the devil, from whom they got the power—often ex ercised by anointing with salve—of assuming the wolf's form; and it was believed that great numbers of them trooped together to the Devil's Sabbath. The stories of mutilations and other mishaps befalling them in the wolf state, by which, when they resumed the human form, they were identified as w-erwolves are exactly like the stories told of witches. In Septem ber. I573• we find a court of Parliament sitting at D4le, in Eranehe-Comt6, authorizing the coun try people to take their weapons and heat the woods for a werwolf, who had already—thus went the recital—"carried off several little chil dren, so that they had not since been heard of, and done injury to some horsemen. who kept them off only with great difficulty and danger to their persons." Throughout Europe the judicial cognizance of witchcraft and of lycanthropy ceased at the same time. In Great Britain, where wolves had early been exterminated, the were wolf was only known by rumors coining from abroad, although Gervase of Tilbury in the thirteenth century says they were off en seen at the deluges Of the moon. The belief. however, that witches could transform themselves into cats and hares, which did prevail, was analogous to the belief in werwolves, especially in its later forms. Consult Gould, The Rook of WercIrolceg (London, 1865).