Table Of Contentthe White Devil
The White Devil
the Werewolf in European Culture
matthew beresford
reaktion books
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33Great Sutton Street
London ec1v odx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2013
Copyright © Matthew Beresford 2013
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Bell & Bain, Glasgow
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
isbn 978 1 78023 188 4
Contents
Introduction 7
part one: the cult of the wolf
1 Of Man and Beast: The Prehistoric Cults of Europe
19
2 The Wolves of Rome: Classical Accounts of the
Werewolf Myth 39
3 Fits of Fury: The Wolves of Germania
57
part two: magic and mayhem
4 The Medieval Werewolf
87
5 A Cruel and Savage Beast: The Werewolf in Folklore
112
6 Of Wolf And Man: Werewolf Cases from Europe
137
part three: darkness visible
7 Methods to the Madness: Medical Explanations
of the Werewolf Myth 165
8 Evolution Creates Dissolution: The End of the Myth?
194
references 237
select bibliography 253
acknowledgements 257
photo acknowledgements 258
index 259
Illustration from Guillaume de Palerne.
Introduction
Once upon a time wolves and men lived alongside one another,
each respecting and benefiting from the other’s way of life.
Those days are gone, and . . . we are poorer for that.
Shaun Ellis, The Man Who Lives with Wolves
This book is not just about werewolves, it is about wolves and
it is about Man. A long time ago, men sought to become
wolves, and when they succeeded, they became cursed and wished
they were wolves no longer. In popular lore, it is said that a man is
transformed into a werewolf on the night of a full moon. As he
undergoes the physical change into beast, he is beset by murderous
urges. A silver bullet would be the only way to stop the man-beast
from killing.
Contemporary preconceptions of the werewolf are predom in antly
formed by film productions. Indeed, werewolves remain a prolific and
marketable theme in popular culture, arguably prompted by Stephanie
Meyer’s recent Twilight Saga whichhas undoubtedly reignited liter-
ary and filmic interest.
This book, however, is more concerned with the origins of the
werewolf myth. It also investigates why the man-wolf has featured
in almost every period of human history and prehistory. As we shall
see, Romans and Greeks were cursed by the man-wolf, Vikings
revered him, medieval peasants feared him and witches tried to
control him. Before considering the extensive European evidence
available on the werewolf , we must first consider what exactly this
‘werewolf’ is. In her 2006book on werewolves, Chantal Bourgault du
Coudray suggests that a werewolf is ‘a human being who changes into
a wolf’,1 but here we will examine whether this ‘change’ is physical
or merely metaphorical.
7
The White Devil
Although it is claimed that ‘No rational human being today
believes that it is physically possible for a human being to be meta-
morphosed into a wolf, into any animal, for that matter’,2 throughout
history, the very opposite has been true. The Sufic scholar Idries Shah
suggested that
most of what is taught and written about esotericism is actu-
ally the broken fossilized remains of once-living schools. We
study the bones of the ancient esoteric philosophies; the oral
traditions, and especially the practical, experiential traditions,
have been lost, or nearly so.3
The deep-rooted beliefs, fears, superstitions and religious ideas of the
past can guide us to an understanding of the werewolf as a modern
myth. In The Universal Kinship, John Howard Moore suggested
that we should ‘label beings by what they are, by the souls that are
in them and the deeds they do’.4 My Part One adopts Moore’s
framework to investigate the ‘guises’ of the werewolf and considers
examples of man emulating the wolf to try to acquire a version of his
power, cunning and strength. Part Two explores links with the devil
and the dark arts – an angle observed by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
study Demonology (published in 1877): ‘these fables are our own
thoughts carried out. What keeps these wild tales in circulation for
thousands of years? What but the wild fact to which they suggest
some approximation of theory.’ 5 It was the devil who conjured up
such ‘wild facts’, Emerson and many others argued.
The reasons for the apparent perpetuation of the werewolf myth
in the popular psyche are considered in Part Three. These are viewed
in tandem with the notion that contemporary culture continues to
expand its fascination with the supernatural through the werewolf
myth, despite the abundance of scientific facts disproving the exis-
tence of werewolves:
we must speak here of lycanthropy, or the nocturnal trans-
formation of men into wolves, histories so well substantiated
that sceptical science has had to recourse to furious mania
8
Description:From Ovid’s Lycaon to Professor Lupin, from Teen Wolf to An American Werewolf in Paris, the lycanthrope, or werewolf, comes to us frequently on the page and the silver screen. These interpretations often display lycanthropy as a curse, with the afflicted person becoming an uncontrollable, feral be
