The early Irish took so favourable a view of wolves that they were accustomed to pray for their salvation, and chose them as godfathers for their children. In Druidical times the wolf and other animals were divine manifestations, and the Celts were so attached to their beast-gods that they did not maledict what they had worshipped, but found it a refuge somewhere. In the earliest Gallic sculpture the dispossessed animals are introduced as companions of the new Saints.
It will be noticed that in the Indian folk-tale, though the identification of the man with the man-eater is clear, a very lenient view is taken of him: he was not always so; even his excursions in tiger-skin were, at first, purely innocent; he was a good husband and a respectable citizen till his wife’s nerves made him lose his temper.
In early Christian times, the man-wolf might be not only innocent but a victim. He might be a particularly good man turned by a sorcerer into a wolf, and in such cases he preserves his good tendencies. In the seventh century such a man-wolf defended the head of St. Edward the Martyr from other wild beasts.
On the other hand, there are stories of Christian saints who turned evil-disposed persons into beasts by means of the magical powers which, at first, all baptized persons were thought to possess potentially if not actively. St. Thomas Aquinas believed in the possibility of doing this. In a Russian folk-tale the apostles Peter and Paul turned a bad husband and wife into bears.
In Europe by degrees the harmless were-wolf entirely disappeared but the evil one survived. The superstition of lycanthropy concentrated round one point (as superstitions often do): the self-transformation of a perverse man or sorcerer into an animal for nefarious purposes. The object of the transformation might be the opportunity for giving free range to sanguinary appetites; but there was another object lurking in the background, and this was the acquirement of second sight, which some animals (if not all) are supposed to be endowed with. Just as Varro and Virgil believed in lycanthropy, so the most highly educated Europeans in the time of Louis XIV. and after, believed in were-wolves. The choice of the animal was immaterial, but it fell naturally on the most prominent and feared wild animal which was locally extant. A fancy or exotic animal would not do, which illustrates the link there is between popular beliefs and facts; distorted facts, it may be, but real and not imaginary things. If a bear of bad morals appears in Norway, people declare that it can be “no Christian bear”—it must be a Lapp or a Finn, both these peoples, who are much addicted to magic, being supposed to have the power of changing into bears when they choose. Instead of seeking the wild beast in man, people sought the man in the wild beast.
As in Asia so in Europe, it was noticed and pondered that the normal wild beast is dangerous, perhaps, but not from a human point of view perverse. The normal wolf like the normal tiger does not attack or destroy for the love of destruction. Wolves attack in packs, but the instinct of the single individual is to keep out of man’s way. He does not kill even animals indiscriminately. In the last times when there were wolves in the Italian valleys of the Alps, the news spread that a wolf had killed a number of sheep. What had really happened was this, which an old hunter told at Edolo to a relative of mine. The wolf jumped down into a sheepfold sunk in the ground. He killed a sheep and ate some of it and then found, to his dismay, that he could not get up the wall of the sheepfold. Nothing daunted, however, he killed a sufficient number of sheep to form a mound, up which he climbed and so effected his escape. No one thought such a clever wolf as this a lupo manaro. But some wolves, like some dogs, are subject to fits of mental alienation, in which they slay without rhyme or reason. Sheep are found killed all over the countryside, and men or children may be among the victims. The question arises of who did it—a wolf, a man, or both in one? The material fact is there, and it is a fact calculated to excite terror, surprise, curiosity. That the fact may remain always a mystery recent experience shows. When the were-wolf mania was rampant in France, honestly conducted judicial inquiry succeeded in a few cases, in tracing the outrages to a real wolf or to a real man. At last, in 1603, a French court of law pronounced the belief in were-wolves to be an insane delusion, and from that date it slowly declined. Heretics were suspected of being were-wolves. As late as fifty years ago, a reminiscence of the loup garou existed in most parts of France, in the shape of the meneux des loups, who were supposed to charm or tame whole packs of wolves which they led across the waste lands on nights when the moon shone fitfully through rifts in hurrying clouds. The village recluse, the poacher, the man who simply “knew more than he should,” fell under the suspicion of being a “wolf-leader,” and, of course, the usual “eye-witness” was forthcoming to declare that he had seen the suspected individual out upon his midnight rambles with his wolves trotting after him. In some provinces all the fiddlers or bag-pipers were thought to be “wolf-leaders.”
Maurice Sand.
“LE MENEUR DES LOUPS.”
If the wolf turnskin died out sooner in England than in France, it was because there were no wolves to fasten it upon. Throughout the horrible witch-mania British sorcerers were supposed to turn into cats, weasels, or innocent hares! Italian witches still turn into cats. I remember how graphically C. G. Leland described to me a visit he had paid to a Tuscan witch; her cottage contained three stools, on one of which sat the witch, on the second her familiar jet-black cat, and on the third my old friend, who, I feel sure, had come to believe a good deal in the “old religion,” and who, in his last years, might have sat for a perfect portrait of a magician! The connexion of the witch and the cat is a form of turnskin-belief in which the feature of the acquirement of second sight is prominent. No witch without a cat! The essential fact in the superstition is the fondness of poor, old friendless women for cats—their last friends. A contributing fact lay in the mysterious disappearances and reappearances of cats and in their half-wild nature. The cat in Indian folk-lore is the tiger’s aunt.
The mode of effecting transformation into animals is various, but always connected with fixed magical procedure. A root or food, or still oftener an ointment, is resorted to: ointments played a great part in superstition; it was by ointments that the unlucky persons accused of being wizards were held to have spread the plague of Milan. But the surest method of transformation was a girdle made of the skin of the animal whose form it was desired to take. This is regarded as a makeshift for not being able to put on the whole skin. An old French record tells of a man who buried a black cat in a box where four roads met, with enough bread soaked in holy water and holy oil to keep it alive for three days. The man intended to dig the cat up and, after killing it, to make a girdle of its skin by which means he expected to obtain the gift of second sight; but the burial-place of the cat was discovered by some dogs that were scratching the earth, before the three days had elapsed. The man, put to the torture, confessed all. In this case, it will be noticed that the spiritual powers of the cat were to be obtained without assuming its outward form. The turnskin who wishes to go back into his human shape, has also to follow fixed rules: a formula must be pronounced by some one else, as in the jungle tiger story, or the man-beast must eat some stated food as in Lucian’s skit (if Lucian wrote it) of the man who, by using the wrong salve, turned himself into a donkey instead of into a bird as he had wished, and who could only resume his own form by eating roses, which he did not accomplish until he had undergone all sorts of adventures.