How vividly the imagination of an excited tribe, once inoculated with a belief like this, can realize it into an event, is graphically told by Dobrizhoffer among the Abipones of South America. When a sorcerer, to get the better of an enemy, threatens to change himself into a tiger and tear his tribesmen to pieces, no sooner does he begin to roar, than all the neighbours fly to a distance; but still they hear the feigned sounds. ‘Alas!’ they cry, ‘his whole body is beginning to be covered with tiger-spots!’ ‘Look, his nails are growing!’ the fear-struck women exclaim, although they cannot see the rogue, who is concealed within his tent, but distracted fear presents things to their eyes which have no real existence. ‘You daily kill tigers in the plain without dread,’ said the missionary; ‘why then should you weakly fear a false imaginary tiger in the town?’ ‘You fathers don’t understand these matters,’ they reply with a smile. ‘We never fear, but kill tigers in the plain, because we can see them. Artificial tigers we do fear, because they can neither be seen nor killed by us.’[[411]] The sorcerers who induced assemblies of credulous savages to believe in this monstrous imposture, were also the professional spiritualistic mediums of the tribes, whose business it was to hold intercourse with the spirits of the dead, causing them to appear visibly, or carrying on audible dialogues with them behind a curtain. Africa is especially rich in myths of man-lions, man-leopards, man-hyænas. In the Kanuri language of Bornu, there is grammatically formed from the word ‘bultu,’ a hyæna, the verb ‘bultungin,’ meaning ‘I transform myself into a hyæna;’ and the natives maintain that there is a town called Kabutiloa, where every man possesses this faculty.[[412]] The tribe of Budas in Abyssinia, iron-workers and potters, are believed to combine with these civilized avocations the gift of the evil eye and the power of turning into hyænas, wherefore they are excluded from society and the Christian sacrament. In the ‘Life of Nathaniel Pearce,’ the testimony of one Mr. Coffin is printed. A young Buda, his servant, came for leave of absence, which was granted; but scarcely was Mr. Coffin’s head turned to his other servants, when some of them called out, pointing in the direction the Buda had taken, ‘Look, look, he is turning himself into a hyæna.’ Mr. Coffin instantly looked round, the young man had vanished, and a large hyæna was running off at about a hundred paces’ distance, in full light on the open plain, without tree or bush to intercept the view. The Buda came back next morning, and as usual rather affected to countenance than deny the prodigy. Coffin says, moreover, that the Budas wear a peculiar gold earring, and this he has frequently seen in the ears of hyænas shot in traps, or speared by himself and others; the Budas are dreaded for their magical arts, and the editor of the book suggests that they put ear-rings in hyænas’ ears to encourage a profitable superstition.[[413]] Mr. Mansfield Parkyns’ more recent account shows how thoroughly this belief is part and parcel of Abyssinian spiritualism. Hysterics, lethargy, morbid insensibility to pain, and the ‘demoniacal possession,’ in which the patient speaks in the name and language of an intruding spirit, are all ascribed to the spiritual agency of the Budas. Among the cases described by Mr. Parkyns was that of a servant-woman of his, whose illness was set down to the influence of one of these blacksmith-hyænas, who wanted to get her out into the forest and devour her. One night, a hyæna having been heard howling and laughing near the village, the woman was bound hand and foot and closely guarded in the hut, when suddenly, the hyæna calling close by, her master, to his astonishment, saw her rise ‘without her bonds’ like a Davenport Brother, and try to escape.[[414]] In Ashango-land, M. Du Chaillu tells the following suggestive story. He was informed that a leopard had killed two men, and many palavers were held to settle the affair; but this was no ordinary leopard, but a transformed man. Two of Akondogo’s men had disappeared, and only their blood was found, so a great doctor was sent for, who said it was Akondogo’s own nephew and heir Akosho. The lad was sent for, and when asked by the chief, answered that it was truly he who had committed the murders, that he could not help it, for he had turned into a leopard, and his heart longed for blood, and after each deed he had turned into a man again. Akondogo loved the boy so much that he would not believe his confession, till Akosho took him to a place in the forest, where lay the mangled bodies of the two men, whom he had really murdered under the influence of this morbid imagination. He was slowly burnt to death, all the people standing by.[[415]]
Brief mention is enough for the comparatively well-known European representatives of these beliefs. What with the mere continuance of old tradition, what with the tricks of magicians, and what with cases of patients under delusion believing themselves to have suffered transformation, of which a number are on record, the European series of details from ancient to modern ages is very complete. Virgil in the Bucolics shows the popular opinion of his time that the arts of the werewolf, the necromancer or ‘medium,’ and the witch, were different branches of one craft, where he tells of Mœris as turning into a wolf by the use of poisonous herbs, as calling up souls from the tombs, and as bewitching away crops:—
‘Has herbas, atque haec Ponto mihi lecta venena
Ipse dedit Moeris; nascuntur plurima Ponto.
His ego saepe lupum fieri, et se condere sylvis
Moerin, saepe animas imis excire sepulcris,
Atque satas aliò vidi traducere messes.’[[416]]
Of the classic accounts, one of the most remarkable is Petronius Arbiter’s story of the transformation of a ‘versipellis’ or ‘turnskin;’ this contains the episode of the wolf being wounded and the man who wore its shape found with a similar wound, an idea not sufficiently proved to belong originally to the lower races, but which becomes a familiar feature in European stories of werewolves and witches. In Augustine’s time magicians were persuading their dupes that by means of herbs they could turn them to wolves, and the use of salve for this purpose is mentioned at a comparatively modern date. Old Scandinavian sagas have their werewolf warriors, and shape-changers (hamramr) raging in fits of furious madness. The Danes still know a man who is a werewolf by his eyebrows meeting, and thus resembling a butterfly, the familiar type of the soul, ready to fly off and enter some other body. In the last year of the Swedish war with Russia, the people of Kalmar said the wolves which overran the land were transformed Swedish prisoners. From Herodotus’ legend of the Neuri who turned every year for a few days to wolves, we follow the idea on Slavonic ground to where Livonian sorcerers bathe yearly in a river and turn for twelve days to wolves; and widespread Slavonic superstition still declares that the wolves that sometimes in bitter winters dare to attack men, are themselves ‘wilkolak,’ men bewitched into wolf’s shape. The modern Greeks instead of the classic λυκάνθρωπος adopt the Slavonic term βρύκολακας (Bulgarian ‘vrkolak’); it is a man who falls into a cataleptic state, while his soul enters a wolf and goes ravening for blood. Modern Germany, especially in the north, still keeps up the stories of wolf-girdles, and in December you must not ‘talk of the wolf’ by name, lest the werewolves hear you. Our English word ‘werewolf,’ that is ‘man-wolf’ (the ‘verevulf’ of Cnut’s Laws), still reminds us of the old belief in our own country, and if it has had for centuries but little place in English folklore, this has been not so much for lack of superstition, as of wolves. To instance the survival of the idea, transferred to another animal, in the more modern witch-persecution, the following Scotch story may serve. Certain witches at Thurso for a long time tormented an honest fellow under the usual form of cats, till one night he put them to flight with his broad-sword, and cut off the leg of one less nimble than the rest; taking it up, to his amazement he found it to be a woman’s leg, and next morning he discovered the old hag its owner with but one leg left. In France the creature has what is historically the same name as our ‘werewolf;’ viz. in early forms ‘gerulphus,’ ‘garoul,’ and now pleonastically ‘loup-garou.’ The parliament of Franche-Comté made a law in 1573 to expel the werewolves; in 1598 the werewolf of Angers gave evidence of his hands and feet turning to wolf’s claws; in 1603, in the case of Jean Grenier, the judge declared lycanthropy to be an insane delusion, not a crime. In 1658, a French satirical description of a magician could still give the following perfect account of the witch-werewolf: ‘I teach the witches to take the form of wolves and eat children, and when anyone has cut off one of their legs (which proves to be a man’s arm) I forsake them when they are discovered, and leave them in the power of justice.’ Even in our own day the idea has by no means died out of the French peasant’s mind. Not ten years ago in France, Mr. Baring-Gould found it impossible to get a guide after dark across a wild place haunted by a loup-garou, an incident which led him afterwards to write his ‘Book of Werewolves,’ a monograph of this remarkable combination of myth and madness.[[417]]
If we judged the myths of early ages by the unaided power of our modern fancy, we might be left unable to account for their immense effect on the life and belief of mankind. But by the study of such evidence as this, it becomes possible to realize a usual state of the imagination among ancient and savage peoples, intermediate between the conditions of a healthy prosaic modern citizen and of a raving fanatic or a patient in a fever-ward. A poet of our own day has still much in common with the minds of uncultured tribes in the mythologic stage of thought. The rude man’s imaginations may be narrow, crude, and repulsive, while the poet’s more conscious fictions may be highly wrought into shapes of fresh artistic beauty, but both share in that sense of the reality of ideas, which fortunately or unfortunately modern education has proved so powerful to destroy. The change of meaning of a single word will tell the history of this transition, ranging from primæval to modern thought. From first to last, the processes of phantasy have been at work; but where the savage could see phantasms, the civilized man has come to amuse himself with fancies.