When confronted with his father Jean altered some of the details of his story, and it was agreed that long imprisonment and extended cross-examination had worn out his already feeble intellect.
It is worth pointing out that in the cases of Rollet, the tailor of Châlons, and the Gandillon family, the prisoners were accused of murder and cannibalism, but not of association with wolves, and that in the trial of Garnier evidence was given as to the depredations of the wolf rather than of the accused. There was doubtless a difficulty in proving the identity of the perpetrator of the murders.
A new era in these trials begins with that of Jean Grenier, for from that time onward medical men became more enlightened, and the belief spread that lycanthropy was a mental malady, with cannibalistic tendencies which had developed under diseased conditions.
In his "Dæmonologie," 1597, a reply to Reginald Scott's "Discovery of Witchcraft," James I of England declared that wer-wolves were victims of a delusion induced by a state of melancholia, and about the same period wolves became practically extinct in England, and only harmless creatures such as the cat, hare, and weasel were left for the sorcerer to change into with any possibility of a safe and natural disguise.
For many years afterwards the confessions of witches, who were executed for their crimes, bore striking resemblance to those made by wer-wolves, and many strange facts which were published at these trials have never been, and may never be, satisfactorily explained on a purely materialistic basis.
CHAPTER IX
THE WER-WOLF IN MYTH AND LEGEND
An extraordinary story about a wer-wolf comes from Ansbach in 1685:
The supposed incarnation of a dead burgomaster of that town was said to be ravishing the neighbouring country in the form of a wolf, devouring cattle as well as women and children. At last the ferocious beast was caught and slaughtered, and its carcass was encased in a suit of flesh-coloured cere-cloth, while its head and face were adorned with a chestnut-coloured wig and long white beard, after the animal's snout had been cut off and a mask resembling the dead burgomaster's features had been substituted. This effigy was hanged, its skin stuffed and put in a museum, where it was pointed out as a proof of the actual existence of wer-wolves. This incident appears to prove that the belief in wer-wolves had been shaken at that date, but it has never been finally eradicated, and it is only natural that a theme which has had such world-wide credence should occur again and again in mythology and literature. It is dealt with in the story of the festival of the god Zeus, which was held every nine years on the Wolf mountain in Arcadia. During the banquet a man, having tasted of a flowing bowl in which human and animal flesh were mixed, was turned into a wolf and remained a wolf nine years. If he had abstained from eating human flesh in the interval he became once more a man. The tradition appears to have originated in the existence of a society of cannibal wolf-worshippers, a member of which perhaps represented the sacred animal for nine years in succession.