This compares in some degree with the practices of the Human Leopard Society, which is of comparatively recent origin.
Lycaon, the King of Arcadia and father of Callisto, was turned into a wolf because he offered human sacrifices to Jupiter, or, in the version given by Ovid, because he tried to murder Jupiter, who was his guest. Others believe that Lycaon is the Constellation of the Wolf, and that in him were the united qualities of wolf, king, and constellation.
Pliny points out that the origin of transformation into wolves was due to Evanthes, a Greek author of good repute, who tells the story of Antheus, the Arcadian, a member of whose family is chosen by lot and then taken to a certain lake in the district, across which he swims and is changed into a wolf for a space of nine years. So, too, Demæntus, during a sacrifice of human victims, tasted the entrails of a boy who had been slaughtered, upon which he turned into a wolf, but ten years later he was victorious in the pugilistic contests at the Olympic games.
The following quaint story is taken from Petronius, being told by one Niceros, at a banquet given by Trimalchio.
"It happened that my master was gone to Capua to dispose of some second-hand goods. I took the opportunity and persuaded our guest to walk with me to our fifth milestone. He was a valiant soldier, and a sort of a grim water-drinking Pluto. About cock-crow, when the moon was shining as bright as midday, we came amongst the monuments. My friend began addressing himself to the stars, but I was rather in a mood to sing or count them; and when I turned to look at him, lo! he had already stripped himself and laid his clothes near him. My heart was in my nostrils, and I stood like a dead man; but he made a mark round his clothes and on a sudden became a wolf. Do not think I jest, I would not lie for any man's estate. But to return to what I am saying. When he became a wolf he began howling and fled into the woods. At first I hardly knew where I was, and afterwards, when I went to take up his clothes, they were turned into stone. Who then was more like to die from fear than I? Yet I drew my sword, and cutting the air right and left came thus to my sweetheart's house. When I entered the courtyard I was like to breathe my last, perspiration poured from my neck, and my eyes were dim. My Melissa met me to ask where I had been so late, and said, 'Had you only come sooner you might have helped us, for a wolf came to the farm and worried our cattle; but he had not the best of the joke, for all he escaped, as our servant ran a lance through his neck.' When I heard this I could not doubt what had happened, and as the day dawned I ran home as fast as a robbed innkeeper. When I came to the spot where the clothes had been turned into stone I could find nothing except blood. But when I got home I found my friend, the soldier, in bed, bleeding at the neck like an ox, and a doctor dressing his wound. I then knew he was a turnskin; nor would I ever have broken bread with him again, no not if you had killed me."
The expression turnskin or turncoat is a translation of the Latin versipelles, a term used to describe a wer-wolf.
Another story in which the human being suffers from the wound inflicted on the wer-wolf concerns a fine lady of Saintonge, who used to wander at night in the forests in the shape of a wolf. One day she caught her paw in a trap set by the hunters. This put an end to her nocturnal wanderings, and afterwards she had to keep a glove on the hand that had been trapped, to conceal the mutilation of two of her fingers.
Eliphas Levi, the occultist, has endeavoured to explain this sympathetic condition between the man and his animal presentment.
"We must speak here of lycanthropy, or the nocturnal transformation of men into wolves, histories so well substantiated that sceptical science has had recourse to furious maniacs, and to masquerading as animals for explanations. But such hypotheses are puerile and explain nothing. Let us seek elsewhere the solution of the mystery, and establish—First, that no person has been killed by a wer-wolf except by suffocation, without effusion of blood and without wounds. Second, that wer-wolves, though tracked, hunted, and even maimed, have never been killed on the spot. Third, that persons suspected of these transformations have always been found at home, after the pursuit of the wer-wolf, more or less wounded, sometimes dying, but invariably in their natural form....