As late even as the beginning of the sixteenth century cases of this kind occurred in France, where the possessed were known as loups-garoux. A young man of Besançon was thus brought before the Councilor of State, De l'Ancre, at Bordeaux, and accused of roving like a wild animal through the neighboring forests. He confessed readily that he was a huntsman in the service of his invisible master, the devil, who had changed him into a wolf and forced him to range by the side of another more powerful wolf through the country. The poor fellow shared the usual fate of his fellow-sufferers, who were either subjected to a sharp treatment of exorcism or simply executed as heretical criminals.
In our day lycanthropy is almost entirely limited to Servia and Wallachia, Volhynia and White Russia. There, however, the disease breaks out frequently anew, and popular belief knows a variety of means by which a man may be changed into a wolf; the animal differs, however, from a genuine wolf in his docked tail and his marked preference for the blood of young children.
In Abyssinia there exists, according to Pearce, a belief that men are occasionally changed into hyenas—the wolves of that country—but this sad privilege is limited to workers in clay and iron, called Booda among the Amharas, who wear a gold earring of special form as a distinction from other inferior castes.
It will thus be seen that, like all other varieties of possession, zoanthropy also is simply a kind of insanity, and our amusement at the marvelous conduct of werewolves will vanish, if we recall the entire change produced in man by the loss of reason. In that sad condition he endures fatigue, cold or heat, and hunger as no healthy man ever can learn to do; he does not mind the severest castigation, for his body is almost insensible, it ceases to be susceptible to contagious diseases and requires, in sickness, double or treble doses of medicine. If we once know the precise nature of an insane person's hallucination, his actions will be apt to appear quite consistent, and thus lycanthropy also not only produces the fine connection of a change into a wolf, but causes the sufferer to conduct himself in all his ways like the animal which he represents.
MAGNETISM.
"Great is the power of the hand."—
St. Augustine, Op., iv. 487.
Mesmer, who was the first to make the anæsthetic effects of certain passages of the hand over the bodies of patients known to the public, sought originally to explain them by the agency of electricity; but as early as 1773 he ascribed them to magnetism. From that day he employed magnets, and by passing them over the affected parts of his patients, he performed remarkable cures for many years in the city of Vienna. He looked upon the magnet as the physician, which cured the patient in the same way in which it attracted iron. Soon after, however, he became acquainted with the famous Father Gassner, of Ratisbon, who had obtained precisely the same results, without a magnet, by simple manipulations, and, henceforth, he also treated his patients with the hand only; but he retained the old name, looking now upon himself, and others who were endowed in the same manner, as possessing the powers of a strong magnet. In the meantime one of his pupils, the Marquis de Puységur, had quite accidentally discovered the peculiar nature of somnambulism, and with rare foresight profited by the moments of clear consciousness which at times interrupted the trance, in order to learn from his patients themselves the means of curing their diseases. He had from that moment devoted all the leisure of his life to the study of these singular but most beneficial phenomena, employing only the simplest manipulations in place of the more exciting means used by Mesmer, and doing an immense amount of good by his judicious cures.