LYALLPUR, a district of India, in the Multan division of the Punjab. It was constituted in 1904 to comprise the “Chenab Colony,” being the waste portion of the former Jhang district that is now irrigated by the Lower Chenab canal. Area, 3075 sq. m.; pop. (1906) 654,666. It is traversed by a section of the North-western railway. The headquarters are at Lyallpur town (pop. in 1906, 13,483), named after Sir James Lyall, a lieutenant-governor. It contains several factories for ginning and pressing cotton.
See Chenab Colony Gazetteer (Lahore, 1904).
LYCAEUS (Mons Lycaeus, Λύχαιον ὄρος: mod. Diaphorti), a mountain in Arcadia, sacred to Zeus Lycaeus, who was said to have been born and brought up on it, and the home of Pelasgus and his son Lycaon, who is said to have founded the ritual of Zeus practised on its summit. This seems to have involved a human sacrifice, and a feast in which the man who received the portion of a human victim was changed to a wolf, as Lycaon had been after sacrificing a child. The altar of Zeus consists of a great mound of ashes with a retaining wall. It was said that no shadows fell within the precincts; and that any who entered it died within the year.
LYCANTHROPY (Gr. λύκος, wolf, ἄνθρωπος, man), a name employed (1) in folk-lore for the liability or power of a human being to undergo transformation into an animal; (2) in pathology for a form of insanity in which the patient believes that he is transformed into an animal and behaves accordingly.
I. Although the term lycanthropy properly speaking refers to metamorphosis into a wolf (see [Werwolf]), it is in practice used of transformation into any animal. The Greeks also spoke of kynanthropy (κύων, dog); in India and the Asiatic islands the tiger is the commonest form, in North Europe the bear, in Japan the fox, in Africa the leopard or hyena, sometimes also the lion, in South America the jaguar; but though there is a tendency for the most important carnivorous animal of the area to take the first place in stories and beliefs as to transformation, the less important beasts of prey and even harmless animals like the deer also figure among the wer-animals.
Lycanthropy is often confused with transmigration; but the essential feature of the wer-animal is that it is the alternative form or the double of a living human being, while the soul-animal is the vehicle, temporary or permanent, of the spirit of a dead human being. The vampire is sometimes regarded as an example of lycanthropy; but it is in human form, sometimes only a head, sometimes a whole body, sometimes that of a living person, at others of a dead man who issues nightly from the grave to prey upon the living.
Even if the denotation of lycanthropy be limited to the animal-metamorphosis of living human beings, the beliefs classed together under this head are far from uniform, and the term is somewhat capriciously applied. The transformation may be voluntary or involuntary, temporary or permanent; the wer-animal may be the man himself metamorphosed, it may be his double whose activity leaves the real man to all appearance unchanged, it may be his soul, which goes forth seeking whom it may devour and leaving its body in a state of trance; or it may be no more than the messenger of the human being, a real animal or a familiar spirit, whose intimate connexion with its owner is shown by the fact that any injury to it is believed, by a phenomenon known as repercussion, to cause a corresponding injury to the human being.