In Central Java we meet with another kind of wer-tiger. The power of transformation is regarded as due to inheritance, to the use of spells, to fasting and will-power, to the use of charms, &c. Save when it is hungry or has just cause for revenge it is not hostile to man; in fact, it is said to take its animal form only at night and to guard the plantations from wild pigs, exactly as the balams (magicians) of Yucatan were said to guard the corn fields in animal form. Variants of this belief assert that the werman does not recognize his friends unless they call him by name, or that he goes out as a mendicant and transforms himself to take vengeance on those who refuse him alms. Somewhat similar is the belief of the Khonds; for them the tiger is friendly; he reserves his wrath for their enemies, and a man is said to take the form of a tiger in order to wreak a just vengeance.
Lycanthropy in South America.—According to K. F. P. v. Martius the kanaima is a human being who employs poison to carry out his function of blood avenger; other authorities represent the kanaima as a jaguar, which is either an avenger of blood or the familiar of a cannibalistic sorcerer. The Europeans of Brazil hold that the seventh child of the same sex in unbroken succession becomes a wer-man or woman, and takes the form of a horse, goat, jaguar or pig.
II. As a pathological state lycanthropy may be described as a kind of hysteria, and may perhaps be brought into connexion with the form of it known as latah. It is characterized by the patient’s belief that he has been metamorphosed into an animal, and is often accompanied by a craving for strange articles of food, including the flesh of living beings or of corpses. In the lower stages of culture the state of the patient is commonly explained as due to possession, but where he leaves the neighbourhood of man real metamorphosis may be asserted, as in ordinary lycanthropic beliefs. Marcellus of Sida says that in Greece the patients frequented the tombs at night; they were recognizable by their yellow complexion, hollow eyes and dry tongue. The Garrows of India are said to tear their hair when they are seized with the complaint, which is put down to the use of a drug applied to the forehead; this recalls the stories of the witch’s salve in Europe. In Abyssinia the patient is usually a woman; two forms are distinguished, caused by the hyena and the leopard respectively. A kind of trance ushers in the fit; the fingers are clenched, the eyes glazed and the nostrils distended; the patient, when she comes to herself, laughs hideously and runs on all fours. The exorcist is a blacksmith; as a rule, he applies onion or garlic to her nose and proceeds to question the evil spirit.
Bibliography.—For the anthropological side of the subject see bibliography to [Werwolf]; also Tijdskrift voor indische Taal, Land en Volkenkunde, xxviii. 338, xli. 548, 568; Med. Zendelingsgenootschap, xxxix. 3, 16; O. Stoll, Suggestion, p. 418; W. H. Brett, Indians of British Guiana. For the pathological side, see Hack Tuke, Dict. of Psychological Medicine, s.v. “Lycanthropy”; Dict. des sciences médicales; Waldmeier, Autobiography, p. 64; A. J. Hayes, Source of Blue Nile, p. 286 seq.; Abh. phil.-hist. Klasse kgl. sächsische Gesellschaft der Wiss. 17, No. 3.
(N. W. T.)
LYCAON, in Greek mythology, son of Pelasgus, the mythical first king of Arcadia. He, or his fifty impious sons, entertained Zeus and set before him a dish of human flesh; the god pushed away the dish in disgust and either killed the king and his sons by lightning or turned them into wolves (Apollodorus iii. 8; Ovid, Metam. i. 198). Some say that Lycaon slew and dished up his own son Nyctimus (Clem. Alex. Protrept. ii. 36; Nonnus, Dionys. xviii. 20; Arnobius iv. 24). The deluge was said to have been sent by Zeus in the time of Deucalion in consequence of the sons’ impiety. Pausanias (viii. 2) says that Lycaon sacrificed a child to Zeus on the altar on mount Lycaeus, and immediately after the sacrifice was turned into a wolf. This gave rise to the story that a man was turned into a wolf at each annual sacrifice to Zeus Lycaeus, but recovered his human form if he abstained from human flesh for ten years. The oldest city, the oldest cultus (that of Zeus Lycaeus), and the first civilization of Arcadia are attributed to Lycaon. His story has been variously interpreted. According to Weizsäcker, he was an old Pelasgian or pre-Hellenic god, to whom human sacrifice was offered, bearing a non-Hellenic name similar to λύκος, whence the story originated of his metamorphosis into a wolf. His cult was driven out by that of the Hellenic Zeus, and Lycaon himself was afterwards represented as an evil spirit, who had insulted the new deity by setting human flesh before him. Robertson Smith considers the sacrifices offered to the wolf-Zeus in Arcadia to have been originally cannibal feasts of a wolf-tribe, who recognized the wolf as their totem. Usener and others identify Lycaon with Zeus Lycaeus, the god of light, who slays his son Nyctimus (the dark) or is succeeded by him, in allusion to the perpetual succession of night and day. According to Ed. Meyer, the belief that Zeus Lycaeus accepted human sacrifice in the form of a wolf was the origin of the myth that Lycaon, the founder of his cult, became a wolf, i.e. participated in the nature of the god by the act of sacrifice, as did all who afterwards duly performed it. W. Mannhardt sees in the ceremony an allusion to certain agricultural rites, the object of which was to prevent the failure of the crops and to avert pestilence (or to protect them and the flocks against the ravages of wolves). Others (e.g. V. Bérard) take Zeus Lycaeus for a Semitic Baal, whose worship was imported into Arcadia by the Phoenicians; Immerwahr identifies him with Zeus Phyxios, the god of the exile who flees on account of his having shed blood. Another explanation is that the place of the sacred wolf once worshipped in Arcadia was taken in cult by Zeus Lycaeus, and in popular tradition by Lycaon, the ancestor of the Arcadians, who was supposed to have been punished for his insulting treatment of Zeus. It is possible that the whole may be merely a reminiscence of a superstition similar to the familiar werwolf stories.
See articles by P. Weizsäcker in Roscher’s Lexikon and by G. Fougères (s.v. “Lykaia”) in Daremberg and Saglio’s Dictionnaire des antiquités; W. Immerwahr, Die Kulte und Mythen Arkadiens, 1. (1891), p. 14; L. R. Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, i. (1896), p. 40; A. Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion (1899); C. Pascal, Studii di antichità e mitologia (1896), who sees in Lycaon a god of death honoured by human sacrifice; Ed. Meyer, Forschungen zur alten Geschichte, i. (1892), p. 60; W. Mannhardt, Wald- und Feldkulte, ii. (1905); G. Fougères, Mantinée et l’Arcadie orientale (1898), p. 202; V. Bérard, De l’origine des cultes arcadiens (1894); H. D. Müller, Mythologie der griechischen Stämme, ii. (1861), p. 78; H. Usener, Rheinisches Museum, liii. (1898), p. 375; G. Görres, Berliner Studien für classische Philologie, x. 1 (1889), who regards the Lycaea as a funeral festival connected with the changes of vegetation; Vollgraf, De Ovidii mythopoeia; a concise statement of the various forms of the legend in O. Gruppe, Griechische Mythologie, ii. p. 920, n. 4; see also [Lycanthropy]; D. Bassi, “Apollo Liceo,” in Rivista di storia antica, i. (1895); and Frazer’s Pausanias, iv. p. 189.
(J. H. F.)