The White Devil: The Werewolf in European Culture PDF
Preview The White Devil: The Werewolf in European Culture
the White Devil The White Devil the Werewolf in European Culture matthew beresford reaktion books Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33Great Sutton Street London ec1v odx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2013 Copyright © Matthew Beresford 2013 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. isbn 978 1 78023 188 4 Contents Introduction 7 part one: the cult of the wolf 1 Of Man and Beast: The Prehistoric Cults of Europe 19 2 The Wolves of Rome: Classical Accounts of the Werewolf Myth 39 3 Fits of Fury: The Wolves of Germania 57 part two: magic and mayhem 4 The Medieval Werewolf 87 5 A Cruel and Savage Beast: The Werewolf in Folklore 112 6 Of Wolf And Man: Werewolf Cases from Europe 137 part three: darkness visible 7 Methods to the Madness: Medical Explanations of the Werewolf Myth 165 8 Evolution Creates Dissolution: The End of the Myth? 194 references 237 select bibliography 253 acknowledgements 257 photo acknowledgements 258 index 259 Illustration from Guillaume de Palerne. Introduction Once upon a time wolves and men lived alongside one another, each respecting and benefiting from the other’s way of life. Those days are gone, and . . . we are poorer for that. Shaun Ellis, The Man Who Lives with Wolves This book is not just about werewolves, it is about wolves and it is about Man. A long time ago, men sought to become wolves, and when they succeeded, they became cursed and wished they were wolves no longer. In popular lore, it is said that a man is transformed into a werewolf on the night of a full moon. As he undergoes the physical change into beast, he is beset by murderous urges. A silver bullet would be the only way to stop the man-beast from killing. Contemporary preconceptions of the werewolf are predom in antly formed by film productions. Indeed, werewolves remain a prolific and marketable theme in popular culture, arguably prompted by Stephanie Meyer’s recent Twilight Saga whichhas undoubtedly reignited liter- ary and filmic interest. This book, however, is more concerned with the origins of the werewolf myth. It also investigates why the man-wolf has featured in almost every period of human history and prehistory. As we shall see, Romans and Greeks were cursed by the man-wolf, Vikings revered him, medieval peasants feared him and witches tried to control him. Before considering the extensive European evidence available on the werewolf , we must first consider what exactly this ‘werewolf’ is. In her 2006book on werewolves, Chantal Bourgault du Coudray suggests that a werewolf is ‘a human being who changes into a wolf’,1 but here we will examine whether this ‘change’ is physical or merely metaphorical. 7 The White Devil Although it is claimed that ‘No rational human being today believes that it is physically possible for a human being to be meta- morphosed into a wolf, into any animal, for that matter’,2 throughout history, the very opposite has been true. The Sufic scholar Idries Shah suggested that most of what is taught and written about esotericism is actu- ally the broken fossilized remains of once-living schools. We study the bones of the ancient esoteric philosophies; the oral traditions, and especially the practical, experiential traditions, have been lost, or nearly so.3 The deep-rooted beliefs, fears, superstitions and religious ideas of the past can guide us to an understanding of the werewolf as a modern myth. In The Universal Kinship, John Howard Moore suggested that we should ‘label beings by what they are, by the souls that are in them and the deeds they do’.4 My Part One adopts Moore’s framework to investigate the ‘guises’ of the werewolf and considers examples of man emulating the wolf to try to acquire a version of his power, cunning and strength. Part Two explores links with the devil and the dark arts – an angle observed by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s study Demonology (published in 1877): ‘these fables are our own thoughts carried out. What keeps these wild tales in circulation for thousands of years? What but the wild fact to which they suggest some approximation of theory.’ 5 It was the devil who conjured up such ‘wild facts’, Emerson and many others argued. The reasons for the apparent perpetuation of the werewolf myth in the popular psyche are considered in Part Three. These are viewed in tandem with the notion that contemporary culture continues to expand its fascination with the supernatural through the werewolf myth, despite the abundance of scientific facts disproving the exis- tence of werewolves: we must speak here of lycanthropy, or the nocturnal trans- formation of men into wolves, histories so well substantiated that sceptical science has had to recourse to furious mania 8
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