By Jill Stefko

The wereanimal belief or legend is universal. In the European and American cultures, the predominant theme is that the werecreature is a wolf. In other cultures, there are were- panthers, werejaguars and werebears. Some societies believed that the person shape shifted and appeared to be the animal while others believed the person became the animal.During the Middle Ages, people in Europe believed in werewolves. Some believed the creature was a wolf whose body was possessed by a demon. Others believed the devil put the person in a trance and transported the soul into a wolf's body. Another theory was that a demon got into a wolf's body and charmed the person into believing that he or she committed savage acts that were revealed in dreams. Another theory believed that the person actually changed into a wolf and that the devil substituted a human form in the werewolf's place.

The majority of werewolf cases come from Europe. They believed the wolf was bloodthirsty and cunning and the animal was greatly feared. Between 1530 and 1630, there were 30,000 cases of werewolves recorded in France alone. People in Normandy believed in lupins or lubins, wolf like beings that talked at night in graveyards in an unknown language. They would flee from humans, but they also dug up graves and ate human bodies. In court documents, the testimony did not vary much. The person made a pact with the devil. They were given an ointment that transformed them into a wolf. Some were given a wolf pelt for protection. Over the centuries, ideas began to change. Werewolf experts believed that the victims suffered from what they called lycanthropy. The victim was usually of less than average intelligence and might have been under the influence of hallucinatory drugs or delusions and believed he or she actually became a werewolf. This was often accompanied by sadistic cravings. Beliefs and legends of those who saw the werewolf might have made them think they saw a snarling four legged beast...

A vivid description of King Lycaons metamorphosis was given in later centuries by Ovid, the Roman poet. With this tale, the werewolf entered popular literature that provided plenty of eerie accounts. It held the attention of medieval literature for almost three centuries. Certain peoples of Poland and Lithuania were widely regarded as sorcerers who turned themselves temporarily into wolves once a year. Similar ritualistic transformation seems to echo in the tales of Livonia describing ceremonies occurring during the Christmas seasons: Christmas, because of its association with the winter solstice, was traditionally a period of magical activity of all kinds. Ireland was a similar repository of werewolf lore; perhaps because wolves thrived there long after they were hunted to extinction in England. At one time the Emerlad Isle was even known as wolf-land and Saint Patrick himself was believed to have transformed Vereticus, the king of Wales, into a wolf.

Romanticized stories involving werewolves persisted for years in Europe. England?s Gervase of Tilbury, a scholastic writing between 1210 and 1214, noted that ?in England we often see men changed into wolves at the change of the moon.? Gervase?s Otia Imperialia, a collection of medieval legends and superstitions, includes the tale of Raimbaud of Auvergne, a former soldier turned outlaw, who turned himself into a werewolf and began a series of attack on children and adults alike until a carpenter chopped off his hand. A similarly curious twelfth century werewolf tale came from Ireland. In his Topographis Hibeniae the ecclesiastic Gerald of Wales related the tale of a priest and a boy who met with a werewolf couple on their journey to Meath. Medieval writers of romance started to construct airy fictions. Werewolves were figured as wicked-step mother and lost-heir of a throne. The Lay of the Werewolf was such a story describing the cruel infidelity of a woman...

There are many individuals today who believe they are werewolves, and some of the lycanthropes have been studied and treated by psychologists and psychiatrists. The November 1975 issues of The Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal reported in details on several recent cases of lycanthropy. In the first case, the twenty-year-old patient, referred to as Mr. H, was convinced that he was a werewolf. A drug user, he told his doctor that while serving in the United States Army in Europe, he had hiked into a forest near his post and had ingested LSD and strychnine, the latter a deadly poison that acts as a stimulant when taken in tiny quantities. Both substances are pharmacologically similar to some of the ingredient used by shape shifters in the past. They had an instant and potent effect on the young man, who claimed to have seen fur growing on his hands and felt it sprouting on his face. Soon he was overcome by a compulsion to chase after, catch, and devour live rabbits. He wandered in this delusional state for several days before returning to the post.

Placed on the tranquilizer chlorpromazine, Mr. H was weaned away from drugs and received adjunct therapy for some nine months, during which time he continued to hear disembodied voices and to experience satanic visions. Claiming to be possessed by the devil, he insisted he had unusual powers. Tests indicated his delusions were ?compatible with acute schizophrenic or toxic psychosis? He was treated with an antipsychotic drug, and when he improved sufficiently, he was referred to an outpatient clinic. After only two visits, however, he had stopped taking the medication and left treatment. Subsequent efforts to contact him failed. Another werewolf patient, thirty-seven-year-old Mr. W was admitted to the hospital after repeated pubic displays of bizarre activity, including howling at the moon, sleeping in cemeteries, allowing his hair and beard to grow out, and lying in the center of busy highways. Unlike Mr. H, Mr. W had no history of drug or alcohol abuse. He had once been a farmer and considered of average intelligence, which was found in an IQ test administered when he served in the United States Navy. Now, he was seen not only as psychotic but also as intellectually deficient, with a mental age of an eight-to ten year-old child...

Was the werewolf phenomenon really a matter of delusion-or drug induced madness? There was no lack of effort to explain the werewolf behavior down through the ages. Some asserted that it was caused by an excess of melancholy or an imbalance in humors, the liquid or fluid part of the body. Many doctors believed that such melancholy could lead to insanity, hallucination and delusion. One physician recommended that the lycanthrope should be treated with baths, purging, bleeding, dietary measures; to promote a state of mental calmness, rubbing opium into the nostrils. In his 1621's work entitled Anatomy of Melancholy Robert Burton, the clergyman and scholar, considered lycanthrope to be a form of madness, and he blamed every thing from sorcerers and witches to poor diet, bad air, sleeplessness and even lack of exercise.

Whatever would be the explanation, the frightened common folk preferred magical explanations. Thus, for some, the werewolf was the projection of a demon, which made its victims appear as a wolf in his own eyes and to those around him. For others, the werewolf was a direct manifestation of the Devil. Early seventeenth century French author Henri Bouguet believed, as did a great many people of that day, that Satan would leave the lycanthrope asleep behind a bush, go forth as a wolf, and perform whatever evil might be in that person?s mind. According to Bouguet, the Devil could confuse the sleeper?s imagination to such an extent ?that he believes he had really been a wolf and had run about and killed men and beasts.?

The Mysteries of Magic, written by nineteenth century French occultist ?liphas L?vi, postulates the existence of a phantom - a body that acted as mediator between a living organism and the soul. ?Thus in case of a man whose instinct is savage and sanguinary, his phantom will wander abroad in lupine form, whilst he sleeps painfully at home, dreaming he is a veritable wolf.? L?vi believed that the wounds so often reported in the cases of werewolves could be attributed to the out-of-body experience. He saw the human body as a subject to magnetic as well as nervous influences and capable of receiving the wounds suffered by the metamorphosed shape...