CHAPTER IX.

THE WEREWOLF.

THE werewolf is so called from the Anglo-Saxon wer (Lat. vir) "man" and wolf. The word corresponds exactly to the Greek lycanthropos, Italian lupo mannaro, Portuguese lobis-homem, and means a wolf who is properly a man. Loup-garou, the name given by the French to the same fearful being, is a pleonastic compound, which they have made out of their Romance appellation for the wolf and their old Frankish word gerulf, i. e., werwlf, werewolf. The people of Bretagne have just such another mongrel term, bleiz-garou (from bleiz, wolf); but they have also the purely Celtic terms denvleiz and grekvleiz, meaning man-wolf and woman-wolf.

The werewolf tradition has not been discovered with certainty amongst the Hindus, but there is no European nation of Aryan descent in which it has not existed from time immemorial. Hence it is certain that the tradition itself, or the germs of it more or less developed, must have been brought by

WEREWOLF.

LYCAON.

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them all from Arya; and if Dr. Schwartz has not actually proved his case, he seems at least to have conjectured rightly in assigning, as one of those germs, the Aryan conception of the howling wind as a wolf* The Maruts and other beings who were busy in the storm assumed various shapes. The human form was proper to many or all of them, for they were identical with the Pitris or Fathers (p. 15), and it would have been a very natural thought, when a storm broke out suddenly, that one or more of those people of the air had been turned into wolves for the occasion. It was also a primæval notion that there were dogs and wolves among the dwellers in hell, and Weber, who has shown that this belief was entertained by the early Hindus,† is of opinion that these infernal animals

were

real werewolves, that is to say, men upon whom such a transformation had been inflicted as a punishment.

The oldest werewolf story on record is that of Lycaon, king of Arcadia, in which however the legend of the werewolf proper is mixed up with another, and apparently a less ancient one, relating to the practice of sacrificing human victims, which seems to have prevailed more extensively and to a

* Ursprung, p. 118.

Indische Studien, i. 412.

later period in Arcadia than in other parts of Greece. Lycaon is said to have been turned into a wolf by Zeus Lycaios, as a punishment for having offered a human victim to the god; and after Lycaon's time, according to a tradition recorded by Pausanias, Plato, and Pliny, similar transformations continued to be things of common occurrence on the same spot. One of the race of Anthos (probably a priestly family) was periodically chosen by lot and taken to an Arcadian lake, where he hung up his clothes on an oak. Then he swam across the lake, was changed into a wolf, and roamed the wilderness for nine years in company with other wolves. At the end of that time, if he had not tasted human flesh in the interval, he swam back again, found his clothes where he had left them, and recovered his original form, only with this difference, that it was nine years older.

It is certain that in Greece as well as in Arya the wolf was in early times a symbol of the stormy winds. It was sacred above all other animals to Apollo, who was surnamed after it Lycaios, or the wolf-god. This fact has much perplexed many learned men, and given them a world of trouble in striving to explain why an animal that figures so often and so naturally as a type of winter, night,

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245

and death, should have become the favourite of the radiant god of day. But all this labour would have been spared had it been borne in mind that even in Homer's time Apollo had not yet become the sungod. Originally he was the god of the summer storms, and in that capacity he himself appeared as a wolf on sundry occasions, as, for instance, in Rhodes, when he slew the Telchins, a dwarfish race of magicians, smiths, and weather-makers, like the German Zwergs and the Panis of India. In the spring time, the appropriate season for the birth of such a god, Apollo's mother, "the dark-robed Leto," or Latona (i. e., the dark storm-cloud), escorted at Jove's command by the Northwind, came as a shewolf from Lycia to the place where she was delivered of her twins. The Zeus Lycaios of the Arcadians was evidently Zeus plus Apollo, the thunderer, considered with special reference to the winds that accompany the thunder. In mythical language, Apollo was the son of Zeus; that is to say, he was Zeus in another form. The two gods were in fact, like Indra and Rudra (p. 18), only different personifications of the same cycle of natural phenomena.

In Greece the tradition of the werewolf appears to have run the usual course of myths. Beginning as a figurative explanation of meteoric facts, it next

246

WEREWOLF IN GREECE.

became a hieratic mystery, and then descended from the domain of religion to that of magic and popular story. In this last stage it is the subject of a ludicrous tale told by Esop. A thief hung about a tavern for some days without being able to steal anything. At last he saw the host sitting before the door in a handsome new garment, and going up to him he began a conversation, in the course of which he fell to yawning and then howling like a wolf.

What's the matter with you?" said the host. "I'll tell you directly," said the thief, "but first let me beg you will take care of my clothes, for I will leave them here. I cannot tell how it is this yawning comes upon me; whether it be for my sins or for any other cause is to me unknown; but so sure as ever I yawn three times I change into a wolf that devours men." So saying he yawned a second time and howled as before. The host started up and would have made off, but the thief held him fast by his tunic, saying, "Stay where you are, I beseech you, and take care of my clothes, that I may not tear them all to bits." With that he yawned a third time, and the host, in mortal terror, ran and hid himself in the innermost nook of his tavern, leaving his tunic in the hands of the thief, who vanished with it instantly.