First, it should be stressed that the idea of a man morphing into a wolf is actually well within the realm of feasibility. Few among us have not lost their tempers on at least a few occasions. During such outbursts, eruptions of uncontrolled emotions spew forth, making us feel as though we have become transformed into some type of fierce beast.
While feeling as though one is an animal admittedly a long country mile from actually manifesting the characteristics of one, it must be remembered that the brain is a powerful organ. For instance, numerous well-documented cases exist of the stigmata, where individuals display the bleeding wounds of Christ on the cross, demonstrating the power of mind over matter.
Such examples dramaticaly demonstrate the powerful link between mind and body. So, it's not such a stretch to argue that, in few rare instances, a human being could periodically express the physical characteristics of some type of a ferocious animal. It may well be that such emotional experiences originally gave birth to the idea that a man could become, at least temporarily, a wild creature of some sort, such as a wolf. The wolf was actually an ideal candidate for that beast, being a canny predator with a wide geographical distribution. This may account for why peoples of many and diverse cultures have independently described the werewolf---the man who becomes a wolf.
Intriguinly, the first depiction of a man-wolf was apparently inscribed on a cave wall, sugesting that even prehistoric Homo sapiens may have been cognizant of this incredible duality. The first written account of a werewolf appears in the Scriptures in the book of Daniel ( 4:15-33 ), where King Nebuchadnezzar exhibited symptoms of werewolfism for nearly four harrowing years. And the Greek legend of King Lycaon of Arcadia being transformed into a wolf by Zeus after offending the god by serving him a meal of human flesh gave birth to the scientific term for werewolf, " lycanthrope."
Later, in the fifth century B.C., the celebrated Greek historian Herodotus reported on the Neuri, a strange people who became wolves for a breif time once a year. In the first century A.D., noted Roman poet Virgil described a sorcerer who transmogrified himself into a wolf by use of secret herbs. Also in that century, renowed Roman Author Gaius Petronius Arbiter wrote of such shapeshifters in his compilation of short stories, " Satyricon."
Moreover, early physicians, such as Paulos Agina f Alexandria ( seventh century A.D. ) and Avicenna ( ninth century A.D. ) and Ali ibn al Abbas ( tenth century A.D. ), both of Persia, were all well aware of the condition. They not only delineated it in detail, but also recommended therapies for them.
Fast forwarding to the Middle Ages, accounts of lycanthropy mushroomed, with an outstanding 30,000 individuals charged with werewolfism in France alone between 1520 and 1630. Without a doubt, the most notorious case centered around Gilles Garnier. Garnier was a peasant whose four-month rampage resulted in the deaths of four youngsters in the French village of Dole, youngsters whose flesh he devoured after which he bayed at the moon. His unholy crimes were witnessed by more than 50 locals who swore that they saw him roaming about in the guise of a halfling-- half-man, half--beast. And, incredibly, Garnier himself admitted that he was indeed a werewolf. As punishment, he was burned alive on January 18, 1573.
In an intriguing modern case, Dr. Harvey Rosenstock, former clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Medical School, published a paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry documenting the case of a 49-year-old-woman stricken with lycanthropy. One evening, when the moon was full, she suddenly jumped to the floor and started to crawl about on all fours as she growled and salivated. Worse, she even began chewing and ripping up the furniture. When she gazed into the mirror, she saw not a female's head, but a wolf's.
Ultimately, she was confined to a psychiatric ward where antipsychotic medications appeared to cure her. But, upon release, she once again reprised her lupine behavior at the rising of the next full moon.
Legend tells us that an individual may become werewolf through several diverse means. Formost among these is being bitten by a werewolf which is ably depicted on the silver screen in such films as The Werewolf of London (1935 ) starring Henry Hull and The Wolf Man ( 1941 ) featuring Lon Chaney Jr. as the infamous Lawrence Talbot. Curses can also lead to the transformation, an idea that intriguingly presented on the gothic TV soap opera, Dark Shadows, with David Selby as the unwilling changeling Quentin Collins. Heredity can also lead to the condition, as suggested in The Undying Monster ( 1941 ), with John Howard as the lycanthropic heir, and in Cry of the Werewolf ( 1944 ), with Nina Foch as a rare female decendant of a gypsy werewolf.
In an unusual motif, a vampire ( appropriately porttrayed by Bela Lugosi ) used his occult mastery to reconfigure an underling into a fur - faced man ( Matt Willis ) in The Return of the Vampire ( 1944 ). In a fascinating 1992 episode of the TV series, Beyond Reality ( entitled "Killer Instinct" ) a laboratory subject ( Lawrence Bayne ) inhaled lupine pheromones in order to establish a psychic link witha wolf, which he then directed to attack humans as he shared the "thrill" of the kill. And, in 1965' Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, in the vignette entitled "Werewolf," a woman became a vicious lycanthrope to free her similarily afflicted entombed husband.
However, cinematic titles can sometimes be misleading. For instance, 1946' s The She-Wolf of London starred June Lockhart ( of Lost in Space fame ) as a female unfairly being framed as a lycanthrope, with none appearing in the flick. But, 1992 British TV series of the same name starring Kate Hodge was true to it's name. And, on the small screen, the 1953 entry "Ghost Wolf" on The Adventures of Superman involved a woman ( Jane Adams ) being mistaken for a loup-garou.
* Loup~garou *
The traditional French name for werewolf, and struggles with the man-beast were a standard of French folklore as early as the sixth century. Most often the werewolves in these stories were horrid monsters that ripped and tore their victims to bloody shreds. Occasionally, however, someone would enter an account into records in which the werewolf was not all that bad.
Of course, other circumstances are traditionally believed to lead to lycanthropy, such as being concieved at the time of the full moon, sleeping outdoors on a Friday beneath a full moon, wearing a wolfskin garment or belt, being subjected to demonic possession, and consuming the raw flesh of a rabid wolf, to enumerate just a few.
Hollywood has conjured up the novel concept of "mad" scientists turning innocents into lycanthropes in their labs, such as in the 1942's The Mad Monster ( with Glen Strange, the actor who went on to portray the Frankenstien monster three times, as the creature ), The Werewolf ( 1956, with Steven Ritch as the hapless victim ), and I was a Teenage Werewolf ( 1957, with Michael Landon in the title role ).
Wearing a pentagram ( a five pointed star ) affords one protection against a werewolf. Shooting such a beast with silver bullets ( as in The Werewolf of London ) is the best - known means of dispatching the creature. But, battering it with a sharp silver implement, such as a silver-handled cane ( as used in The Wolf Man ), is also effective.
Curing a werewolf is also possible, according to popular lore. One way is supposedly by merely calling him by his human name while he is in his animal state. Another method requires the highly dangerous trick of extracting three drops of the entity's blood while in beastly form. Yet a third technique demands that the lycanthrope restrain himself from attacking humans for a full nine years.
Again, Hollywood introduced some inventive means of tackling the problem. In The Werewolf of London, devouring a special flower that blooms only during moonlight prevented the dreded transformation of one night only. In Dark Shadows, consumption of a moon poppy while in the werewolf state would end the affliction forever. Another Dark Shadows lycanthrope, the malevolent Count Petofi ( Thayer David ), was cured by a gypsy spell. And werewolf Lawrence Talbot sought a solution from science.
Conservative physicians, of course, reject all such supernatural notions, preferring to consign lycanthropy's causes to the realm of the mundane.For instance, one theory argues that an injury of the brain's temporal ( i.e., side ) lobes can set off manisfestations of lupine behavior. Another ascribes werewolfism to a condition known as "hypertrichosis," or excessive hairiness, where a thick, soft growth of hair covers the entire face ( even the eyelids ) of the sufferer, as well as other body sites. A good example of this condition, are the circus brothers of Mexico, who not only have fame for their acts, but also, for their hairy wolf-like bodies. Normal in every way, just like any other teenaged boys, their condition derives from family genes.
Perhaps the most imaginative hypothesis yet advanced comes from historian Dr. Mary Matossian of the University of Maryland, who theorized that contaminated rye bread was the causative factor. Specifically, during the Middle Ages, Matossian believed that ergot, a fungal parasite that induces LSD - type hallucinations, became ground into the bread. This caused some individuals to imagine that they were werewolves, and others to believe that they were seeing such entities. Once modern processing techniques were instituted, lycanthropic outbreaks simultaneously decreased.
Of course, other halflings have been depicted in both legend and fiction, such as werelions, werefoxes, wereleopards, and weresnakes. Others from legend, folklore, to modern times include manapes, Badger people, bear people, jackal people, leopard men, Orang Pendek, tiger people, and Yeti, just to name a few. Another intriguing rendition was delivered by Simone Simon in 1942's Cat People, in which she periodically metamorphosed into a panther due to an inherited legacy from her home village in Serbia.
* Anubis *
Anubis is the jackal-headed Egyptian god of the underworld, the judge of the dead. Sometimes known as the Great Dog, Anubis was mated to Nepthys, the underworld goddess Isis. Dogs were greatly revered in aceint Egypt, and Anubis had a place of great honor in the pantheon of gods.
For Christians in the Middle Ages, images of Anubis reinforced folk legends of werejackals that attacked unwary desert travelers. While some ancient cults saw Anubis as a conduit for healing, others believed the priests with their dog~headed masks were assuming the pagan god's role as judge of the underworld and were stealing the souls of those hapless victims that they only pretended to cure.
Sources/Credit/Excerpt:
By: Brad Steiger
The Dictionary of Mysticism
Lancer Books ( 1963 ) ~
Terror By Night
What? Want to know more??
Try this:
Author of the strange and spooky, Tom Slemen tells the story of a werewolf on the prowl between Wrexham and Denbigh.
Don't worry, it was in 1790 and it hasn't been seen since - or has it..?
As most horror film buffs know, a werewolf is a person who changes into a wolf-like creature when the moon is full. This is a myth, as most country-dwellers who know their folklore will tell you.
A real werewolf is said to be a large unidentified species of wolf which has no tail and is usually quite long; often more than seven feet in length, and the animal carries out most of its hunting at night when the moon is full.
But these strange creatures also go on the prowl most nights regardless of whether the moon is full or not. Most people have heard of the Beast of Bodmin Moor and the Surrey Puma.
But there is another violent creature roaming parts of the United Kingdom which has also killed people, and this animal is known as the Welsh Werewolf.
Records of an enormous wolf-like animal in North Wales date back to 1790, when a stagecoach travelling between Denbigh and Wrexham was attacked and overturned by an enormous black beast almost as long as the coach horses.
The terrifying animal tore into one of the horses and killed it, while the other horse broke free from its harness and galloped off into the night.
The attack took place just after dusk, with a full moon on the horizon. The moon that month seemed blood red, probably because of dust in the stratosphere from a recent forest fire in the Hatchmere area.
The locals thought the moon's colour was a sign that something evil was at large and the superstitious phrase, "bad moon on the rise" was whispered in travellers' inns across the region. In the winter of 1791, a farmer went into his snow-covered field just seven miles east of Gresford, and he saw enormous tracks that looked like those belonging to an overgrown wolf.
He followed the tracks with a blacksmith for two miles, and they led to a scene of mutilation which made the villagers in the area quake with fear that night.
One snow-covered field was a lake of blood dotted with carcasses of sheep, cattle, and even the farmer's dog.
The farmer was found locked up in his house in a terrible state. He wasn't harmed physically, but he was terrified. He had barricaded himself in after witnessing an enormous black animal that resembled a wolf ripping the throat out of his sheepdog.
The animal had then gone for the farmer, but he had managed to run into the farmhouse in time. He had bolted the heavy oaken door and hid under a table in the kitchen armed only with a pitchfork.
The farmer said the wolf pounded on the heavy oak door, almost knocking it off its hinges. The weird-looking animal then stood up on its hind legs like a human and looked in through the windows of the farmhouse.
Its eyes were blue and seemed intelligent and almost human-like. The beast foamed at the mouth as it peered in, then bolted from the window to commit carnage on the farm.
The church set up patrols in search of what was suspected to be a werewolf, and bands of villagers braved the freezing blizzards with lanterns, muskets and pitchforks in search of the beast, but only its tracks were ever seen.
Seven years later, two men walking across the Bickerton Hills in Cheshire saw something that sent them running for their lives.
They rushed into an inn and refused to continue their journey until morning. At dawn on the following day, the mutilated bodies of two vagrants were found in a wood just five miles from the inn.
The attacks by the large black wolf gradually died out, and the people of Cheshire and Wales breathed a sigh of relief.
But two centuries later, attacks by a large unidentified animal were reported again.
In February 1992, a national newspaper reported sightings of a strange bear-like animal that had been seen across Wales. In the north of the country, a farmer who had spotted the animal on the night of a full moon said he had afterwards found two of his lambs had been killed.
And in 2001 the local newspaper, the Evening Leader ran a series of articles about sightings of big cats, like a puma in Treuddyn, near Mold, and Bangor-on-Dee, near Wrexham.
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Taken from Tom Slemen's The Haunted Liverpool series of books.
All books are published by The Bluecoat Press of Liverpool and are available in all good bookstores.
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~*~
Bray Road Beast Reports:
Terror of the ... Wisconsin Wolfman
May Turner
The Sun
February 25, 1992
THE FLESH-EATING beast of Bray Road has been terrorizing residents of a rural town for the last few years and keeping them locked in their homes after nightfall.
Sometimes dubbed the Wisconsin Wolfman, the beast runs on its hind legs, steals chickens, chases deer, eats roadkill and scares the living daylights out of people unlucky enough to meet it on a moonlit night.
So the people of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, try to avoid Bray Road at night.
Jon Fredrickson, the local animal control officer, keeps sighting reports of the creature in a folder marked WEREWOLF. "It seems to hang around Bray Road," says Fredrickson.
Barbara Holt is one resident who had a close encounter with the wolfman. She was driving home on Bray Road one night when she saw something strange on the side of the road.
"Its eyes glowed and its mouth was ringed with big teeth, actually fangs," she recalls.
"It was about 5 feet, 7 inches tall, weighed around 150 pounds and had brownish gray fur, with large pointed ears, like a dog or wolf."
She says it was eating something while kneeling. She remembers the claws vividly. When she passed it, it just looked at her for a moment, then went back to eating what Barbara believes was some small animal probably roadkill. To describe what she saw, she points to a picture of a werewolf she has photocopied from a library book.
"What I remember most is that it was kneeling like a man," she says.
"I don't take Bray Road in the dark anymore."
Pat Braxton saw the wolfman on Bray Road and might have become an evening snack for the beat if she had not been in her car.
She was driving on the road when she felt she'd hit something. She stopped and went back to check. But there wasn't anything on the road or alongside it.
"It was hard to see because it was not only dark but also foggy," she says. "I was about to get back into the car when I looked up and saw this thing a few yards off the road, near the trees."
"It was hairy and standing on two legs, looking at me with large, glowing eyes. I jumped into the car and locked the door."
"It was fast. I never saw anything move so fast. It was by the side of the car just as I slammed the door.
"When its nails hit the metal, it sounded like someone scraping the car with a steel rake."
She started the car and gunned it away.
"I could hear its claws screeching on the trunk as it slid off. If it had gotten me, I probably would have been dinner that night."
Prowling:
Several children report the wolf creature chasing them and then running into the woods or cornfields.
Adults claim to have seen it chase deer and run them down and kill them.
"Whatever it is, it runs like a man, and is it fast!" says Karen Bowey.
Animal control officer Fredrickson thinks it's a wolf or coyote, or maybe a cross between a wolf and a dog. But, whatever it is, he admits there is certainly something strange prowling Bray Road.
The interest to the werewolf phenomenon will never fade away
April 4.2006
A werewolf is one of the central figures of the oldest superstitions. This monster featured in numerous Hollywood blockbusters has been terrifying children and adults worldwide for thousands of years as well as vampires, witches, mermaids, ghosts and sorcerers. Werewolf is also known by the name 'lycanthrope' meaning "a wolf human" and originating from the Greek word Likantropia. Some dictionaries define the word as 'turning a witch into a wolf".
The werewolf theme was always popular in the folklore worldwide, and each country has its name for the creature. Beginning from the epoch of Romulus and Remus, stories about wolves and werewolves excited the imagination of such prominent figures as Jean-Jack Rousseau, Carolus Linnaeus and Jonathan Swift. The talented writers composed an entire series of wonderful stories about werewolves.
However, the werewolf is little known as compared with his fellow, the vampire. The werewolf is more multiform and more mysterious than the vampire. The modern science may easily discredit all the mythical characteristics given to the vampire. But it is known that in old times some strange disease really affected entire settlements and turned people living there into furious beasts. Those diseased revealed all the classical symptoms of lycanthropy.
The interest to the werewolf issue seems to be inexhaustible. In the 20th century, filmmakers were inspired with the issue for making a great number of films about werewolves. Today, fiction and journalism reveal even a deeper approach to the werewolf issue and consider it in a wider aspect.
December 17, 1976 London's The Daily Mail published a story entitled 'Werewolf Killer Caught, The Police Say' that told about the seizure of a criminal known as the Paris werewolf for committing numerous killings. At the end of WWII, Nazis founded a terrorist organization code named Werwolf (Werewolf). Criminals are often described with the strong moral metaphor 'werewolves' when they commit really wild series killings, violations that are beyond logic; when they practice cannibalism, tortures, sadomasochism and Satanism. The irony of the metaphor means that the wolf never attacks and kills itself unless it is hungry or wounded. According to recent researches, wolves in a pack maintain close trusting relations where the entire pack is based upon mutual responsibility. And in case some of the wolves in a pack reveals the killer instinct they liquidate it for the welfare of the rest of the pack.
Genuine werewolves in the contemporary society are those who come to mental hospitals as patients and participate in ritual ceremonies of American Indians. Doctors call people of both sexes who imagine or feel they are werewolves 'lycanthropes'. So, today the word 'lycanthrope' is a professional medical term indicating a pathological condition; and the word 'werewolf' is a word used in fiction, films and as a characteristic of criminals.
Werewolves and their terrible doings were known already in the time when Rome was being founded. People in Ancient Greece also feared the scary creature. But werewolves as well as vampires were particularly scary for people in Eastern Europe where the only mentioning of a werewolf made peasants turn white and look around numb with fear.
Unlike vampires that got out from their coffins to suck blood out of living people, werewolves do not belong to the other world. The werewolf is an absolutely earthly phenomenon. It is highly likely that the turning of humans into wolves was connected with some disease, and anyone could be affected with the disease. It was for sure that a werewolf bite would make a victim diseased. But nobody knew when and under what conditions the terrible werewolf symptoms could reveal themselves. And this fact explained the wild fear and mass executions in the Middle Ages when people suspected of being werewolves were burnt or executed with swords. When the mass fear sweepingly spread, people known as batty or those having something wolfish in their features could be immediately prosecuted as werewolves.
People suspected of lycanthropy found themselves in a really terrible situation. Such attacks as a rule entailed a huge range of moral and religious problems in the epoch when the church played a really important role in the everyday life of all people.
The tradition of that time was to start open legal proceedings with tortures against those declared werewolves, and then the latter were executed which was usually burning. It is not known exactly how many people were executed by hanging or burning on the charges of lycanthropy. However, ancient written evidence proves that the number was quite considerable indeed.
People particularly feared the full moon as it was believed that the disease affected people particularly at this time. Those affected with the disease found their bodies awfully changed, they looked and behaved very much like wolves. After the terrible transformations, werewolves set off for their night wandering to kill anyone they met. That was a real disaster indeed. A human can turn into a vampire only after an attack and bite of another vampire. But lycanthropy was the disease that could suddenly affect anyone, and there was no salvation from it.
There was little chance that patients suffering from lycanthropy could be cured. As a rule, werewolves were doomed to their every night wandering until some other stronger creature killed them or they were not shot with a silver bullet. Unlike vampires, werewolves could be killed in very traditional ways, but it was believed that especially cast silver bullets were particularly effective against werewolves. It was until the 18th century that people in some parts of Europe believed that werewolves had their haired wolf tails hidden under clothes even when they turned into humans again. People thought that the physical peculiarity was always typical of lycanthropy patients, and doctors stated they actually saw patients having tails. That was true that doctors could offer no medicine to cure the disease.
Ancient treatises say that true lycanthropes not only physically turned into wolves, their mind and behavior also changed at that. Such people sensed they were absolute beasts. Those documents stated that meeting a lycanthrope was also risky on a sunny day, but moonlit nights of the full moon were particularly dangerous. It took just a very short period of time for lycanthropy patients to begin to transform into wolves. They felt fever and thirst, then their hands and legs turned into legs resembling those of a wolf. People threw off their shoes as their feet turned into wolf's paws. The mind of a lycanthropy patient also absolutely changed, and it could no longer stay indoors. Then nausea and spasms entailed madness when the transformation became perfectly evident: a patient threw his clothes off, his body began to cover with hair and the feet grew coarse. Soon, all of the head was covered with thick hair and it seemed a human was wearing an animal mask. Then a lycanthrope was gripped with the blood lust and it ran away in search of a victim. Like many beasts of prey, lycanthropes killed their victims by biting their cervical arteries. When the blood lust was satisfied, a lycanthrope fell asleep right in the forest where he killed his victim. At daybreak, a lycanthrope turned into a human again.
Lycanthrope always felt when the terrible transformations began, but they usually occurred within a very short period of time. So, people suffering from the awful disease had to take special measures not to be exposed. Lycanthropes having big houses had special secret rooms where they hid until they turned into humans again. Others preferred to escape to forests where they were growling and rolling about the surface.
Philosophers and scholars in all epochs disputed whether werewolves actually existed or were just a fiction. Many of outstanding scholars supposed that in case of some mental diseases patients could feel they are beasts, but they emphasized that real lycanthropes could not exist at all.
In 125 B.C., Roman poet Marcell Sidet wrote that people affected with lycanthropy revealed mania, frightful appetites and wolf ferocity. According to the poet, people were particularly subject to the disease at the beginning of a year, in February, when the disease was widespread and revealed in acute forms.
Translated by Maria Gousseva
Werewolves of Elkhorn - For decades, terrified eyewitnesses have reported encounters with otherworldly creatures on country roads near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. We sent a brave team of investigators to separate monster from myth. 10/26/06
Werewolves - Are They Real? - Where Did the Legends Come From? - 7/18/07
'Werewolf boy' - who snarls and bites - on the run from police after escaping Moscow clinic - 12/21/07
Man Charged With Sex Assault After Convincing Victim He Was Werewolf/Vampire - 2/11/08
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