Where Do Werewolf Legends Come From? Wolves, Rabies and the Beast Within

Herodotus reported in the fifth century BC that the Neuri, a people north of the Black Sea, turned into wolves once a year, and said he did not believe it. Greek myth had Lycaon, king of Arcadia, turned into a wolf by Zeus for serving him human flesh, which gives the condition its clinical name, lycanthropy, and Pliny described a rite in which an Arcadian swam across a lake, lived as a wolf for nine years and swam back a man. The Roman Petronius, around 60 AD, tells the first story with the modern shape: a soldier strips at a crossroads, urinates in a circle around his clothes, becomes a wolf and runs howling into the woods, and is later found in bed with a wound in the neck where a farmhand had speared the wolf. The Norse berserkers and the ulfhednar, wolf-coats, fought in animal skins in a battle frenzy, and the sagas treat the shift between man and wolf as a thing that warriors did.

Several things in the life of medieval and early modern Europe pointed the same way:

• •Wolves: they were common, they took sheep and, in hard winters and in wars, children, and the records of France in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries list thousands of wolf attacks on people; the Beast of Gevaudan killed about a hundred in the 1760s
• •Rabies: a person bitten by a rabid wolf becomes, weeks later, feverish, aggressive, unable to swallow, biting and howling, and dies within days; a disease that turned people into something wolflike and was spread by a wolf's bite is the werewolf's nearest natural model
• •Serial killers: some of those tried as werewolves, Gilles Garnier in 1573 and probably Stumpp, had killed and eaten children, and a society without the category of the murderer for pleasure supplied the category it had
• •Ergot: rye infected with the fungus produces hallucinations and a sensation of the skin crawling, and outbreaks cluster with witch and werewolf trials
• •Outlaws and outcasts: the wolf's head was the old term for a man outside the law whom anyone might kill, and the hermit, the leper and the madman living in the forest were wolves to the village

Werewolf trials ran alongside witch trials from about 1500 to 1700, concentrated in France, Switzerland, the German lands and the Baltic, and the belief the courts held was that the transformation was a pact with the Devil, achieved by an ointment, a belt or a wolf skin, which made it heresy as well as murder. Some of the accused had killed; most had confessed under torture to what their questioners described. A curious exception comes from Livonia in 1692, where an old man called Thiess told a court he was a werewolf and that werewolves were the hounds of God, who went to hell three times a year to fight the witches for the harvest, and the historian Carlo Ginzburg has read that as the trace of an old shamanic fertility cult that the church had recast as devilry. The trials faded with the witch hunts, and by the eighteenth century a werewolf was a superstition of the countryside.

Almost none of the modern werewolf is folklore. The full moon as the trigger appears in no trial record and in only a few medieval tales, and became the rule with the Universal film The Wolf Man in 1941, whose writer, Curt Siodmak, also invented the verse about a man who is pure of heart, the pentagram in the palm and the infection by bite that makes the werewolf a contagion, a borrowing from the vampire. The silver bullet was added in the same decades, from a scattering of stories about silver against the Beast of Gevaudan and against witches. The transformation as a painful, involuntary curse that the sufferer dreads is Hollywood's contribution and its most durable one, since it turned the werewolf from a criminal into a victim and made the story about the beast inside anyone; the wolf man of 1941 is a man who does not want to be a wolf, which no one accused at Cologne would have said.

The werewolf has lasted because it is the oldest form of a thought every culture has, that a person can become an animal and that the animal is already there. The clinical lycanthropy that psychiatry describes, in which a patient believes they are turning into a wolf, is rare and real; the fear of what people do when the restraints are off, in war, in a frenzy, at night, is universal; and the wolf, the one large predator that shared Europe's forests with people until the nineteenth century and hunted in packs like them, was the natural mask. The wolves were exterminated from Britain by 1700 and most of Western Europe by 1900, and they are now returning to Germany, France and the Alps under protection, into a landscape whose stories about them were told for a thousand years by people who could hear them at night.

Werewolf legends descend from Greek, Roman and Norse stories of men who became wolves and were fed in medieval Europe by real wolf attacks, by rabies, which turns a bitten person into a biting, howling thing, by killers who ate children, and by the church's belief that transformation was a pact with the Devil, which produced hundreds of trials between 1500 and 1700. The full moon, the silver bullet, the bite that infects and the sufferer who dreads the change were added by cinema after 1941.