"Howling in shadows, living in a lunar spell. He finds his heaven spewing from the mouth of hell. And when he finds who he's looking for listen in awe and you'll hear him bark at the moon" - Bark at the Moon, Ozzy Osbourne.
Werewolves have been sadly neglected of late. They've not been getting their due and that's a damned shame because they're one of my favourite monsters. Obviously zombies, serial killers, and Frankenstein's monster are all great but there's something about the hairy handed gents that ticks all the boxes for me. Organisations like the London Fortean Society, Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub, and SELFS have hosted talks on witches, vampires, fairies (twice), and mermaids (three times) but, since I've been attending - at least, there's been nothing on werewolves at all.
Until now that is. Werewolves haven't always wiled away their moonlit nights in obscurity. Back in the forties Lon Chaney Jr was appearing as a Wolf Man, alongside Bela Lugosi and Claude Rains, in a film of the same name. Twenty three years later, in Face of the Screaming Werewolf, he reappeared as a mummified version, and in the eighties you could barely move without being mauled by American Werewolves in London or Teen Wolves. 1984's Wolf saw Jack Nicholson and James Spader hunting down deer, howling, and generally menacing poor Michelle Pfeiffer.
My favourite werewolf programme is 1980's Children of the Full Moon. Part of the excellent Hammer House of Horror tv series, I probably saw this three or four years after it was first broadcast and it scared the absolute shit out of me. Rewatching it on YouTube a few years back I could see that some of the effects were a bit ropey but the memories of watching Christoper Cazenove, Diana Dors, and a hairy faced axeman peering through a bedroom window of a remote and spooky mansion as an impressionable teenager still sent chills up my back. Typing this now, the chills are back.
Only a few of these fictional werewolves appeared in last week's SELFS talk about the folkloric history of werewolves and, sadly, there was no riffing on Warren Zevon's 1977 classic Werewolves of London with its tales of eating a big dish of beef chow mein in Lee Ho Fook's, drinking a pina colada in Trader Vic's, and mutilating little old ladies late at night. But that didn't stop it being a rather splendid evening. As most evenings with SELFS tend to be.
Presented online (for obvious reasons) via Zoom and a YouTube slideshow, the evening began with our host George explaining the literal meaning of the word werewolf - man-wolf. The French prefer the word loup-garou. Loup being a wolf and garou being a man who transforms himself into an animal. The Greek derived term lycanthrope means wolf-person allowing the women to get involved. A rare treat it seems as werewolves do seem to be primarily male.
It was speculated that prehistoric hunters would disguise themselves in wolf pelts to hunt buffalo, the early theologian Augustine of Hippo claimed the devil lacked the ability to turn a man into a wolf but that Satan was able to make a man both look and think like a wolf. In the 11th century King Cnut spoke of werewolves and there were rumours that King John, who ruled England from 1199-1216, actually was one.
In 8AD, Ovid's Metamorphoses told of Lycaon, the king of Arcadia, killing his own son (he had fifty sons so he could spare one) Nyctimus and serving his flesh up to Zeus, the king of Gods, to test his claim to omniscience. Understandably displeased at this culinary cuntishness, Zeus restored Nyctimus to life and turned Lycaon into a wolf.
"What big eyes you have grandma"
"All the better to see with you"
Was the grandmother in Little Red Riding Hood a wolf in disguise or was she, in fact, the real grandmother who had transformed into a werewolf? A shapeshifter. Rare female werewolves were said to be 'hairy on the inside' but most werewolf tales differ only marginally over time. The 1C Roman author Petronius, in his Satyricon, told of a friend who took all his clothes off, turned into a wolf, and ran around a graveyard before 'worrying' some sheep. It doesn't sound too far from the escapades of the American werewolf in London.
In Auvergne, France, in 1588, a huntsman reported being attacked by a wolf. During the attack he had somehow managed to cut off one of the wolf's paws which he later showed to an acquaintance. The paw mutated into a woman's hand complete with a wedding ring and when the acquaintance returned home he found his wife dead in the kitchen. Where her hand used to be there was nothing but a bloody stump.
Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum of 1486 made claims that wolves would sometimes snatch both adults and children from their beds and eat them. Kramer called this an act of God who had summoned evil spirits to punish us humans for our sins. God can be a right bastard.
In 1621, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy described a form of 'wolf madness' that involved howling men with hollow eyes whose insanity was so fevered they were unable to be persuaded that they were not wolves. Among other clinical and neuroscientific theories for this mania, rabies has been mooted as a likely diagnosis.
The last authenticated werewolf trial in France took place in 1847. Sergeant Francois Bertrand, then still a teenager, was arrested and jailed for one year for desecration of cemeteries and necrophilia (he'd dig up dead bodies, masturbate over them, dissect them, and then bury them again). His deeds were discovered when locals heard dogs howling in terror, discovered coffins prised open and corpses that had been gnawed at.
Bertrand, or the Vampire of Montparnasse as he became known (blurring the already thin line between vampires and werewolves), claimed he was driven by a force that made him feel he'd been turned into a ravenous animal and as a child he was fixated with eating human flesh after sunset. Despite all this his colleagues said he was a great guy and after he served his sentence he moved to Le Havre and lived out an uneventful life as a mailman and lighthouse keeper. The appetite for human flesh, apparently, having been sated.
Latvia, like France, seems a hotspot for werewolves and the trial of Hans the Werewolf in 1651 is typical of medieval Latvia where paganism was still practiced in defiance of Christianity long after the nation had converted. Baltic peasantry accused people of being werewolves over petty jealousies in a manner not dissimilar to witch hunts of the time and the authorities would always be keen to juice that accusation into one of Satanism.
Hans confirmed he believed himself to be a beast when under transmutation and the court took this to be evidence of Satanic magic and the fact that Hans said a 'man in black' had given him the body of a wolf was further proof that this was the work of Old Nick. As a Satanist, Hans faced the death penalty but there were other werewolves believed to be operating in Latvia at the time and rumour even had it that they would visit Hell three times a year to ensure a good harvest. Or possibly so Beelzebub could carry out an appraisal on them.
An appraisal system for werewolves would be difficult to operate. While there are some clear KPIs there seems to be no consistent reason for them appearing, no specific time of year or even, it was suggested, time of day. I'm not sure I'm on board with that last point as to my knowledge, and I've watched the Thriller video in its entirety, werewolves definitely seem to prefer nights. Nights with full moons usually. Good for getting naked under.
Some see belief in, or superstition regarding, werewolves as representative of our fascination with liminal spaces and hybrids. Werewolves are a hybrid of man and the unknown, a mix of the material and the immaterial and the 16c Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus believed that man had two spirits. A human one and an animal one. After their life had ended, Parcelsus warmed to his theme, those that had given in to sin and carnality would be turned into wolves or ghosts and forced, it seems, to linger eternally in purgatory. Worrying sheep no doubt.
Similarly, others believed werewolves to be the spirits of dead epileptics or cataleptics but none of that explains the behaviour of Peter Stumpp, the Werewolf of Bedburg, who was executed on the Halloween night of 1589 by 'breaking'. His flesh was torn from his body with red hot pincers as he was attached to a wheel. Next his arms and legs were removed before all his bones were broken to prevent him crawling out of the grave. To finish the job they chopped his head off and burnt his remains on a pyre.
It's recorded as one of the most brutal executions of all time but his crimes, confessed to under extreme torture, make pretty grisly, if likely untrue, reading. He was accused, and found guilty, of werewolfery, witchcraft, killing and eating fourteen children, ripping two unborn babies from their pregnant mother's wombs and swallowing them before describing them as 'dainty morsels', having an incestuous relationship with his own daughter (who, shockingly, was sentenced to death alongside him for this), eating his own son's brain, and having sexual intercourse with a succubus sent to him by the Devil.
The German werewolf stories seem to be the most gruesome of all so it's probably best not to give birth to a werewolf in Germany. Luckily there's a method of ensuring that doesn't happen. If you've had six children and they're all girls - don't have a seventh in case she's female too. Seven daughters born in succession, it was said, ensured that one would become a werewolf.
In Greece it was believed that being born on Christmas Day would make you a werewolf but in the Nordic countries you can't be born a werewolf, you have to become one. In Finland it's said grandmothers are particularly susceptible to lycanthropy and can poison children with their fingernails and in Norway and Sweden a person who wishes to transform into a werewolf has to perform a bizarre midnight ritual of drinking and headbanging.
Perhaps that explains some of the more outre antics of bands like Burzum and Bathory. If you're not into the whole Monsters of Rock thing a shortcut to werewolfdom can be found by the simpler, though more unpleasant, task of eating a wolf's brain. In Russia you were neither born a werewolf nor could you compel yourself to be one. It was something that was done to you. Russian mountain legend had it that St Peter and St Paul had the power to punish greedy and selfish people by turning them into wolves.
If that's true we can expect to hear Vladimir Putin howling from within the walls of the Kremlin some time soon. The howling and the hairy faces are easy ways to spot werewolves but there is a danger these may just be ordinary wolves. How do we tell the difference?
There are some instructions. Wolves tend to travel in packs, werewolves solo. Wolves avoid humans but werewolves actively seek them out for very obvious purposes. If you find yourself the target of such a beast what can you do? What recourse do you have?
Firstly, try not to go out in a full moon in the first place but if you have to carry a five pointed star, a glass of holy water, and/or a gun with a silver bullet. Calling a werewolf by its human name upsets and discombobulates it and buys you precious time though making the sign of the cross may be even more effective. Most of all, though, stay on the path.
Opinion as to whether or not exorcism works with werewolves is divided though there are many who believe, I'm writing this like it's actual real science for some reason, conversion to Christianity is effective but possibly the most bizarre protection method comes from the bayou in the deep south of the USA.
The loup-garou of the bayou is said to own a boat the size of an aircraft but is scared of frogs but if you don't have a green amphibian handy, and they're hard to keep hold of, a sieve will suffice. If holidaying in Louisiana hang a sieve outside your door and any lurking loup-garou will be distracted by its compulsion to count the holes. Because loup-garous of the south, it seems, all suffer from arithmomania.
Having gone through the folkloric history of werewolves, regional variations, how to identify them and how to protect ourselves from them the evening was coming to an end so we ran through a few fictional werewolves and had a brief Q&A that took in Stephen King, Dracula (a werewolf as well as a vampire), Psycho, The Howling, Company of Wolves, Ginger Snaps, Dog Soldiers, Rik Mayall, Bad Moon Rising, the Southend Werewolf Bill Ramsey, huskies, exorcisms in Connecticut, and our old friend and SELFS favourite James I of England/VI of Scotland.
Even 'enchanted girdles' cropped up. It had been a great talk, as ever, and by the time it had finished it was pitch black outside and I was tempted to take all my clothes off and allow my inner loup-garou some free expression beneath the light of a silvery moon. Alas, I was distracted by a sieve but it's halloween very soon and now my plan to go trick or treating on a pumpkin spacehopper dressed up as a Covid spore can't happen due to the latest coronavirus restrictions I can at least bark at the moon. Even if biting people is probably considered a high risk activity right now.
Happy hallowe'en. Awwwoooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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