The Complete Idiot's Guide to Werewolves (12 page)

 

Leger was tried for the girl’s murder. In the magistrate’s investigation, it was discovered that Leger had eaten of his victim’s flesh. Leger admitted that he’d long supped on the raw flesh of rabbits, but that he had become consumed by an urge to taste human flesh. He also openly admitted to every gruesome detail of his crime. He was sentenced to death for crimes associated to lycanthropy (which was still considered an actual crime in France at the time).

 

After his execution, Leger’s corpse was handed over for scientific examination. His head and brain were thoroughly examined, and the acting physicians discovered that he had in fact suffered from an unidentified brain disorder that had caused extreme deterioration of his neural tissue. This is significant because it marked the first occurrence in a werewolf trial where the beliefs offered by traditional superstitions were challenged by new advances in the arenas of science and medicine.

Chapter 7

Werewolves, Wolves, and Religion

Both werewolves and wolves alike have had a long but turbulent relationship with the organized religions of humanity. While they have at times been worshipped, they have far more often been persecuted by the religions and governments of the past. In many religions, wolves are associated with certain demonic figures, quite often portrayed as shadowy and deceptive agents of evil or as symbols of violence and greed. Wolves had little to redeem them from such views in the medieval world. They were neither beasts of burden nor a source of food and therefore had no value to humans. They were seen as a burden and a threat to livestock, so most farmers were more than happy to participate in the Christian church’s demonization of the wolf, which had once been highly revered by a number of European cultures.

In 1187, Giraldus Cambrensis provided an account of one priest’s rather unusual encounter with a wolf. According to the story, the priest was traveling from Ulster to Meath. When the hour grew late, the priest and his young attendant set up camp for the night in the woods along the road. They had no sooner built a fire than a wolf stepped calmly into their campsite from the surrounding woods.

 

Needless to say, the priest and his attendant were terrified by the sight. The wolf then began to speak in a male human voice and told the men they had nothing to fear from him (which does not seem to have helped very much). Trembling, the priest begged the wolf in the name of God not to harm them. The wolf replied with words of a Christian nature, which seemed to at least somewhat convince the priest that he was not evil.

 

The wolf explained that he was a member of a clan from Ossiry that was cursed to follow a particular ritual. He went on to say that every seven years two members of the clan, one man and one woman, were chosen by lots and sent into the woods to live as wolves. If they managed to survive this period without doing evil to humans, then they would be allowed to return to human form, and two new clan members would again be chosen to take their place in the woods. However, the wolf told them, his female counterpart was in the woods, very near to death. Being that they were Catholics, the wolf begged the priest to follow him to the she-wolf and perform the proper religious rites.

More out of fear than any sense of spiritual obligation, the priest followed the wolf into the woods. They soon came upon the form of a dying she-wolf, who was moaning and sighing with the voice of a human woman. Upon seeing them, she greeted the priest in a polite human fashion. The priest then began giving her the rites of a last communion. When she asked the priest to place the Eucharist wafer in her mouth, he told her he did not come equipped with any. The priest apparently lied because he was afraid to put his hand near her mouth, out of concern that she might bite him.

 

The male he-wolf, however, now approached the priest and pointed with his muzzle to a small missal book the clergyman carried. Somehow, perhaps by scent, the he-wolf knew that the priest had several wafers in this book. The he-wolf then reached toward the she-wolf with his paw and pulled back her wolf-skin from her head to her navel, which exposed the torso of a human woman (basically, exposing her breasts). He again implored the priest not to deny her the gift of Heaven by failing to administer the proper death rites. He then returned the wolf-skin, and she resumed her beastly form. Finding himself rather disturbed by this, and being out of excuses, the priest now removed the wafer and completed the final rites for the she-wolf. They then left her and returned to the campsite.

 

The he-wolf remained with the priest and his attendant through the rest of the night. In the morning, he escorted them to the road and pointed them in the proper direction. The he-wolf then returned to the woods to complete his seven-year trial.

 

It would seem that this account sparked some debate as to the nature of certain living things. The question was raised by some as to whether or not these particular wolves should be thought of as humans or as beasts. For example, if a hunter was to kill one of these human-wolves, would he have committed murder in the eyes of God? It was partially concluded that since these wolves were intelligent, then at the least they could not be considered “brutes.” However, since it was also believed that God himself had imposed these wolf-forms upon them, they could not be considered fully human in their form either.

One of the primary reasons that wolves and werewolves became targets of the Christian church was that both eventually came to be associated with witchcraft. What the medieval church called “witchcraft,” however, was usually nothing more than the traditional practices of Europe’s pre-Christian nature religions. In order to speed the acceptance of Christianity throughout the region, the Christian church actively demonized such practices by denouncing them as devil worship. Suddenly, the practice of any religion aside from Christianity would make one an outlaw. In Scandinavia, for example, women who practiced wolf rites (likely of a pre-Christian nature religion) were called
Vargamor,
meaning “wolf-crones.”

 

After the rise of Christianity, the Vargamor were labeled a coven of devil-worshipping witches. The folklore soon changed to fit this new label, and it came to be said that the Vargamor would first lure unsuspecting men into their dens with promises of sex, then feed them alive to their demonic wolves. Some lore claimed that the Vargamor served these wolves, while others claim that they had the power to command the wolves at will.

 

In the myths of the Norse (which includes the ancestors of the Scandinavians), female warrior spirits called
Valkyries
were often depicted as riding on the backs of wolves. The Vargamor may have been responsible for some form of religious rite that meant to invoke the powers of the Valkyries. When this idea later encountered Christianity, however, it probably gave rise to the view that the Vargamor were witches. In much of Europe’s later “pro-Christian” folklore, witches are often described as riding through the night on the backs of wolves (just as the Valkyries once were).

A number of religions, not just Christianity, have their own demonic or negative wolf figures. In the dialects of the Hindus, for example, the word meaning “wolf” is used interchangeably to also mean “criminal/ outlaw.” From the Hindus to the Europeans to the ancient Aramaeans, they all have their own forms of such wolf-demons.

 

In Romanian folklore, the wolf-demon Varcolac may have been a reinvention of older Norse myths of the titanic wolf Fenrir (who was believed to be able to trigger the apocalypse called
Ragnarok
by swallowing the sun). Varcolac is said to be the eternal enemy of light, and he seeks to devour the moon and sun. There are rare times when he nearly succeeds, causing solar and lunar eclipses. In some legends about Varcolac (namely those that claim he is a wolf-demon), it is said that he takes physical form by emerging from the corpse of any infant that has not been baptized.