Author: Doris V. Sutherland

The below article, entitled “Lycanthropy”, comes from the August 25 1849 edition of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. The piece treats werewolves as a western equivalent to the ghouls of the Arabian Nights, and suggests that tales of vampires, werewolves and ghouls stem from a single psychological source. In making this argument, the author discusses the familiar rogues’ gallery of alleged vampire Arnold Paole, alleged werewolf Jean Grenier and probable necrophile François Bertrand, the last of these being the main case study.

The article is an example of how broad the concept of clinical lycanthropy was during the nineteenth century. Today, the term is used in a stricter sense to refer to people who believe that they have the ability to transform into animals. As this article shows, however, the concept was once associated with a broader range of bestial compulsions. Had Bertrand’s corpse-violating crimes taken place today, then he would likely be described as ghoulish; I can also imagine tabloids likening him to a vampire, given his fondness for cemeteries and coffins. But I rather doubt that people would equate him with a werewolf.

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WHOEVER has read the ‘Arabian Nights’ Entertainments’ will be acquainted with the words goul and vampyre. A goal was believed to be a being in the human form, who frequented graveyards and cemeteries, where it disinterred, tore to pieces, and devoured the bodies buried there. A vampyre was a dead person, who came out of his grave at night to suck the blood of the living, and whoever was so sucked became a vampyre in his turn when he died.

Both these persuasions have been rejected by the modern scientific world as altogether unworthy of credence or inquiry, although, about a century ago, the exploits of vampyres created such a sensation in Ilungary, that they reached the ears of Louis XV, who directed his minister at Vienna to report upon them. In a newspaper of that period there appeared a paragraph to the effect that Arnold Paul, a native of Madveiga, being crushed to death by a wagon, and buried, had since become a vampyre, and that he had himself been previously bitten by one.

Continue reading “Werewolf Wednesday: Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal on Lycanthropy (1849)”

The August 1802 edition of The Scots Magazine includes a letter on the topic of lycanthropy. Although the author makes early digressions into the Lazzaroni of Naples (I’m unfamiliar as to this area of werewolf folklore) and Ethiopian were-hyenas, the general focus is on British werewolves.

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Sir,

Among the popular superstitions of Scotland, there seems to have been one, the traces of which are now almost obliterated, the origin of which might be a subject of curious and entertaining discussion. Lycanthropy, or the belief of the occasional transformation of magicians, and sometimes of other persons by the power of magicians, seems formerly to have been very extensively diffused.

In Germany, the belief was at one time quite current, and is alluded to by various authors. Among the Lazzaroni of Naples, the manners of whom have too much verisimilitude to the idea, this transformation was very recently believed. [James] Bruce found a similar notion prevalent in Abyssinia; and relates that the inhabitants of Gondar imagined the hyænas that infested their streets by night, and were accustomed to prey on mangled carcasses, were individuals of the Jewish tribes of Samen, transformed into the shape of that ferocious animal.

Continue reading “Werewolf Wednesday: Notes on Lycanthropy (1802)”

This week’s snippet of werewolf history comes from Thomas Blount’s Glossographia, an early dictionary published in 1656. Besides The Damnable Life and Death of Stubbe Peeter (1590) the Glossographia is the earliest text I’ve covered for this series, and it specifically mentions the Stubbe Peter/Peter Stumpp case in its entry on the word “Werewolf”:

Werewolf or Were-wolf (were in the old Sax. was sometimes used for man) this name remains still known in the Teutonick, and is as much as to say Man-wolf; which is a certain Sorcerer, who having anointed his body with an Ointment, made by instinct of the Devil, and putting on a certain inchanted Girdle, does not only to the view of others, seen as a Wolf, but to his own thinking, hath both the shape and nature of a Wolf, so long as he wears the said Girdle, and accordingly worries and kills humane creatures. Of these sundry have been taken in Germany, and the Netherlands. One Peter Stump, for being a Were-wolf and having killed Thirteen Children, Two Women, and One Man, was at Bedhur, not far from Cullen, in the year of 1859 [sic], put to a very terrible death.

The year given for Stumpp’s execution is an obvious typo: he was killed in 1589, not 1859.

Continue reading “Werewolf Wednesday: Glossographia (1656)”