Lycanthropy

“ II. As a pathological state lycanthropy may be described as a kind of hysteria, and may perhaps be brought into connexion with the form of it known as latah. It is characterized by the patient’s belief that he has been metamorphosed into an animal, and is often accompanied by a craving for strange articles of food, including the flesh of living beings or of corpses. In the lower stages of culture the state of the patient is commonly explained as due to possession, but where he leaves the neighbourhood of man real metamorphosis may be asserted, as in ordinary lycanthropic beliefs. ”

“ Lycanthropy is often confused with transmigration; but the essential feature of the wer-animal is that it is the alternative form or the double of a living human being, while the soul-animal is the vehicle, temporary or permanent, of the spirit of a dead human being. The vampire is sometimes regarded as an example of lycanthropy; but it is in human form, sometimes only a head, sometimes a whole body, sometimes that of a living person, at others of a dead man who issues nightly from the grave to prey upon the living. ”

“ The phenomenon of repercussion, the power of animal metamorphosis, or of sending out a familiar, real or spiritual, as a messenger, and the supernormal powers conferred by association with such a familiar, are also attributed to the magician, male and female, all the world over; and witch superstitions are closely parallel to, if not identical with, lycanthropic beliefs, the occasional involuntary character of lycanthropy being almost the sole distinguishing feature. ”

“ Transmigration of souls, a metempsychosis, deals solely with the passing of the soul after death into another mortal form. Lycanthropy confines itself to the metamorphosis of physical man to animal form only during man's physical lifetime.
Metempsychosis is a change of condition dependent on the principle of evolution (i.e. evolution upward and retrogressive) . Lycanthropy is a change of condition relative to a property, entirely independent of evolution. The one is wholly determined by man's spiritual state at the time of his physical dissolution ”

“ Even in Europe, after an age of scepticism, the old natural superstition is returning, despite the pitch-fork, under another shape. The learned authoress of the Night-side of Nature objects to ‘illusionists,’ argues lycanthropy to be the effect of magico-magnetic influence, and instances certain hysterical and nervous phenomena of eyes paralyzed by their own weakness. ”

“ If we once know the precise nature of an insane person's hallucination, his actions will be apt to appear quite consistent, and thus lycanthropy also not only produces the fine connection of a change into a wolf, but causes the sufferer to conduct himself in all his ways like the animal which he represents. ”

“ Sometimes we can discover the precise natural fact which the superstition had misread. Thus, epilepsy, the phenomenon of nightmare, and that form of madness which leads men to imagine themselves transformed into some animal, are, doubtless, the explanation of many tales of demoniacal possession, of incubi, and of lycanthropy. ”

“ One of the most curious beliefs prevalent at the time was the belief in lycanthropy, that is, that certain individuals can, under certain conditions, change their bodily shape, and appear as animals to persons at a distance! ”

“ Now it really occurs that, in various forms of mental disease, patients prowl shyly, long to bite and destroy mankind, and even fancy themselves transformed into wild beasts. Belief in the possibility of such transformation may have been the very suggesting cause which led the patient to imagine it taking place in his own person. But at any rate such insane delusions do occur, and physicians apply to them the mythologic term of lycanthropy. ”

“ Even if the denotation of lycanthropy be limited to the animal-metamorphosis of living human beings, the beliefs classed together under this head are far from uniform, and the term is somewhat capriciously applied. The transformation may be voluntary or involuntary, temporary or permanent; the wer-animal may be the man himself metamorphosed, it may be his double whose activity leaves the real man to all appearance unchanged, it may be his soul, which goes forth seeking whom it may devour and leaving its body in a state of trance ”

“ In the seventeenth century lycanthropy was gravely defended by doctors of medicine as well as of divinity, on the authority of the story of Nebuchadnezzar, which proved undeniably the possibility of such metamorphoses.
65 Pliny (Hist. Natur. xxx.) 'observes,' as Gibbon quotes him, 'that magic held mankind by the triple chain of religion, of physic, and of astronomy.'
Cotemporary annalists record the extraordinary frenzy aggravated, as it was, by the proceedings against the Templars, the signal of witch persecutions throughout France. ”

“ One has only to read the histories of the times to know that these witches claimed the power of transforming themselves into various animals, both for the purposes of disguise and also to convey themselves swiftly to the scenes of their imaginary orgies. Lycanthropy, or the power to change themselves into wolves, was everywhere believed in, and the ability to transform themselves into cats by rubbing their bodies with a special salve or ointment provided by Satan himself, found equal credence. ”

“ So, ever this truth runs through all legends of ghost and demon—through the uniform records of what wonder accredits and science rejects as the supernatural—lo! the dread machinery whose wheels roll through Hades! What need such awful engines for such mean results? The first blockhead we meet in our walk to our grocer’s can tell us more than the ghost tells us; the poorest envy we ever aroused hurts us more than the demon. How true an interpreter is Genius to Hell as to Earth! The Fiend comes to Faust, the tired seeker of knowledge; Heaven and Hell stake their cause in the Mortal’s temptation. ”

“ Imagine to yourself a person, whose soul has just departed. Behold that pale corpse, which is still upon the bed, the head fallen upon the breast; the hair dishevelled and bathed in the sweat of death; the eyes sunken; the cheeks hollow; the face of ashy paleness; the tongue and the lips of a leaden hue; the body cold and heavy. Those who see it grow pale and tremble. How many there are who, upon seeing a relation or friend in this condition, have changed their life, and have left the world! But still more dreadful is it when the body begins to decay. ”

“ The lily and the rose falls to pieces in your hand, your touch withers it, and it leaves only rottenness behind: the youth's, the virgin's beauty and loveliness — look at it without any self-imposed illusion, without the brutish sting of the senses — is horrour and putridity and everything we revolt from! a few hours of death, a corpse dug out of its tomb, make this woe manifest to all. And I myself! what is there within me but death? a ghost and a skeleton! the stench of my own corpse haunts me; and in all my feelings there is madness, in all my thoughts despair. ”

“ Like air impalpable, and yet not air;—
"Where am I led?" ask'd Life with hollow sigh.
"To Death, that dim phantasmal Every where,"
The Ghost replied. "Nature's circumfluent robe,
Girding all life—the globule or the globe."
"Yet," said the Mortal, "if indeed this breath115
Profane the world that lies beyond the tomb;
Where is the Spirit-race that peoples death?
My soul surveys but unsubstantial gloom,
A void—a blank—where none preside or dwell,
Nor woe nor bliss is here, nor heaven nor hell." ”

“ Locke assures us, we have as clear an idea of spirit as of body. But, if it be asked, how a spirit, that never was embodied, can form to itself a body, and come up into a world where it has no right of residence, and have all its organs perfected [27] at once; or how a spirit, once embodied, but now in a separate state, can take up its carcase out of the grave, sufficiently repaired, and make many resurrections before the last; or how the dead can counterfeit their own bodies, and make to themselves an image of themselves ”

“ With frightful lucidity, she had the vision of her corpse, and she passed her hands over her whole body in order to probe to the bottom an idea which, though simple, had never yet occurred to her—that she bore her skeleton within her, that it was not a result of death, a metamorphosis, a culmination, but a thing one carries about, a spectre inseparable from the human form, and that the framework of life is already the symbol of the tomb. ”

“ Can the breath Of very heaven bid these bones revive, Open the graves, and clothe the ribs of death? Yea, Prophesy, the Lord hath said again: Say to the wind, come forth and breathe afresh, Even that they may live, upon these slain, And bone to bone shall leap, and flesh to flesh. The spirit is not dead, proclaim the word. Where lay dead bones a host of armed men stand! ”

“ The worms after having consumed the flesh eat each other, and, in the end, nothing remains of that body but a fetid skeleton, which, in course of time, is divided, the bones being separated, and the head falling from the body: they " become like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors, and the wind carried them away." (Dan. ii. 35.) Behold, then, what man is a little dust upon a threshing-floor, which is carried away by the wind.
Behold that nobleman, who was considered to be the life and soul of society, where is he? ”

“ Eating its heart confers peculiar qualities, notably fertility and the gift of tongues, and the draconite or precious stone which lies embedded in its forehead has incredible properties in the way of medicine and magic, but only if you catch the animal alive and remove the stone without otherwise injuring it. ”

“ Balancing hell, on the left hand of the spectator, is brute earth, the grave, the forming and the swallowing clay, out of which souls, not yet acquitted or condemned, emerge with difficulty, in varied forms of skeletons or corpses, slowly thawing into life eternal. ”

“ I remember how we delved in this ghoul's grave with our spades, and how we thrilled at the picture of ourselves, the grave, the pale watching moon, the horrible shadows, the grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the antique church, the dancing death-fires, the sickening odors, the gently moaning night-wind, and the strange, halfheard, directionless baying, of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure. ”

“ At the end of one of these experiments I became totally lost to the external world, its surroundings and influences, and found myself in the world of Spirit—in the midst of a vast and boundless Chaos, in which no sound struck upon me save the rattling of the bones of a huge and ghastly skeleton which swayed and swung to and fro in the bleak air from the point of a vane on the top of a vast pole, itself the very spectre of the one on which mentally, I had hung my mortal foe. ”

“ Necromancy as a science of the abyss; spiritism as the abyss giving up every form of delusion; sorcery, witchcraft, as rich indeed in testimony but to human perversity alone, apart from intervention of diabolism belonging to the other world—I testify with my whole heart to the truth of these accusations, though I do not believe that the unseen world is so utterly cut off from the world of things manifest as Éliphas Lévi considered in his own paradoxical moods. But once more—what has become of [Pg xvi] Magic? ”

“ But if these notions appear to derogate from the perfection of the Divine attributes, and if these mummies be in all their parts true representations of the human form, may we not refer them to the future rather than the past?—May we not be looking into the womb of Nature, and not her grave? ”

“ Imagination can figure few deaths more horrible than to be sucked under these rocks into some unfathomable abyss, where your corpse could never be found to give intimation of your fate. A water kelpy, or an evil spirit of any aquatic propensities, could not choose a fitter abode; and, to say the truth, I believe at our first entrance, and when all our feelings were afloat at the novelty of the scene, the unexpected plashing of a seal would have routed the whole dozen of us. ”

“ All things in the world without brought the thought of the grave, and the pause of being, and the withering up of beauty, closer and closer to his soul. In the palpable and griping winter, death itself seemed to wind around him its skeleton and joyless arms. ”

“ His eyes sought a human form, but beheld, creeping towards him from a corner opposite, which resembled rather the lair of a wild beast than the abode of anything human, a monster, the sight of which made his blood run cold. A ghastly deathlike skeleton, all the hue of life perished from a face on which grief and despair had traced deep furrows—his beard and nails, from long neglect, grown to a frightful length-his clothes rotten and hanging about him in tatters; and the air he breathed, for want of ventilation and cleansing, foul, fetid, and infectious. ”

“ And again I sunk into visions of Ligeia—and again (what marvel that I shudder while I write?) , again there reached my ears a low sob from the region of the ebony bed. But why shall I minutely detail the unspeakable horrors of that night? Why shall I pause to relate how, time after time, until near the period of the gray dawn, this hideous drama of revivification was repeated; how each terrific relapse was only into a sterner and apparently more irredeemable death; how each agony wore the aspect of a struggle with some invisible foe ”