The werewolf is an imaginary beast mostly known for its ability to transform from human to wolf, with the frequency and transformation requirements varying from one tradition to another. The result of the transformation differs widely as well: the afflicted human can turn into a pig, cat, calf, or even owl and still be called a werewolf. However, in most traditions, werewolves are humans that turn into wolves, whether for a night, 101 days, or forever. According to some legends, werewolves can be cured by being hit with a blessed arrow or with an arrowhead dipped in holy water, while other stories tell of werewolves delivered from the curse simply by bleeding from a human-inflicted wound. Generally speaking, the werewolf is depicted in legend as a victim, mostly male, that did not choose to live this ordeal. Some she-wolves are known in legends and folktales, and are sometimes portrayed in contemporary novels, television programs, and films.
Werewolves inherit the condition or become werewolves by a wide variety of means. They might get infected by a virus, get bitten by another werewolf, fail in their religious duties, receive a curse, get conceived on Christmas or Easter eve, or be born on Easter. Most werewolves have no recollection of their animal activities because their human sides keep few traces of their transformations except for a mark called “The Mark of the Beast” on the palm of the hand.
Werewolves belong to the greater category of shape-shifters in which shape-shifters, twin gods, hybridation, and wolf brothers all run through wolf stories in a leitmotif of doubling. Again, shape-shifting comes in many forms and ranges from superficial transformation (the exterior changes but the interior remains the same: blood, bones, mind) to a complete biological transformation, where the person being transformed feels his or her body becoming something else. The state of being a werewolf is also called “lycanthropy” and the person transforming is a “lycanthrope.”
Representation of the werewolf as a shape-shifter has been examined in detail by literary scholar S. K. Robish. In Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature (2009), Robish argues that hosting the wolf, becoming the wolf, and taming the wolf allow humans, through myths and legends, to overcome humankind’s inner, beastly nature. The werewolf, as a double being, is the host of the interaction between men and animals, good and evil, control and chaos. Metaphorically speaking, the shape-shifter’s balance between human and animal can be understood as a manifestation of the dark and savage urges within humans, urges that culture teaches us to repress.
The shape-shifting ritual is, in itself, quite impressive. Many stories insist on the suffering endured by the human part of the hybrid being, and this narrative makes the transformation meaningful. By turning into one of Western civilization’s most feared animals, the werewolf transformation has become a sacred scene, one where boundaries no longer exist between the animal and the human worlds. The werewolf is, at that single moment, a perfect fusion of two completely different biological entities. These identities, both living in the same universe, must coexist within a single body, creating a constant tension lived and often resented by the human part of the werewolf. Contemporary examples of this hatred of one’s werewolf nature are abundant in television programs like Being Human (2011–2014) and novels like Bitten by Kelley Armstrong (2001). Being a werewolf is lived as a positive experience in other cases, such as Jacob Black’s character in the Twilight novels and films. In these narratives, the beastly nature is described as an incredible power used to serve good or evil. The perfect reconciliation of human and animal is embodied in one body, manifesting how the human’s acceptance of its nature can result in strength and endless possibilities.
In the modern television series Being Human, a man struggles to overcome the curse of the werewolf. Many traditional cultures affirm the existence of shape-shifters or humans that can take the form of animals. However, most modern werewolf-themed books and films present the condition as a terrible affliction. (BBC America/Photofest)
These positive experiences do not only occur when someone is attacked and turned into a werewolf, or born with the ability to transform at will. In some cases, humans will go to great lengths to learn how to unleash the beast within. With herbs, prayers, incantation, rituals, and other means, people have tried to absorb the animal’s power to better hunt, fly, make war, or gain power. The animal within is therefore understood as a potential for creativity and life, as opposed to a dark sibling capable of destruction and harm.
Cultural anthropology has been interested in people’s relation to nature for some time. Werewolves, as manifestations of tensions between humans and bestiality, constitute a fascinating research ground. Sometimes seen as a regression, the werewolf is the result of a defeat to the violent attack of something unnatural, untamed, and uncivilized. In a world where culture is considered superior to nature, the animal side of the werewolf is often described as the bad one, with the human side trying to overcome it. Culture implies a transformation or a denial of nature.
However unnatural the werewolf is, the shape-shifter can only transform according to the animal as defined. In that regard, the established duality living inside the werewolf’s body can’t be more than what Nature allows. Therefore, the modern idea of nature as a source of good that exists outside of human life is challenged, and the intricate link between humans and animals, or wolves, reinstated within living people.
In late medieval Europe, at the time when the first settlers came to America, wolves were both admired and feared, known as cruel scavengers. In that regard, werewolves were a natural occurrence in fairy tales, the Inquisition, and alchemy manuals and bestiaries. Inherited from an Indo-European background and known among others in Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, and the British Isles, the European werewolf, as well as the image of the wolf, was transported across the Atlantic and collided with the indigenous peoples of North America.
Alleged werewolf sightings still occur in the United States and in Canada, with witnesses recalling detailed events. These recollections contribute to the evolution of the werewolf figure as an active constitution of America’s culture, and reveal a lot about the modern understanding of nature and its powers. These beasts will often be referred to as freaks of nature, mistakes, or the devil’s work. This denial of the animal side of humanity is manifested in the violent reactions of witnesses who are mostly disgusted with the monster they describe.
In Canada, werewolves are unique in their intimate link with religion and the frequency of their occurrence in folktales. In a book published in 1900, Honoré Beaugrand describes a pack of werewolves eating a man. They had all been turned by the devil and could only be cured by getting hit with bullets dipped in holy water from a gun filled with a powdered four-leaf clover. A character also describes his father’s encounter with a native she-wolf. Overall, werewolves from French Canada and Québec are men being punished for avoiding confession for more than seven years. They then become the devil’s beasts, with animal hair growing inside their skin. Their humanity and souls are in danger as they biologically change, becoming part animal and part human.
For Native Americans in both Canada and the United States, the wolf is an animal widely represented among Iroquois, Algonquin, Pueblos, and Northwest coastal groups such as the Quileute (made famous by the Twilight saga). These groups have included wolf totems in their system of representation and credit this animal with strong powers of healing. Some nations claim the wolf as their ancestor, associating the wolf, as a mythical animal, with foundation myths. Transformation into a wolf is perceived as a crisis-solving event, a ritual that can help an individual survive a dangerous situation or save a tribe from famine and war.
In Native American societies there is no distinction between a wolf of flesh and bones and the spirit of the wolf. In that sense, most narratives will mention Wolf as an entity, both mythical and physical. Wolf’s power can be summoned in rituals such as mask ceremonies, where the ritualistic transformation of men into wolves will act as a symbolic narrative.
Nations who consider Wolf to be the founder of their people speak of a gradual historic transformation from wolf to man. To go back to their roots, they practice rites of passage in which the participants enter a sacred place, the forest, connecting with the mythical moment of the beginning. In what Mircea Eliade refers to as a cosmological ceremony, the origin of the people is reinvested, actualized, and repeated.
Lycanthropy
The werewolf is the best-known lycanthrope, but transformation into a bear or other animal is not unknown, and Native American myth and folklore offers a variety of lycanthropes. Lycanthropy is also a very real—if somewhat rare—clinical condition, which can be a manifestation of paranoid schizophrenia. One such case involved a woman who at first blush appeared to be quite ordinary; she had been married for two decades. Throughout her marriage she had felt consumed by animalistic urges, however, and finally she had a breakdown in front of her extended family in which she acted like a wolf, which is indeed what she claimed to see in the mirror. Shortly thereafter she had another episode in her bedroom in which she growled and scratched like a wild animal, after which she was hospitalized and medicated. Such cases, though uncommon, may be linked to the folklore of werewolves.
C. Fee
Native American werewolves are very different from the European werewolf and have contributed to the evolution of the American werewolf archetype. Brought by Christian settlers who thought shape-shifters to be possessed by demons, the European werewolf met a powerful and natural counterpart, one that was considered to be a normal part of life and the manifestation of a strong being. Cultural contact changed both types of werewolves, as Native Americans incorporated Christian monotheistic ideas into their cosmogony, and Christian settlers accepted the idea of humans being able to transform into an animal without being owned by the devil.
Geneviève Pigeon
See also Demonic Possession; Dwayyo; Rougarou; Skinwalker; Vampires; Zombie Legends
Further Reading
Brown, Nathan. 2009. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Werewolves. New York: Penguin Books.
Douglas, Adam. 1992. The Beast Within: A History of the Werewolf. New York: Avon.
Eliade, Mircea. 1971. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Godfrey, Linda. 2012. Real Wolfmen: True Encounters in Modern America. New York: Penguin Books.
Robish, S. K. 2009. Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press.
Werewolf—Primary Document
Werewolves in Modern Fiction (1914)
Legends of werewolves can be traced back through the centuries to ancient Greek literature. Medieval German and French accounts of werewolves are known, and reports of werewolves prowling in the forests of England appear in the nineteenth-century record. However, the rise of skepticism and scientific thinking relegated werewolves to the realm of fiction, where gothic novelists nurtured and developed the legend into its modern form. In this selection from Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute (1914), the inner struggle between man and beast is narrated in detail, forming a key element of recent werewolf portrayals in books, television, and film.
He knew very well that his nervous attack was coming on again. As he set down the bottle upon the washstand he muttered to himself, “Now I’m going to have a night of it.” He began to walk the floor again with great strides, fighting with all his pitiful, shattered mind against the increasing hysteria, trying to keep out of his brain the strange hallucination that assailed it from time to time, the hallucination of a thing four-footed, a thing that sulked and snarled. The hotel grew quiet; a watchman went down the hall turning out each alternate gas jet. Just outside of the door was a burner in a red globe, fixed at a stair landing to show the exit in case of fire. This burned all night and it streamed through the transom of Vandover’s room, splotching the ceiling with a great square of red light. Vandover was in a torment, overcome now by that same fear with which he had at last become so familiar, the unreasoning terror of something unknown. He uttered an exclamation, a suppressed cry of despair, of misery, and then suddenly checked himself, astonished, seized with the fancy that his cry was not human, was not of himself, but of something four-footed, the snarl of some exasperated brute. He paused abruptly in his walk, listening, for what he did not know. The silence of the great city spread itself around him, like the still waters of some vast lagoon. Through the silence he heard the noise of the throng of college youths. They were returning, doubling upon their line of march. A long puff of tepid air breathing through the open window brought to his ears the distant joyous sound of their slogan:
“Rah, rah, rah! Rah, rah, rah!”
They passed by along the adjacent street, their sounds growing faint. Vandover took up his restless pacing again. Little by little the hallucination gained upon him; little by little his mind slipped from his grasp. The wolf—the beast—whatever the creature was, seemed in his diseased fancy to grow stronger in him from moment to moment. But with all his strength he fought against it, fought against this strange mania, that overcame him at these periodical intervals—fought with his hands so tightly clenched that the knuckles grew white, that the nails bit into the palm. It seemed to him that in some way his personality divided itself into three. There was himself, the real Vandover of every day, the same familiar Vandover that looked back at him from his mirror; then there was the wolf, the beast, whatever the creature was that lived in his flesh, and that struggled with him now, striving to gain the ascendency, to absorb the real Vandover into its own hideous identity; and last of all, there was a third self, formless, very vague, elusive, that stood aside and watched the strife of the other two. But as he fought against his madness, concentrating all his attention with a tremendous effort of the will, the queer numbness that came upon his mind whenever he exerted it enwrapped his brain like a fog, and this third self grew vaguer than ever, dwindled and disappeared. Somehow it seemed to be associated with consciousness, for after this the sense of the reality of things grew dim and blurred to him. He ceased to know exactly what he was doing. His intellectual parts dropped away one by one, leaving only the instincts, the blind, unreasoning impulses of the animal.
Still he continued his restless, lurching walk back and forth in his room, his head hanging low and swinging from side to side with the movement of his gait. He had become so nervous that the restraint imposed upon his freedom of movement by his bathrobe and his loose night-clothes chafed and irritated him. At length he had stripped off everything.
Suddenly and without the slightest warning Vandover’s hands came slowly above his head and he dropped forward, landing upon his palms. All in an instant he had given way, yielding in a second to the strange hallucination of that four-footed thing that sulked and snarled. Now without a moment’s stop he ran back and forth along the wall of the room, upon the palms of his hands and his toes, a ludicrous figure, like that of certain clowns one sees at the circus, contortionists walking about the sawdust, imitating some kind of enormous dog. Still he swung his head from side to side with the motion of his shuffling gait, his eyes dull and fixed. At long intervals he uttered a sound, half word, half cry, “Wolf—wolf!” but it was muffled, indistinct, raucous, coming more from his throat than from his lips. It might easily have been the growl of an animal. A long time passed. Naked, four-footed, Vandover ran back and forth the length of the room.
By an hour after midnight the sky was clear, all the stars were out, the moon a thin, low-swinging scimitar, set behind the black mass of the roofs of the city, leaving a pale bluish light that seemed to come from all quarters of the horizon. As the great stillness grew more and more complete, the persistent puffing of the slender tin stack, the three gay and joyous little noises, each sounding like a note of discreet laughter interrupted by a cough, became clear and distinct. Inside the room there was no sound except the persistent patter of something four-footed going up and down. At length even this sound ceased abruptly. Worn out, Vandover had just fallen, dropping forward upon his face with a long breath. He lay still, sleeping at last. The remnant of the great band of college men went down an adjacent street, raising their cadenced slogan for the last time. It came through the open window, softened as it were by the warm air, thick with damp, through which it travelled:
“Rah, rah, rah! Rah, rah, rah!”
Naked, exhausted, Vandover slept profoundly, stretched at full length at the foot of the bare, white wall of the room beneath two of the little placards, scrawled with ink, that read, “Stove Here” “Mona Lisa Here.”
Source: Norris, Frank. Vandover and the Brute. New York: Doubleday, Page, & Company, 1914.