Lycanthropy

In depth

Lycanthropy is built from two Greek words, lykos, wolf, and anthropos, human being. It names the condition of the werewolf: a human who becomes a wolf, by curse, by craft, or by nature, and usually becomes human again. The word is very old, and for most of its history it has belonged to storytelling and to the study of belief.

It has had two other lives. Physicians in antiquity and after used it for a melancholy in which sufferers wandered at night and believed themselves wolves, the root of what is now called clinical lycanthropy. And in the early 1990s, people who felt themselves to be wolves in spirit borrowed lycanthrope as a name for themselves, before the broader word therianthrope replaced it so that cats, bears and birds would not be left out.

In practice

• In a folktale, a man who puts on a wolfskin belt and runs as a wolf until dawn is a lycanthrope in the oldest sense of the word.
• A modern wolf therian may read old posts in which people like them are called lycanthropes, and recognize the community before it had settled on its present vocabulary.

Common questions

Is lycanthropy the same as therianthropy?

In folklore, therianthropy is the general term for human-to-animal transformation, and lycanthropy is the wolf-specific case. As an identity, therianthropy refers to people who identify as animals and does not involve physical change at all.

Is lycanthropy real?

Physical transformation into a wolf belongs to legend. The stories are real and very old, and so are the people today who identify as wolves in a non-physical sense. Those are different subjects, and this library keeps them on separate shelves.

Related terms