Trials, Physicians and Skeptics

Three answers to one question

When someone was said to have become a wolf, educated Europeans could give one of three explanations. The change was real, worked by some power beyond nature. The change was an illusion, a deception of the senses. Or there was no change at all, only a sick or troubled person who believed in it. Each answer had its champions from late antiquity to the end of the seventeenth century, and the balance among them helped decide whether an accused man or woman lived or died.

Doubt is as old as the legend. Herodotus repeated the tale of the wolf-changing Neuri and said he did not believe it. A Roman naturalist of the first century, gathering the wonders of his day, declared flatly that people are not turned into wolves and back again, and wondered at the credulity of those who thought so. This page follows the argument from there. It is a grave history, told here with care for the people at the center of it.

The physicians' melancholy

The medical tradition begins with a Greek physician of the second century whose account was copied by later medical writers in Byzantium. Sufferers, he wrote, went out at night, especially in February, imitating wolves or dogs and lingering among the tombs until dawn. They were pale, with dry, sunken eyes, a parched tongue and great thirst, and their legs were covered in sores from stumbling in the dark and from the bites of dogs. He called the condition lycanthropy and counted it a form of melancholy, the disease of black bile, which the medicine of the day blamed for despair, fear and strange fixed beliefs.

The treatments were those of the age: bleeding, baths, a careful diet, and remedies to bring sleep. Physicians writing in Arabic took the description over, and it passed in Latin translation into the medical schools of medieval Europe. The likeness between these symptoms and the folk signs of a werewolf, the thirst, the dry eyes, the scratched legs, is no accident. The learned and the popular traditions fed each other for centuries.

Theologians and the doctrine of illusion

Medieval theology was, on the whole, skeptical of transformation. In the early fifth century Augustine of Hippo weighed the old stories of people turned into beasts and concluded that no demon could truly change one creature into another, since only God makes natures. What witnesses saw, he suggested, was a phantom likeness that appeared to others in animal form while the person lay elsewhere as if asleep.

Church law took up the same line. A widely copied canon of the early tenth century declared that anyone who believed a creature could be changed into another kind or likeness, except by the Creator, was worse than a pagan. A German bishop's handbook for confessors, from the early eleventh century, set a penance for anyone who believed that the Fates could give a newborn child the power to become a wolf, a thing it noted the Germans called a werewolf. The great theologians of the thirteenth century agreed that demons could deceive the senses but could not change the substance of things. For several hundred years the official view of the learned was that werewolves were dreams, delusions or tricks, and that believing in them was itself a fault.

The demonologists' debate

That view hardened into something more dangerous in the late fifteenth century, when the fear of witchcraft as an organized conspiracy with the devil took hold in parts of Europe. A notorious handbook for witch-hunters, printed in the 1480s, kept to the older position that transformation was illusion, but it stressed how powerfully the devil could work such illusions, and how real the harm done under them was.

Over the following century the writers on demonology divided. A few, among them an influential French jurist of the 1580s, argued that the devil could truly change a body into a wolf. Most held a middle view: the devil either clouded the senses of the werewolf and of all who saw him, or did the killing himself while the deluded person slept and dreamed it. The difference mattered less than it might seem. On either view the accused had made a pact with the devil, and the pact itself was the crime. Denying that transformation was possible did not, by itself, save anyone.

The trials

Werewolf trials took place from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth: in the western Alps, across France and especially its eastern borderlands, in the German lands, the Low Countries and the Baltic provinces. They were far fewer than the trials for witchcraft and often overlapped with them. The charges were terrible: the killing and eating of children, attacks on travelers, the slaughter of livestock, all done in wolf shape after a pact with the devil.

The confessions were strikingly alike, and that is the clue to how they were made. Under torture, or the threat of it, prisoners said what their questioners already believed. They told of a dark stranger, a salve or a belt, a meeting at night. Printed pamphlets then carried the most lurid cases across borders, and the pattern hardened.

Many of the accused were poor and on the margins: beggars, wandering laborers, solitary old people, shepherds living half wild in the hills, people disliked by their neighbors. Some suffered from illness of mind or body, and a few may have believed their own confessions. Some were probably guilty of real murders, to which the wolf was added as an explanation. Behind many cases stood a hard winter, a run of attacks by real wolves, or a missing child, and a frightened community's need for someone to blame. The usual sentence was death, often by burning.

Skeptical judges and physicians

Even at the height of the trials, some people said plainly that the courts were wrong. A physician at a German court, writing in the 1560s, argued that most accused witches were melancholy, deluded old women who needed treatment, not punishment, and he counted lycanthropy among the diseases. An English country gentleman of the 1580s mocked the whole idea of bodily change and put the confessions down to fear, torment and folly. Physicians across Europe went on describing lycanthropy as an illness of the mind.

Some judges listened. In 1598 the high court in Paris heard the appeal of a wandering beggar condemned to death as a werewolf; it judged him a simple-minded man rather than a sorcerer and sent him to a hospital instead. In 1603 a court in southwestern France examined a teenage shepherd boy who boasted of running as a wolf and attacking children. The judges concluded that he was a neglected child of weak understanding and ordered him confined in a friary, where he could be taught and kept, rather than executed. These were not acts of modern compassion, and the boy's life in the friary was short. But they mark a turning: the idea that the person in the dock might be sick, foolish or ill-used rather than in league with the devil.

The decline of the trials

Through the seventeenth century the trials thinned out. Courts demanded better evidence, appeal judges grew wary of confessions drawn by pain, and the steady voice of the physicians gained ground. The Baltic case of 1692, in which an old man described werewolves as hounds of God who fought witches for the harvest, shows a court more puzzled than frightened, and in the end it punished him far more lightly than earlier judges might have done. His story is told on the origins page.

By the end of the century the medical view had largely prevailed. Lycanthropy stayed in the textbooks as a form of melancholy or madness, and in time it passed into modern psychiatry as clinical lycanthropy, a rare condition in which a person believes they are turning, or have turned, into an animal. The werewolf itself left the courtroom and went back into story.

What the history teaches

The werewolf trials are a small chapter in the long history of persecution, but a sharp one. They show how quickly fear settles on the vulnerable: the poor, the strange, the sick, the friendless, the very young and the very old. They show that a confession given under torture tells us about the questioner, not the prisoner. And they show that a frightening story, once a community believes it, can make ordinary people capable of great cruelty toward a neighbor.

They also show the worth of the skeptics, who were not always braver or kinder than those around them, but who kept asking whether the obvious explanation was the true one. That habit of patient doubt is still the best protection against turning people into monsters.

One distinction is worth making for readers who come here from the side of identity. Therians do not believe their bodies change, and therianthropy is not an illness; the page on common misconceptions explains why. Anyone frightened by thoughts of physical transformation, or troubled by beliefs they cannot set aside, deserves kind and qualified help, and the page on wellbeing and care is a good place to begin.