The Book of Were-Wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould (best desktop ebook reader .txt) 📕

hay, and the

werewolf is cast off a high cliff into the sea, and that is the end

of him. The king, the queen, and the princes live happily, and may be

living yet, for no notice of their death has appeared in the

newspaper.”

 

This story bears some resemblance to one told by Von Hahn in his

Griechische und Albanesische Märchen; I remember having heard a very

similar one in the Pyrenees; but the man who flies from the werewolf

is one who, after having stripped off all his clothes, rushes into a

cottage and jumps into a bed. The werewolf dares not, or cannot,

follow. The cause of his flight was also different. He was a freemason

who had divulged the secret, and the werewolf was the master of his

lodge in pursuit of him. In the Bearnais story, there is nothing

similar to the last part of the Slovakian tale, and in the Greek one

the transformation and the pursuit are omitted, though the woman-eater

is called “dog’s-head,” much as an outlaw in the north of Europe was

said to be wolf-headed.

 

It is worthy of notice in the tale of The Daughter of the Ulkolak,

that the werewolf fit is followed by great exhaustion, [1] and

that the wolf is given clothes to tear, much as in the Danish stories

already related. There does not seem to be any indication of his

Laving changed his shape, at least no change is mentioned, his hands

are spoken of, and he swears and curses his daughter in broad

Slovakian. The fit very closely resembles that to which Skallagrim,

the Icelander, was subject. It is a pity that the maid Bràk in the

Icelandic tale did not fall upon her legs like the young lady in the

hay.

 

[1. Compare this with the exhaustion following a Berserkir fit, and

that which succeeded the attacks to which M. Bertrand was subject.]

 

CHAPTER IX.

 

NATURAL CAUSES OF LYCANTHROPY.

 

Innate Cruelty—Its Three Forms—Dumollard—Andreas Bichel—A Dutch

Priest—Other instances of Inherent Cruelty—Cruelty united to

Refinement—A Hungarian Bather in Blood—Suddenness with which the

Passion is developed—Cannibalism; in pregnant Women; in

Maniacs—Hallucination; how Produced—Salves—The Story of

Lucius—Self-deception.

 

WHAT I have related from the chronicles of antiquity, or from the

traditional lore of the people, is veiled under the form of myth or

legend; and it is only from Scandinavian descriptions of those

afflicted with the wolf-madness, and from the trials of those charged

with the crime of lycanthropy in the later Middle Ages, that we can

arrive at the truth respecting that form of madness which was invested

by the superstitious with so much mystery.

 

It was not till the close of the Middle Ages that lycanthropy was

recognized as a disease; but it is one which has so much that is

ghastly and revolting in its form, and it is so remote from all our

ordinary experience, that it is not surprising that the casual

observer should leave the consideration of it, as a subject isolated

and perplexing, and be disposed to regard as a myth that which the

feared investigation might prove a reality.

 

In this chapter I purpose briefly examining the conditions under which

men have been regarded as werewolves.

 

Startling though the assertion may be, it is a matter of fact, that

man, naturally, in common with other carnivora, is actuated by an

impulse to kill, and by a love of destroying life.

 

It is positively true that there are many to whom the sight of

suffering causes genuine pleasure, and in whom the passion to kill or

torture is as strong as any other passion. Witness the number of boys

who assemble around a sheep or pig when it is about to be killed, and

who watch the struggle of the dying brute with hearts beating fast

with pleasure, and eyes sparkling with delight. Often have I seen an

eager crowd of children assembled around the slaughterhouses of French

towns, absorbed in the expiring agonies of the sheep and cattle, and

hushed into silence as they watched the flow of blood.

 

The propensity, however, exists in different degrees. In some it is

manifest simply as indifference to suffering, in others it appears as

simple pleasure in seeing killed, and in others again it is dominant

as an irresistible desire to torture and destroy.

 

This propensity is widely diffused; it exists in children and adults,

in the gross-minded and the refined., in the well-educated and the

ignorant, in those who have never had the opportunity of gratifying

it, and those who gratify it habitually, in spite of morality,

religion, laws, so that it can only depend on constitutional causes.

 

The sportsman and the fisherman follow a natural instinct to destroy,

when they make wax on bird, beast, and fish: the pretence that the

spoil is sought for the table cannot be made with justice, as the

sportsman cares little for the game he has obtained, when once it is

consigned to his pouch. The motive for his eager pursuit of bird or

beast must be sought elsewhere; it will be found in the natural

craving to extinguish life, which exists in his soul. Why does a child

impulsively strike at a butterfly as it flits past him? He cares

nothing for the insect when once it is beaten down at his feet, unless

it be quivering in its agony, when he will watch it with interest. The

child strikes at the fluttering creature because it has life in it,

and he has an instinct within him impelling him to destroy life

wherever he finds it.

 

Parents and nurses know well that children by nature are cruel, and

that humanity has to be acquired by education. A child will gloat over

the sufferings of a wounded animal till his mother bids him “put it

out of its misery.” An unsophisticated child would not dream of

terminating the poor creature’s agonies abruptly, any more than he

would swallow whole a bon-bon till he had well sucked it. Inherent

cruelty may be obscured by after impressions, or may be kept under

moral restraint; the person who is constitutionally a Nero, may

scarcely know his own nature, till by some accident the master passion

becomes dominant, and sweeps all before it. A relaxation of the moral

check, a shock to the controlling intellect, an abnormal condition of

body, are sufficient to allow the passion to assert itself.

 

As I have already observed, this passion exists in different persons

in different degrees.

 

In some it is exhibited in simple want of feeling for other people’s

sufferings. This temperament may lead to crime, for the individual who

is regardless of pain in another, will be ready to destroy that other,

if it suit his own purposes. Such an one was the pauper Dumollard, who

was the murderer of at least six poor girls, and who attempted to kill

several others. He seems not to have felt much gratification in

murdering them, but to have been so utterly indifferent to their

sufferings, that he killed them solely for the sake of their clothes,

which were of the poorest description. He was sentenced to the

guillotine, and executed in 1862. [1]

 

[1. A full account of this man’s trial is given by one who was

present, in All the Year Round, No. 162.]

 

In others, the passion for blood is developed alongside with

indifference to suffering.

 

Thus Andreas Bichel enticed young women into his house, under the

pretence that he was possessed of a magic mirror, in which he would

show them their future husbands; when he had them in his power he

bound their hands behind their backs, and stunned them with a blow. He

then stabbed them and despoiled them of their clothes, for the sake of

which he committed the murders; but as he killed the young women the

passion of cruelty took possession of him, and he hacked the poor

girls to pieces whilst they were still alive, in his anxiety to

examine their insides. Catherine Seidel he opened with a hammer and a

wedge, from her breast downwards, whilst still breathing. “I may say,”

he remarked at his trial, “that during the operation I was so eager,

that I trembled all over, and I longed to rive off a piece and eat

it.”

 

Andreas Bichel was executed in 1809. [1]

 

[1. The case of Andreas Bichel is given in Lady Duff Gordon’s

Remarkable Criminal Trials.]

 

Again, a third class of persons are cruel and bloodthirsty, because in

them bloodthirstiness is a raging insatiable passion. In a civilized

country those possessed by this passion are forced to control it

through fear of the consequences, or to gratify it upon the brute

creation. But in earlier days, when feudal lords were supreme in their

domains, there have been frightful instances of their excesses, and

the extent to which some of the Roman emperors indulged their passion

for blood is matter of history.

 

Gall gives several authentic instances of bloodthirstiness. [1] A

Dutch priest had such a desire to kill and to see killed, that he

became chaplain to a regiment that he might have the satisfaction of

seeing deaths occurring wholesale in engagements. The same man kept a

large collection of various kinds of domestic animals, that he might

be able to torture their young. He killed the animals for his kitchen,

and was acquainted with all the hangmen in the country, who sent him

notice of executions, and he would walk for days that he might have

the gratification of seeing a man executed.

 

[1. GALL: Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau, tom. iv.]

 

In the field of battle the passion is variously developed; some feel

positive delight in slaying, others are indifferent. An old soldier,

who had been in Waterloo, informed me that to his mind there was no

pleasure equal to running a man through the body, and that he could

lie awake at night musing on the pleasurable sensations afforded him

by that act.

 

Highwaymen are frequently not content with robbery, but manifest a

bloody inclination to torment and kill. John Rosbeck, for instance, is

well known to have invented and exercised the most atrocious

cruelties, merely that he might witness the sufferings of his victims,

who were especially women and children. Neither fear nor torture could

break him of the dreadful passion till he was executed.

 

Gall tells of a violin-player, who, being arrested, confessed to

thirty-four murders, all of which he had committed, not from enmity or

intent to rob, but solely because it afforded him an intense pleasure

to kill.

 

Spurzheim [1] tells of a priest at Strasbourg, who, though rich,

and uninfluenced by envy or revenge, from exactly the same motive,

killed three persons.

 

[1. Doctrine of the Mind, p. 158.]

 

Gall relates the case of a brother of the Duke of Bourbon, Condé,

Count of Charlois, who, from infancy, had an inveterate pleasure in

torturing animals: growing older, he lived to shed the blood of human

beings, and to exercise various kinds of cruelty. He also murdered

many from no other motive, and shot at slaters for the pleasure of

seeing them fall from the roofs of houses.

 

Louis XI. of France caused the death of 4,000 people during his reign;

he used to watch their executions from a neighbouring lattice. He had

gibbets placed outside his own palace, and himself conducted the

executions.

 

It must not be supposed that cruelty exists merely in the coarse and

rude; it is quite as frequently observed in the refined and educated.

Among the former it is manifest chiefly in insensibility to the

sufferings of others; in the latter it appears as a passion, the

indulgence of which causes intense pleasure.