Sabine Baring-Gould’s Book of Were-Wolves (1865)
Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition (London: Smith, Elder, and Co.), 1865.
Lycanthropes go by many names, writes Sabine Baring-Gould in his “account of a terrible superstition”, and “half the world believes, or believed, in were-wolves”. In France’s Périgord, those born out of wedlock are known to transform into louléerou with each full moon. In Normandy, the loups-garoux borrows its hide from the devil. Bulgarians and Slovakians knew the creature as vrkolak; to the Serbs, it was vlkoslak; in “the ancient Bohemian Lexicon of Vacerad”, it was vilkodlak; and in Russia, oborot. Among the Anglo-Saxons, an utlagh (or outlaw) was said to have a wolfish head. In Iceland and Norway, some men were thought to be eigi einhamir, “not of one skin”.
From where did the werewolf originate? In The Book of Were-Wolves (1865), the answer is Arcadia, the Ancient Greek province which, thanks to Theocritus and Virgil, has become a shorthand for utopia. In Nicolas Poussin’s painting Et in Arcadia Ego (1637–38), shepherds gather around a tomb to inspect the titular inscription (roughly, “even in Arcadia, there am I”), a grim suggestion that even the walls of Eden cannot stem death’s tidal ebb. In Baring-Gould’s text, the werewolf is a thorn in any vision of civilizational progress or lamentation of lost paradises. The monster serves as a reminder that utopic, predator-free pastures are always built on the graves of a mass cull — as in England, where wolves were “extirpated . . . under the Anglo-Saxon kings” — or a barbarous sacrifice:
It is to be observed that the chief seat of Lycanthropy was Arcadia and it has been very plausibly suggested that the cause might be traced to the following circumstance:—The natives were a pastoral people, and would consequently suffer very severely from the attacks and depredations of wolves. They would naturally institute a sacrifice to obtain deliverance from this pest, and security for their flocks. This sacrifice consisted in the offering of a child, and it was instituted by Lycaon [an Arcadian king who fed his son to Zeus and was subsequently turned into a wolf for his perversity]. From the circumstance of the sacrifice being human, and from the peculiarity of the name of its originator, rose the myth.
But the lycanthrope also suggests that no matter how many beasts are slain or children given over to the gods, the wolf’s violent predation can never be eradicated, for this is a repressed behavior of humans, too, waiting to emerge cyclically in phase with the moon.
If we expand the scope to general considerations of “metempsychosis, innate cruelty, hallucination, &c.”, as our author does, the “transformation into beasts forms an integral portion of all mythological systems”. In addition to extended case studies of notable werewolves and their executions — the Hermit of S. Bonnot, Thievenne Paget, the Tailor of Châlons-Roulet, Jean Grenier, et al. — Baring-Gould considers kuanthropy and boanthropy, when humans become dogs and cows. He tracks down accounts of men transforming into serpents in India, hyenas in Abyssinia, and bears in Livonia, who must remain “kneeling in one spot for one hundred years” to regain their human form. In the Norse tradition, which is “as transparent as glacier ice”, the etymology of berserker, those fearsome warriors who fought in trance-like states, may also reveal ursine associations. Unlike Björn Halldorson, who derives the word from “bare of sark” (i.e., without armor), Baring-Gould argues that the name comes from how “those doughty champions . . . went about in bear-sarks, or habits made of bear-skin over their armour”. The cultural contexts and animals may differ — “a mere matter of taste!”, writes the author — but the transformational processes are roughly the same.
As for psychological origins, Baring-Gould finds, in the werewolf, a primal longing crystallized, akin to George Bataille’s description in Theory of Religion (1973) of how “we yearn for our lost continuity”, “an indistinct flow of being into being — one thinks of the unstable presence of water in water”. In Baring-Gould’s words:
The human soul with its consciousness seemed to be something already perfected in a pre-existing state, and, in the myth of metempsychosis, we trace the yearnings and gropings of the soul after the source when its own consciousness was derived, counting its dreams and hallucinations as gleams of memory, recording acts which had taken place in a former state of existence.
And yet, this “former state of existence”, still palpable in our dreams and myths, works against a core tenet of progress, that we are somehow distinct from the animal world. Because “our forefathers failed to detect the line of demarcation drawn between instinct and reason” — for, as we are still too slow to recognize, no such line exists — humans were forced to wall themselves off with aspirations of temperance and rationality. To be confident in our humanity, the man with bestial appetites was reimagined as a literal beast.
An Anglican clergyman whose bibliography contains more than 1,200 works, including more than 100 books, Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924) was “the last man who knew everything”, in Matthew Walther’s borrowed phrase, whose interests overflowed library shelves: “philology, anthropology, folklore, children’s stories, hymnology, hagiography, geology, topography, painting, optics, metallurgy, ancient and modern history, musical theory, biblical archeology, the plausibility of miracles, the minutiae of the English salt mining industry, and the theater.” Born in Exeter in 1834, he grew up traveling abroad with his family, before going up to Clare College, Cambridge, after which he took holy orders. As a teacher, he was eccentric, and it is said that he instructed students with a pet bat perched on his shoulder; as a writer, he was insatiable, routinely setting down three thousand words each day at his standing desk. In his memoir of childhood, he reveals that his voracious reading habit was a way of finding community where he otherwise couldn’t: “Looking back at this period of hobbledehoyhood, I can see that it bred in me a shrinking from society and a consequent love for isolation, and therewith a lack of conversational gifts. . . . Those whose words I really do value are to be found in books, not in small talk on food, motors, lawn-tennis, bridge and novels”.