Werewolf: The Curse of the Full Moon

In folklore, a werewolf is a person who can shapeshift into a wolf, or into a hybrid wolf-human creature, either by choice or by a curse. The word itself, from Old English werwulf, literally means 'man-wolf'. Ancient writers had another name for the affliction: lycanthropy, from the Greek lukánthrōpos, 'wolf-man' — a term first used to describe people who simply believed themselves to be wolves.

The idea is old and widespread. Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, described a people near the Black Sea, the Neuri, who were said to turn into wolves for a few days each year. The Roman poet Ovid told of King Lycaon of Arcadia, who served human flesh to the god Jupiter to test him; discovering the deception, Jupiter turned Lycaon into a wolf forever. Pliny recounted a different version: a sacrificial victim who swam across a lake, became a wolf on the far shore, and lived as one for nine years — with the condition that if he touched no human flesh in that time, he would become a man again. He succeeded, but lost nine years of his life to the wolf's form. Vergil, Propertius, Servius, and Petronius — who lived from 27 to 66 CE and served as entertainment director in Emperor Nero's court — all wrote of the transformation, Petronius weaving a werewolf tale into his satirical Satyricon.

Across Eurasia, other cultures imagined their own animal-human hybrids: Scandinavian bear-men, Native American bison-men, African hyena-men, Turkish itbarak, and, according to some tellings, the 'cat women' of Istanbul. One tradition places the earliest recorded claim of werewolf reality in Central Asia around the year 170, in a letter describing the curse — or, as the letter apparently framed it, a power rather than a curse. Those born werewolves, it was said, were born in March, a month said to hold twice the usual number of full moons, with the transformation tied to days between the 3rd and the 18th. Believers claimed werewolves could be recognized by changes in eye color and unusually large, sharp canine teeth.

By the early 15th century, belief in werewolves had fused with the era's growing terror of witchcraft. The earliest werewolf trials emerged in what is now Switzerland — the Valais and Vaud regions — before spreading across Europe through the 16th century, peaking in the 17th, and fading out in the 18th. In France alone, between 1520 and 1630, more than a hundred years, an estimated 30,000 werewolf cases shook the countryside. Accusations of lycanthropy were a small but potent thread within the broader witch-hunt phenomenon, often tangled with older charges of wolf-riding and wolf-charming.

Specific cases reveal how deadly this belief became. In 1573, near Dole close to Dijon, France, a man named Gilles Garnier was accused of harming villagers and killing children while transformed. When he confessed, he was burned alive at the stake. In 1598, near Caude, French villagers found the mutilated body of a 15-year-old boy being devoured by a pair of wolves; when the villagers approached, the creatures fled into the trees. The most notorious case, that of Peter Stumpp in 1589, ignited a fresh wave of fascination and persecution across French- and German-speaking Europe. The persecution lasted longest in Bavaria and Austria, where the hunting of suspected 'wolf-charmers' continued past 1650, with final cases recorded in Carinthia and Styria in the early 18th century.