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

>Those bloody tyrants, Nero and Caligula, Alexander Borgia, and

Robespierre, whose highest enjoyment consisted in witnessing the

agonies of their fellow-men, were full of delicate sensibilities and

great refinement of taste and manner.

 

I have seen an accomplished young woman of considerable refinement and

of a highly strung nervous temperament, string flies with her needle

on a piece of thread, and watch complacently their flutterings.

Cruelty may remain latent till, by some accident. it is aroused, and

then it will break forth in a devouring flame. It is the same with the

passion for blood as with the passions of love and hate; we have no

conception of the violence with which they can rage till circumstances

occur which call them into action. Love or hate will be dominant in a

breast which has been in serenity, till suddenly the spark falls,

passion blazes forth, and the serenity of the quiet breast is

shattered for ever. A word, a glance, a touch, are sufficient to fire

the magazine of passion in the heart, and to desolate for ever an

existence. It is the same with bloodthirstiness. It may lurk in the

deeps of some heart very dear to us. It may smoulder in the bosom

which is most cherished by us, and we may be perfectly unconscious of

its existence there. Perhaps circumstances will not cause its

development; perhaps moral principle may have bound it down with

fetters it can never break.

 

Michael Wagener [1] relates a horrible story which occurred in

Hungary, suppressing the name of the person, as it was that of a still

powerful family in the country. It illustrates what I have been

saying, and shows how trifling a matter may develope the passion in

its most hideous proportions.

 

[1. Beitrage zur philosophischen Anthropologie, Wien, 1796.]

 

“Elizabeth –– was wont to dress well in order to please her

husband, and she spent half the day over her toilet. On one occasion,

a lady’s-maid saw something wrong in her head-dress, and as a

recompence for observing it, received such a severe box on the ears

that the blood gushed from her nose, and spirted on to her mistress’s

face. When the blood drops were washed off her face, her skin appeared

much more beautiful—whiter and more transparent on the spots where

the blood had been.

 

“Elizabeth formed the resolution to bathe her face and her whole body

in human blood so as to enhance her beauty. Two old women and a

certain Fitzko assisted her in her undertaking. This monster used to

kill the luckless victim, and the old women caught the blood, in which

Elizabeth was wont to bathe at the hour of four in the morning. After

the bath she appeared more beautiful than before.

 

“She continued this habit after the death of her husband (1604) in the

hopes of gaining new suitors. The unhappy girls who were allured to

the castle, under the plea that they were to be taken into service

there, were locked up in a cellar. Here they were beaten till their

bodies were swollen. Elizabeth not unfrequently tortured the victims

herself; often she changed their clothes which dripped with blood, and

then renewed her cruelties. The swollen bodies were then cut up with

razors.

 

“Occasionally she had the girls burned, and then cut up, but the great

majority were beaten to death.

 

“At last her cruelty became so great, that she would stick needles

into those who sat with her in a carriage, especially if they were of

her own sex. One of her servant-girls she stripped naked, smeared her

with honey, and so drove her out of the house.

 

“When she was ill, and could not indulge her cruelty, she bit a person

who came near her sick bed as though she were a wild beast.

 

“She caused, in all, the death of 650 girls, some in Tscheita, on the

neutral ground, where she had a cellar constructed for the purpose;

others in different localities; for murder and bloodshed became with

her a necessity.

 

“When at last the parents of the lost children could no longer be

cajoled, the castle was seized, and the traces of the murders were

discovered. Her accomplices were executed, and she was imprisoned for

life.”

 

An equally remarkable example will be found in the account of the

Mareschal de Retz given at some length in the sequel. He vas an

accomplished man, a scholar, an able general, and a courtier; but

suddenly the impulse to murder and destroy came upon him whilst

sitting in the library reading Suetonius; he yielded to the impulse,

and became one of the greatest monsters of cruelty the world has

produced.

 

The case of Sviatek, the Gallician cannibal, is also to the purpose.

This man was a harmless pauper, till one day accident brought him to

the scene of a conflagration. Hunger impelled him to taste of the

roast fragments of a human being who had perished in the fire, and

from that moment he ravened for man’s flesh.

 

M. Bertrand was a French gentleman of taste and education. He one day

lounged over the churchyard wall in a quiet country village and

watched a funeral. Instantly an overwhelming desire to dig up and rend

the corpse which he had seen committed to the ground came upon him,

and for years he lived as a human hyæna, preying upon the dead. His

story is given in detail in the fifteenth chapter.

 

An abnormal condition of body sometimes produces this desire for

blood. It is manifest in certain cases of pregnancy, when the

constitution loses its balance, and the appetite becomes diseased.

Schenk [1] gives instances.

 

[1. Observationes Medic. lib. iv. De Gravidis.]

 

A pregnant woman saw a baker carrying loaves on his bare shoulder. She

was at once filled with such a craving for his flesh that she refused

to taste any food till her husband persuaded the baker, by the offer

of a large sum, to allow his wife to bite him. The man yielded, and

the woman fleshed her teeth in his shoulder twice; but he held out no

longer. The wife bore twins on three occasions, twice living, the

third time dead.

 

A woman in an interesting condition, near Andernach on the Rhine,

murdered her husband, to whom she was warmly attached, ate half his

body, and salted the rest. When the passion left her she became

conscious of the horrible nature of her act, and she gave herself up

to justice.

 

In 1553, a wife cut her husband’s throat, and gnawed the nose and the

left arm, whilst the body was yet warm. She then gutted the corpse,

and salted it for future consumption. Shortly after, she gave birth to

three children, and she only became conscious of what she had done

when her neighbours asked after the father, that they might announce

to him the arrival of the little ones.

 

In the summer of 1845, the Greek papers contained an account of a

pregnant woman murdering her husband for the purpose of roasting and

eating his liver.

 

That the passion to destroy is prevalent in certain maniacs is well

known; this is sometimes accompanied by cannibalism.

 

Gruner [1] gives an account of a shepherd who was evidently

deranged, who killed and ate two men. Marc [2] relates that a

woman of Unterelsas, during the absence of her husband, a poor

labourer, murdered her son, a lad fifteen months old. She chopped of

his legs and stewed them with cabbage. She ate a portion, and offered

the rest to her husband. It is true that the family were very poor,

but there was food in the house at the time. In prison the woman gave

evident signs of derangement.

 

[1. De Anthropophago Bucano. Jen. 1792.]

 

[2. Die Geistes Krankheiten. Berlin, 1844.]

 

The cases in which bloodthirstiness and cannibalism are united with

insanity are those which properly fall under the head of Lycanthropy.

The instances recorded in the preceding chapter point unmistakably to

hallucination accompanying the lust for blood. Jean Grenier, Roulet,

and others, were firmly convinced that they had undergone

transformation. A disordered condition of mind or body may produce

hallucination in a form depending on the character and instincts of

the individual. Thus, an ambitious man labouring under monomania will

imagine himself to be a king; a covetous man will be plunged in

despair, believing himself to be penniless, or exult at the vastness

of the treasure which he imagines that he has discovered.

 

The old man suffering from rheumatism or gout conceives himself to be

formed of china or glass, and the foxhunter tallyhos! at each new

moon, as though he were following a pack. In like manner, the

naturally cruel man, if the least affected in his brain, will suppose

himself to be transformed into the most cruel and bloodthirsty animal

with which he is acquainted.

 

The hallucinations under which lycanthropists suffered may have arisen

from various causes. The older writers, as Forestus and Burton, regard

the werewolf mania as a species of melancholy madness, and some do

not deem it necessary for the patient to believe in his transformation

for them to regard him as a lycanthropist.

 

In the present state of medical knowledge, we know that very different

conditions may give rise to hallucinations.

 

In fever cases the sensibility is so disturbed that the patient is

often deceived as to the space occupied by his limbs, and he supposes

them to be preternaturally distended or contracted. In the case of

typhus, it is not uncommon for the sick person, with deranged nervous

system, to believe himself to be double in the bed, or to be severed

in half, or to have lost his limbs. He may regard his members as

composed of foreign and often fragile materials, as glass, or he may

so lose his personality as to suppose himself to have become a woman.

 

A monomaniac who believes himself to be some one else, seeks to enter

into the feelings, thoughts, and habits of the assumed personality,

and from the facility with which this is effected, he draws an

argument, conclusive to himself, of the reality of the change. He

thenceforth speaks of himself under the assumed character, and

experiences all its needs, wishes, passions, and the like. The closer

the identification becomes, the more confirmed is the monomaniac in

his madness, the character of which varies with the temperament of the

individual. If the person’s mind be weak, or rude and uncultivated,

the tenacity with which he clings to his metamorphosis is feebler, and

it becomes more difficult to draw the line between his lucid and

insane utterances. Thus Jean Grenier, who laboured under this form of

mania, said in his trial much that was true, but it was mixed with the

ramblings of insanity.

 

Hallucination may also be produced by artificial means, and there are

evidences afforded by the confessions of those tried for lycanthropy,

that these artificial means were employed by them. I refer to the

salve so frequently mentioned in witch and werewolf trials. The

following passage is from the charming Golden Ass of Apuleius; it

proves that salves were extensively used by witches for the purpose of

transformation, even in his day:—

 

“Fotis showed me a crack in the door, and bade me look through it,

upon which I looked and saw Pamphile first divest herself of all her

garments, and then, having unlocked a chest, take from it several

little boxes, and open one of the latter, which contained a certain

ointment. Rubbing this ointment a good while previously between the

palms of her hands, she anointed her whole body, from the very nails

of her toes to the hair on the crown of her head,