Note 102 — Front matter

John Fiske, Myths and myth-makers, p. 78, fol., gives the origin and development of the werewolf as follows: From the conception of wolf-like ghosts it was but a short step to the conception of corporeal werewolves.... Christianity did not fail to impart a new and fearful character to the belief in werewolves. Lycanthropy became regarded as a species of witchcraft, the werewolf as obtaining his powers from the Devil. It was often necessary to kill one’s enemies, and at that time some even killed for love of it (like the Berserker); often a sort of homicidal madness, during which they would array themselves in the skins of wolves or bears and sally forth by night to crack the backbones, smash the skulls and sometimes to drink with fiendish glee the blood of unwary travelers or loiterers.... Possibly often the wolves were an invention of excited imagination. So people attributed a wolf’s nature to the maniac or idiot with cannibal appetites, then the myth-forming process assigned to the unfortunate wretch a tangible lupine body. The causes were three: 1. Worship of dead ancestors with wolf totems originated the notion of transformation of men into divine or superhuman wolves. 2. The storm-wind was explained as the rushing of a troop of dead men’s souls or as the howling of wolf-like monsters (called by Christianity demons). 3. Berserker madness and cannibalism, accompanied by lycanthropic hallucinations, interpreted as due to such demoniacal metamorphosis, gave rise to the werewolf superstition of the Middle Ages. The theory that if one put on a wolf’s skin he became a werewolf, is perhaps a reminiscence of the fact alleged of Berserkers haunting the woods by night, clothed in hides of wolves or bears. A permanent cure was effected by burning the werewolf’s sack, unless the Devil furnished him with a new wolfskin. Primitively, to become incarnated into any creature, the soul had only to put on the outward integument of the creature. The original werewolf is the night-wind—a kind of leader of departed souls, howling in the wintry blasts. Encyc. Brit, under Lycanthropy:—The Berserkir of Iceland dressed in the skins of bears and wolves, and further on: “Beastform is in mythology proper far oftener assumed for malignant than for benignant ends.”