A postcard comes to my apartment every six months with a cartoon tooth on it.
The tooth has a face, and then, going further than anybody needed it to go, arms. It's holding a toothbrush, which raises a question about the tooth's relationship to its own hygiene that I've decided not to pursue. The card says IT'S TIME! and my name is printed on it in a font that's trying to be handwriting and isn't fooling anybody.
Great.
Nobody asked me. That's the part.
I don't remember consenting to a permanent standing arrangement with an office on the ground floor of a building that also contains a nail salon and a place that sells phone cases. At some point in my twenties I walked in with a chipped molar. Apparently that was a lifetime agreement. Now the card comes, and it'll keep coming after I'm dead, because those systems aren't built to notice.
What I do when the card arrives is floss.
I floss like a person who has always flossed. Suddenly there's intent. I go buy the good floss, the waxed kind in the dispenser shaped like a compact, because I've somehow decided the cheap floss is what got me into this, and I keep it up for eleven days, which is exactly long enough to make my gums bleed and nowhere near long enough to matter to anybody with a light on their head. (There's also a water pick, which I bought during a previous card cycle and used twice, both times spraying the mirror, the faucet and a hand towel that belonged to somebody else, and which now lives in its box in the cabinet where I keep the things that were going to be a whole new era.)
Then I go, and I get the paper bib clipped around my neck with the little chain, like a person about to be served a lobster and also possibly executed, and I lie there while somebody puts a hook into the back of my mouth and I make the noise. It's a gurgle with a question mark on the end, it means "I have swallowing to do and I'm unclear on the protocol," and there's no dignified way to produce it.
And every single time, without variation, she stops, and she puts the hook down, and she says: "You're doing a lot of work right here."
Lower left. Same spot, every six months for the entire time I've been an adult.
Anyway. Wolves.
The word began its life as a medical diagnosis, which nobody tells you
Lycanthropy comes straight out of Greek. Lykos, wolf, and anthropos, human, bolted into lykanthropos, which is the least interesting true thing on this page.
The better one is that the Greek word barely shows up in ancient Greek at all. It appears late, it appears rarely, and where it does appear, notably in the medical writing associated with Galen, it describes a patient. Somebody with a ravenous appetite and a conviction about wolves. It picks up real currency only in Byzantine Greek, in the tenth-century encyclopedia known as the Suda.
Then it crosses into English, and the first recorded use is 1584, in Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft, where it means a form of madness in which a person believes they've become a wolf. A diagnosis, with a sick person attached to it.
Lycanthropy doesn't reliably mean actual physical transformation in English until somewhere around 1830. So the word spent nearly its entire documented life as a medical label, and then the nineteenth century took it off the doctors and handed it to the monsters, who have had it ever since. I find this upsetting in a way I can't fully justify, and I've stopped trying to.
Arcadia, where a king served the wrong dinner
The origin story people reach for is Lycaon, in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book One.
Jupiter comes down to Arcadia in disguise to find out whether the reports about humanity are as bad as he's heard. Lycaon, the local king, decides to test whether this guest is really a god. The test he designs is to serve him the flesh of a prisoner, partly boiled and partly roasted. He also plans to murder Jupiter in his sleep, because when Lycaon commits to a theme he commits.
Jupiter brings the house down, literally. Lycaon runs for the fields and turns into a wolf as he goes, keeping the grey, the same eyes, the same look of fury on a new face.
Pausanias tells it differently. In his version Lycaon sacrifices a human infant on the altar of Zeus Lykaios and turns wolf on the spot, which is less of a dinner party and more of a rite. So the mechanism is already unstable in antiquity.
Both versions agree on the thing the movies eventually throw away, though. Lycaon does something. Nobody bites him and nothing is going around. He commits an act, and the wolf is the sentence for it.
Herodotus wrote down the rumor and then declined to buy it
The earliest report that reads like a straight werewolf claim sits in Herodotus, Book Four of the Histories, section 105. It concerns a people called the Neuri. The Scythians and the Greeks living in Scythia told him that once a year every one of the Neuri turns into a wolf for a few days and then turns back.
Herodotus writes it down. And then he says, in effect, that they told him this and swore to it and he doesn't believe it.
Which gets skipped constantly in the retellings. The first surviving werewolf report in Western literature comes with the first surviving eye-roll attached.
So.
Note the interval, though. Annual, not monthly, and the monthly one has an origin we'll get to.
The trials were real, and this is where it stops being fun
For roughly two centuries, European courts tried people for being werewolves, convicted them, and killed them. In documented cases, with names.
Gilles Garnier, a hermit near Dole in the Franche-Comté, confessed to killing and eating children and was burned at the stake on 18 January, in a year the sources give as either 1573 or 1574. Somebody should check that against the court record. I'm leaving it wobbling.
Peter Stubbe is the famous one. His name also turns up as Stumpp, Stump and Stube depending on where you find him, which tells you something about the paperwork. He was executed at Bedburg near Cologne on 31 October 1589, having confessed, under torture or the immediate threat of it, to a pact with the devil and a magic belt that turned him into a wolf. The execution was staged as a spectacle, and he was broken on the wheel and had flesh torn away in ten places with red-hot pincers before he was beheaded and burned, and his daughter and the woman described as his mistress were killed alongside him.
Almost everything anyone knows about Stubbe comes from a single sixteen-page pamphlet printed in London in 1590, translated from a German original that no longer exists. It was pulled back into circulation in 1920 by an occultist named Montague Summers. That's a chain of custody I'd want disclosed if it were being introduced as evidence anywhere.
The context isn't neutral either. The Cologne War had been grinding through the Electorate from 1583 to 1588. Stubbe was very probably a convert to Protestantism, the last Protestant strongholds there fell in 1589, the year he died, and the accounts note that aristocracy attended the execution, including the new Catholic Elector. Historians have argued the whole production functioned as a warning to a population being pressured back to Rome. You don't have to accept that in full to notice that a man's death was extremely useful to people who weren't him.
The Gandillon family, at Saint-Claude in the Jura, 1598. Pernette Gandillon attacked two children who were picking berries, a four-year-old boy died, and villagers tore her apart on the spot. Her relatives Pierre, Georges and Antoinette were then arrested, confessed to a salve and a pact and a sabbat, and were burned. The presiding judge was Henri Boguet, whose Discours des sorciers became a working handbook for prosecuting exactly this.
Which is the mechanism, right there, inside one family. A judge collects confessions, publishes the confessions as a manual, and the manual teaches the next judge what questions to ask, and the next set of confessions comes back matching the manual, because that's what happens when you supply a frightened person with the answer and then hurt them until they produce it.
On scale, be careful. You'll see a figure of 30,000 werewolf executions in France between 1520 and 1630 repeated in otherwise serious places. The historian Willem de Blécourt traced that number to a 1611 book by Pierre de Lancre, where it referred to the general population of the Labourd region and not to anybody's execution count. His own conclusion is that the total number of prosecuted werewolves in Europe probably didn't exceed several hundred. Archive work across France, Germany, Switzerland and the Low Countries lands in the same neighborhood. One commonly cited tally gives about 280 known cases between 1407 and 1725, on the order of two percent of recorded witchcraft executions.
What that correction buys you is a number small enough that a person could in principle learn every name in it.
The people in those records were overwhelmingly poor. Many were rural, some were clearly unwell, and the ones who confessed were frequently confessing to a script that had been read to them first. I'm not going to try to find an angle on that.
Two courts that looked at the accused and decided he was sick
This is the part I didn't expect.
Jacques Roulet, Angers, 1598. Found near the mutilated body of a teenage boy with blood on him. He said he'd been a werewolf ever since taking something his parents gave him, and he was sentenced to death. Then he appealed to the Parlement of Paris, which looked at him, concluded he was feeble-minded and not diabolical, and commuted the sentence to two years' confinement at Saint-Germain-des-Prés with religious instruction.
Jean Grenier, 1603. A shepherd boy of about thirteen who told anyone who'd listen that he'd made a pact and turned into a wolf and eaten children, with a body count that went up every time he told it. On 6 September 1603 the Parlement of Bordeaux recognized his youth and his weakness of mind and refused to execute him. He was confined for life in a Franciscan friary in the city, where Pierre de Lancre came to look at him in 1610 and wrote up his teeth and his eyes and his hands with enthusiasm.
So the highest courts in France, in the same decade as the burnings, twice looked at somebody claiming to be a wolf and returned the verdict ill. In 1598 and in 1603. Not in 1850.
The credulity was never total. Where a case got kicked upstairs to people who were less frightened and more bored it sometimes came back as a medical finding, which makes the executions worse rather than better, because the knowledge to do otherwise was already in the building and just wasn't evenly distributed.
Psychiatry does document this, and it's rarer than anyone wants
Clinical lycanthropy is real, and it isn't a punchline.
It's the delusional belief that one has transformed, or is transforming, into an animal. Jan Dirk Blom published a systematic review in History of Psychiatry in 2014 covering the literature from 1850 onward. He found 56 original case descriptions of that delusion, of which only 13 met the criteria for lycanthropy proper. The rest fell into the wider category, clinical zoanthropy, where the animal is something other than a wolf.
Thirteen. In more than a century and a half of published psychiatric literature.
It's generally understood as a symptom and not a diagnosis, turning up within schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe depression, intoxication and withdrawal. Some cases sit on top of hallucinations that disturb the person's sense of their own body, which is the detail that stayed with me, because it means the belief is downstream of a real altered physical experience.
You can't run any of this backward and diagnose the dead. The syndrome exists, though, and a small number of the people the courts burned were probably experiencing something in this territory, and they were killed for saying so.
Petrus Gonsalvus, who had hair on his face and a job
The theory that hypertrichosis explains werewolves is built on a real man who was never accused of anything.
Petrus Gonsalvus was born in Tenerife in 1537 with congenital hypertrichosis, meaning hair over most of his face and body. Taken to Europe as a child, he ended up at the French court of Henry II, raised and educated as a nobleman. He married a woman named Catherine, and of their six children four inherited the condition, and the naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi wrote him up as a man of the woods, and portraits of the whole family hang at Ambras Castle in Austria to this day, where they get linked, constantly, to the development of Beauty and the Beast. He died in 1618.
So the most famous hairy man in early modern Europe was never hunted or tried or burned. He was collected. Dressed well and painted over and over by people who considered themselves his patrons, and there's no version of that life I'd call a rescue.
As an explanation for the trials, though, hypertrichosis is weak, and the reason is arithmetic. The condition is vanishingly rare, and the trial records are full of ordinary-looking farm laborers whose neighbors had known their faces for thirty years.
The explanations that get wheeled out every autumn, ranked by how much weight they hold
Ergotism. Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye. It contains alkaloids related to LSD, and eating it can produce convulsions, hallucinations and burning sensations in the limbs. The story writes itself: bad harvest, moldy bread, whole village sees wolves.
Nope.
It's a weaker argument than its popularity suggests. When Linnda Caporael proposed ergotism for the Salem afflictions in 1976, Nicholas Spanos and Jack Gottlieb published a rebuttal in Science the same year showing that the reported symptoms didn't match convulsive ergotism and the epidemiology didn't work either. That rebuttal has held up. The objection applies here with extra force, because the werewolf confessions aren't a jumble of hallucinatory imagery. They're strikingly organized: pact, salve, belt, sabbat, arriving in roughly the order the demonologist's questionnaire asks for them. A fungus doesn't draft a legal answer.
Rabies. Better, in one narrow respect. Wolves were significant rabies carriers in Europe, and a bitten human develops agitation and terror of water and eventually violence, so the bite-transmits-the-condition shape of modern werewolf lore does have a real disease underneath it. What rabies can't do is produce a defendant. It kills you in days to weeks, and months of alleged predation followed by a confession and a trial isn't a timetable the disease permits.
Ordinary violence. The unglamorous one. The Garnier and Stubbe cases describe crimes another century would have prosecuted as murder with no wolf in the paperwork anywhere. Hand a court a supernatural category and it starts finding candidates for it, including candidates who did nothing.
Ingredients, all three. Anybody selling you one clean cause for two centuries of trials across half a continent is selling something.
Everything you know about killing one was written by a screenwriter in 1941
Now the good part.
Silver doesn't appear as a werewolf's weakness anywhere in the folklore. Not in the trial records, and not in the regional remedies, which are a scattered mess: wolfsbane, exorcism, striking with iron, calling the person by their Christian name, plain decapitation, with no consistency from one valley to the next. Nothing about the metal.
The silver bullet is Curt Siodmak, writing The Wolf Man for Universal in 1941. And the film doesn't even use one. Larry Talbot is beaten to death with a silver-headed walking stick, which is a considerably worse way to go and which nobody has ever put on a T-shirt.
Anyway.
Siodmak also wrote the verse. Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright. Presented in the film as old peasant wisdom, written by a German screenwriter in Hollywood, on a deadline, for a studio.
Read the last line again, because it's the detail that undoes everything. Autumn moon. In the 1941 film the transformation is tied to wolfsbane blooming, and the moon in that verse is a season and not a phase.
The full moon rule shows up two years later, in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, 1943, where the change gets pinned to the full moon and the verse is amended on the way past so the moon is now full and bright. Two Universal pictures, two years apart, produced the silver and the schedule, and both now get described online as ancient European folklore by people who are absolutely certain, which I understand, because 1943 was a long time ago and everything before you were born is arguably ancient.
The calendar is the gift, and it took until 1943 to hand it over
Consider what the full moon does to the story.
Lycaon served a god human flesh and got what he had coming. Stubbe confessed to a pact, and a pact is a choice, which is precisely why they were able to kill him for it. Every version of this before the movies makes the wolf a consequence of something the person went and did, and guilt is the whole engine.
Put it on a lunar cycle and the engine runs backward. It comes when it comes, and he can beg to be chained up before sundown and mean it, and be perfectly decent company on the other twenty-nine days, and the tragedy is that nobody believes him in time. The full moon is the invention that turns the werewolf back into a patient, which is what the word meant in the first place, back with Galen, before the nineteenth century handed it to the monsters.
It took from Ovid to a Universal sequel to hand the man a schedule.
So, the tooth on the postcard. Twenty-odd years, and nobody in that office has ever once suggested I'm a bad person. The card doesn't come because I failed at something, it comes because it's six months, and when I open my mouth she finds what she always finds and says the sentence she always says and hands me a new toothbrush in a plastic sleeve. I show up on the interval and the interval takes the blame.
Anybody who has ever dreaded a thing that arrives whether or not you're ready has wanted that exact deal, and 1943 is the year somebody finally wrote it down for the werewolf.
