Legends Of The Werewolves

now on the History Channel stories from the pages of time stories of triumph and tragedy adventure and achievement as we go in search of history where was today's images of these man turned wolf monsters mostly came from the make-believe world of Hollywood but the ancient Greeks and Romans believed werewolves actually existed and were absolutely clean deadly shockingly in the 16th century thirty thousand people in France were accused of being werewolves as we go in search of history will discover the beliefs fears and hysteria that surround legends of the werewolves people have always had a McCobb fascination with what terrifies them most whether it's real life savagery of serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer or imagined monsters like Frankenstein and Dracula humans are irresistibly drawn to these horrifying subjects one of the most ancient and enduring is the werewolf there were werewolf stories as far back as you find recorded stories and in all countries in Greece and middle Europe and Asia they're everywhere at the dawn of civilization there was little that separated man from beast people then thought humans could revert to animals a belief called shape-shifting virtually every society primitive societies and so forth have stories and beliefs about transformation from animal to human form and vice versa you go back even on the cave paintings you have pictures of what appear to be half man half stag all civilization has probably been a story of you know keeping certain impulses and emotions and and and urges in in check and most of these are the the more primitive instincts the animal instincts so ever since man started becoming civilized you know the werewolf has been lurking somewhere back there in in the shadow not so much in the shadows that the werewolf wasn't noted by the ancient Greek and father of history Herodotus in the fifth century BC he reported in his travels of a shape-shifting people known as uriens each neurio changes himself once a year into the form of a wolf and he continues in that form for several days after which he resumed his former shape you'll find very strong werewolf myths in the among the Greeks the Romans I mean you got Roman werewolf stories which sound like they were you know they were they were produced by Hollywood last week one of these stories came from a Roman satirist named patrol eNOS he was among the first to chronicle an enduring connection between werewolves in the full moon Petronius wrote of a man who on a night lit by a full moon went to visit his mistress he asked to soldier friend to accompany him along the way the soldiers suddenly stopped stripped off his clothes transformed into a wolf and ran into the darkness the full moon really does have a connection with genuine werewolf lore because there is a belief that somehow the full moon creates madness in people lunacy moon so the full moon and the transformation from man to beast is a natural magical connection arriving at his mistress's home the man learned that a servant had fought off a wolf with a sword wounding it on the neck the next day the man discovered the soldier in his barracks dying of a sword wound to his neck these were stories that were widely told and widely believed that if you if you were wounded as a wolf you transform back into human form with the wound stayed with you an even more horrifying account of a werewolf came from the Roman poet Ovid writing in the 1st century he told of an ancient Greek king named like Han whose cruelty was so notorious that the king of the gods Jupiter himself paid him a visit but like Heian refused to believe his visitor was a god and tested him by serving a sumptuous feast in which he had secretly mixed human flesh cannibalism even even among the ancient Greeks was was a no no I mean that so that was a real taboo to put a cannibal meal for a God was a tremendous offense Jupiter instantly detected the tainted food furious he turned like Heian into a wolf so he could pursue his penchant for human flesh in a more suitable form from the name of King Lycaon comes the word lycanthrope meaning one who transforms into a wolf this story has has had profound effect upon our understanding of werewolves because here right at the very beginning was a recognition that the whole idea werewolfism was related to those aspects of the human being that were posed to civilization in civilized society during the Middle Ages the belief that humans transform into animal predators was prevalent around the world and was by no means limited to wolves in Lapland there were where reindeer in South America where opossums and in Japan where wild cats what we're talking about is a phenomena where people believe they or some of their neighbors can change into an animal that animal is the predominant predator of the area people then believed that donning the skin or pelt of an animal was one way to become that animal Vikings made this belief a part of their military arsenal by getting into bear skins before battle this practice contributed to their reputation for being absolutely fearless and maniacal warriors they were called Bar Sark a term that survives today as the word berserk the word what the word really means in the ancient language is the men in Bear shirts what the berserkers would do is they'd put on these bearskin shirts and feel that they had been some way magically imbued with the courage the strength the ferocity of a bear they were very much feared and they were known to be completely out of you know they were out of control they were no longer human throughout medieval Europe however it was the wolf that was most feared as the largest carnivore in the area it was thought to be the most dangerous predator people might encounter Montague summers a nineteenth-century authority on occultism and the supernatural aptly described what the wolf meant to medieval Europeans the distinctive features of life are unbridled cruelty beastial ferocity and ravening hunger he has something of the demon of hell he's the symbol of night and winter of stress and storm the dark and mysterious harbinger of death cautionary stories about wolves were widely repeated especially to the most vulnerable part of the population children one of the most famous of these is Little Red Riding Hood oh grandma what big teeth you have the better to eat you with my dear but it is a very very sinister story and it's clearly a werewolf story because here you've got the little girl and here you've got the wolf dressed up like grandmother you have the wolf talking to Little Red Riding Hood this is no ordinary one clearly this is a werewolf as we go in search of history werewolf hysteria sweeps through Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries Europe was a hotbed of werewolf activity it was a tumultuous time wracked with irrational fears superstition and sweeping religious change during the height of the Middle Ages particularly as the Reformation was about to begin the the great struggle against witchcraft the burning times begin to occur and right on the heels of the struggle against witchcraft a new struggle with werewolfism began and all of a sudden there was this new wave of belief that we're Wilson which is all existed and that they were all having a supernatural and negative impact upon society the panic surrounding werewolves grew from witchcraft hysteria from 1300 to 1700 thousands of people were brought to trial on charges of witchcraft the accusations human sacrifice cannibalism and sexual license came primarily from peasants and the accused were almost exclusively peasants as well witchcraft hysteria was fueled partly by economic and societal problems poverty disease crime and famine commonly plagued Europe peasants no matter how hard they worked ended up with less with almost no way to climb out of the bottom many peasants blame their poverty and other troubles on the witchery of their neighbors so other peasants became scapegoats for incurable social ills people really on the brink that's when misfortune hits them and it's all part of society purging itself violently and horrific Lee when it's under extreme emotional and physical pressure which fears were also fueled by religion then the Catholic Church was the dominant force in people's lives it dictated behavior and provided explanations for phenomena people didn't understand according to church doctrine Satan intended to destroy Christian civilization and required hordes of disciples witches to do so sorcery was viewed as treason an attempt to overthrow the church it's the time when Christendom splits in half has never before when Protestantism appears and suddenly it looks as if Lucifer's legions are pouring out this is an all-out struggle to thwart sorcery the church created the Inquisition an extreme legal process that made massive witch-hunting possible Bishop's serving as inquisitors sought out heretics those who spoke or wrote against the traditions of the Roman Church by 1231 Inquisition courts under direct control of the papacy were established across Europe heretics who repented received a sentence of life imprisonment those who wouldn't repent were usually burned alive the Inquisition ruthlessly pursued a bloody course its goal was to annihilate all people who were not sincere Roman Catholic Christians among the victims Protestants June's witches mystics and werewolves werewolfism or like ham through pee was considered a form of witchcraft both involved a pact with the devil heresy people are all around were afraid that strange magical things were happening to other people and against them once a hysteria begins it tends to spread so that when a really gruesome crime was met up with werewolves were immediately suspected by the 16th century the secular courts had adopted Inquisition procedures to protect society from witches and werewolves in 1532 judicial torture became the legal means to determine malevolent witch craft and lycanthropy you can't actually prove the crime materially you can't prove that somebody cast a spell of a single moment so the only sure way of obtaining a verdict as a confession and once you've got that idea into a heads the best way of attaining confession is to apply force inquisitors hearing these confessions and finding it hard to contemplate the inhuman and sadistic horrors of the crimes enumerated preferred to think of them as having been committed by a true monster half-man laughs wolf and we blew the devil in France the term for werewolf was loup-garou and suddenly in the early 1500s werewolves began to appear there in epidemic proportions according to legend they could be easily identified you've got eyebrows that meet together good sign of a werewolf werewolves have hair growing on their palms plus its shape but they have very rough problems so that's the rough palms were a sign of a werewolf anybody in 16th century France who lived off alone isolated from other people who was unkempt who behaved in a wild strange or disagreeable manner might easily be thought of as a werewolf in a slew of accusations and arrests between 1520 and 1630 more than 30,000 people in France alone were brought to trial accused of being werewolves typical was the story of a 16th century peasant named Giovanni a he had the tell-tale eyebrows that met in the middle and lived like a hermit in a hut outside the city of dole villagers rescuing a girl from an attacking wolf thought they recognized Jilin the animal they believed he had transformed himself by rubbing a magic salve on his skin one week later Geel was seized barbarously tortured into a confession and burned at the stake but the victims of werewolf hunts were by no means limited to men one famous account of a she-wolf came from central France in the Auvergne region a hunter was attacked by a wolf in 1558 in the fierce battle the hunter managed to slice off a paw putting the severed limb in his pouch he stopped by a nobleman's chateau to relate his adventure but when he pulled out the paw he found the slender hand of a woman with a gold wedding band on one finger recognizing the ring the noblemen raced upstairs and found his wife bandaging the bloody stump of her arm she confessed to being a werewolf and was burned at the stake confessions however were a doubtful authenticity because of the interrogation process then they they sort of you know boil people in oil and and put it torture them with hot pincers you boy you'd be surprised how quickly somebody's going to confess to being a werewolf or a witch under those circumstances such was the fate in 1589 of a poor peasant named Peter Stumpp he was accused of becoming a werewolf by donning a magic pelt never mind the no Pelt was ever found authorities had a confession elicited with the aid of redhot pincers the wheel and by pulling flesh from his bones all of which was depicted in a sensational publication of the times known as a broadside Stokes fate became the best known of all werewolves because the broadside was devoured by people seeking escape from the relentless grind of daily life the best-seller in 16th century Europe I mean people love that sort of stuff they still do today but but this was this was supposed to be reality this this is these broad sides were the national Enquirer's that they're up there day one werewolf trial in 1604 made legal history with an unprecedented incident of compassion the defendant was Jean Grenier a 14 year old Shepherd from the Bordeaux region of France he was a slow witted boy today he would be termed mentally disabled give him to roaming the countryside when a witness testified that she had seen him put on a magic Pelt and turn into a wolf he was arrested he claimed that a mysterious Dark Stranger the devil perhaps had given him the pelt which turned him into a werewolf he freely admitted the stalking the forest coming upon children and attacking them the courtroom erupted an uncomfortable laughter when Grenier described his preference for young flesh finding an old woman as tough as leather this made him a sure candidate for execution however a lawyer made an impassioned speech that he was a victim of his disordered brain the argument of insanity prevailed and instead of death Grenier was sentenced to prison in a monastery where he steadily deteriorated and died before the age of 20 that was sort of remarkable that somebody would look at a case like this and say wait a minute this is not a werewolf this this person does not turn into a wolf when in search of history returns some explanations for what happened as early as the second century AD Roman doctors astonishingly recognized werewolfism as a psychological disease a firm of depression but the treatment seemed as bad as a werewolf attack the opening of a vein and letting of blood while the cure was barbaric the diagnosis was quite perceptive today psychiatrists have a name for the mental illness in which a person believes he or she actually changes into a wolf lycanthropy such a person may even howl crave raw meat or run around on all fours during an attack of this sickness there are now enough cases that we can begin to look at them and see that there are people who have this grand delusions that they can change and do change into different animals and that when they get into the that delusion they even act out the part and do things that we think I was being associated with the animals by the mid 17th century people had begun to realize that those who proclaimed themselves to be wolves were instead insane many victims were sent off to monasteries rather than being burned at the stake a few imagine werewolves were not insane though they might have been under the influence of drugs Whiteman's were often concocted by so-called witches to treat the illnesses of peasant folk into a cauldron went plants and herbs such as poppy seeds from opium aconite or wolfbane which slows down the heart and belladonna a poisonous plant also known as deadly nightshade when rubbed into the skin this magic salve entered the bloodstream and induced mental confusion wild excitement and delirium thinking one had become a werewolf would not be out of the question another possible hallucinogen occurred in rye bread a staple of the European peasants diet in the Middle Ages when winters were extremely cold a fungus called air got infected the rye the bread could induce LSD type hallucinations such as seeing a werewolf or being one suddenly a perfectly normal person became wild mad bestial what at whatever it affects the brain people go quite nuts they run around and and you know that crazy and there there have been murders berserk situations that have been attributed to people eating this poison reports of villagers frightened by the sight of a ragged human running through the forest fueled fears of werewolves but the culprit was often just a hermit and there were a few cases of feral or wild children who after being lost or abandoned had learned forest survival skills Amala and Kamala were among 16 children supposedly raised by wolves who were found in India between 1843 and 1933 when the girls were removed from a wolf lair in 1920 they walked on all fours ate nothing but raw meat and how old to escaped captivity Amala died within one year at the age of about two and a half Kamala died nine years later at age 17 perhaps the most famous feral child was Victor of Avalon whose story was told in the 1969 Francois Truffaut film the wild child in 1797 French villagers became frightened by a mysterious wild man seen running through the woods three years later a naked 12 year old boy was captured he was covered with cuts and bruises and terrified of humans and he preferred to eat nuts and berries too when he prepared food Victor lived to the age of 40 but never learned to speak another explanation for werewolf sightings could be to medical diseases discovered later one hypertrichosis is a rare genetic disorder that occurs in one in every billion births it causes increased hair growth all over the body and this can be very extensive so extensive that it virtually covers the skin surface and makes the child look like a dog or animal or werewolf in the sixteenth century this disease was observed in Peter Gonzalez and his children there are these wonderful drawings of people with these furry faces looking by the way very much like line the line Chaney jr. make up during the Middle Ages such people could have easily been mistaken for werewolves seeing these pictures would say would lead people to believe all bye yes yet goodness yes it's all true the second disease that may have helped perpetuate the werewolf myth is porphyria it's an extremely rare form of a genetic blood disorder first recognized early in the 20th century in some severe cases patients are so sensitive to sunlight that prolonged exposure could result in the loss of tissue from the extremities face and hidden something like this might tend to come out late at night if they had a lot of damage to their tissues the hands particular that hands might be sort of tend to hold their hands in a clawed up position if the tissue is lost from their lips their teeth would be more exposed and there would be this brownish color which people might associate with blood plus this slide amount of extra hand growth particular the temples some experts dispute the scientific and medical data saying they are insufficient explanations for the broad-based pervasive belief in werewolves during the 16th and 17th centuries werewolf beliefs are not just in a few places where LSD might have gotten into the food supply werewolves are not just in a few places where there might have been outbreaks or family traditions of porphyria it's a much larger phenomena than that the werewolf myth oz has come down to us through the ages basically as a myth about our inner nature the animal side of us as we like to think about it as opposed to the spiritual side it has a certain amount of Appeal because we are animals after all I think is a mistake to go look for rational explanations because on some level it's not people have always been fascinated with the employed boundary you know between human beings and animals especially of the fear of the beasts within when in search of history returns Hollywood creates the ultimate werewolf saga despite a lineage that dates back to ancient times most of what is familiar today about werewolves comes from the 1941 movie The Wolfman whoever is bitten by a werewolf and lives becomes a werewolf himself starring Lon Chaney jr. as the werewolf the monster is instantly recognizable universe as the Wolfman was the premiere power icon of the 1940s it was the first really original you know monster that had come down the pike for a long time Wolfman is a great great film what the werewolf lacks is a great novel and that's perhaps why the werewolf is not quite as is as popular as the vampire or the Frankenstein monster or dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde there are a lot of very fine werewolf stories but no there's nothing to match Dracula nothing to match the you know Mary Shelley's Frankenstein typical of the literary attempts was in 1846 Victorian potboiler by gwm Reynolds vogner the bear wolf it was serialized a chapter at a time in the pulp magazines of the day that were known as penny dreadfuls it's sort of rolling Victorian prose the werewolf snatching off the golden-haired violet I child the mothers screaming and all of this kind of stuff which which was read to Ben just thrilled they working in a shop girl of 19th century England nearly 20 years later in 1865 a more scholarly work appeared a collection of legends assembled by the clerics a vine baring-gould in the book of werewolves but the first novel to gain literary recognition would not be published until 1933 written by Hollywood screenwriter guy endure and set in France it was called the werewolf of Paris this was actually based upon a real case of a French soldier who had gotten into the cemeteries of Paris and was actually ghoul like eating the blood and gore of the recently dead but this story traced him as if he were a werewolf and then in 1935 it was turned into a movie that was quite successful the movie renamed the werewolf of London swapped Paris for London to appeal to its english-speaking audience when my experiments are completed I will show the results to the entire world not before remember this dr. Glendon the werewolf instinctively seeks to kill the thing it loves best it was the first feature-length werewolf film and though well received the film failed to become the benchmark for the genre the reason the sensors sensors felt the transformation from man into beast was to close a parallel to Darwin's controversial theory of evolution especially coming hot on the heels of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial a fiercely debated case in which a tennessee schoolteacher was prosecuted for presenting evolution to his class thus the crucial scene of any werewolf movie the transformation happened off screen with the film's box office success Universal Studios was eager to produce another but again they ran into censorship as Adolf Hitler was tightening his Nazi noose around Europe censors decided that horror movies had no place in the tension ridden times just before World War two there was a international embargo on Hollywood horror movies and they stopped making them for a few years because the British Board of Film censors was very concerned that this was a demoralizing kind of form of of entertainment curiously Hitler was fascinated with Wolves typical was the term he chose for his dreaded u-boats the wolf pack so called for their tactic of surrounding a convoy and mercilessly picking off one ship at a time Adolf Hitler was absolutely fascinated with wolf imagery he surrounded himself with all kinds of totems and and like to name things after wolves and one of his favorite American motion pictures was the three little pigs and used to whistle who's afraid of the big bad wolf you knows he went about his bunker the ban on horror movies however would itself become a war casualty it turned out that moviegoers needed an emotional release and horror movies fit the bill in the earth man movies starring Lon Chaney that Universal Pictures made is an American character who's kind of displaced into a 1940's Europe where there is no war but there's a werewolf behind every tree and what do you have in the Wolfman saga is the werewolf trying to put to sleep the beasts in human nature all of this you know happening against the real world backdrop of the war and it's probably not a coincidence that the Wolfman saga began right after Pearl Harbor and wound up just in time for groceryman the Wolfman established the defining traits of a werewolf his appearance when the moon was full the mark of the pentagram a satanic emblem that pointed to the werewolf's next victim and death by a silver bullet silver purportedly being to werewolves as garlic is to vampires but the most memorable was the transformation from man to wolf the first time audiences had ever seen this on screen the overwhelming power of the visual would change the public's perception of the monster for all time one of the things that both stage and screen due to complex folk mythology is they simplify it and put it together so that you can have it easily available to you movies helped us in understanding the werewolf by simplifying it and giving it some characteristics we could identify with the werewolves movie characteristics were created by German emigrant and screenwriter Kurt see old Mac I've got to give credit to Kurt shot Mac who I think is the father of all modern werewolf myths the full moon silver bullet pentagram in the hand as far as I know curtsy awed Mac invented all that and a new person her camera when I write for portion fixes so I invented certain things like the pendulum maybe it exists before I don't know she owed Mac also invented a few lines of verse that chilled the spines of millions of viewers and became a classic quote of the genre even man who is pure in heart and says display us at night we become a boy friends of wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon in spite the result of see old Max brilliantly conceived screenplay was that Hollywood had simply made up its own rules about the werewolf rules that stuck everybody believes the real way to become a werewolf is you'll be bitten by a word that comes right out of the films no that's that's strictly Hollywood law when a werewolf well didn't bite people a werewolf torn the bits and ate them there wasn't going to be enough left of the victim to become another werewolf but it was that film that for moderate America I think for probably the modern world has fixed the image of the werewolf as this flat faced furry thing with fangs but that is that's that's the Hollywood werewolf it's not the werewolf of ancient legend when in search of history continues the werewolf legend still has the power to fascinate despite all that's known about werewolves from ancient legends and myths to scientific and medical explanations the animal continues to instill intense debate conservationist groups fight for the right of the wolf to exist believing he symbolizes all that is wild and free in nature others would prefer wolves be eradicated completely seeing them as dangerous and destructive predators humans uneasy relationship with the wolf continues man has a beast inside him and that's a that's a sort of secret desire to change into one and lose all the civilized restraints the more civilized weak we are the more we need to need to at least fantasize about no longer be civilized such fantasies became widespread when the old werewolf films were released on television in the 1950s children began to develop an affinity with a scary creature it wasn't until the the films were released to television and and and were really available to the public to see and the kids started getting their hands on them they adopted them because at 12 years old monsters you latch onto that because they're not understood any more than you are they have a tough time dealing with their environments just like you do but they can fight back and you fantasize through those characters rather than an object of fear the werewolf was becoming a pop-culture icon in 1972 Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee created a series werewolf by night they're fun to read about your even little kids and they're always looking under the bed hoping there isn't a monster under the bed er an ogre and there is something fascinating about the idea that maybe maybe in some way some people do change at night into something else contemporary adults have been reticent to abandon the werewolf as mere kid stuff Gary branders best-selling 1977 novel the howling about a contemporary coven of werewolves became a cult classic in part by focusing on the werewolves raw sexuality and lust the face of the wolf was only an inch from his own moon it's breath hot identical hissed in his ear glistening teeth as long as two of his finger joints snapped at the air moved closer to his throat part of the joy of being aware all of us that you can go out and jump any lady where well if you want to and no one's going to look funny at you it's it's the freedom the freedom to be a sexy and lustful as you want to modern werewolves even stop the internet a live-action role-playing game werewolf the apocalypse is so popular that it attracts thousands of players around the world we use the internet to link up a whole bunch of games across the United States and actually across the different nations and where we communicate to each other about what's happening in each of our games and so we create this shared universe of many little games making a larger game it were the werewolf of this kind of a group is not your ravening child killing Beast New Age where rules they are really representative of a lot of good things in the world thank you in 1997 the United States Post Office joined the monster craze with five movie monster stamps Lon Chaney Jr's Wolfman is back in vogue more than 50 years after writer curtsy old Mac created the character Wow so I created something which might live much longer that only shows you shouldn't be a writer should be a postage stamp and Yola immortal the werewolf has evolved throughout history what most of us now accept as legend was ones very real it began as a way to explain the unexplainable a creature to blame for the atrocities of man and a symbol of the sexuality and power that many humans envy but could not attain the werewolf holds a prominent place in our past and continues to live on primarily for our entertainment as we discover when we go in search of history you

Channel: Bárbara Stalteri

Views: 1,122,817

Rating: 4.7594814 out of 5

Keywords: werewolf, werewolves, Werewolf, Werewolves

Id: HCHZjU7Hi0w

Length: 43min 40sec (2620 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 15 2013

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