The Book of Were-Wolves - Sabine Baring-Gould (red queen free ebook TXT) 📗
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werewolf is cast off a high cliff into the sea, and that is the end
of him. The king, the queen, and the princes live happily, and may be
living yet, for no notice of their death has appeared in the
newspaper.”
This story bears some resemblance to one told by Von Hahn in his
Griechische und Albanesische Märchen; I remember having heard a very
similar one in the Pyrenees; but the man who flies from the werewolf
is one who, after having stripped off all his clothes, rushes into a
cottage and jumps into a bed. The werewolf dares not, or cannot,
follow. The cause of his flight was also different. He was a freemason
who had divulged the secret, and the werewolf was the master of his
lodge in pursuit of him. In the Bearnais story, there is nothing
similar to the last part of the Slovakian tale, and in the Greek one
the transformation and the pursuit are omitted, though the woman-eater
is called “dog’s-head,” much as an outlaw in the north of Europe was
said to be wolf-headed.
It is worthy of notice in the tale of The Daughter of the Ulkolak,
that the werewolf fit is followed by great exhaustion, [1] and
that the wolf is given clothes to tear, much as in the Danish stories
already related. There does not seem to be any indication of his
Laving changed his shape, at least no change is mentioned, his hands
are spoken of, and he swears and curses his daughter in broad
Slovakian. The fit very closely resembles that to which Skallagrim,
the Icelander, was subject. It is a pity that the maid Bràk in the
Icelandic tale did not fall upon her legs like the young lady in the
hay.
[1. Compare this with the exhaustion following a Berserkir fit, and
that which succeeded the attacks to which M. Bertrand was subject.]
CHAPTER IX.
NATURAL CAUSES OF LYCANTHROPY.
Innate Cruelty—Its Three Forms—Dumollard—Andreas Bichel—A Dutch
Priest—Other instances of Inherent Cruelty—Cruelty united to
Refinement—A Hungarian Bather in Blood—Suddenness with which the
Passion is developed—Cannibalism; in pregnant Women; in
Maniacs—Hallucination; how Produced—Salves—The Story of
Lucius—Self-deception.
WHAT I have related from the chronicles of antiquity, or from the
traditional lore of the people, is veiled under the form of myth or
legend; and it is only from Scandinavian descriptions of those
afflicted with the wolf-madness, and from the trials of those charged
with the crime of lycanthropy in the later Middle Ages, that we can
arrive at the truth respecting that form of madness which was invested
by the superstitious with so much mystery.
It was not till the close of the Middle Ages that lycanthropy was
recognized as a disease; but it is one which has so much that is
ghastly and revolting in its form, and it is so remote from all our
ordinary experience, that it is not surprising that the casual
observer should leave the consideration of it, as a subject isolated
and perplexing, and be disposed to regard as a myth that which the
feared investigation might prove a reality.
In this chapter I purpose briefly examining the conditions under which
men have been regarded as werewolves.
Startling though the assertion may be, it is a matter of fact, that
man, naturally, in common with other carnivora, is actuated by an
impulse to kill, and by a love of destroying life.
It is positively true that there are many to whom the sight of
suffering causes genuine pleasure, and in whom the passion to kill or
torture is as strong as any other passion. Witness the number of boys
who assemble around a sheep or pig when it is about to be killed, and
who watch the struggle of the dying brute with hearts beating fast
with pleasure, and eyes sparkling with delight. Often have I seen an
eager crowd of children assembled around the slaughterhouses of French
towns, absorbed in the expiring agonies of the sheep and cattle, and
hushed into silence as they watched the flow of blood.
The propensity, however, exists in different degrees. In some it is
manifest simply as indifference to suffering, in others it appears as
simple pleasure in seeing killed, and in others again it is dominant
as an irresistible desire to torture and destroy.
This propensity is widely diffused; it exists in children and adults,
in the gross-minded and the refined., in the well-educated and the
ignorant, in those who have never had the opportunity of gratifying
it, and those who gratify it habitually, in spite of morality,
religion, laws, so that it can only depend on constitutional causes.
The sportsman and the fisherman follow a natural instinct to destroy,
when they make wax on bird, beast, and fish: the pretence that the
spoil is sought for the table cannot be made with justice, as the
sportsman cares little for the game he has obtained, when once it is
consigned to his pouch. The motive for his eager pursuit of bird or
beast must be sought elsewhere; it will be found in the natural
craving to extinguish life, which exists in his soul. Why does a child
impulsively strike at a butterfly as it flits past him? He cares
nothing for the insect when once it is beaten down at his feet, unless
it be quivering in its agony, when he will watch it with interest. The
child strikes at the fluttering creature because it has life in it,
and he has an instinct within him impelling him to destroy life
wherever he finds it.
Parents and nurses know well that children by nature are cruel, and
that humanity has to be acquired by education. A child will gloat over
the sufferings of a wounded animal till his mother bids him “put it
out of its misery.” An unsophisticated child would not dream of
terminating the poor creature’s agonies abruptly, any more than he
would swallow whole a bon-bon till he had well sucked it. Inherent
cruelty may be obscured by after impressions, or may be kept under
moral restraint; the person who is constitutionally a Nero, may
scarcely know his own nature, till by some accident the master passion
becomes dominant, and sweeps all before it. A relaxation of the moral
check, a shock to the controlling intellect, an abnormal condition of
body, are sufficient to allow the passion to assert itself.
As I have already observed, this passion exists in different persons
in different degrees.
In some it is exhibited in simple want of feeling for other people’s
sufferings. This temperament may lead to crime, for the individual who
is regardless of pain in another, will be ready to destroy that other,
if it suit his own purposes. Such an one was the pauper Dumollard, who
was the murderer of at least six poor girls, and who attempted to kill
several others. He seems not to have felt much gratification in
murdering them, but to have been so utterly indifferent to their
sufferings, that he killed them solely for the sake of their clothes,
which were of the poorest description. He was sentenced to the
guillotine, and executed in 1862. [1]
[1. A full account of this man’s trial is given by one who was
present, in All the Year Round, No. 162.]
In others, the passion for blood is developed alongside with
indifference to suffering.
Thus Andreas Bichel enticed young women into his house, under the
pretence that he was possessed of a magic mirror, in which he would
show them their future husbands; when he had them in his power he
bound their hands behind their backs, and stunned them with a blow. He
then stabbed them and despoiled them of their clothes, for the sake of
which he committed the murders; but as he killed the young women the
passion of cruelty took possession of him, and he hacked the poor
girls to pieces whilst they were still alive, in his anxiety to
examine their insides. Catherine Seidel he opened with a hammer and a
wedge, from her breast downwards, whilst still breathing. “I may say,”
he remarked at his trial, “that during the operation I was so eager,
that I trembled all over, and I longed to rive off a piece and eat
it.”
Andreas Bichel was executed in 1809. [1]
[1. The case of Andreas Bichel is given in Lady Duff Gordon’s
Remarkable Criminal Trials.]
Again, a third class of persons are cruel and bloodthirsty, because in
them bloodthirstiness is a raging insatiable passion. In a civilized
country those possessed by this passion are forced to control it
through fear of the consequences, or to gratify it upon the brute
creation. But in earlier days, when feudal lords were supreme in their
domains, there have been frightful instances of their excesses, and
the extent to which some of the Roman emperors indulged their passion
for blood is matter of history.
Gall gives several authentic instances of bloodthirstiness. [1] A
Dutch priest had such a desire to kill and to see killed, that he
became chaplain to a regiment that he might have the satisfaction of
seeing deaths occurring wholesale in engagements. The same man kept a
large collection of various kinds of domestic animals, that he might
be able to torture their young. He killed the animals for his kitchen,
and was acquainted with all the hangmen in the country, who sent him
notice of executions, and he would walk for days that he might have
the gratification of seeing a man executed.
[1. GALL: Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau, tom. iv.]
In the field of battle the passion is variously developed; some feel
positive delight in slaying, others are indifferent. An old soldier,
who had been in Waterloo, informed me that to his mind there was no
pleasure equal to running a man through the body, and that he could
lie awake at night musing on the pleasurable sensations afforded him
by that act.
Highwaymen are frequently not content with robbery, but manifest a
bloody inclination to torment and kill. John Rosbeck, for instance, is
well known to have invented and exercised the most atrocious
cruelties, merely that he might witness the sufferings of his victims,
who were especially women and children. Neither fear nor torture could
break him of the dreadful passion till he was executed.
Gall tells of a violin-player, who, being arrested, confessed to
thirty-four murders, all of which he had committed, not from enmity or
intent to rob, but solely because it afforded him an intense pleasure
to kill.
Spurzheim [1] tells of a priest at Strasbourg, who, though rich,
and uninfluenced by envy or revenge, from exactly the same motive,
killed three persons.
[1. Doctrine of the Mind, p. 158.]
Gall relates the case of a brother of the Duke of Bourbon, Condé,
Count of Charlois, who, from infancy, had an inveterate pleasure in
torturing animals: growing older, he lived to shed the blood of human
beings, and to exercise various kinds of cruelty. He also murdered
many from no other motive, and shot at slaters for the pleasure of
seeing them fall from the roofs of houses.
Louis XI. of France caused the death of 4,000 people during his reign;
he used to watch their executions from a neighbouring lattice. He had
gibbets placed outside his own palace, and himself conducted the
executions.
It must not be supposed that cruelty exists merely in the coarse and
rude; it is quite as frequently observed in the refined and educated.
Among the former it is manifest chiefly in insensibility to the
sufferings of others; in the latter it appears as a passion, the
indulgence of which causes intense pleasure.
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