The Element Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Complete A–Z for the Entire Magical World. Judika Illes

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Vargamors were forest-dwelling Swedish wild women who communed with wolves.

      

The connection between wolves and witches is so powerful that when some European Romany hear a wolf howl, the automatic reaction is to advise caution as the sound may signal the approach of a witch.

      In myth and legend, wolves nurture humans: Zoroaster was allegedly suckled by a mother wolf; Siegfried, Teutonic hero, allegedly had a wolf for a foster-mother, and the founders of Rome, the abandoned babies Remus and Romulus, were found and nursed by a she-wolf.

      The wolf was once Rome’s totem animal. The primordial horned spirit Faunus negotiates the balance between deer and wolves, the way the Greek deity Artemis sets the balance between wolves, deer, and hunters. The Lupercalia, Rome’s festival of fertility and purification, was held in honor of Faunus, also known as Lupercus, the wolf spirit. Remnants of the holiday linger in Valentine’s Day traditions. And Feronia was the Italian sacred spirit of magic, prosperity, and freedom. Her sacred animal is the wolf. Once upon a time, if slaves sat on a stone in her shrine, they gained their freedom. Feronia survives but not as a goddess; her most common manifestation is as a witch who roams the marketplace, once women’s place of power.

      Wolves are identified with ravenous appetites, whether for food, sex or pleasure. They are identified with strong male sexuality, as in wolf whistles. A wolf is a euphemism for a sexually predatory man. One observes the evolution of demonization of wolves in the tale Little Red Riding Hood. The wolf Little Red Riding Hood meets in the earliest forms of the story is clearly a man. He forcibly gets her into bed; she only escapes by insisting that she needs to use the bathroom—this of course in the days prior to indoor plumbing. Later versions, cleaned up for children, suggest that the villain Little Red Riding Hood encounters is a real wolf, albeit a talking, cross-dressing one.

       Werewolves

      What exactly are werewolves? Monster-movie material or something real? During Europe’s Witchcraze, a concurrent werewolf panic (centered mainly in France but also present through other regions of Europe) resulted in the deaths of many men. Just as witchcraft was identified with women, werewolves were identified with men.

      Johannes Nider, author of an early fifteenth-century witch-hunter’s manual The Formicarius, discusses male witches who transform into wolves. Werewolves may be nothing more than male witches. During the witch-hunts, as witchcraft became increasingly identified with women, public perception and theology may have required that men be classified differently—if men and women can both be witches, then all this theology about women being the gender more susceptible to Satanic wiles goes out the window. To wear a wolf’s skin may be a euphemism for walking the shaman’s or male witch’s path.

      European werewolves, similar to Navajo skin-walkers, may not look exactly like real wolves. They may walk upright and have no tail, which sounds suspiciously like a person. Other descriptions suggest that werewolves have a human body but a wolf’s head, like an Egyptian deity or like a masked human.

      Although they might or might not literally transform, once upon a time, many people strove to be identified with wolves.

      

      

According to Book 10 of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’ grandfather was named Autolykos—“He who is a Wolf.”

      

The desire to identify with wolves is demonstrated by once popular boy’s names: Adolf, Rudolph, Wolfgang, Wolfram, and plain old Wolf.

      

The blues singer called Howlin’ Wolf was born Chester Burnett. His adopted name may be understood as a magical name, a veritable boast of primal male and magical power. In many of his songs he explicitly identifies himself with the creature, as a source of pride and power.

      

The Pawnee nation, Plains Indians from presentday Kansas and Nebraska, identified so profoundly with wolves that the Plains hand-signal for wolf is the same as the one for Pawnee. Others referred to them as the Wolf People.

      

Odin’s warriors behaved like wolves, hence the name “wolf-warriors.” Sixth- to eighth-century CE helmets and scabbards found widely through Western and Central Europe were decorated with figures that may be werewolves or berserkers.

      The earliest written report of werewolves derives from Herodotus, the fifth-century BCE Greek writer. According to him, a tribe known as the Neuri, living north of the Black Sea, had members who turned into wolves for several days each year. Today, this is thought to refer to Scythian shamans.

      Werewolf transformation manifests in two distinct ways:

      

      

those who shift back and forth between human and werewolf manifestations

      

those who assume the form of a wolf full-time

      People become werewolves voluntarily and involuntarily. People become werewolves accidentally or intentionally. People transform themselves into werewolves or others do it for them. The second manifestation, the full-time wolf, is virtually always an involuntary transformation and is frequently the result of a curse.

      How else do you become a werewolf?

      

      

Ancestry may be blamed. Someone from a family full of werewolves may be more likely to be one.

      

Simply sleeping in the moonlight may do the trick.

      

Taking off one’s clothes and howling in the moonlight is considered effective, too.

      

The notion that being a werewolf is contagious is popular nowadays but derives more from movie traditions than from any folk wisdom. It may derive from confusion between vampires and werewolves.

      

In Ojibwa tradition, eating meat that was previously tasted by a real wolf leaves you prone to transformation.

      

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