The Origin of the Werewolf SuperstitionStewart, Caroline Taylor
History
The Origin of the Werewolf Superstition
Stewart, Caroline Taylor
Werewolves
The Iroquois believed in people who could assume a partly
animal shape. See Grinnell, Blackfoot lodge tales, p. 79:—“An
old blind wolf with a powerful medicine cured a man, and made
his head and hands look like those of a wolf. The rest of his
body was not changed. He was called a man-wolf.”
(7) Witchcraft.[66] It is very easy to see why it was usually the
so-called medicine-men (more correctly Shamans), who claimed such
transformation power, because they received remuneration from their
patients.[67]
[66] Ethn. Rep. 1880-81, p. 73:—Witches could and did assume
animal shapes. For example a dog seen by a man which had fire
streaming from its mouth and nostrils. It was _night_. The man
shot at it, and the next morning tracked it by the marks of
blood from its wound. At a bridge a woman’s tracks took the
place of the dog’s, and finally he found the woman. She had
died from the effect of the shot. Page 73: Likewise a hog, when
pursued, disappeared at a small creek, and finally reappeared
as an old man, who said it was he, whom they had been chasing.
So they, the pursuers, knew he was a witch. Page 74: A Canadian
Indian one _evening_ pursued a white bull with fire streaming
from its nostrils. He had never seen a white bull on the
reservation before. “As it passed in front of a house it was
transformed into a man with a _large white blanket_, who was
ever afterward known as a witch.”
Ethn. Rep. 1901-02, p. 395:—A man going out at _night_ noticed
a queer-looking burro. Upon his return home he was told that a
large cat had entered the house. He went out again, discovered
a man wrapped in a blanket, but not in the Zuñi fashion, his
head was sunk low in the blanket. He knew this creature to be a
wizard.
Ethn. Rep. 1887-88, p. 458:—That the medicine man (Shaman)
has the faculty of transforming himself into a coyote and
other animals at pleasure and then resuming the human form, is
as implicitly believed in by the American Indians as it was
by our own forefathers in Europe. And page 459: The Abipones
of Paraguay credit their medicine-men with power to put on
the form of a tiger. The medicine-men of Honduras claimed the
power of turning themselves into lions and tigers. Also the
Shamans of the Nicaraguans possessed similar power. Hertz,
p. 133 fol.:—“In der christlichen Zeit wurde der heidnische
Cultus Teufelsanbetung und hier entstand mit dem Hexenglauben
die Vorstellung von Menschen, die sich mit Hilfe des Satans aus
reiner Mordlust zu Wölfen verwandeln. So wurde der Werwolf das
Bild des tierisch Dämonischen in der Menschennatur.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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