Whose Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?

Daniel 4 & Mark 5

In 1692, in Swedish Livonia (modern-day Estonia), a trial occurred in which a man, Thiess of Kalterburg, faced some highly unusual charges at the local court of Jurgensburg. The 86-year-old man was not initially to be tried himself; his presence was needed as a witness to a church robbery. But, his local reputation preceded him. You see, Thiess was known for engaging in the demonic practice of lycanthropy, that is, of being a werewolf. But rather than denying being in league with the Devil, Thiess of Kalterburg openly admitted to having engaged in lycanthropy, but contended that he engaged in this shapeshifting in the service of God. He and several of his companions, he claimed, were benevolent werewolves, “hounds of hell,” who transformed into wolves and ventured down to the nether regions to engage in combat with the Devil and his witches. In the end, Thiess was sentenced to be flogged and banned for life from Jurgensburg for trying to turn people away from Christianity.

Historically, cases like this in Christian Europe were not uncommon, though rarely was the accused let off so lightly. In the 15^th and 16^th centuries, a number of trials took place in which individuals were accused of being a werewolf. Between 1540 and 1620, over 30,000 accusations of “werewolfing” surfaced in France, often as part of the larger charge of witchcraft. In such cases, the accused would be charged with having made a deal with the devil, whereby they would be given a magical item or salve that would allow them to turn into a wolf, and then wreak havoc in the form of grave robbing, deviant behavior, and especially violence including murder of livestock and children.

Now, there are a number of ways to understand the preoccupation with lycanthropy in Europe at the time. For one, we can imagine how the expansion of human civilization into previously wilderness areas meant an increasing likelihood of encounters with real wolves, which would prey on remote homesteads. At the same time, sociologically, the concern over werewolves and witches was an expression of the anxiety and paranoia brought on by the breakup of Catholic Europe at the Reformation, and the subsequent wars and persecutions. In this way, we can understand how werewolves became the scapegoat for both natural disasters and societal tensions.

And yet, it has to be acknowledged that the werewolf was not the creation of dark Medieval imagination. You already heard the story from Daniel of God turning Nebuchadnezzar into a beast for his arrogance. But long before that story, In the Epic of Gilgamesh, dating back to 2100BC, long before Christianity came to the fore, there was a subtle but powerful reference to shapeshifting. Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king, was pursued by the goddess Ishtar. When he rejected her advances, he listed all the former lovers she has destroyed, including one unnamed suitor that Ishtar had cursed by changing him into a wolf, in a moment of divine wrath or perhaps fickle emotion.

Moving westward and forward in time a bit, to the myths of ancient Greece, the werewolf appears again, in the story of King Lycaon. According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lycaon was the king of Arcadia and was, depending on the version, either a deeply curious skeptic or an outright villain. He wanted to ferret out whether a certain visitor to his court was a man or the god Zeus in disguise. To test him, Lycaon served him human flesh—sometimes it was that of a slave, others say it was Lycaon’s own son. Zeus was outraged. He flipped the table, unleashed thunderbolts, and transformed Lycaon into a wolf. What Zeus did was not to change him a beast, but to reveal what was already hidden inside. That ais, Lycaon did not just become a wolf; he already was one, in spirit. Zeus just made it visible to others. In later works of Greek philosophy and drama, the werewolf came to symbolize hubris—arrogant defiance of divine law—in memory of Lykaon’s attempt to set himself up in judgement of the gods. Indeed, the story of Lycaon lives on, in that he gave his name not only to the creature he became—lykos, wolf—and also the condition he suffered, lycanthropy, meaning wolfman, werewolf.

But these were myths, stories, not to be taken literally. And in fact, when centuries later

thousands were accused of being werewolves, the medical professionals of the day as well Church leaders dismissed any danger of men becoming wolves. Doctors believed lycanthropes were mostly harmless, often suffering from a mental illness, melancholia (depression), which was brought on by a dryness of the body and produced a certain restlessness of soul, with lycanthropes roaming at night and loitering by grave monuments until daybreak (not unlike like the demoniac in today’s Gospel). The Church, for its part, attacked the idea theologically, arguing in sermons and treatises that shapeshifting of the sort that werewolves were known for was simply not possible. For the changing of a human into a wolf would involve the transformation of one nature into another. Only God could do that, as he does in the Eucharist, changing bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus. The devil, though, has no such powers. Hence, cases of werewolves were judged to be demonic hallucinations on the part of the so-called werewolf and of witnesses. Yes, theologians thought about this, about werewolves!

But neither scientific explanations nor theological rebuttals of the Church were enough to stymie the werewolf accusations that were being thrown about in the15th and 16th centuries. Nor have these authoritative rejections done much to lessen interest in werewolves in popular culture today. Werewolves remain as popular in our day as they ever were, it seems, judging by their presence in contemporary novels, films and tv shows.

It is in fact this fictional portrayal of the werewolf that interests us today, not the existence of actual werewolves—which, as I said, officially don’t exist. I mean, have you ever wondered why certain monsters like the werewolf hang on, why storytellers are so keen to tell their stories, embellishing them and updating them for new audiences. What is it about these classic monsters that continues to hold our attention? Their endurance as fictional characters suggests to me that these monster stories are true—not in the sense that werewolves or vampires or ghosts exist, but in the sense that the stories they tell are true. They reflect a truth about human existence and human nature. It’s not that we should be afraid of bumps in the night or worry when the full moon is out. But rather we should beware of the monsters among us, the monsters we might become. This in fact why I’ve made a custom of preaching Halloween sermons like this: because the classic horror stories are stories that capture a truth, a warning, that we as Christians should heed.

So, what then is the warning of the werewolf warn us about, what does it mean? The werewolf is symbolic of the corruption, the debasement of man, a man who’s lost his humanity.

You see this in the earliest mention of the werewolf in modern literature, in the little-known horror novel from 1824, The Albigenses by Charles Maturin who was an Anglican priest. The book is ostensibly about the Albigenses, a heretic sect that the Catholic church warred against in the 13^th century France, but the story tells of a werewolf who is imprisoned in a dungeon. In the context of the story, the werewolf represents human depravity, a metaphor for cruelty abetted by “dubious Christianity” and warped religious ideals. As one critic put it, the werewolf was “a natural way of expressing the instantaneous bestiality which might erupt without warning and overthrow reason at any moment even in the most civilized human being.”

Indeed, it is precisely when we think ourselves most cultured and enlightened, when we imagine ourselves no longer bound by God’s laws, that we’ve advanced or evolved beyond such petty constraints, that’s when, rather elevating ourselves, we end up debasing ourselves, letting loose our most animalistic tendencies. We see this play out in history: Germany in the years before World War II was known for being the most cultured and most scientifically advanced in all of Europe. Students from across the continent and Britain would flock to German universities to study with the brightest lights in all the fields. But it was mere decades later, that this most cultured people threw off their civility, transforming into a most monstrous society. It’s not for nothing that Hitler used werewolves and wolves as symbols of German strength and purity against those seeking to destroy them.

What this suggests is that lycanthropy is a condition that we all can catch, that we all have within us, even if we have never been bitten by a werewolf. There is within us a bestial nature, something wild and animalistic, uncivilized, unrestrained, violent, even predatory, that we are tempted to give ourselves over to. As a literary device, you can appreciate how powerful the werewolf is as metaphor for the darker side of human nature. It captures well the hidden predatoriness of mass murderers and psychopaths, as well as the submerged violence that boils just under the surface of all of us, ready to come out at the first sign of a full moon or other trigger.

It’s important to understand, though, that the werewolf is not just an animal. Animals only kill to eat or to defend themselves or their territory. The werewolf is driven by rage, malice, jealousy. He is a man who has lowered himself, debased himself, given over to baser instincts. Sure, the change may not always be voluntary: the condition is often the result of a curse or an affliction. But humanity as a whole is under a curse, we could say, as a result of the Fall. Because our ancestors fell out with God, we live in a world that is not the way it’s supposed to be, that is wrong, and our character is bent towards doing wrong. But that doesn’t absolve us of the wrong we do, any more than the curse excuses the werewolf’s barbarity.

Here we see the werewolf for what he is, theologically, symbolically—the werewolf is one who given up his humanity, who has given up his dignity as a human being. He has traded, intentionally or unintentionally, his being made in the image of God in exchange for some power or freedom available to him as a lower creature.

You see, Christianity understands humanity as existing between heaven and earth, above the animals, but, as the psalm says, “a little lower than the angels.” We are to be a bridge, having both a bodily nature, like the animals, but also a soul, a spiritual nature, able to know God and be in communion with Him. It’s when we forget those two natures that we get in trouble. When we think we are only our minds, our souls, we forget our natural limitations, our mortality, and our compassion for others; and when we forget our soul, our rational nature, we give ourselves over to our bodily appetites, our carnality. But we were made for more than our stomachs, more than our instincts for gratification, for food, sex, power or the pleasure of diversions. We are animals, yes, creatures of God, but our calling, our destiny is to be something more, something higher.

The werewolf is man as he has rejected this higher calling, this upward-aiming destiny, and so is controlled, if not by the swell of the full moon, then by the gravitational pull of his appetites, his animal drives, liable to become a monster, a predator, if pushed far enough. This is something, again, that we are all susceptible of, because we all live under the curse, after the Fall. 

But Christ came to free us from this curse, to set our lives in order, to recover our humanity. In the collect for the second Sunday after Christmas, we pray: “O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share in the divine life of him who humbled himself to share in our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ.” Jesus became human, came down to our level, so that we wouldn’t sink down any further, to the level of the beasts. He came rather to pull us up, to lift our sights up to divine things, the things of heaven, that he might bring us into the divine life, into communion with Him.

In the werewolf, as with other classic fictional monsters, we see a kind of “negative image” of the Gospel, what we might become apart from God, apart from salvation in Christ. And we are therefore put in mind of the great gift that we’ve been given by the grace of Christ. Christ has come to restore us to God, so that we might no longer howl at the moon, in frustration or anger, but instead shout praise in love and gratitude to our Maker and Redeemer. And for that reason we say, thanks be to God!