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Werewolves and diseases
The use of ointments had a real background, as, for example, lingonberry albums have a hallucinogenic effect, causing twilight states and altering the body perception in such a way that the person in question thinks he is wearing a fur on the skin. Similarly, preparations containing hemlock, fly agaric or henbane could cause intense and uninhibited trance states. Belladonna triggers strong hallucinations. It was also known as Wolfberry, an association between wolf and madness. The use of Eisenhut reduces the sensation on the skin, "as if you were wearing a coat". Eisenhut appears in connection with wolves.
A disease suffered by wolves and humans and transmitted by wolves and humans is rabies. Its nature as an infectious disease was unknown until the 19th century. In fact, the werewolf in some cases, so 1445 at Cologne "only" rabid wolves, who were also not considered then as transformed people. Her bites were treated with divine blessing.
The near east refers to connections between rabies and transformational ideas. The Arabic word "calab" means rabies, but also "dog mutation" and symptoms such as rage are analogous to the werewolf-attributed behavior. In Europe, rabies was called Hundswut. The representations of demonic wolves in the early modern period resembled more rabies-ill than healthy wolves: they are described as aggressive to all other living beings and with tongue sticking out from their mouths and sparkling eyes. They invade villages and show no fear. The wolves of the early modern period, however, had learned to fear man, they withdrew and avoided human settlements. In fact, healthy wolves almost never attack humans, but rabid wolves do. Rabies animals lose their human fear. There are credible traditions of wolves with rabies that ran into villages and bites all the animals that came to meet them.
Do the stories of werewolves have their origins in certain diseases? (Image: rudall30 / fotolia.com) The course of rabies in humans is similar to the appearance after that in animals, especially wolves: In the first stage, they are nervous and irritable, after about 3 days then aggressive and spit, bite, kick around and scream for help. The paralysis that occurs during the course of the disease causes the lips to be pulled upwards and expose the teeth. The speech paralysis leads to vocalizations, which were interpreted as Rougemont- howling or barking. Other symptoms such as sexual hyperactivity and bloody saliva are reminiscent of werewolves.
The physician Joseph Claudius Rougemont reported in his 1794 published "Treatise on the Hundswuth" that the behavior of rabies patients was equated with the behavior of rabid dogs and wolves. However, the connection between an animal bite and the incoming rabies was made, leading to the idea that he would become a werewolf bitten by a wolf. Also, the belief in the folk belief that would become a werewolf, the meat eaten by animals that had been torn by a rabid wolf or a werewolf, fits into this interpretation scheme. A virus transmission is also possible in this way and the people concerned could fall ill with rabies. The symptoms in rabid people whose mood changes between hyperactivity and total despair have also been described as typical behaviors of "werewolves." This also applies to the "hydrophobia", which manifests itself as a panic state of excitement and is triggered by the visual perception of water that despite burning thirst due to the swallowing paralysis can not be drunk. According to Rougemont, "the elderly" interpreted the despair of the sick at the sight of water as fear to see the image of a dog as a mirror image.
The spastic twitches were interpreted as an assumption of dog behavior, says Rougemont. Another daring interpretive approach makes an association between "werewolfism" and rabies seem logical. The risk of infection with a wolf bite is immense, because the sick wolf tears deeper wounds than an infected fox, an infected cat or bat. The appearance of a wolf in a village, even in the literal sense of the word, was an event in historical times and more impressive than a snappy infected cat. There are also the much more common rabid dogs and whether they were distinguished in case of doubt by wolves, is questionable. Here we are in the area of speculation that I would like to expand.
An indication is the traumatization of the sick. In Vaulargeot a wolf killed several people in 1783. Three fell ill with rabies. The patients warned against their own rage and developed fantasies of ravenous wolves. The rabies treatment shows a close relation to werewolf myths The belladonna was supposed to bring about the transformation of wolves as well as to protect against rabies. Sufferers should be cured by throwing a wolf fur. Wolfsleber should cure rabies.
Some doctors and veterinarians tend to see unilaterally misinterpreted diseases in myth history. On the other hand it speaks that even the physicians of the early modern times distinguished between the devilish werewolf transformation and the insania lupicana. The delusion of being a wolf was considered an independent disease early on. The disease rabies was known to scholar medicine since ancient times. The knowledge of the physicians rarely reached the people and diseases got a magical aspect. Magical thinking logically returns to the same origin as similarly recognized behavior. It is thus possible that rabies experiences flowed into werewolf stories. In a world view in which illnesses could be caused by demons, there was the devil, wolves could be evil spirits, and everyday reality flowed into witchcraft beliefs, a common disease transmitted from wolves to humans is more than a side effect.
Rougemont portrayed the cruelty of human rabies in compassionate words: (...) The convulsions often come with seizures. The patients, greatly weakened by such violent torments, often watch with pleasure the moment which puts an end to their so sad existence, usually by violent convulsions. "The treatment of the rabies patients by the population and the authorities was in accordance with the treatment of alleged werewolves: Until the 19th century, rabies patients were suffocated, drowned, burned or killed. In the case of no illness, euthanasia was as regularly practiced as in rabies until the murder of the mentally ill in National Socialism. Unfortunately, the evidence for overlapping rabies and werewolfism is poor.
In addition to rabies, other physical illnesses are considered worthy of discussion for the werewolf's ideas. In particular, the porphyria is mentioned, which occurs only very rarely and insofar can only be considered as a limited explanation for the widespread belief in werewolf. In the case of porphyria patients, the gums are destroyed, making their teeth look big like predators, their skin dries and breaks, their joints stiffen, their fingers writhe and they can only leave the house at night because their body can not tolerate daylight. Since this symptom of the disease is combined with unbearable pain, the patients roar and scream, so that, on the whole, the notion that there is a transformation of the wolf was not illogical, as it was known. The Werwolfforscher Peter Kremer noted, however, that the tellers of werewolf sagas in his research, the porphyria was unknown. There is a danger of projecting too much rationality into past epochs.
Mental illness was known to at least early modern physicians and they distinguished the werewolves from it. Of the mental illnesses, psychoses, epilepsy, schizophrenia and autism are those whose symptoms are very similar to "werewolfism": epileptics fall into a trance-like state (aura) before having a seizure. Schizophrenics have the feeling of being separated from their bodies and doing things they can not control. Autists isolate themselves as much as possible from the surrounding human society and live in their own world. Some of them scream or howl. In psychosis, the boundary between external reality and inner experience, between time and space, images of the subconscious and material reality disappears. Today's psychiatry knows a disease lycorexia in which the sick think they are wolves or dogs. Some of these diseases were associated with wolves - wolves tongue was used as a remedy for epilepsy. To rip out the heart of a wolf should cure epilepsy abruptly.
In the alcohol delirium as well as in the cocaine rush, users report that they felt "little animals" on their skin, felt their skin peel off. Fixers are known to have the effect of breaking their skin when the effect of heroin subsides. To extreme mental states, triggered by malnutrition came in the early modern era drug-like substances in the food as the ergot, henbane in alcoholic beverages.
Mental illnesses associated with extreme states such as mania are a distorted element of the states of shamanic animal transformation. Such conditions may have flowed into the werewolf myth. However, it is problematic to associate the allegations in the werewolf processes partially or generally with analogous clinical pictures: Why should mentally ill people with "werewolf" symptoms or mentally ill, who considered themselves werewolves, to have been objects of the witch trials? This could only have been the case if such a person offered to "make an example". In the scheme of social discipline such charges of the mentally ill do not fit.
For this reason, the dispute of Rudolph Leubuscher in his 1850 published book "About the Wehrwölfe and Thierverwandlungen in the Middle Ages" questionable. For Leubuscher, the delusion of being a wolf was the expression of a "savagery of the mind." Leubuscher equated the imagination of being a wolf with cannibalistic tendencies, incest wishes, necrophages, and necrophilous disease symptoms. Leubuscher immediately recognized a whole list of diseases that matched the stereotype of the werewolf in the witch trial. What we experience is the shift of interpretive power from theology to science. In the 19th century it was necessary to find a rational explanation for everything. The exclusion of the "savage, barbaric, pagan", the contempt of nature towards civilization remained. The last convicted werewolves did not go to the stake in the 18th century, but to the madhouse.
As a bourgeois scientist, Leubuscher took the accusations in the witch trials seriously and regarded the defendants as mentally ill from the outset, but was unable to critically question the constituent function of the witch trials. Here speaks the citizen loyal to the state, for whom what is outside or even against the existing rule is wild. The term wildness implies for the citizen of the 19th century something that needs to be reclaimed, cleared, sorted. The interpretation of the witch trial, the devil pact, was now considered wrong - but not the basic assumption that the victims were "guilty".
Even after the French Revolution, the werewolf remained alive as a metaphor for unwanted social conditions: even Karl Marx mentioned in the "Critique of Political Economy" the werewolf as a synonym for the insatiable greed of the capitalists to devour the earth together with its inhabitants. The werewolf was no longer a reality, but an allegory, a metaphor, a satire. The animal transformation of the shaman had arrived in the arts section.
outlook
The werewolf pursuit of the early modern period should not be dismissed as atavistic superstition. Centers of witch hunt were not the most backward, but the most advanced regions of Europe. Not backwoodsmen farmers, but intellectuals developed the instrument of the processes. The werewolf myth lives on: After the First World War, horror stories were told in the old town of Hanover. A werewolf should devour children in dark cellars. There were no rumors: Fritz Haarmann murdered 27 boys. He bit the throat of some and is known as the "werewolf of Hannover". The Nazis used the term in a similarly grisly context: they wanted to use upset adolescents as "werewolves" against the Allies. Today's neo-Nazis call themselves - as derivative - werewolves resin. Wolves, however, do not beat baseball clubs around, nor do they fire people's houses. The animal is abused here to justify its own brutality.
With the soul that wanders through the invisible world in animal form, such atrocities have nothing to do. Not with the wolf either. But wolf myths, which harm neither humans nor wolves, continue to exist: Papenburg farmers know the world dog, which roams the moor at night. In the RPG "Werewolf - The Apocalypse" you play a werewolf as a character. The werewolf does not seem to interfere with either the geographic or biological limits of the wolf: Near Fortaleeza in Brazil, there lives a man today who has experienced something special: he saw the wolf man! And in the film Howling III, baggies are making the outback of Australia unsafe. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)