The Curse of the Wer.. - Site de Thomas - Free

12 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
The werewolf already had a rich documentary history in Western
literature prior to the nineteenth century. The ancient myth of Lycaon
is one of the earliest accounts of the metamorphosis of a human being
into a wolf; recounted by Pausanius and Appollodorus (both Greek
writers of the second century AD) and more famously in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
it features Zeus transforming the King of Arcadia into
a wolf as punishment for serving a meal of human flesh. The first
extended use of the werewolf in a work of fiction appeared in a comedy
entitled Satyricon, written in the first century AD by the Roman author
Petronius Arbiter, in which a man looks on in horror as an acquaintance
strips off his clothes and runs away in the form of a wolf. References
to lycanthropy also appeared in early Western literature in the work of
poets, travel writers, mythographers, historians and physicians; Paulus
Aegineta’s seventh-century cyclopedia of medicine, for example, describes
lycanthropy as a disease caused by ‘brain malfunction, humoral
pathology, and hallucinogenic drugs’. 2 A number of stories featuring
benevolent werewolves survive from the medieval period, 3 and from
the fifteenth century, in the context of the Christian Church’s crusade
against witches, lycanthropy was increasingly interpreted as the work
of the Devil, 4 although scholars such as Johann Wier, Reginald Scot
and Robert Burton continued to champion Paulus Aegineta’s view of
lycanthropy as a form of madness or melancholy. 5
By the time the Abbé Laurent Bordelon wrote A History of the
Ridiculous Extravagancies of Monsieur Oufle (published in 1710),
a considerable body of literature on the subject of lycanthropy had
accumulated in the libraries of Europe, and much of the more recently
published material engaged in discussion of the magical or
supernatural aspects of the phenomenon. Bordelon (like Wier, Scot
and Burton) was concerned to disparage the kind of unreasoned
superstition which had inspired such tracts during the excesses of the
witchhunts, and to this purpose he created the character of Monsieur
Oufle, who
spent a great part of his Life in reading a vast Number of Books which treat
of Magick, Witchcraft, Spectres, Phantoms, Hobgoblins, Wanton Spirits,
Elves, Fairies, Judicial Astrology, Divinations, Apparitions, Charms, and,