LYCANTHROPEDIA - The Official Philip Jose Farmer Home Page

It is only thanks to these
dramatizations of Larry Talbot’s
life that the West became aware of
this Eastern European folk poem,
alerting all to the danger of
lycanthropy’s indiscriminant
spread from victim to victim
though biting. More recent
discoveries indicate that this may not be the case, as
a peculiarity of genetics would seem to go hand in
hand with this, but as there is currently no known
way to test for the theriomorph gene, still it remains
a valid and sobering threat.
The verse has, in fact, been used in conjunction
with a number of cases of lycanthropy around the
world. Dr. Lorrimer van Helsing quoted it when
discussing the curse of the werewolf in his “Van
Helsing’s History of Horror”, and Gabriel Van
Helsing found the poem inscribed in a castle in
Vasaria, Transylvania [23], the ancestral home of
the Valarius gypsy family (which spawned not only
a number of werewolves including Velkan
Valarius, but the Vladislav soul-clone of Dracula as well). The poem was uttered by the
Leviathans in Collinwood, Maine, in 1969, concerning werewolf Chris Jennings , heir to
a lycanthropic curse dating back to Quentin Collins in 1790 [24]. Jack Russell, a
werewolf by night who has been linked by some researchers to the Talbot family, has
also acknowledged the gypsy lore as legitimate [25]. It should be noted, however, that
the exact verbology of these lines may be misleading. Monster expert Walter Paisley
dismisses the notion that werewolves are under the thrall of the Moon [26], and there are
cases in which werewolves have transformed regardless of the lunar cycle, sometimes
even in daylight.