Drugs and Lycanthropy

Another explanation for lycanthropy, advanced both by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century demonographers and some modern writers, implicates hallucinogenic drugs. In an overwhelming number of lycanthropy cases, suspects were thought to effect their metamorphosis by means of magical salves. The objective of individuals who thus transformed themselves into animals...was to be able to inflict injuries on others without being identified. Nathanial Crouch, the vehement English demonographer, related a typical account involving the use of such magical ointments in his The Kingdom of Darkness (1688): "That a certain woman being in prison on suspicion of witchcraft, pretending to be able to turn herself into a wolf, the magistrate before whom she was brought promised her that she should not be put to death in case she would then in his presence thus transform herself, which she readily consented to, accordingly she anointed her head, neck, and arm-pits, immediately upon which she fell into a most profound sleep for three hours, after which she suddenly rose up, declaring that she had been turned into a wolf, and had been at a place some miles distant, and there killed first a sheep and then a cow...."

Pierre Bourgot and Michel Verdun, the werewolves of Poligny, testified that they used a magical ointment to effect their metamorphosis. Weyer, who cited this case in order to dismiss lycanthropy as a hallucination, described the ointment's effects: "On rubbing themselves with a salve they would be changed into wolves, and on rubbing with certain herbs would resume [their] human shape. As wolves they had marvelous swiftness.... They told various stories of killing and devouring children and animals. Michel would be transformed in his clothes, but Pierre took his off, and resumed them when retransformed."

Testimony about magical ointments was likewise recorded during the trials of Gilles Garnier, Jacques Roulet, and Jean Grenier. Boguet also stressed the role of magical unguents in lycanthropy: "The confessions of Jacques Bocquet, Francoise Secretain, Clauda Jamguillaume, Clauda Jamprost, Thievenne Paget, Pierre Gandillon and George Gandillon are very relevant to our argument; for they said that, in order to turn themselves into wolves, they first rubbed themselves with an ointment, and then Satan clothed them in a wolf's skin which completely covered them, and then they went on all-fours and ran about the country chasing now a person now an animal according to the guidance of their appetite...."

The drugs employed in shape-shifting were similar to those used in the witches' flying ointments.... The most complete list of ingredients for the werewolf ointment was provided by Nynauld in his De la lycanthropie, transformation, et extase des sorciers (1615): "Belladonna root, nightshade, the blood of bats and hoopoes, aconite, celery, sopoforic nightshade, soot, cinquefoil, calamus, parsley, poplar leaves, opium, henbane, hemlock, varieties of poppy, and the crustaceans...." Giovannii Della Porta described the relevant effects of some of these drugs in his Natural Magic (1658): "by drinking a certain potion, the man would seem sometimes to be changed into a fish; and flinging out his arms, would swim on the ground: sometimes he would seem to skip up, and then dive down again. Another would believe himself turned into a goose, and would eat grass, and beat the ground with his teeth, like a goose: now and then sing, and endeavour to clap his wings. And this he did with [mandrake, deadly nightshade, and henbane]."

The question raised by such claims is this: can lycantrhopy be explained in terms of the actions of psychotropic drugs? Some modern researchers, again those belonging to the 1960s "drug culture" generation, have noted that henbane and datura can produce the subjective impression of transformation into animals, and hence drugs can account for the phenomenom of lycanthropy in Europe.

One authority cited in support of this argument is the noted German toxicologist, Erich Hesse, who has stated that, "A characteristic feature of the solanaceae psychosis is...that the intoxicated person imagines himself to have been changed into some animal, and the hallucinosis is completed by a sensation of the growing of feathers and of hair, due probably to the main paraesthesia. In all these states the intoxicated person is loud, loquacious, restive; he laughs, and carries on animated discussions with people who are not there.

The sensation of changing into a wolf and the urge to chase and eat animals have also occurred during LSD psychosis, suggesting that such feelings are possible during drug-induced hallucinatory epeisodes (Sidky 246-249).

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Drugs and Lycanthropy copyrighted 1998 to Shantell Powell.