Beast

by S. R. Schwalb

  The furious butcher seeks the advice of the local “oracle,” a parish grave-digger and sacristan (caretaker of church accoutrements). The information he presents recalls the Gévaudan Beast’s seeming invincibility save for a sword: “Slay a wer-wolf thou canst not, for his hide is proof against spear or arrow, though vulnerable to the edge of a cutting weapon of steel….” Foreboding words, but the story has an upbeat conclusion.

  The Power of Silver and Sacred Bullets

  Philip of Macedon (382–336 BC) learned from the Oracle of Delphi, Greece, “With silver weapons you may conquer the world.” Why is this? What is it about silver that associates it with the power with which to take on loups-garous?

  Silver is a precious metal with many unique properties and associations. Webster’s defines it as “a white ductile very malleable metallic element that is capable of a high degree of polish, is chiefly monovalent in compounds [resistant to toxic organisms], and has the highest thermal and electric conductivity of any substance.” The ancients kept milk and other beverages and fluids fresh in vessels of silver.

  Hunter Jean Chastel was said to kill the second Beast of Gévaudan with ammunition made from silver medals depicting the Virgin Mary and blessed by the local priest.

  Contrariwise, folklorist Andrew Lang, in relating his own account of the wolf of the Gévaudan, said that perhaps the Beast was immune to the power of silver: “Others alleged that when he [the Beast] had been shot, like the great Dundee [John Graham, the Viscount Dundee, a Jacobite highlander who, some say, was impervious to lead ammunition through a pact with the devil], with a silver bullet (a well-known charm against sorcery) at such close quarter that it appeared impossible he should not be mortally wounded, in a day or two some fresh horror would announce that the creature was still uninjured.”

  The story “The Wolf” by Guy de Maupassant, mentioned earlier, includes the idea of having one’s ammunition consecrated: The younger brother asks, “Perhaps we should have our bullets blessed by our cousin, the bishop …”

  Devlin refers to a case in the Vendée, France, in which a sorceress, in the guise of a wolf, made daily calls on a country laborer, who was advised to shoot it with “blessed bullets.” He did so, and the wolf transformed into the sorceress—who was also an ex-girlfriend. (Devlin explains that the incident, validated the farmhand’s breaking off relations with the wolf-girl; she was in the wrong by stalking him and by taking beastly form.)

  Worthy French Werewolves

  Investigator Elliott O’Donnell informs us that not all the werewolves of France were wicked. “Many were exceedingly virtuous, and owed their metamorphosis to the vengeance of witch or wizard.” At least two saved human lives: the first, an abbot (the superior of a monastery), and the second, a reformed hunter of Huguenots (French Protestants). In the first tale, The Case of the Abbot Gilbert, of the Arc Monastery, on the Banks of the Loire River, the Abbot was on his way home when he dozed off and tumbled from his horse after making merry at a village fair. He was about to be attacked by wildcats, when he was saved by a werewolf, who fought off the felines. Despite the Abbot’s protestations, the lycan insisted on accompanying him back to the monastery. The next morning the monks were astonished to find that the werewolf in its natural state was “a stern and awesome dignitary of the Church,” who rebuked Abbot Gilbert for his behavior at the fair.

  In the latter account, The Case of Roland Bertin, a ship’s commander named André Bonivon was attacking Huguenot communities along the banks of France’s river Rhône when his vessel ran aground in a storm. Bonivon fell overboard into a whirlpool, but was hauled ashore by a werewolf (much to his consternation), led to a home in a nearby town, fed, and locked in for the evening. In the morning, the werewolf released him as it revealed itself as Roland Bertin, a Huguenot minister, whose wife had been killed by Bonivon’s men the night before. The minister told the astonished Bonivon a local woman named Mère Grénier was responsible for his lycanthropic state; in reality, he was a man who loved life and could not kill. Said he to Bonivon, “Assassin, I have spared you. Spare others.” André did.

  Memory and Story

  It is important to keep in mind that memories are not infallible. Scholar and author Jonathan Gottschall relates how in 1995, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus was able to plant a fabricated childhood remembrance—that of being separated from parents at a shopping mall—within the minds of a quarter of the undergraduates with whom she was working. The students even tendered extra embellishments, amplifying the false incident. Gottschall explains too that we may reconstruct events in order to give ourselves the starring role: “We misremember the past in a way that allows us to maintain protagonist status in the stories of our own lives.” Patients undergoing psychotherapy, who feel their lives are off balance, find sharing their experiences may aid in the process of scripting new personal narratives, providing “a story they can live with.”

  French rustics in the nineteenth century and earlier frequently made use of traditional elements of the supernatural in their recountings of interactions with others. Many of these accounts germinated from hostilities and grudges held against neighbors or authorities. Through a story, a paysan might allege that the farmer next door was observed in the form of a werewolf or warlock. Such a narrative, with footings in traditions of occult coding, seemed more credible than owning up to one’s enmity toward the neighbor, and spared one from publicly admitting their animosity. Thus story became safehold. One of Devlin’s examples is the Beast account of Bégou, who claimed he came upon a hairy Antoine Chastel washing in a moonlit brook; the startled Antoine attacked his onlooker wolf-formed. Bégou’s audience may well have concurred that the “shifty” son of Jean Chastel was a loup-garou.

  Stories were also told “to excuse the narrator’s shortcomings,” or to “explain and vindicate one’s behavior” (echoes of Gottschall, above). For example, Devlin relates a tale of southwestern France, in which a youth from Asasp fancied a girl from Lurbe. When attempting to call on his intended with a companion, the girl was discovered in the form of a goat. After she was caught and translated herself into a young lady again, she was released in more ways than one: The engagement was off.

  Werewolves = Man-Eating Wolves?

  We learn through Montague Summers that some authorities, such as George Turberville, author of The Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting, published in 1575 and 1611 and recalling a 1400 Booke of Huntynge, hold that, “Some Wolues … kill children and men sometimes: and then they neuer feede nor pray vpon any thing afterwards … Such Wolues are called War-wolves, because a man had neede to beware of them.” Richard Thompson says the French loup-garou (translated as “wolf-werewolf”) also simply implies a wolf that is anthropophagus; that is, a man-eater, and this meaning was a familiar one at the time of the Beast.

  Sabine Baring-Gould reproduces a sermon about “were-wolves” given by Doctor Johann Geiler von Keysersperg to his congregation in Strasbourg on the third Sunday in Lent in 1508. The doctor commences with the question, “What shall we say about were-wolves?” and states that they can be also called ber-wöllffs (bear-wolves), or wer-wöllffs, and they eat men and children for seven reasons (several of which support the theory presented in this book). The first reason is simple hunger, especially in winter when prey may be scarce. The second is savageness; this is why they eat children, again in winter and when they have offspring to feed. The doctor cites a proverb, “He who seeks a wolf at Candlemas, a peasant on Shrove Tuesday, and a parson in Lent is a man of pluck.” He also notes that wolves of colder climes are smaller and more savage. The third reason is age; the maturing wolf can no longer run as fast as its prey; also, it may be what twentieth-century US government Biological Survey hunters four centuries later called a “gummer” (an old wolf with poor teeth) and so it prefers the easier-to-catch-and-eat human. Next is experience. Canis lupus finds human flesh sweet and addictive. “So he acts like old topers [drunkards], who, when they know the best wine, will not be put off with
inferior quality.” The fifth reason is ignorance. Mad dogs bite randomly, and, per von Keyserberg, the wolf is a “mad and inconsiderate” dog. Sixth is the devil, who may become an animal. The doctor also mentions lycanthropy and “a man who had the phantasy that he himself was a wolf. And afterwards he was found lying in the wood, and he was dead out of sheer hunger.” The seventh reason is God, and to this the bishop of Mende might well subscribe: “For God will sometimes punish certain lands and villages with wolves …” Says Baring-Gould, “It will be seen from this extraordinary sermon that Dr. Johann Geiler von Keysersperg did not regard werewolves in any other light than natural wolves filled with a lust for human flesh; and he puts aside altogether the view that they are men in a state of metamorphosis.”

  Heinrich Kraemer’s 1487 Malleus Maleficarum, “Hammer of Witches,” also considered lupine predations as not irregular when wolves are famished. However, Canis lupus could be “possessed,” used by sorcerers or demons to carry out fiendish acts, or to rebuke sinners for their transgressions. It also held that men could commit crimes under the conviction that they have become beasts, especially under occult influences, but human beings could not transmute into wolves.

  Werewolf Sorcerers

  Another type of werewolf was what was held to be a warlock who ranged nocturnal byroads of rural France materialized as a wolf. Devlin states that rustics might report an encounter with such a being, but claim the sorcerer as a local with which they were feuding. Such traditions “reflected not only people’s appreciation of the dangers of their environment and their ignorance of nature, but also a tendency to exaggerate the fearful—both to divert and admonish listeners.” Graham Robb notes that stories of werewolves “reflected real fears” related to lupine encroachments in developed areas; wolf invasions were related to environmental causes, such as unsparing hibernal conditions and the felling of timber, reducing animal habitats.

  According to Montague Summers and other sources, “The countryfolk in the Gévaudan district were well assured that the monster was a warlock, who had shifted his shape, and that it was useless to attempt to catch him.” There is one instance of a boy stating he saw buttons on the underside of La Bête, indicating that it was “a werewolf (in a waistcoat).” Pourcher states that indeed the Beast was considered a werewolf or demon that “could charm firearms.” One farmer, a well-to-do and much-respected man, deposed before a magistrate that on one occasion when he had encountered the Beast after it had made a prodigious bound through the air, he heard it murmur: “Convenez que, pour un vieillard de quatre-vingt-dix ans, ce n’est pas mal sauter. (Admit it, for an old man of ninety years, that was not a bad leap.)”

  Richard Thompson tells us that English writer and Earl of Orford Horace Walpole commented on this anecdote in January 1765, likening the Beast to London’s Cock Lane Ghost, a performing spirit also known as “Scratching Fanny,” which had been the talk of the town a few years before. Said Walpole, “Compare the two cases and then tell me that we live in an enlightened century.”

  The Beast of Gévaudan: A Werewolf?

  Yes, if one is referring to historical sources that defined man-eating wolves as werewolves. And the Beast is also a werewolf of viva voce, by word of mouth. The legends of La Bête, as Devlin points out, can be enfolded within a long tradition of purposeful storytelling. The Beast’s eyes, odor, and ability to move on its hind legs are all attributes of the traditional French country werewolf. Devlin quotes an area seigneur’s letter in relating other qualities ascribed to the Beast by locals: “It talks, takes tobacco, becomes invisible, boasts in the evening about its exploits of the day, goes to the sabbath, does penance for its sins.”

  But this was storytelling not intended to explain or identify the creature. Instead, country yarns related to werewolves and the Beast served their yarnspinners in helping them deal with real circumstances, perhaps providing some relief from the apprehension of succumbing to its predations, having a loved one fall prey, enduring the authorities’ ceaseless and fruitless hunts, withstanding untrustworthy and disruptive interlopers, and, using the Beast in traditional fashion, to implicate a disliked neighbor.

  CHAPTER 20

  Man-Beasts and Serial Killers

  There he uttered howling noises, and his attempts to speak were all in vain. His clothes became changed into bristling hairs, his arms to legs, and he became a wolf.

  —Ovid, Lycaon

  The eighteenth-century French countryside at night: total darkness, as if the world were caught within a great vial of ink. There was no light save that of the moon and stars along desolate byways that connected isolated villages. The flicker of a torch now and then or the glow of a fire beneath the threshold of a humble home might serve as a reference for those daring to brave the impenetrable black. And something or someone seemed to be watching from the edges of the intricate forests.

  By conjuring up such an eerie scenario, we can imagine how travelers could fall victim to a gamut of misdeeds by vagrants and others in the middle of nowhere. And, as discussed in our section on serial killers, there was most definitely a criminal element in the French countryside. Phil Barnson says, “We are not yet in Chicago, but close.” Outlaws, military deserters, the unfortunates, and drifters could make life perilous. It was not so different more than one hundred years later, when serial killer Joseph Vacher murdered eleven and possibly twenty-five or more mostly young people (at least more than twice the number killed by London’s Jack the Ripper in 1888), many guarding livestock, in rural southern France from 1894 to 1897.

  A homeless person might beg for bread to stave off hunger for one more day. A highwayman might knock a rider off his mount and make off with horse and possessions. Others may have sought to satisfy carnal or bloodthirsty desires. The motivations for such acts were greatly varied, possibly including disrupted, impoverished, or traumatic childhoods. During the attacks in the Gévaudan, witnesses spied haunting figures within the forests’ shadows, human, yet clad in fur and animal skins. Could they have been men possessed? Bloodthirsty criminals using the crisis of the Beast to conceal heinous acts? Aristocrats with twisted tastes, demanding horrible favors? Victims of hallucinogenic nightmares? Malnourished peasants, army deserters, abandoned children, or the mentally ill? Perhaps their presence reveals the unshackling of primal instincts under the most wretched of conditions.

  Marauders and Intruders: Human Beasts?

  It has been claimed that some or all of the killings of the Gévaudan may have been perpetrated by humans, not by mysterious beasts. It is easy to imagine how evildoers might exploit such a situation. To confuse the population, to intimidate authorities, and to achieve the illusion of supernatural status, these blackguards seemed to transform into something other than human. To achieve this metamorphosis, they may have used animal fur or skins, parts of animals, or exotic amulets.

  An ancient phenomenon that has been extensively studied and archaeologically verified, our desire to be on equal footing with the formidable wild beasts we once hunted—and which hunted us—is as old as humanity itself.

  Before detailing the cases and sightings of bestial humans related to deaths in the Gévaudan, let us recall examples of our long-time fascination with man-beasts.

  Scholar Anne Clark reminds us that there have been accounts of man-beast hybrids since the remote ages: the famous sphinx, harpies—in the Greek harpyiai (snatchers)—mermaids, mermen, centaurs, and so on. Men might associate with animals so much so that they identify themselves with them, or are identified with them (e.g., modern sports teams and their fans). The ancient geographer Isidore reported that Thessalonian warriors were so in harmony with their horses they gave the impression that man and mount were one creature.

  New World colonists viewed Native Americans as being very much like wolves. The French actually began referring to various tribes as loups (French for wolves). Those resisting Christianity were believed bewitched by ce loup infernal. A number of North American peoples seemed to have lived side
by side with Canis lupus. Some groups believed they were descended from wolves. Biologist and historian Bruce Hampton says a Pawnee group known as the Skidi were considered so lupine in their ways that a Bureau of American Ethnology report stated that other indigenous peoples claimed the Skidi were able to see as a wolf, “two looks away,” and to possess the auditory capability, like a wolf, to hear clouds move overhead.

  The inclusion of (depending on the biblical translation) satyrs or men-goats or “hairy ones” of Isaiah 34:14 in the Old Testament—a passage sometimes referred to in conjunction with werewolves—may, Clark says, result from a slip of wording acquired in translation or from a desire to amplify the forlorn atmospherics of the passage: “And demons and monsters shall meet, and the hairy ones shall cry out one to another, there hath the lamia lain down, and found rest for herself” (Douay-Rheims Version). Clark notes that the Hebrew phrase for “hairy ones” is translated as “Devil” in Revelations. The word “lamia” is associated with Lilith, folkloric female vampire and first wife of Adam before Eve.

  Classic myths describe the gods changing men into beasts, such as the goddess Artemis changing the hunter Actaeon into a stag after he came upon her bathing; he was then destroyed by his own hounds. An outraged Zeus transformed Lycaon (the name comes from the Greek word for wolf: lykos), ruler of Arcadia, into a wolf when the mortal served the deity human flesh as a test of his divinity. Such myths, say Otten, serve as warnings not to indulge in bestial appetites. In other stories, beast-like creatures become men, such as Saint Christopher, sometimes said to have been a cynocephalus, or dog-headed being, who, upon angelic intervention and conversion, relinquished his animalic side.

  Writer Richard Bernheimer examines a curious phenomenon of the Middle Ages: the wild man. This hale, hearty, and hairy fellow, usually unclothed, is depicted, like a medieval Kilroy, in all sorts of works of art, illuminated manuscripts, and architecture dating from feudal times. Wild men (who, Bernheimer says, perhaps represent our primitive side) preferred forests to civilization and subsisted as hunter-gatherers. Armed with hefty cudgels, these mighty wildings were ready to take on all comers: humans, dragons, or other wild men. They had dominion over animals, reigning as beast-tyrants, bullying bears and boars with muscle and mace; strong-arming stags and unicorns to serve as their mounts. And like the French country meneur de loups (wolf master), the wild man might have a pack of Canis lupus companions. Also, as do some lycanthropes, he went about on all fours, and (very werewolf-like) a wonder-working animal skin might be the key to his fortitude. Wild women lived in the forest, too, and sometimes wild parents attempted to switch their offspring with those of unsuspecting human passersby.