Whoever therefore believes that anything can be made, or that any creature can be changed to better or to worse or be transformed into another species or similitude, except by the Creator himself who made everything and through whom all things were made, is beyond doubt an infidel.19
In the Christian theology of the Middle Ages, other than to deceive and trick people, the Devil could do nothing without God’s permission. The alleged power of Satan had become so degraded by 1400 that he was no longer regarded with horror and revulsion but had become instead the familiar curly-tailed red cartoon figure, a trickster at his worst.20
Authorities were still executing people for performing sorcery or witchcraft, both women and men, but not as supernatural, superpowered beings themselves, like broomstick-flying witches, a subtle but important distinction. The crime was known as maleficium—causing harm by the use of occult means—and was thought to be perpetrated by mortal men and women, akin to using poison today. The word itself literally meant “mischief” or “wrongdoing” and appears in Anglo-American legal language today as “malfeasance”—a willful act intended to do harm. In other words, one could perform witchcraft and be punished for it without being a supernatural witch. Witchcraft was perceived as a criminal act performed by ordinary human beings.21
When it came to werewolves, it was not just priests, monks and theologians who declared lycanthropy nonsense; Byzantine physicians one after another from the fifth to the seventh centuries argued that a belief in lycanthropy was itself a diagnosable delusional mental disorder, a form of melancholy or a disease. Paul of Aegina (620–90 AD), for example, wrote in his On Medicine:
Those suffering from lycanthropy go out during the night imitating wolves in all things, and lingering about tombs until morning. You may recognize these persons by these marks; they are pale, their vision feeble, their eyes dry, tongue very dry and the flow of the saliva stopped; but they are thirsty, and their legs have incurable ulcerations from frequent falls. Such are the symptoms of the disease. You must know that lycanthropy is a species of melancholy.22
The terms “clinical lycanthropy”; lycomania; lupine insania; mania lupine; “wolf man syndrome” or insania zooanthropica to this day refer to a rare psychiatric disorder in which a subject believes himself or herself to have been transformed into a wolf or another savage animal. Clinical lycanthropy is differentiated from lycanthropy, which is defined as an occult belief in the supernatural transformation or shape-shifting of humans into wolves or other animals. (Although “lycos” specifies “wolf,” the term “lycanthropy” is generally applied to the metamorphosis of humans into any animal. Such general metamorphosis can be more accurately called zoanthropy or reverse intermetamorphosis.)
There was a period in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it was believed that clinical lycanthropy was waning, as very few people believed in werewolves anymore, but the resurgent prevalence of werewolves in modern literature and film fueled a corresponding recent resurgence of cases of clinical lycanthropy, which is associated symptomatically with a class of schizophrenic psychosis disorders, or with delusional misidentification of the “self.”23 (In some medical literature, the use of the street drug MDMA—XTC or ecstasy—has been linked to a resurgence of clinical lycanthropy.)24
Werewolves had been so rationalized and medicalized by the year 1000 that they became subject to a medieval type of “heroin chic” romanticism in literature, in which they were frequently portrayed as attractive, lonely, suffering, victimized, self-sacrificing, chivalrous heroes in fictional and mythological tales emerging during the Grail romance era. The “chivalrous werewolf” narratives often feature a noble knight or prince who transforms into a werewolf to protect the subject of his romantic love, but while he is a werewolf she betrays him by stealing his transformative device—either a potion, a ring, a belt or his clothes—trapping him forever in his lovelorn werewolf state.25
People in the West during the Middle Ages were well on the way to accomplishing a harmoniously rational vision of a godly world without Satan and monsters in it, and as the Renaissance—the “rebirth” of knowledge, culture and humanism—began to dawn in the fourteenth century, one would have expected that the newly “reborn” Church and society would now reach even greater heights of knowledge and harmony. We even invented a printing press to spread liberating knowledge to the people! Unfortunately, history never does what we expect it to. The Renaissance brought knowledge and great art but also paranoia, death, disorder, continental warfare, the Great Witch Hunt and our first recorded serial-killer epidemic in the form of a surge of werewolf cases.
UNITY IN CRISIS AND THE CRIMINALIZATION OF THE WEREWOLF
The transformation of the “chivalrous werewolf” into a serial-killing monster occurred as part of the so-called Great Witch Hunt of 1450 to 1650, when thousands of women were systematically tortured, raped and killed in witchcraft prosecutions, which it is not an exaggeration to characterize as a Church- and state-sponsored campaign of serial murder (see chapter six).
Witch hunts, whether for witches and werewolves or for Jews, Jacobites, republican antimonarchists, anarchists, communists, gays, illegal immigrants, Islamist terrorist sleepers or even serial killers, frequently occur in societies where elites become divided and insecure.
Witch hunts are directed at unifying elites to homogeneously lead the masses under the guise of an urgent and immense threat that discounts a previous plurality of free thought and liberty: for example, the post-9/11 notion that we now need to sacrifice some of our deeply held beliefs in individual liberty and privacy in the name of collective security against terrorism. It is not reaching too far to compare our current fear of terrorists with our past fear of witches. For example, the chance of an American being killed by a terrorist is an extraordinarily unlikely 1 in 20 million, compared to being killed in a car accident (1 in 19 thousand), drowning in their own bathtub (1 in 800 thousand), or being struck by lightning (1 in 1.5 million), yet society is in an acute state of anxiety over the terrorist “threat.”26 It’s not about logic but perception. Witch hunts tend to publicly focus on threats that cannot be easily explained or demonstrated, as a substitute for or diversion from what might actually be dividing the elites at the time.
What was dividing the educated European elites in the 1400s? Religion and the unity of the all-powerful Church in Rome. In Western Europe, there was only one Church that could make or unmake kings: the Catholic Church. You did not become king unless the Papacy blessed your reign. As a kingmaker, the Church faced numerous secular power challenges to its primacy from alternative antipopes to outright new Christian movements that would eventually culminate with the birth of a rival Protestant Church in 1517.
Elites became divided over which faction of Christianity they would adhere to and support and seek sanctification of their thrones from. With the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press in the 1450s, a phenomenon comparable to the introduction of the Internet in the 1990s, suddenly all these divisive religious issues and debates went viral among the literate elites. The elites who were showered in a mass of “alternative” facts and evidence needed to be quickly reined in and unified behind the Church in Rome against an internal threat perhaps greater than the issue of its own corruption: the division of the Church.
The Church now called upon the elites to unify behind it in a great war—a Christian jihad or internal crusade—a war that the Church claimed it had always been fighting against the Devil and the Devil’s foot soldiers: hidden sleeper cells of heretics, witches, sorcerers, demons, vampires and werewolves, all working in partnership with the Devil.27 Suddenly the Devil, who was just a funny little trickster, was now given all these new powers, a kind of satanic Osama bin Laden masterminding witchcraft, the occult and the making of monsters.
In a Patriot Act–like papal bull (decree) issued on December 5, 1484, the pope called upon ecclesiastical and civil authorities everywhere to fo
rget their differences and cooperate with contractor Church inquisitors and demonologists in their war on witches, monsters and heresy, guided by the Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, who would issue a notoriously misogynist manual for witch-hunting called Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches’ Hammer).
Full of theological errors and contradictions, the book explained the chaos of religious dissent by blaming it on the Devil’s “terrorists”: witches and werewolves. Printed in fourteen editions between 1486 and 1520, the Malleus Maleficarum in some parts of Europe would become a handbook for inquisitors, prosecutors and judges.28
The Malleus Maleficarum claimed that, along with witches, werewolves literally existed through pacts with the Devil, who Kramer maintained had greater powers granted to him by God than the Church previously was willing to admit. Disagreeing with the general wisdom of the time, Kramer argued that human beings could never be certain about reality; any phenomenon could be different from what it appeared to be and could be a demonic illusion. In contrast to previous thought, which denied the reality of demons, Kramer denied the reality of reality.29 A lot of people were going to die for this now.
Kramer double-talked his way around the proscriptions the Church imposed against beliefs in lycanthropy and argued that either werewolves were real wolves possessed by demons or they were humans who were bewitched by the Devil to believe they had the prowess and ferocity of werewolves:
Thus, as to the question of whether they are true wolves or demons in forms that appear this way, one says that they are true wolves but are possessed or impelled by demons in two different ways. One way is without the working of sorcerers . . . These things happen through an illusion on the part of demons when God is punishing some nation on account of its sins. The other way is also an illusion on the part of sorcerers. For instance . . . a story about a certain man who thought that he was turned into a wolf at specific times when he was lurking in caves. He entered these caves at a specific time and while he remained fixed there, he imagined that he became a wolf and went around devouring children. Since in reality it was merely a demon possessing a wolf that was doing this, he falsely thought while dreaming that he himself was going around. He remained deranged in this way until he was found lying in the forest hallucinating. 30
Some civil authorities were hostile to this new faction of church demonologists, and dragged their feet on prosecuting those charged with being witches or werewolves. Had not the Canon Episcopi declared the belief in creatures like witches and werewolves heresy? Kramer wrote that perhaps it was a heresy instead to obstinately deny the existence of witches and werewolves.31
Since the witch-hunting craze was a result of a schism in the Catholic Church, one would have hoped that the schismatic Protestants would have rejected it. But both Catholics and Protestants turned to witch-hunting as a means of cultivating unity, adding each other’s religion to the list of capital offenses as they embarked on the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), in which Catholics and Protestants slaughtered each other, leaving behind at least eight million dead.
I don’t want to suggest that Heinrich Kramer’s kooky procedural manual Malleus Maleficarum defining witches in 1486 was anything like John Douglas, Robert Ressler and Ann Burgess’s Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives defining serial killers in 1988, but it was in a way. While Malleus Maleficarum was lunatic raving and Sexual Homicide was a scholarly study (albeit statistically problematic with only thirty-six murderers as subjects), both works functioned as “manuals” to explain preexisting pandemic aberrant social phenomena that had not been systematically categorized or incorporated into any forensic system until their publication. In the same way that Sexual Homicide became a procedural manual for profiling serial killers, Malleus Maleficarum became a procedural manual for profiling witches and werewolves. The difference of course being that while Sexual Homicide described a phenomenon that actually existed—serial killers—Malleus Maleficarum described a fantasy phenomenon that did not exist—witches and werewolves. But historically the two books functioned in similar ways.
THE SERIAL LYCANTHROPE TRIALS
Both real wolves and fantasy werewolves for centuries had been blamed whenever a child or a woman was found mutilated or cannibalized, but they were rarely systematically investigated, policed or prosecuted. Frequently these cases occurred on the outskirts of villages, the victims either traveling to a market or tending sheep or working in the field on the edge of forests, but out of sight of the village proper. There were no police to investigate these deaths and no forensic sciences to discern the nature of the wounds and deaths. Each community or local feudal authority dealt with such cases in its own way.
The Church in the 1450s stepped into this patchwork of jurisdictions and declared that contrary to previous thought, monsters like witches and werewolves not only existed but were an ecclesiastical crime, and that civil authorities were now obligated to enforce and punish it on behalf of the Church’s inquisitorial courts. Werewolves and witches became legally an existing phenomenon, profiled and criminalized by the Malleus Maleficarum as a Devil’s instrument and pursued, investigated, judged and punished by a combination of ecclesiastical and secular authorities.
We know today that nonrabid wolves rarely attack people, and it is easy for us to imagine in the past a migratory serial killer pouncing on victims at random and mutilating them in a bloodlust, perhaps even in a psychotic state, imagining that he is a werewolf. These delusional (or “visionary”) psychotic-schizophrenic serial killers suffering from an organic mental disease exist, like Richard Chase, the “Vampire of Sacramento,” who murdered and grotesquely mutilated five people from 1977 to 1978, and Herbert Mullin, the “Die Song Killer,” who killed and mutilated thirteen people in Santa Cruz from 1972 to 1973 in the belief that his “sacrifices” would prevent earthquakes.
Two things happened in the 1400s. Werewolves, witches and other monsters were defined and criminalized by Malleus Maleficarum, and a bureaucracy and “industry” to investigate, pursue, arrest, punish and exterminate those monsters arose: a type of “police.” Simultaneously we begin to see werewolves appear before the court system now mandated to prosecute this new menace to Christendom. Increasingly the accusations will now begin to appear in historical court records.
These trials of werewolves that today we easily recognize as very mortal serial killers began to occur during the 1450–1650 witchcraft prosecutions. I believe that these serial killers existed earlier, but that either they rarely reached a formal trial, the trial records did not survive, or, especially in the pre–printing press era, the popular accounts of their cases were not mass-produced and distributed. Accounts of medieval serial killers might still be sitting somewhere, waiting to be discovered among rare handwritten manuscripts in some monastery. Until the printing press, very selective historical records were kept.
Also, prior to Malleus Maleficarum serial killers would not have been formally prosecuted as werewolves, since it was a heresy to believe in werewolves. Until the witch hunt began, there was no systematic, proactive policing mechanism in the European world. There were no police departments or prosecutorial agencies in the way there would be a systemic and organized inquisitorial witch-hunting investigative machinery pursuing heretic suspects, collecting evidence and bringing the accused before ecclesiastical courts. Courts of justice and proactive law enforcement in the premodern world concerned itself mostly with crimes against the king and his landholding aristocracy, against public order, against encroachments on the rights and property of the elite landowners and failure to remit taxes.
Crimes like murder or rape among peasants, which did not challenge authority, disturb public order or disrupt property interests and taxation, were handled in the community in which they occurred, often through vigilante justice or vendetta or blood-money settlements, outside a formal court system—or at best by the local feudal lord’s arbitrary authority. Prior to the 1450s, serial killers if identi
fied and captured were probably lynched or pitchforked to death by the community without much judicial procedure.
But with the rise of the witch hunt we see a spate of serial-killer trials suddenly appear in the historical record, including those of the infamous aristocrats Gilles de Rais in 1440 and Elizabeth Báthory in 1611, both of their trials initiated with accusations of witchcraft and black magic and only secondarily associated with charges of multiple murder.32 But it wasn’t just aristocrats who were brought before the courts. There was a significant number of commoners charged with these “recreational” crimes as well.
Compared with the witch trials described in the next chapter, werewolf trials were rarer, but the defendants are very recognizable today as typical serial killers. There were at least 300 werewolf trials in western Europe between 1450 and 1650 (compared with 40 thousand to 100 thousand witch trials) and although not all the trial records survived, among some of the ones that did the accused have a remarkably familiar modern pathology. Here, for example, to start with, is a relatively well-known case (among historians who study serial killers) of a werewolf in Germany in 1589 that could easily describe a modern-day serial killer like John Wayne Gacy.
Peter Stubbe, “Werewolf of Bedburg”—Germany, 1589
Peter Stubbe (or Peeter Stübbe, Peter Stumpf, Peter Stump) in Bedburg, Germany, perpetrated eighteen serial murders, raping, killing, mutilating and cannibalizing his victims, all in the same community where he lived. Arrested in 1589, Stubbe was accused of making a deal with the Devil to acquire powers to transform himself into a werewolf to satisfy his obsession for fame and celebrity and his depraved sexual lusts.
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