The court dismissed and dismisses the appeals and, for the verdict resulting from the trial, condemned and condemns Jean Grenier to be locked up for the remainder of his life in one of the city’s monasteries. He is to serve this monastery for the rest of his life. He is prohibited from ever leaving there under the penalty of hanging or strangling.
Seven years later, like an FBI agent from the Behavioral Sciences Unit interviewing an incarcerated serial killer, the werewolf-and-witchcraft advocate Pierre de Lancre, a judge and King Henri IV’s special counselor, visited Jean Grenier in the monastery to interview him. Lancre reported:
I found that he was a young man of twenty or twenty-one, of medium height, rather small for his age, with wild-looking eyes that were sunken and black, and completely distraught. His eyes gave the impression that he was ashamed of his misfortune, which he seemed to understand somewhat; he did not dare look anyone straight in the eye. He seemed a bit dazed, not that he did not understand what he heard or failed to do promptly what the good fathers asked of him. Rather he was hardly devout, and he did not seem to understand easily even simple things that only seemed commonsensical.
He had very long and bright teeth that were wider than normal, protruding somewhat and rotten and half black from being used to lash out at animals and people. His fingernails were also quite long and some were completely black from the base to the tip, even that of the thumb of the left hand, which the Devil prevented him from trimming. With regard to those that were so black, one could say that they were half worn down and more broken than the others, and less normal, because he used them more than he used those on his feet. This clearly shows that he was indeed a werewolf, and that he used his hands both for running and for grabbing children and dogs by the throat.
He cleverly confessed to me that he had been a werewolf and that while in this condition he had roamed the fields following the commands of the Lord of the Forest. This he confessed freely to everyone and denied it to no one, believing that he would avoid all criticism and disgrace for this situation by saying that he was no longer a werewolf . . .
We observed that he greatly despised his father, believing that he was responsible for the bad training he received. He believed, moreover, that he was a werewolf, for he had declared that he would use the same wolf’s skin as he did. This is why, when he came to some understanding of his affliction, he hated him for it when I made him see it so strongly. He confessed to me also, in a straightforward manner, that he still wanted to eat the flesh of little children, and that he found the flesh of little girls particularly delicious. I asked him if he would eat it if he had not been prohibited from doing so, and he answered me frankly that yes he would, and more that of girls than that of boys because they are more tender.41
DEFENDING SERIAL LYCANTHROPES
Not all the literate elites and scientists testifying before the courts in the cases of werewolves and witches believed in the existence of these kinds of supernatural phenomena. The forensic debate on werewolves, when they reached the courts as the Grenier appeal did, were focused on two questions:
First, did certain humans literally transform into werewolves and were these people possessed by the Devil?
Second, were these people deluded (perhaps by the Devil) into believing that they had become werewolves?
In other words, the same old question: did werewolves (and witches) exist, or did these people have delusions, in what we would today describe as a psychopathology, mental illness, or behavioral disorder?
These were urgent questions argued at the time. The debate on werewolves between witch-hunting demonologists and physicians during the Renaissance era would foreshadow the debates between theologians and forensic psychiatrists (alienists) in the nineteenth century on what they termed homicidal mania or monomania, and even the debates ongoing today between profilers and criminologists, sociologists and psychologists, on the fundamental psychopathology of serial killers, necrophiliacs and cannibals and what they represent in medical and psychiatric terms.
In 1596, Claude Prieur, a Franciscan monk, heretically denied the existence of werewolves in his Dialog on Lycanthropy, or Transformation of men into wolves, commonly called werewolves, and if such a thing can be done. In it he argued:
I have not heard that he left his human form, but rather that men could be found that were so cruel that they merited being called brutal beasts rather than reasonable creatures, in order to delight in all ungodliness . . . We have so many examples of them that it seems impossible to me to say the contrary, that is, of men who, turning and changing themselves into a foreign form, devour the people that they meet, even other beasts, and especially young children. And as for me, I do not say that they are monsters, but truly men, and by nature of the same species as you and me . . . I will concede to you that there might be found people acting so much against nature that they attack human bodies, dead or alive, in order to devour and eat them, especially small children, and that they might have the appearance of wolves, of which I can confirm for you some very recent examples, as we have heard recently by reliable letters from Paris dated the twentieth of August, on which day two little children had been eaten by the ones about which you have heard spoken, & about which as one says there are seventeen of them in the same place, and as many in the other neighboring towns: But I will never agree (as the Church fathers also will not do) that such people take on another form, in order to hide by this means their human form, for we have already proved the contrary through those doctors. . . . in few words, remember this sentence of the philosopher; Species non mutatur, the species never changes.42
The copious amount of material published on this question suggests that this issue of “men transformed into beasts” must have arisen frequently. Reading these sixteenth-century case notes is a frustrating experience because one begins to realize that people back then not only should have known better, but did know better. Of course werewolves did not really exist; but if not, what are they?
These questions were asked and appear to us as modern as questions about serial killers today: Were werewolves sick and insane? Were they suffering from a disease with an organic cause? This is a question that proponents of the biochemical explanation for serial killers debate today, suggesting that genetic traits; blood or urine chemistry; chromosome structure; levels of testosterone, serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) or hormones; abnormal neurological physiology; or behavioral disorders like Asperger’s syndrome, an autism-spectrum disorder, could be the key to explaining serial-killer behavior. These types of questions were not only theoretically debated, but put before the courts during some of those werewolf trials, with expert witnesses called in to testify.
From the mid-1500s, physicians (albeit of a premodern humoral medicine) began to participate through academic publications and in courtroom testimony in the debate surrounding the Devil, witchcraft and werewolves, which had previously been the realm of demonologists, theologians, lawyers and judges. The debate concerned not only insanity and melancholia as alternative explanations for alleged cases of witchcraft and werewolves, but also the possibility of the Devil or witchcraft causing illnesses in the body and the criteria for distinguishing between insanity of a biochemical (humoral) origin and a demonic possession. The early stirring of forensic-scientific thought in the mid-1500s came hand in hand with the Renaissance-era rebirth of the Devil, witches and werewolves.
Jacques Roulet Werewolf Appeal, 1598
In 1598, thirty-five-year-old Jacques Roulet (Rollet) was caught literally red-handed after murdering, mutilating and cannibalizing a fifteen-year-old boy near Angers, France. During his trial Roulet confessed to murdering and cannibalizing a series of children and adults, claiming that he used an ointment to transform into a werewolf. (The use of an ointment by lycanthropes is a common theme in trial records.) In his 1599 account of the case, Jean Beauvoys de Chauvincourt argued th
at Roulet’s claims of being a werewolf were a ploy to advance an insanity defense. Beauvoys de Chauvincourt contemptuously wrote:
Seeing that he could not deny that which he had confessed, embracing a simulated madness as the means of his salvation, admitted having eaten iron carts, windmills, lawyers, prosecutors and sergeants, meats that because of their great hardness, and because they were not well seasoned, he had not been able to digest very well . . . The judges of Angers for these confessions sentenced him to death, without taking into consideration the diabolical cunning in which Satan his master had instructed him, that is, to counterfeit madness . . .43
Amazingly, Roulet’s insanity plea on appeal was accepted by the French parliament, which upon reviewing the case commuted his death sentence to a two-year confinement in an insane asylum at the Hospital Saint-Germaine. Like a television pundit today editorializing on a light sentence handed down by a judge, Beauvoys de Chauvincourt wrote:
I believe that said Lords of the Court interpreting all things in a good way, as they have custom to do, considering the rustic nature of the man, his inconsistencies, his manner of living, his attitude, his actions, and in short his entire behavior, have only sentenced him for two years to said place, in order that, during this time, they might more easily be able to go over with a fine-tooth comb and in minute detail his condition and his morals. For if, following the daily observation that they will make of his actions, they notice so much as a little bit of his wickedness, he has not escaped and is only pulling on his choke collar and soon they will have tightened it.
CLINICAL LYCANTHROPIA–LYCOMANIA LUPINA INSANIA
We see in werewolf trial records that the courts were acutely aware of the possibility of some organic disorder, described as lycanthropia or lycomania. The English scholar Reginald Scot attacked as superstition the notion of supernatural transformations of humans into werewolves as described by the Malleus Maleficarum and proposed by Bodin. Published in 1584, Scot’s book The Discoverie of Witchcraft Wherein the Lewde Dealings of Witches and Witch Mongers is Notablie Detected ridiculed witch-hunters and the notion of human transformation.44 Scot simply stated, “Lycanthropia is a disease, and not a transformation . . . A disease proceeding partly from melancholy whereby maniacs suppose themselves to be wolves, or such ravenous beasts. For Lycanthropia is of [what] the ancient physicians called Lupina melancholia or Lupina insania.”
This issue of lycanthropy as a clinical disease is a compelling one, especially if we explore the link between whatever it was that those werewolf cannibals were and today’s proponents of biochemical explanations for serial-killer behavior. Even today, clinical lycanthropy baffles us and psychiatrists question whether ancient lycanthropy as described by Byzantine and Greek physicians for nearly two thousand years was the same mental malady manifested during the lycanthrope epidemic.
A thousand years of medical descriptions of clinical lycanthropy, or lycomania, are very consistent not only with werewolf reports but with descriptions of vampires as well. The sufferer wanders at night and avoids daylight; there is a lack of saliva, accompanied with crusted foaming at the mouth, dry red eyes, clawlike fingernails, discoloration of skin, abnormal hair growth, sores on the lower legs, disfigurement of the feet and hands, grotesquely distorted facial features and bizarre disordered behavior. Recent medical literature on historical lycanthropy has identified the disease of congenital porphyria as having features with the kind of behavioral and physical symptoms reported in the defendants accused of being werewolves.45 The most consistent picture is that of a man, but occasionally of a woman or child, who wanders about at night. He may come from a family that produced a werewolf previously; thus, lycanthropy was held to be familial. The werewolf’s skin is pale and has a yellowish or greenish tint and numerous excoriations. The mouth is red, the eyes are unsteady and the exposed parts are hairy.
Congenital porphyria, which in its advanced stages produces extensive facial lesions and mutilation of the hands, is a rare recessive-gene disease in which there is an inability to convert porphobilinogen to porphyrin in the bone marrow. Among its characteristics that are of particular interest in relation to werewolf symptomology is severe photosensitivity accompanied by a vesicular erythema that is particularly noticeable in summer or in mountainous regions. There is a tendency for the skin lesions to ulcerate and infect cartilage and bone, destroying structures such as the nose, ears, eyelids and fingers. Hypertrichosis and pigmentation may develop on the photosensitive areas and teeth may turn red or reddish-brown. Nervous manifestations are most common in the acute intermittent variety but may occur in the other types, porphyria cutanea tarda and the “mixed” type of hepatic porphyria.
A Google search for medical photographs of current patients suffering from porphyria reveals images of people with movie-werewolf-like features: furry faces; snarling, disfigured mouths with jaggedly broken teeth; hairy bodies covered in sores and lesions; disfigured, clawlike fingers and feet.46 The images of current porphyria patients very much match the physical descriptions that witnesses gave of the boy werewolf Grenier.
Furthermore, the use of psychotropic concoctions to treat the disorder or ergot poisoning common in the era resulting in hallucinations or erratic behavior is also hinted at by the frequent references in the trials to the use of ointments and potions by werewolves, echoing recent reports of links between a resurgence of clinical lycanthropy and the use of the street drug ecstasy.47
Werewolves victimized a broad category of people, from both male and female children to adolescents and young maidens. Gradually, however, in the culture of “private” serial victimization, the immoral promiscuous female, especially the prostitute, becomes increasingly the serial werewolf’s preferred category of victim, deserving of the savagely cruel punishment the werewolf dispenses.
LITTLE “LESS-DEAD” RED RIDING HOOD: THE EMERGENCE OF THE PROSTITUTE AS PREFERRED VICTIM
We see in the folklore of the Werewolf era the promiscuous woman or prostitute emerge as a preferred “less-dead” victim for the werewolf serial killer to stalk and target, the kind of victim who to this day remains a preferred target of serial killers. The strange story of Little Red Riding Hood and her encounter with a wolf emerges in oral tradition throughout Europe precisely during the 1450–1650 werewolf epidemic. While we are all familiar with the “G-rated” Brothers Grimm and Walt Disney versions of the tale, there are some thirty different variants from its original telling, with some passages that are lewd, troubling and confounding, describing not just wolves, but explicitly werewolves, cannibalism, sex and prostitution.
The first printed version of “Little Red Riding Hood” was written by Charles Perrault and appeared in his 1697 book Tales of My Mother Goose, which contained such other stories as “Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots,” “Bluebeard” and “The Sleeping Beauty.” We often characterize Perrault’s fairy tales as children’s stories, but really they were folktales. Perrault’s stories sometimes echoed dark historical themes and events.48 His story “Bluebeard” was inspired by the serial killer Gilles de Rais with Perrault’s version substituting wives for the children that de Rais had actually killed, while “The Sleeping Beauty” has long been cited for its necrophilic theme.49
In Perrault’s version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” she explicitly strips naked beneath the wolf’s gaze before getting into bed under the covers with him to be eaten. There is no happy ending and no last-minute rescue by hunters in that version. It’s a vile and dark horror story.50
In the earlier French oral tale “The Grandmother,” on which Perrault based his written story, the wolf is described as a bzou, a French term for “werewolf” (“loup-bzou,” “loup-brou or “loup-garou,” depending on the French dialect of the region). The bzou encounters the girl on the way to her grandmother’s house and asks her which path she intends to take: “The path of needles or the path of pins?” Little Red Riding Hood chooses the path of needles. This strange
passage is mostly ignored by analysts or dismissed as nonsense, but Richard Chase Jr. and David Teasley point out that medieval prostitutes were known to identify themselves by a cluster of lace needles at their shoulder.51
The bzou takes the other path and arrives at the grandmother’s house and kills her before the girl gets there. After cutting up the grandmother’s corpse into edible morsels and draining her blood into a wine bottle, the creature disguises itself as the grandmother and awaits the arrival of the girl, whom he then tricks into cannibalizing her grandmother in a perversion of the Christian communion, in which Christ’s flesh and blood are offered as bread and wine. In the original story, a cat comments, “For shame! The slut is eating her grandmother’s flesh and drinking her grandmother’s blood.”52
In some versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” she is fully aware that her grandmother has been substituted by the wolf. When he invites her to join him in bed, she first performs an elaborate striptease for the wolf, removing each item of her clothing—her bodice, her dress, her petticoat, her shoes and her stockings—meticulously described in the story, item by item, with a fetishistic precision as she strips naked before the hungry, panting wolf and tosses the items one by one into the fire. Then she gets into bed with the wolf, and after the ritual exploratory foreplay—“Oh, Grandmother, what big arms you have . . . what big eyes . . . what big teeth . . .”—she is ravished, murdered, and eaten by the wolf. In other versions Little Red Riding Hood, standing naked before the bed after her striptease, tells the wolf she needs to relieve herself before joining him under the bedcovers. The bzou invites her to “do it” in the bed. The girl counters that she needs to defecate. The bzou does not relent and he invites her to defecate in the bed. The girl insists that she wants to do it outside, and the wolf ties a string to her and allows her to go out. Out of the wolf’s sight, Little Red Riding Hood ties the string to a tree branch and escapes. In other versions she is rescued by a passing hunter.
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