forms through all these things) while the bodies of the men thus affected lie in another place, being alive, but yet in an ecstasy far more deep than any sleep. Now this phantasy may appear unto other senses in a bodily shape, and a man may seem to himself to be such an one as he often thinks himself to be in his dream, and to bear burdens, which if they be true burdens indeed, the devils bear them, to delude men’s eyes with the appearance of true burdens, and false shapes.” We must bear in mind that these explanations come from the highest authority, one of the greatest Doctors of the Church, and will, I think, very fairly cover most of the cases of the werewolf.
In early days it was recognized that a werewolf might be a person who was afflicted with a horrible mania, and Marcellus Sidetes, who lived in the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, circa A.D. 117–161, wrote Περὶ λυκανθρώπου, a long medical poem in Greek hexameter verse, consisting of forty-two books, of which only a couple of fragments remain. He says that Lycanthropy is a disease, a kind of insanity or mania when the patient was afflicted with hideous appetites, the ferocity, and other qualities of a wolf. He further tells us that men are attacked with this madness chiefly in the beginning of the year, and become most furious in February; retiring for the night to lone cemeteries and living precisely in the manner of ravening wolves.
Under Lycanthropia, Burton[49] notes as follows: “Lycanthropia, which Avicenna calls Cucubuth, others Lupinam Insaniam, or Wolf-Madness, when men run howling about graves and fields in the night, and will not be persuaded but that they are wolves, or some such beasts. Aetius (Lib. 6, cap. 11) and Paulus (Lib. 3, cap. 16) call it a kind of melancholy; but I should rather refer it to madness, as most do. Some make a doubt of it whether there be any such disease. Donat ab Altomari (Cap. 9, Art med.) saith, that he saw two of them in his time: Wierus (De praestig. Daemonum, 1, 3, cap. 21) tells a story of such a one at Padua, 1541, that would not believe to the contrary, but that he was a wolf. He hath another instance of a Spaniard, who thought himself a bear; Forrestus (Obseruat. lib. 10, de morbis cerebri, cap. 15) confirms as much by many examples; one amongst the rest of which he was an eye-witness, at Alcmaer, in Holland, a poor
