Werewolf patients

Greniers case is one of the few that represents a change in the attitudes towards the werewolf-phenomenon. The leader for the questioning who checked Grenier's case found that he was unable to a rational thinking. "The change in shape only existed in the sick person's disorganized brain", the jurist wrote. "As a consiquence of this the crime can't get punished for." Wether the knowledge really had come to the frensh courts or not the judges started to look at the werewolf cases with something that looked more like tolerance. This can partly have to do with the werewolf hysteria that grabbed the people and even made some of France most leading persons to admit guilty to be werewolves. Was the phenomenon real or was it just illusions - or insanity which was brought forward by the use of drugs?

Through the years big efforts were made to explain the phenomenon with werewolves. Some thinkers assured that it happend when a person had an excess of melancholy or, in line with that time's doctrines, an unbalance in the body fluids, the floating part of the body. Many doctors thought this sort of melancholy could give hallucinations, illusions and madness. One doctor recommended that the werewolf should be treated with baths, enema, blood-letting, diet and - to get a calm sence - opium which should be rubbed in the nostrils. Robert Burton, the Brittish priest and scientist also thought that this was a sort of madness, and he blamed everything from witches to a wrong diet, bad air, sleeplessness and even lack of exercise.

How near the truth these ideas were they never got really accepted. Instead did the frightened public stick to the occult explanations. That's why many saw werewolves as a demonic projection, which made the victim to see through the demon's eyes and others to see him as a wolf. To others the werewolf were a direct manifestation of the Devil.

The early 1600's-author Henri Bouguet thought, like many others at this time, that Satan leaved the werewolf sleeping behind a bush, appeared as a wolf and did whatever evil thoughts the person had in his mind. According to Bouguet could the Devil puzzle the sleeping person's mind so much "that he truly belive that he is a wolf and runs around to kill people and animals".

If wolves represented natural evil, comparable with plague or starvation, it was obviously necessary to look at werewolves as supernatural evil. Since the Bible didn't offer any explanations on how this phenomenon should be looked at this was left to the church's theorists to rationalize.

This wasn't any easy task. To say that Satan really could transform women and men to wolves would be a direct contradiction to one of the Christian's most important doctrines - that only God has the power to create. But if witches or demons couldn't create a wolf, could they move their souls to an already existing wolf? Once again did the doctrine say no. Such transformations would constitute a change of an holy reality, saying that the "shapeshifter", either he was a human or a demon, had powers equal to God's.

Some, who said that the Devil was the master of illusions, came with an alternative theory. "Only God could do real miracles", S:t Thomas of Aquino wrote in his Summa Theologica, "but the demons have been allowed to do dishonest wonders, strange to us, and they use some parts from elements in the world which function is to do transformations." Thomas mentioned three ways how these evil spirits could trick people:

As an attendent show that what really doesn't exist. Showing what are as something else than what it really is. And hiding what really exists to make it look like it doesn't exist at all.

This discussion was going on for centuries. The doctors became more and more sure about the fact that this werewolf-phenomenon was a direct mastifestation of a psychial sickness. Other theoretics looked at like a paranormal and occult event.

In the book Mysteries of Magic does the french occultist from the 1800's liphas Lévi these "violent mania" which the medicine gave the credit to the werewolf-phenomena and instead said that an occurrence of an astral body which was acting like a mediator between the soul and the material organism.

In that way can - when a man's instinct is wild and blood-thirsty - his astral body wander out in a shape of a wolf while he is sleeping at home and is dreaming that he is a real wolf.

Even today are details discussed among occultists and others. Rose Gladden, brittish exorcist and clairvoyant, says that astral projections can be the reason to werewolf activities:

Suppose that I am an evil person" , she says, "who enjoys the horrible things of life. Well, when I project my astral body out of my physical body all the surrounding evil can then grab me. And it should be this evil grip of my astral projection, or my "duplicate", which transformes me to an animal... a wolf. The evil forces finds it much easier to exist within the humanity - for an example an evil man - than in a nebulous vacuum. People with a tendency for werewolf activities was and still are the humanity's cruelest manifestation.

That a lot of people thinks that werewolves still exists is confirmed with all desirable clarity by the reaction to Fox Broadcasting Company's "werewolf-line". There are individuals who belives today that they are werewolves, and some of them has been examined and treated by psychologists and psychiatrists. 1875: a number of The Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal had a note that this "so called destinct state of mind" had been excluded from the medicine books, and wrote about several new werewolf-events.

In the first case there where a patient in his 20's, called Mr H, who were convinced that he was a werewolf. He used drugs and told his doctor about the time when he did his military services in the United States army in Europe. He had taken a trip to a forest near his post and there he took LSD and strychnine, the later a mortal poison which works as stimulants when it's used in small doses. The effect was sudden and powerful. The young man said that he had seen fur growing on his hands and feet and felt it grow on his face as well. He got overwelmed by the feeling to hunt, catch and eat alive rabbits. He wandered around with this hallucination for days before he returned to his post.

Mr H was treated with calming medecine, got cured from drugs and had therapy for about nine months, when he continued to hear strange voices and experienced satanic visions. He said that he was obsessed by the Devil and that he had rare powers. The tests showed that his state of mind could be "compared to acute schizophrenia or toxic psychosis". He was treated with antipsychotic drugs and when his state got better did he stay at a non-institutional care. Only after two visits did he stop with the medications and ended the treatment. Later attempts to reach him has failed.

Another werewolf patient, a man who was 37 years old, mr W, was brought to the hospital after he had showed a bizzare behaviour in public, which means among other things, howling to the moon, sleep on graveyards, letting the hair and beard grow, and sleep between the roads on highly frequent highways. With a difference from mr H didn't mr W have a background of drug- or alcohol abuse. He had been a farmer and was known to have a normal IQ, which a test from the navy had shown. Now he was seen as a psychotic and a mentally retarded person, which mentally age was as an eight- till ten years old child.

The doctors did a brain examination which showed an abnormal physological change in the brain's tissue, called walnut brain. The diagnosis on Mr W showed that he suffered of a chronic brain syndrome of an unknown origin. When he was put on anti psychotic drugs he didn't show that he had any werewolf- symptoms. Later, when he was treated at the non-institutional care, he showed a childish and calm behaviour.