The Accursed College: Lycanthropy
"All angels, both good and evil, have the power to transform our bodies by their natural virtue."
—St Thomas Aquinas
"Savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock."
—ACTUS APOSTOLORUM, XX, 29.
There is no hard line between the natural and the supernatural. Such a dichotomy is a modern hallucination that no one really believes. The ‘disenchantment of the world’ never happened. The throne of the hegemon is empty, the king of clockworks never reigned. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the persistence of the shapeshifter. Even now it is mandated, under threat of social destruction, that you believe in a certain sodomic sorcery— the ability, with the assistance of certain surgical rituals and chymicals, to become another sex.
Abironis birth, and bred with Beliall; Wod werwolf, worme, and scorpion vennemous, Lucifers laid, fowll feyindis face infernall; Sodomyt, syphareit fra sanctis celestiall,
—The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie
The archetypal shapeshifter is the man-wolf. It has persisted through the centuries, from Arcadia to the medieval witch trials. Even de-clawed and framed as a rare psychosis, lycanthropy has survived into modern times (Keck et al 2006).
According to the bishops Olaus Magnus and Majolus, the werewolves in the 16th century formed "an accursed college" of those "desirous of innovations contrary to the divine law." Werewolfism was, from the very beginning, associated with sorcery. Virgil’s (c.39–37 bc) adaptation of Theocritus’ second Idyll, cites the precedent of what is evidently a master sorcerer:
Bring Daphnis home, my spells, bring him from the city. These herbs and these drugs, picked in Pontus, were given to me by Moeris himself (they grow in profusion in Pontus). By their power I often saw Moeris change into a wolf and hide himself in the woods, and I often saw him use them to rouse ghosts from the bottom of their tombs, and spirit sown crops away into another field. Bring Daphnis home, my spells, bring him from the city.
Virgil Eclogues 8.94–100
Before the contrivances and artifices of our current age took root; before screen and media illuminated and entrained; when our globe was scarcely peopled and vast expanses of untamed wilderness and hushed woodlands prevailed, the Known and the Unknown journeyed side by side. In solitude, in the wastelands, in the haunted places, men communicated with the totemic spirits and demons. From these beings, they learned the arts of sorcery and acquired abilities like clairvoyance, invisibility, and lycanthropy.
The property of animal metamorphosis is likely as old as man. The werewolf is too ancient and too widespread to be given a single origin. Its sources fade into the pathless darkness, into the abyss of time, and its streams have since sometimes separated, sometimes united, meandering through obnubilated terrains, under various climates, changing in color and abundance according to the nature of their bed and their tributaries, that it might be difficult to deduce their origin and course from their current components historically.
Gervaise of Tilbury says in his Otia Imperalia—
"We often hear in England, during the lunar cycles, that men change into wolves, which kind of men the Gauls call 'gerulfos', but the English truly say 'wer-wlf'. For 'wer' in English means 'man', and 'wlf' means 'wolf'." Gerviase later emphasizes: “One thing I know to be of daily occurrence among the people of our country: the course of human destiny is such that certain men change into wolves according to the cycles of the moon” (813; III.120)
In the old Bohemian Lexicon by Vacerad from 1202 A.D., the term for were-wolf is "vilkodlak," which is defined as "faunus." "Vilkodlaci, incubi, or invidi, from wandering everywhere with animals, hence they are called incubi from lying upon humans, i.e., violating, which the Romans call 'faunos ficarios'."
St. Thomas Aquinas, in the "Summa Theologica," Part 1, Question 114, Article 4, states that only God can perform genuine miracles. However, demons are allowed to execute deceptive marvels, which, though extraordinary to us, are not true miracles. They utilize specific elemental seeds present in the world to carry out these actions, making it seem as if they are causing transformations. The Devil has the ability to form a body from the air, taking on any desired appearance. Similarly, he can envelop any physical entity with any tangible form to manifest within it.