The werewolf and the full moon: the history of a legend

In the modern imagination the werewolf is inseparable from the full moon: as soon as the lunar disc appears in the sky, the man turns into a beast. This link, which twentieth-century cinema made almost compulsory, has a more complex history. Ancient and medieval sources tell of transformations into wolves for various reasons, and the Moon appears in them only now and then, while in some European folk traditions, including the Italian one, the full moon takes on a central role.

Lycaon, the Neuri and Petronius' soldier

The best-known Greek myth is that of Lycaon, king of Arcadia, turned into a wolf by Zeus for offering the god human flesh; Ovid tells the story in the first book of the Metamorphoses. Herodotus, in the fifth century BC, reports that the Neuri, a people of the steppes north of the Black Sea, were said to turn into wolves for a few days every year, though he adds that he does not believe it. In none of these tales does the Moon play a decisive role.

The most famous Latin text is a tale included in Petronius' Satyricon, in the first century AD. The freedman Niceros relates that he travelled by night with a soldier who, on reaching the tombs, stripped and turned into a wolf. The story specifies that the Moon was shining as bright as noon, «luna lucebat tamquam meridie», but her light serves above all to make the scene visible, not to cause the transformation. Pliny the Elder, almost a contemporary, judged such beliefs to be false.

The Middle Ages and the lunations

In the Middle Ages the theme grew richer. The lai of Bisclavret, composed by Marie de France in the twelfth century, tells of a baron who turns into a wolf for a few days every week and who, robbed of his clothes by his unfaithful wife, can no longer become a man again. In the early thirteenth century Gervase of Tilbury, in the Otia imperialia, stated that in England men were often seen to change into wolves according to the lunations, one of the first explicit testimonies of the link between lycanthropy and the lunar cycle.

In the same period theology debated whether such a transformation was possible. Many authors, following Augustine, regarded it as an illusion produced by the devil, who made appear as a wolf what remained a man. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the age of the great witch trials, some defendants were also accused of lycanthropy, especially in France and the German lands, and the question entered the treatises on demonology.

The werewolf in Italy

The Italian expression «lupo mannaro» probably derives from the late Latin lupus hominarius, «human wolf». In many regions, from Abruzzo to Sicily, nineteenth- and twentieth-century folklorists collected tales of men who on full-moon nights were seized by an irresistible sickness, left their homes howling and roamed the countryside or rolled in puddles. According to a widespread belief, anyone born on Christmas night risked becoming a werewolf.

Italian folk stories often present the werewolf more as a sick man to be pitied than as a monster. It was said that wounding him slightly, so that he lost a few drops of blood, was enough to bring him back to himself, and in some versions his wife had to wait for him without opening the door until he had knocked several times. In the twentieth century cinema, with films such as The Wolf Man of 1941, definitively fixed the image of the transformation under the full moon.

The history of the werewolf shows how a very ancient theme, the metamorphosis of man into animal, gradually became bound to the Moon. The full moon, with its light that transforms the night landscape, offered a perfect image of the moment when human nature seems to yield to the wild, and folk tradition embraced it with extraordinary force.