Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/331

Rh wolf being wounded and the man who wore its shape found with a similar wound, an idea not sufficiently proved to belong originally to the lower races, but which becomes a familiar feature in European stories of werewolves and witches. In Augustine's time magicians were persuading their dupes that by means of herbs they could turn them to wolves, and the use of salve for this purpose is mentioned at a comparatively modern date. Old Scandinavian sagas have their werewolf warriors, and shape-changers (hamramr) raging in fits of furious madness. The Danes still know a man who is a werewolf by his eyebrows meeting, and thus resembling a butterfly, the familiar type of the soul, ready to fly off and enter some other body. In the last year of the Swedish war with Russia, the people of Kalmar said the wolves which overran the land were transformed Swedish prisoners. From Herodotus' legend of the Neuri who turned every year for a few days to wolves, we follow the idea on Slavonic ground to where Livonian sorcerers bathe yearly in a river and turn for twelve days to wolves; and widespread Slavonic superstition still declares that the wolves that sometimes in bitter winters dare to attack men, are themselves 'wilkolak,' men bewitched into wolf's shape. The modern Greeks instead of the classic adopt the Slavonic term  (Bulgarian 'vrkolak'); it is a man who falls into a cataleptic state, while his soul enters a wolf and goes ravening for blood. Modern Germany, especially in the north, still keeps up the stories of wolf-girdles, and in December you must not 'talk of the wolf' by name, lest the werewolves tear you. Our English word 'werewolf,' that is 'man-wolf ' (the 'verevulf' of Cnut's Laws), still reminds us of the old belief in our own country, and if it has had for centuries but little place in English folklore, this has been not so much for lack of superstition, as of wolves. To instance the survival of the idea, transferred to another animal, in the more modern witch-persecution, the following Scotch story may serve. Certain witches at Thurso for a