[86] Encyc. Brit., XV. under Lycanthropy: In Prussia, Livonia and Lithuania, according to two bishops, werewolves were in the 16th century far more destructive than “true and natural wolves.” They were asserted to have formed “an accursed college” of those “desirous of innovations contrary to the divine law.” Also see note 90.
[87] See ante p. 13, and notes 64, 65, 66, 69, 84, 102, 110.
[90] Andree, p. 72. This same tiger-man in Asia killed a woman, whose husband set out in pursuit, followed him to his house, got hold of him later in his man shape and killed him. Feats similar to some performed by him are cited in Ethn. Rep. 1887-88, p. 470: The medicine-men of the Pawnee swallowed arrows and knives, and also performed the trick of apparently killing a man and bringing him back to life, like the Zuñi.
[91] Grimm, Rechtsalterthümer, II. 566: Hexen waren fast alle aus der ärmsten und niedrigsten Volksklasse (see note 84). Literary Digest, March 9, 1907, p. 378, article on Spiritualism and Spirituality: “Many, very many, spiritualists seem to care for communion with spirits only that they may more surely keep physically well, and earn their bread and butter and clothing the easier.” Encyc. Brit. under Lycanthropy: The absurdity of the superstition would have much sooner appeared, but for the theory that a werewolf when wounded resumed human shape; in every case where one accused of being a werewolf was taken, he was certain to be wounded, and thus the difficulty of his not being found in beast form was satisfactorily disposed of.
The wolf disguise, or transformation into a werewolf was that most often assumed for example in Germanic lands.[93] The term _wolf_ became synonymous with _robber_, and later (when the robber became an outlaw,[94]) with _outlaw_, the robber and outlaw alike being called wolf and not some other animal (i. e., only the wolf-man surviving to any extent) firstly, because the wolf was plentiful; and secondly, because as civilization advanced, there came a time when the wolf was practically the only one of the larger undomesticated animals that survived.[95] We can notice this in our own United States, for example in eastern Kansas, where at night coyotes and even wolves are sometimes heard howling out on the prairie near woodlands, or in the pastures adjoining farms, where they not infrequently kill smaller animals, and dig up buried ones.[96] In Prussia also it is the wolf that survives to-day. American Indians, and other savages however do not restrict the transformations to the wolf,[97] because other wild animals, are, or were till recently, abundant amongst them. As civilization advances, one by one the animal myths disappear with the animals that gave rise to them (like that connected with the mastodon);[98] or else stories of such domestic animals as the pig, white bull, dog superseded them.[99] When this stage was reached, as time went on and means of successfully coping with the brute creation became perfected, the animals were shorn of many of their terrors, and finally such stories as Aesop’s fables would arise.[100] This however was psychologically a long step in advance of our were-wolf believing peoples of an earlier period.