ences.

With our limited knowledge of the Unknown it is, of course, impossible
to be arbitrary as to the class of spirits to which such phenomena
belong. They may be Vice Elementals, _i.e._, spirits that have never
inhabited any material body, whether human or animal, and which are
wholly inimical to man's progress--such spirits assume an infinite
number of shapes, agreeable and otherwise; or they may be phantasms of
dead human beings--vicious and carnal-minded people, idiots, and
imbecile epileptics. It is an old belief that the souls of cataleptic
and epileptic people, during the body's unconsciousness, adjourned
temporarily to animals, and it is therefore only in keeping with such a
view to suggest that on the deaths of such people their spirits take
permanently the form of animals. This would account for the fact that
places where cataleptics and idiots have died are often haunted by semi
and by wholly animal types of phantasms.

According to Paracelsus Man has in him two spirits--an animal spirit and
a human spirit--and that in after life he appears in the shape of
whichever of these two spirits he has allowed to dominate him. If, for
example, he has obeyed the spirit that prompts him to be sober and
temperate, then his phantasm resembles a man; but on the other hand, if
he has given way to his carnal and bestial cravings, then his phantasm
is earthbound, in the guise of some terrifying and repellent
animal--maybe a wolf, bear, dog, or cat--all of which shapes are far
from uncommon in psychic manifestations.

This view has been held either _in toto_, or with certain reservations,
by many other writers on the subject, and I, too, in a great measure
endorse it--its pronouncement of a limit to man's phantasms being,
perhaps, the only important point to which I cannot accede. My own view
is that so complex a creature as man--complex both physically and
psychologically--may have a representative spirit for each of his
personalities. Hence on man's physical dissolution there may emanate
from him a host of phantasms, each with a shape most fitting the
personality it represents. And what more thoroughly representative of
cruelty, savageness, and treachery than a wolf, or even something partly
lupine! Therefore, as I have suggested elsewhere, in some instances, but
emphatically not in all, what were thought to have been werwolves may
only have been phantasms of the dead, or Elementals.

CHAPTER II

WERWOLF METAM