was but a
short step to the conception of corporeal werewolves. In the Middle Ages
the phenomena of trance and catalepsy were cited in proof of the theory
that the soul can leave the body and afterwards return to it. Hence it
was very difficult for a person accused of witchcraft to prove an alibi;
for to any amount of evidence showing that the body was innocently
reposing at home and in bed, the rejoinder was obvious that the soul may
nevertheless have been in attendance at the witches' Sabbath or busied
in maiming a neighbour's cattle. According to one mediaeval notion, the
soul of the werewolf quit its human body, which remained in a trance
until its return. [76]

The mythological basis of the werewolf superstition is now, I believe,
sufficiently indicated. The belief, however, did not reach its complete
development, or acquire its most horrible features, until the pagan
habits of thought which had originated it were modified by contact
with Christian theology. To the ancient there was nothing necessarily
diabolical in the transformation of a man into a beast. But
Christianity, which retained such a host of pagan conceptions under such
strange disguises, which degraded the "All-father" Odin into the ogre
of the castle to which Jack climbed on his bean-stalk, and which blended
the beneficent lightning-god Thor and the mischievous Hermes and the
faun-like Pan into the grotesque Teutonic Devil, did not fail to impart
a new and fearful character to the belief in werewolves. Lycanthropy
became regarded as a species of witchcraft; the werewolf was supposed
to have obtained his peculiar powers through the favour or connivance
of the Devil; and hundreds of persons were burned alive or broken on
the wheel for having availed themselves of the privilege of
beast-metamorphosis. The superstition, thus widely extended and greatly
intensified, was confirmed by many singular phenomena which cannot
be omitted from any thorough discussion of the nature and causes of
lycanthropy.

The first of these phenomena is the Berserker insanity, characteristic
of Scandinavia, but not unknown in other countries. In times when
killing one's enemies often formed a part of the necessary business of
life, persons were frequently found who killed for the mere love of the
thing; with whom slaughter was an end desirable in itself, not merely
a means to a desirable end. What the miser is in an age which worships
mammon, such was the Berserker in an age