Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 16, 2025
"May werewolves seize me if this be not dry work! Ho' there, bring me a horn of ale." As soon as he had quenched his thirst in a long draught, and wiped his hairy lips with much relish, the narrator went on: "So at night, as you may think, we kept a strict and sober guard, and rested in our harness.
The wide-spread superstitions concerning werewolves and swan-maidens, and the hardly less general belief in metempsychosis, show that primitive culture has not arrived at the distinction attained by modern philosophy between the immortal man and the soulless brute. Still more direct evidence is furnished by sundry savage customs.
But it was disappointing to see him in human garb even werewolves, it seems, must march with the times. This enigmatical growth of the human mind flourishes in Calabria, but is not popular as a subject of conversation.
If this be so, they afford an excellent collateral illustration of the belief in werewolves. The same mental habits which led men to regard the insane or epileptic person as a changeling, and which allowed them to explain catalepsy as the temporary departure of a witch's soul from its body, would enable them to attribute a wolf's nature to the maniac or idiot with cannibal appetites.
The more old-fashioned werewolves cling to the true versipellis habits, and in that case only the pigs, the inane Calabrian pigs, are dowered with the faculty of distinguishing them in daytime, when they look like any other "Christian." There is a record, in Fiore's book, of an epidemic of lycanthropy that attacked the boys of Cassano.
Often they also perceived smoke which showed the presence of people. On several occasions Hlawa approached such forest settlements, whence wild people would issue, clothed with skins upon their naked bodies, armed with clubs and bows, and looking from under their shaggy-tangled hair; the men took them to be werewolves.
"Where is Ketill?" cried Estein, as they reached the boat. The man in charge had seen nothing of him. "May werewolves seize him!" exclaimed Helgi. "He has had time enough to tear the long ships plank from plank." "We have no time to wait for him; it is his fault if he be left," said Grim. "That knowledge would doubtless comfort him," replied Estein; "but nevertheless I shall wait."
And therefore the Danelagh men, who feared not mortal sword, or axe, feared witches, ghosts, Pucks, Will-o'-the-Wisps, werewolves, spirits of the wells and of the trees, and all dark, capricious, and harmful beings whom their fancy conjured up out of the wild, wet, and unwholesome marshes, or the dark wolf-haunted woods. For that fair land, like all things on earth, had its darker aspect.
In this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of certain forces of great power and, so far as the human point of view is concerned, exceptional malignancy. To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement.
But here are we, who hardly know a loam from a lentil, breaking our back over seed catalogues. Public opinion may compel us to raise vegetables, but we are going to go about it our own way. If the stones are going to act like werewolves and suck the moisture from our soil, let them do so. We don't believe in thwarting nature.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking