You really should embrace the gift of being a lycanthrope. Very few people can truly be in touch with their animal spirit; even fewer can become that animal. Along with that, though, you shouldn't abuse the gift either. In France alone, nearly 30,000 people were killed because they were accused of being a werewolf.

The wolf frightens the humans because of its howling, its glow-in-the-dark yellow eyes, its hunting ability, its silent walking, and its nocturnal activity. These characteristics are easily related and explained through supernatural and/or demonic phenomena.

The nightly activities of a werewolf were believed to be, of course, to hunt, murder, and eat their victims. Some werewolf stories tell that their purpose was to kill and devour entire herds of sheep or similar animals. Nevertheless, Lycanthropy is closely

related to cannibalism. (The original version of Little Red Riding Hood is a good example to understand the relation between cannibalism and lycanthropy.)

It is possible to find many ways to become a werewolf that do not require to deal with the Devil. In Italy, the common belief is that anybody who is born on a full moon Friday or who sleeps outdoors during one of those days, is prone to become a werewolf. In the Balcanic Peninsula -where the famous Transylvania is located- grows a flower that, people say, if eaten, causes the eater to acquire Lycanthropy. To drink from the water filling a wolf track or from where a wolf pack has drunk, or to eat the brains of a real wolf are other popular ways still believed in Europe to become -accidentally or intentionally- a werewolf.

Eisler's theories offer interesting explanations of many of the werewolf's characteristics. For instance, emphasizing the sexual connotations: primitive men wearing wolfskin outfits often had the initiative of fighting their leaders to obtain the desired woman, or of kidnapping her out of a more peaceful tribe. Because of this, werewolves are also believed to be kidnappers. Regarding cannibalism, the ancestral tribes ate whatever they could find when the ice destroyed their northern huts and were forced to emigrate south where they found still fruit-eating, pacific people. If you inhabited one of these southern communities, and suddenly the village was pillaged and burned down, your wives raped by men in wolfskins, and the next day what was left of it was attacked by a real wolf pack, wouldn't you think there was similarity between man and wolf?

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