Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/103

L U X L Y C 89 LUXOR, more properly El-Aksur, " The Castles" (plur. pauc. of kasr), a village on the Nile, 450 miles above Cairo, occupies part of the site of the ancient Thebes, and has its name from the ruins described in vol. vii. p. 777. The village is also called Abu l ]Iajjaj from the patron saint whose tomb is mentioned by Ibn Batuta, i. 107, ii. 253. See also Yakut, i. 338. Luxor is the centre for visitors to the ruins of and about Thebes, and is increasingly frequented by travellers and invalids in the winter season, being the only place above Osyut (Sayut) provided, with hotel accommodation suitable for Europeans. The district is the seat of an extensive manufacture of forged antiques, often very skilfully made. LUZON, or LugoN. See PHILIPPINE ISLANDS. LYCANTHROPY is a term used comprehensively to indicate a belief, firmly rooted among all savages, and lingering in the form of traditional superstition among peoples comparatively civilized, that men are in certain circumstances transformed temporarily or permanently into wolves and other inferior animals. In the European history of this singular belief, wolf transformations appear as by far the most prominent and most frequently recurring instances of alleged metamorphosis, and consequently in most European languages the terms expressive of the general doctrine have a special reference to the wolf. Examples of this are found in the Greek AUKCIV^PCOTTO?, Russian volkodldk, English were-wolf, German ivahrwolf, French loup-garou. And yet general terms (e.g., Latin, versipellis ; Russian, oboroten ; Scandinavian, hamrammr : English, turnskin, turncoat) are sufficiently numerous to furnish some evidence that the class of animals into which metamorphosis was possible was not viewed as a restricted one. It is simply because the old English general terms have been long diverted from their original signification that the word " lycanthropy " has recently been adopted in our language in the enlarged sense in which it has been defined above. There are two unfailing characteristics of lycanthropous belief : (1) there can nowhere be a living belief in con temporary metamorphosis into any animal which has ceased to exist in the particular locality ; (2) belief in metamor phosis into the animal most prominent in any locality itself acquires a special prominence. These characteristics apart, the phenomena of lycanthropy exhibit a very con siderable diversity in their nature. Throughout the greater part of Europe the were-wolf is preferred on the principles just noted. There are old traditions of his existence in England, in Wales, and in Ireland. In southern France, the Netherlands, Germany, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Servia, Bohemia, Poland, and Russia he can hardly be pronounced extinct now. In Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland the bear com petes with the wolf for pre-eminence. In Persia the bear is supreme, in Japan the fox ; in India the serpent vies with the tiger, in Abyssinia and Bornou the hysna with the lion, in eastern Africa the lion with the alligator ; in western Africa the leopard is per haps most frequently the form assumed by man, among the Abipones the tiger, among the Arawaks the jaguar, and so on. In none of these cases, however, is the power of transformation limited exclusively to the prominent and dominant animal. The most familiar phase of the superstition is also the latest and most sophisticated. It was no belief in mere transformation ; the transformation here was accomplished by Satanic agency voluntarily submitted to, and that for the most loathsome ends, in particular for the gratification of a craving for human flesh. " The were-wolves," writes Richard Verstegan (Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, 1628), "are certayne sorcerers, who having annoynted their bodies with an oyntment which they make by the instinct of the devill, and putting on a certayne inchaunted girdle, doe not onely unto the view of others seeme as wolves, but to their owne thinking have both the shape and nature of wolves, so long as they weare the said girdle. And they do dispose themselves as very wolves, in wourry- ing and killing, and most of humane creatures." Such were the views about lycanthropy current throughout the continent of Europe when Verstegan wrote. France in particular seems to have been infested with were-wolves during the 16th century, and the consequent trials were very numerous. In some of the cases, e.g., those of the Gandillon family in the Jura, the tailor of Chalonp, and Roulet in Angers, all occurring in the year 1598, there was clear evidence against the accused of murder and cannibalism, but none of association with wolves ; in other cases, as that of Gilles Gamier in Dole in 1573, there was clear evidence against some wolf, but none against the accused ; in all the cases, with hardly an exception, there was that extraordinary readiness in the accused to confess and even to give circumstantial details of the metamor phosis, which is one of the most inexplicable concomitants of mediaeval witchcraft. Yet, while this lycanthropy fever, both of suspectors and of suspected, was at its height, it was decided in the case of Jean Grenier at Bordeaux, in 1603, that lycanthropy was nothing more than an insane delusion. From this time the loup-garou gradually ceased to be regarded as a dangerous heretic, and fell back -into his pre-Christianic position of being simply a " man-wolf- fiend," as which ue still survives among the French peasantry. In Prussia, Livonia, and Lithuania, according to the bishops Olaus Magnus and Majolus, the were-wolves were in the 16th century far more destructive than "true and natural wolves," and their heterodoxy appears from the assertion that they formed "an accursed college" of those " desirous of innovations contrary to the divine law." In England, however, where at the beginning of the 17th century the punishment of witchcraft was still zealously prosecuted by James L, the wolf had been so long extinct that that pious monarch was himself able (Demo- nologie, lib. iii.) to regard "warwoolfes" as victims of delusion induced by "a naturall superabundance of melancholic." Only small creatures, such as the cat, the hare, and the weasel, remained for the malignant sorcerer to transform himself into ; but he was firmly believed to avail himself of these agencies. Belief in witch-animals still survives among the uneducated classes in parts of the United Kingdom. The were-wolves of the Christian dispensation were not, however, all heretics, all viciously disposed towards mankind. "According to Baronius, in the year 617, a number of wolves presented themselves at a monastery, and tore in pieces several friars who entertained heretical opinions. The wolves sent by God tore the sacrilegious thieves of the army of Francesco Maria, duke of Urbino, who had come to sack the treasure of the holy house of Loreto. A wolf guarded and defended from the wild beasts the head of St Edmund the martyr, king of England. St Oddo, abbot of Cluny, assailed in a pilgrimage by foxes, was delivered and escorted by a wolf." * Many of the were-wolves were most innocent and God-fearing persons, who suffered through the witchcraft of others, or simply from an unhappy fate, and who as wolves behaved in a truly touching fashion, fawning upon and protecting their benefactors. Of this sort were the " Bisclaveret " in Marie de France s poem (c. 1 200), the hero of " William and the Were-wolf " (translated from French into English about 1350), and the numerous princes and princesses, knights and ladies, who appear temporarily in beast form in the Mdhrchen of the Aryan nations generally. Nay the power of transforming others into wild beasts was attributed not only to malignant sorcerers, but also to Christian saints. " Omnes angeli, boni et mali, ex virtute naturali habent 1 A. do Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, 1872, vol. ii. p. 145.

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