In 1691 Livonia, in what is now Latvia, an old man named Thieß confessed to a court that he was a werewolf. But not an evil werewolf. A few times a year, he went down to Hell with his brother-werewolves to rescue crops that had been carried off by sorcerers in league with the Devil. Astonished to hear this tale, the magistrates interrogated Thieß for some length, and finally punished him with lashes and exile.
The case did not excite any contemporary comment, and it was forgotten for more than two centuries. The trial record was then discovered and published by the scholar Hermann von Bruiningk in 1924, who had interested himself in the case for the reason that Thieß was apparently the last man to be punished for being a werewolf in Livonia.1 Ten years later, the Nazi philologist and historian Otto Höfler wrote a description of Thieß’s trial as a postscript to his famous book Cultic Secret Societies of the Germans.2 According to him, Thieß’ confession was confirming evidence of pre-Christian wolf-cults that had persisted in Germanic lands through centuries of Christian oppression. Members of these brotherhoods underwent ecstatic, communal transformations into wolves, by which they eradicated their base individual selves and united themselves with their ferocious gods.
This was a classic trope of pre-war Nazi historiography: that the true spiritual essence of the Folk was never identical with the official European religion. Despite the deadening Christianity imposed on the people by their elite intellectual oppressors, certain members of the true German community lived in cultic brotherhoods with each other and their ancestors. The specific tenets of these brotherhoods were never committed directly to writing, but by a creative reading of written sources, like Tacitus’ Germania or Livonian trial records, you could detect footprints of the mystical traditions that had lasted underground for so many centuries. Many authors of the post-medieval period, like Philipp Melanchthon and Jean Bodin, had also reported cases of werewolves, giving their own testimonies to the pre-historic cult.
Höfler’s conceit was nonsense. Legends like his come less out of documentary research than out of frustration with gray modernity and a nostalgia for the sensory dreamworld of the past. It is fair enough to feel such things, but not at the expense of the truth. Notwithstanding the existence of outside testimonies, it is impossible to do direct scientific research on unwritten ancient traditions like the wolf-cult, and Höfler’s historical proof for them was a shadow of a shadow. They belong to sentimental fantasy, not to the documentary history that is the basis of all solid knowledge of the past. ‘Ah’, the Nazi says—’the very nature of folk culture is that is was never written down: so how can you dismiss it on the absence of documents?’ Very well—then men were born from dragons’ teeth, then Merlin built Stonehenge. If even for a moment you indulge the evidentiary standards that are typically applied to folk-history, you have already lost the only means you had to resist any historical fabrication. Now it is easy to dismiss the folkish fantasies in a book by a Nazi like Höfler, but not necessarily when they are told on behalf of unwritten ‘indigenous’ traditions that we might be inclined to favour.
Indeed, the right has never had a monopoly on folkish mysticism. Leftist historians are often just as hostile to the old intellectual elite as the Nazis were, and often just as excited to find traces of the true People’s resistance in the mists of time. So it was that Carlo Ginzburg happened upon the story of Thieß in Höfler’s book, and described it with the deepest fascination. In a series of books and articles, he repeatedly compared Thieß’s wolf-cult to the benandanti, a society of Italian sorcerers that he described in one of his most famous works.3 Just like them, Thieß had belonged to a pre-Christian shamanistic cult, extending from Italy to Livonia, that had been carried on from the remotest antiquity to the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, membership in this perennial cult was one of the means by which the downtrodden agrarian people of Europe put up spiritual resistance to their literate oppressors.
All of this was the subject of a recent debate between Carlo Ginzburg himself and Bruce Lincoln, professor of the history of religion at the University of Chicago.4 It began on 3 March 2015, when Lincoln gave a lecture in London on Thieß’s trial and its interpretation over the last century. In the course of it, he criticized Ginzburg severely for drawing a comparison between Italian sorcerers and Livonian werewolves. Above all, Lincoln argued, there were important formal discrepancies between the cult of the Benandanti and the cult of the werewolves as Thieß described it in court. There was no genetic cultural relationship between the two. Instead, the resemblances could be accounted for in functional terms: given a similar set of economic and cultural conditions, resistance could be expected to crop up in similar ways, albeit mediated by the mythological apparatus available in each location. Like the Benandanti’s nighttime escapades, Thieß’s playing a werewolf could be understood as a Baltic peasant’s resistance to the literate German overlords. No ancient tradition was necessary to explain a phenomenon like werewolves; only the peasants’ cultural circumstances plus their fertile imaginations.
Then Lincoln turned to his opponent’s biography. Ginzburg, he argued, had had special personal reasons for retelling Thieß’s story so lovingly. His father Leone Ginzburg (1909–1944) had fought as a partisan in World War II during the German occupation of Italy. Carlo, Lincoln argued, had attempted to rescue his father’s memory by transmuting Höfler’s cultic fantasy into a true story of marginalized healers, in solidarity with each other as well as with the oppressed people of all time, among whom his father was numbered. ‘If’, Lincoln said, ‘there is a shaman in this story—one who undertakes journeys to the underworld, communes with spirits of the dead, battles demonic forces, gains the power to heal self and others—I’m inclined to think it is not Old Thieß, but Carlo Ginzburg.’
Though he did not spell it out explicitly, Lincoln identified an important symmetry in the historiography of the last century. Left-wing attempts to rescue the buried perspectives, rituals and inner lives of the oppressed dead have often been nothing more than the photo-negative of right-wing longing for the ancient Volk. Both left and right want their heroic forefathers, and nobody with such a need for communion with the past is likely to be slowed down by documents and proof.
Lincoln was right to describe this. But he could have gone further with his historical curiosity. The underlying question is: where did Livlanders like Thieß learn to be werewolves? Höfler and Ginzburg answered: from their shamanic ancestors. Lincoln answered: it makes little difference, but the important fact of Thieß’ case was his class resistance against his overlords. In doing so, he dodged the task of accounting for the specific content of Thieß and his judges’ belief that he was a werewolf.
I think it is likeliest after all that Thieß had been influenced by the very learned testimonies which both Höfler and Gizburg cited as independent evidence of pre-modern werewolfery. There is a methodological presupposition that we must guard against here, though it has been taken for granted for centuries. It goes like this: Here are the werewolves, and here are the learned descriptions, ancient and modern, of those werewolves. If there are several such learned descriptions, this can only be because werewolves were recorded at different periods and in different places by naïve observers.
In the first place, we must always be mindful that ancient Greco-Latin literature exerted a continual and strong influence on all elite scholarship down to the end of the seventeenth century. When the likes of Philipp Melanchthon and Jean Bodin wrote about werewolves, they were informed not only by contemporary forensic evidence but also by their own libraries. From the time they were schoolboys, these men read the descriptions of witchcraft and lycanthropy in Herodotus, Ovid, Seneca, Pliny, and Horace. It is for this reason, and not any continuity of actual sorcery, that essentially all of the attributes of witches in pre-modern Christendom—flight, pacts with the gods of Hell, eye-of-newt-and-toe-of-frog—are also to be found in ancient plays and poems about Medea the sorceress.
Pliny and Melanchthon are not, therefore, to be taken as independent witnesses to a single set of cultic phenomena that spanned the centuries. Nor can separate early-modern sources be taken as attestations of actually independent phenomena. A good deal of the similarity between werewolf-cults can be informed by the fact that the people describing them interpreted the behaviour of monsters according to the natural-historical categories supplied for them by classical and contemporary sources.
Werewolves themselves, as Höfler, Ginzburg and Lincoln have all pointed out, were described frequently and in detail in those sources.5 But these historians covered only a fraction of the available material. There was an abundance of manuals and books about werewolves right down to the end of the seventeenth century, which themselves summarized testimony from ancient and early-modern sources. Glance into only one of these manuals, and the footnotes alone will reveal a world of detailed discussion of werewolves, in theological, judicial, antiquarian, and medical contexts.6 Keeping to forensic cases, there were werewolf-cases all over Europe—but especially in Livonia—that were sedulously assembled by learned men. This discussion was available to any literate person, as books on werewolves were available in Latin, German, English, French, Italian, and other languages.
Nor is Old Thieß himself to be considered apart from the learned literature. It is easy to imagine how he became a werewolf under its influence. Illiterate himself, he could certainly have learned of werewolves at second hand from a person who could read, or at third hand from another peasant; and woven his own fantasy from there. One does not, after all, need to be able to read in order to be influenced by writing. In fact, the very interrogation that took place at Thieß’s trial, in the course of which the judges asked alternatingly leading and probing questions, is a very good example of the kind of encounter that set illiterate peasants face-to-face with the book-learning of their masters.
In summary, the myth of werewolves in Livonia was ancient, but it was revived in the late middle ages by men who could read ancient books. It was then acted out obligingly by the Livonian peasants themselves. To make an even wider generalization, only writing is steady and active: illiterate culture is reactive and changeful, and a single interruption destroys permanently whatever tradition might have accumulated within it. When writing and illiteracy coexist, however, illiterate people can borrow motifs from their learned overlords, and if they suck parasitically for long enough on the same tradition, the illusion of an ancient folk custom can be produced. But we should not be deceived: books are the only means by which knowledge, religion and culture can be transmitted ungarbled across millennia.
Hermann von Bruiningk, ‘Der Werwolfwahn in Livland und das letzte im Wendenschen Landgericht und Dörptschen Hofgericht i. J. 1692 deshalb stattgehabte Strafverfahren’, Mitteilungen aus der livländischen Geschichte, 24 April 1924, pp. 163–220.
Otto Höfler, Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen (Frankfurt: Verlag Moritz Diesterweg, 1934). Lincoln’s translation of this appendix appears in the present book on pages 33–45.
See above all Carlo Ginzburg, I benandanti. Ricerche sulla stregoneria e sui culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1966).
It is summarized in a recent book which they jointly published: Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Ginsburg and Lincoln supply a helpful appendix of ‘Commonalities between Thiess’s Testimony and Descriptions of Livonian Werewolves in Learned Literature’ in ibid., pp. 195–200.
For instance: Theophilus Lauben, Dialogi und Gespräch von der Lycanthropia, oder der Menschen in Wölf-Verwandlung. Darinnen Vier Gelehrte Personen / eine Geistliche / eine Rechts-Gelehrte / eine Artzney-Verständige / und Welt-weise / von dieser Materi und andern merckwürdigen Sachen viel curieuses discuriren. Mit Beyfügung allerhand dergleichen eschröcklichen unt entsetzlichen Geschichte / so sich bald hier bald dort wahrhaftig zugetragen. (Frankfurt: Arnold Heyl, 1686).
So, you're saying that there's absolutely NO possibility of long-term cultural transmission outside of books?