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]
[76] In those days even an after-dinner nap seems to have been
thought uncanny. See Dasent, Burnt Njal, I. xxi.
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.
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