Werewolves

Technorati Tags: Creatures,legends,myth,wolves,humans,werewolves

 

Besides being a recluse, Gilles Garnier was also a mass murderer who devoured children when they strayed from home. Witnesses who saw him committing these atrocious crimes said he sometimes took the form of a wolf. Once captured Garnier confessed that he had indeed changed himself into a wolf and killed and eaten children. He was charged with the abominable crimes of lycanthropy and witchcraft and burnt alive at Dole, in eastern France, on 18 January 1573.

Usually only starving or rabid wolves attack people, and in the sixteenth century these were assumed to be werewolves (from the Old English word wer, meaning man). Garnier came from a wolf-infested area where four people were tried as werewolves between 1520 and 1575. Elsewhere in Europe trials were less common, though many more accusations were made. England had none, as wolves had been eliminated by 1500. A notorious werewolf came from near Cologne, Germany. Peter Stubbe was convicted of murdering and eating 13 children (including his own son) and two pregnant women. He boasted that the devil had given him a magic belt, which he used to turn himself into the likeness of a devouring wolf. Stubbe was broken on the wheel, beheaded, and burnt on 28 October 1589.

During the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, female witches were said to ride to their sabbats on wolves, and male witches to change, or shape-shift, into wolves when attacking people and animals. If a transformed wolf was injured, the person’s body would still bear the wound when it returned to human form. A 1588 story from the French Auvergne tells of a huntsman who cut off the paw of a wolf and placed it in his bag. Later, when showing it to a local nobleman, he was astonished to find that it had changed into a hand wearing a golden ring. The horrified nobleman recognized the ring and rushed to his kitchen where he found his wife nursing her wounded arm. She was promptly burnt as a witch. In many werewolf trials, such as the Gilles Garnier case, the defendant was judged to be genuine shape-shifter and was condemned to a painful death. But since ancient times lycanthropy – the belief that one is turning into a wolf – has also been recognized as an abnormal mental condition. Afflicted people howl, frequent graveyards and crave human flesh.

In 1603 a 14-year-old shepherd boy, Jean Grenier, was tried at Bordeaux in France for attacking and eating children. In court the boy claimed that the lord of the forest had given him a wolf skin and a salve with which to turn himself into a wolf. He admitted eating a dog, a baby and two little girls. But detailed questioning during his trial showed that Grenier was given to inventing all manner of wild stories. After consulting with medical specialists, the judge pointed out that the unfortunate Grenier was clearly mentally retarded and called for a verdict of insanity. Instead of being burnt at the stake, he was imprisoned in a monastery, where he died at the age of 20.

While most convicted werewolves do seem to have been psychotic serial killers, werewolves also have a more benign side. In 1692 an 80-year-old peasant named Thiess told the judges of Jurgensburg, Livonia – at that time a province of Russia – that three times a year he turned into a wolf. It was his destiny, announced at his birth, to change into an animal and fight on behalf of his people. On the nights of Saint Lucy, Saint John and the Pentecost, Thiess claimed he joined the other Livonian werewolves on a journey to hell to fight with the devils and sorcerers over the harvest for the coming year. Thiess seems to have been continuing an ancient tradition of dream battles for fertility undertaken by special people in the form of animals.

Wolves were traditionally associated with the realm of the dead and werewolves were thought to be most active during the 12 nights after Christmas, when the dead were supposed to roam the earth. In hunter-gatherer societies the ability to change temporarily into the shape of an animal was one of the sources of a shaman’s power. The belief that some people can change themselves into wild animals seems almost universal. In areas where wolves do not exist, other creatures fulfill this role. In South America they change into were-jaguars; in Africa into were-leopards, were-hyenas, and even were-crocodiles; in India into were-tigers; and in Japan into were-foxes and were-badgers.

 

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The Sixth Sense

Technorati Tags: Paranormal,intuition,feeling,sixth sense

 

In London during the late 1930s Irish medium Eileen Garrett (later a US citizen) experienced visions of a large airship crashing in flames. When she learnt that two dirigibles, the R-100 and the R-101, were being constructed at the time, she became convinced that the R-101 was doomed. Sir Sefton Brancker, head of civil aviation, laughed at the premonition and assured everyone the R-101 was as “safe as a house, except for the millionth chance.” The great airship lifted off on October 4, 1930 for a non-stop flight to India. It crashed in France the following day, killing Sir Sefton Brancker and 45 others on board.

During a séance three days later Garrett was visited by several “spirits” from the R-101, including Brancker. They told Garrett that the R-101 had sprung a gas leak – a story at odds with the official explanation. An engine had backfired, said Garrett, and escaping gas had ignited. Government investigators, however, ignored this “testimony” – it was inadmissible in a court of law!

Western scientists generally regard human beings as electrochemical machines receiving information through five senses – hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch. Paranormal researchers would add other means of obtaining knowledge – including extrasensory perception, or ESP, which they divide into four classes: telepathy (communication of thought), precognition (knowledge of the future), retrocognition (knowledge of the past not acquired by normal means), clairvoyance (knowledge of distant places acquired independently of the senses and telepathy).

Shamans and witch doctors have always practiced ESP. The Malays interpreted their dreams to find fish, the Zulus to find game. Australian aboriginal people used smoke signals to tell distant friends that telepathic messages were to be sent. Today some researchers believe that ESP occurs in the unconscious (or subconscious) and that it is pushed up into the conscious mind.

Since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882, scientists have shown that ESP exists and have tried to discover how it works. In the 1930s Dr Joseph Banks Rhine of Duke University in North Carolina, USA, started some laboratory tests, carefully controlling conditions and variables to eliminate coincidence. He called the study “parapsychology.” For telepathy experiments Dr Karl E. Zener, one of Rhine’s colleagues, devised packs of 25 special cards showing five straightforward patterns – square, cross, star, circle and wavy lines. In one experiment Dr Rhine requested his subjects to identify cards that were placed face down. Positive results far exceeded the possibilities of pure chance, but skeptics accused the researchers of dishonesty or mistakes in procedures. Experiments then became more elaborate – independent witnesses were present and in telepathy experiments screens enclosed the subjects. The card tests still produced strong evidence for the existence of telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition.

Perhaps the Ganzfeld experiments have provided the most successful demonstration of ESP to date. Charles Honorton began them in 1971 at the Psychophysical Research Laboratories in New Jersey, USA, and continued them when he moved to the university of Edinburgh, Scotland. Tests take place in a space devoid of patterned sensory input, called a “Ganzfeld” – German for “whole field.” The ESP receiver wears translucent goggles with a red light shining on them and earphones playing “white noise” (unstructured sound). The absence of sensory stimulus is said to allow unconsciously received impressions to reach the conscious mind. The receiver describes and records what he or she is seeing, while in another room a “sender” concentrates on a target image – a picture or film clip – to be transmitted telepathically. The receiver’s description is then compared with the image. Success rates are said to be about 50 per cent; the chances of coincidence are estimated at only 5 per cent.

Recent experiments into precognitive remote perception, carried out at America’s Princeton University by Robert Jahn and colleagues, have also produced positive results. A sender goes to a place far away, selected at random by a computer from a pool of 100 possibilities, and records impressions and takes photographs. The receiver, who does not know the senders location, tries to visualize where the sender is, makes sketches and describes his or her own mental impressions. Over many experiments, the amount of correct information from the receiver about the site was 15 percent greater than could be expected by guesswork. The odds against this result happening purely by chance are about a hundred thousand million to one. The distance between sender and receiver makes no difference, nor does it matter whether the sender visits the site before or after the test is done.

 

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The Pied Piper Of Hameln

Technorati Tags: Vanishings,children,legends,Hameln town,piper,rats

 

Robert Browning’s poem, The Pied Piper of Hamelin is based on an old German legend translated into English in 1605 by Richard Verstegan. In Verstegan’s story, an odd-looking man “who for the fantastical cote which he wore being wrought with sundry colours, was called the pyed pyper” came to Hameln and, for an agreed price, offered to rid the town of rats. He “went pyping through the streets, and forthwith the rates cam all running out;” he then led them to the River Weser, where they drowned.

When the piper asked for his reward, the burghers of Hameln went back on their word and refused to pay him. So the piper played once again and this time called to the town’s children to follow him. Outside the town a door opened in the hillside, revealing a large cavern. After the piper had led the children through the door, it closed behind them and melted from view.

A lame boy who could not keep up with the others took back the news, but the lost children were neither seen nor heard of again. According to Verstegan, this happened on 22 July 1376. But a fourteenth-century account gives the date as 26 June 1284 and the number of stolen children as either 130 or 150.

Attempts to explain the legend include floods, plagues, ritual murder, dance mania and a children’s crusade that moved through the area in the thirteenth century. The most convincing explanation so far lies in the fact that Bishop Bruno of Olmutz (now called Olomouc) sent agents into the region to recruit colonists for his diocese in Bohemia. There is a startling similarity between family names in the town records of Olomouc and Hameln, which suggests that Hameln was one of the places where recruiting was successful.

The piper adds a supernatural dimension to the story, for rat-catchers were credited with the ability to charm rats away by piping, fiddling, or reciting incantations. A concealed hillside door that opens and closes takes the story into European mythology. It was long thought that the otherworld lay inside such hills. In Wagner’s Tannhauser this is portrayed as the pagan kingdom of Venus, and in folklore generally as the land of the fairies, who were notorious for stealing children. Over the years the people of Hameln may have come to believe that their lost children were taken by otherworld beings.

 

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