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I needed to know more about werewolves.
Carlo Ginzburg, I realized, was my man. Ginzburg is an Italian historian who practises what’s described as « microhistory » — in his case, the story of obscure individuals who got caught in the cogs of medieval justice, or the Inquisition, or populist massacres: lepers, Jews, heretics, and yes, werewolves.
In Ginzburg’s Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (originally published in Italy in 1989) I found Thiess, an eighty-year-old man from Livonia (present-day Latvia) who in 1692 confessed with great pride to being a werewolf. Vilkatis Tīss in Latvian.
Three times a year, he said, at St. Lucy’s night before Christmas, the night of St. John, and of the Pentecost, the werewolves of Livonia go into hell, ‘at the end of the sea’…Similar to dogs (they are the dogs of God, Thiess said), and armed with iron whips, the werewolves pursue the devils and the sorcerers, who are armed with broomsticks wrapped in horsetails. At stake in the battle was the fertility of the fields…That year the Livonian and the Russian werewolves had both won. The harvest of barley and of rye was going to be abundant. There was also going to be enough fish for everyone.
The judges are pretty dumb: they keep trying to make Thiess admit he’s in league with the Devil, despite his insistence that he’s actually fighting the Devil, and that thanks to his victory, nobody is going to starve that winter! He’s sentenced to ten whiplashes, and banished.
Carlo Ginzburg had a passion for these forgotten oddballs whose brush with power was usually tragic, people whose voices « reach us strangled, altered, distorted; in many cases, they haven’t reached us at all. » His most famous book was The Cheese and the Worms (1976) about a 16th-century Friulian miller tried for claiming God and the angels had been created like worms in a cheese. Ginzburg had his own reasons to mistrust power: he came from a distinguished family of Italian Jewish anti-fascists; his mother was the writer Natalia Ginzburg, and his father the scholar and publisher Leone Ginzburg, who was imprisoned and finally tortured to death by the Gestapo when Carlo was a child.
Last week, Ginzburg died in Bologna at the age of 87. Check out his Ecstasies to learn about the connections between « the Lap or Siberian shamans, the Baltic werewolves, the armiers of the Pyrenean Ariège, the benandanti of Friuli, the Dalmatian kresniki, the Romanian cǎluşari, the Hungarian táltos, the Caucasian burkudzäutä », or what happens when male and female witches fly at night with Diana the Huntress.
