How to Become a Werewolf

Historical legends describe a wide variety of methods for becoming a werewolf:

• One of the simplest was the removal of clothing and putting on a belt made of wolf skin, probably a substitute for the assumption of an entire animal skin which also is frequently described.

• In other cases the body is rubbed with a magic salve.

• To drink water out of the footprint of the animal in question or to drink from certain enchanted streams were also considered effectual modes of accomplishing metamorphosis.

• It is also said that the seventh son of the seventh son will become werewolf.*

• Olaus Magnus says that the Livonian werewolves were initiated by draining a cup of specially prepared beer and repeating a set formula.

• Ralston in his Songs of the Russian People gives the form of incantation still familiar in Russia.

• Another is to be directly bitten by a werewolf, where the saliva enters the blood stream.

• Sleep on the ground in an open field on a Friday night when the moon is full. Many Europeans who lived several centuries ago approved of this method.

• In Galician, Portuguese and Brazilian folklore, it is the seventh of the sons (but sometimes the seventh child, a boy, after a line of six daughters) who becomes a werewolf. This belief was so extended in Northern Argentina (where it is called the "lobizón"), that seventh sons were abandoned, ceded in adoption or killed. A law from 1920 decreed that the President of Argentina is the godfather of every seventh son. Thus, the State gives him a gold medal in his baptism and a scholarship until his 21st year. This ended the abandonments, but it is still traditional that the President godfathers seventh sons.

• In other cases the transformation was supposed to be 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.

 *Becoming a werewolf simply by being bitten by another werewolf as a form of contagion is common in modern fiction, but rare in legend, in which werewolf attacks seldom left the victim alive to transform.