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This fascinating book is a scholarly treatment of a subject that its author considers, after extensive research, historical fact. Following is a short excerpt from hundreds of references he offers:
In The Mysteries of Magic Éliphas Lévi writes: "We must here speak of lycanthropy, or the nocturnal transformation of men into wolves, histories so well substantiated that skeptical science has had recourse to furious manias, and to masquerading as animals for explanations. But such hypotheses are puerile, and explain nothing.
This author gives it as his opinion that werewolfery is due to the "sidereal body, which is the mediator between the soul and the material organism,", and largely influenced by a man's habitual
thought being attached by strong sympathetic links to the heart and brain. Thus in the case of a man whose instinct is savage and sanguinary, his phantom will wander abroad in lupine form, whilst he sleeps painfully
at home, dreaming he is a veritable wolf. . . .
C.W. Leadbeater, in his The Astral Plane, its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena, offers a theosophical explanation of the many problems concerning vampires and werewolves. His
view is that certain astral entities are able to materialize the "astral body" of a perfectly brutal and cruel man who has gained some knowledge of magic, and these fiends drive on this "astral body", which they
mould into "the form of some wild animal, usually the wolf"", to blood and maraud.
In his monograph, The Book of Were-wolves, Baring-Gould is inclined to attribute werewolfery, the terrible truth of which he does not for a moment evade, to a species of
madness, during the accesses of which the person afflicted believes himself to be a wild beast and acts like a wild beast. "In some cases this madness amounts apparently to positive possession."
Mr. Elliott O'Donnell, in his Werwolves, remarks that "the actual process of the metamorphosis savours of the superphysical". The werewolf is sometimes in outward form a wolf,
sometimes partly wolf and partly human. This may be the result of the fact that he is "a hybrid of the material and immaterial". (pp. 102-03)
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