What happened
In 1691 the court of Jürgensburg (today Zaube in Latvia) questioned an old man known as Thiess of Kaltenbrun as a witness in a church-robbery case. Locals considered him a werewolf, and he openly confirmed it. He said that three times a year – on St Lucy's night, at Pentecost and on St John's night – he and other werewolves turned into wolves and travelled “beyond the sea” to a Hell hidden beneath a swamp. There they fought the Devil and his witches with iron rods to recover the stolen grain, livestock and fruits of the earth – without this the harvest would fail. Werewolves, he insisted, did not serve the Devil but were “God's hounds” and went to Heaven when they died. He even showed a nose broken by a sorcerer. In 1692 the court sentenced him to flogging and lifelong banishment for superstition and healing with charms.
Witnesses
The judges and witnesses of the Jürgensburg court; the interrogation records survive and have been published by historians.
Explanations and hypotheses
The Thiess case shows a very different werewolf from the sensational German and French trials – a guardian of the harvest, not a bloodthirsty monster. Carlo Ginzburg compared him to the benandanti of Friuli and saw a trace of pre-Christian shamanic beliefs; other scholars, such as Willem de Blécourt, consider these parallels overstated. The court did not believe in the transformations; it punished Thiess for practices that turned people away from the Church.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
Sources
- Carlo Ginzburg, Bruce Lincoln, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf – transcript of the trial record (University of Chicago Press, 2020)
- Stefan Donecker, The Werewolves of Livonia (Preternature, 2012)
More: Wikipedia (en)