King Lycaon - Blog Posts

Werewolf traditions from cultures around the world...

1) In Argentina, a family's seventh born child would sometimes be killed out of fear that it would be a werewolf, especially if they were male and their father was also a seventh child.

2) In French Canadian folklore, not confessing your sins on Easter was a surefire way of being cursed to transform into a werewolf.

3) In Norse mythology, there's a myth about a father and son who discover magical wolf pelts and after putting them on are forced to live as wolves for 10 days before they can turn human again.

4) In Greek mythology, the first ever man wolf hybrid was King Lycaon who was cursed for trying to trick Zeus into eating human meat.

5) In 1500s France, a man named Peter Stumpp was found guilty of killing and eating a dozen people while in werewolf form, including two pregnant women and his own son.

Apparently, the ancient Greeks had their own take on the werewolf legend.

On the slopes of Mount Lykaion, worshipers of Zeus-Lykaois (Zeus-the-Wolf) would conduct a ritual in his honor. A ritual that supposedly involved cannibalism and human sacrifice. Inspired by the well-known myth where King Lycaon kills his own son Nyctimus and tries to trick Zeus into eating his flesh only to be found out and transformed into a wolf, the ritual attendance would gather once every nine years in the dead of night and make their sacrifice consisting of a human volunteer and an animal. And after the deed was done, a portion of the volunteer's intestine would be mixed with the animal's entrails. The cult members would then each take a morsel of meat and whoever wound up eating the human flesh was transformed into a wolf.

The kicker is they would be stuck in their wolf form for nine years and the only way to be transformed back would be to abstain from eating human flesh that entire time. Not an easy task for a wolf.