People have been trying to turn into wolves for a very long time, and the instructions they left behind are specific, strange and remarkably consistent across Europe.

This is an account of those traditions: what the rituals involved, where they came from, and what historians think was actually going on. It is folklore and history rather than a set of instructions.

The wolf belt

The most widespread European method involved a belt, usually described as being made from wolf skin and sometimes from the hide of a hanged man.

The belt was fastened, often with a specific number of notches, and the wearer took wolf form. Removing it reversed the change. In several German trial records the accused claimed a belt had been given to them by a stranger in the woods, which was understood at the time to mean the devil.

What makes the belt version interesting is how mundane it is. There is no transformation of the soul, no curse, no moon. It is a piece of clothing that works like a switch, closer to putting on a uniform than to being cursed.

Salves, girdles and river water

Other traditions attached the change to other objects and actions.

Ointments. Salves rubbed onto the skin appear repeatedly in trial testimony. Modern historians generally read these as genuinely psychoactive: preparations made from henbane, belladonna and mandrake, all of which produce hallucinations including sensations of flying, fur and bodily change. People taking those substances would have experienced something they had no other framework for.

Water. In parts of Scandinavia and the Baltic, drinking from a wolf's paw print, or from a stream a wolf had drunk from, was believed to transmit the condition.

Sleeping outdoors. Several traditions hold that sleeping in the open under a full moon, on a particular night of the year, was enough on its own.

Inheritance. In much of Eastern Europe the condition was not acquired at all. It ran in families, or attached to children born on particular days, or to a seventh son.

The berserkers

The best documented case of people deliberately taking on animal identity is Norse, and it was not folklore. It was military.

Berserkers fought in a state of induced fury, and the related úlfhéðnar, the wolf-coats, wore wolf pelts into battle. The sagas describe them howling, biting their shields and feeling neither fire nor iron.

The name itself is disputed: ber-serkr may mean bear-shirt, or it may mean bare of shirt. Either way the practice was real, organised and effective enough that Norwegian law eventually banned it.

Explanations for the state range from ritual psychology and group frenzy to henbane, mushrooms and simple alcohol. What is not disputed is that trained men entered a condition in which they behaved like animals and were valued for it.

Fenrir sits behind this tradition as its mythological anchor. Our article on Fenrir covers the wolf who swallows the world at Ragnarök.

What was actually happening

Four explanations account for most of the historical cases, and they are not mutually exclusive.

Clinical lycanthropy. A rare but genuine psychiatric condition, still recognised, in which a person believes they are transforming into an animal. It typically appears alongside psychosis, and it explains some confessions given without torture.

Hallucinogens. The ointments described in trial records contained tropane alkaloids that reliably produce exactly the sensations reported.

Ergotism. Rye infected with ergot fungus produces convulsions and hallucinations. Outbreaks correlate suspiciously well with clusters of werewolf and witch accusations.

Ordinary violence, explained badly. Some of those tried were killers, and a society without a concept of the serial murderer reached for the one it had. Peter Stumpp in Germany and Gilles Garnier in France were both executed as werewolves after confessions under torture, and both had almost certainly killed people.

None of this makes the belief silly. Given what those societies knew, the wolf was the most reasonable available explanation for a person who killed like an animal.

Why the rituals always need a prop

Almost every tradition requires an object: a belt, a pelt, a salve, a skin. That is worth noticing.

Anthropologists reading these accounts tend to see the same mechanism at work in all of them. The object gives permission. Putting on a wolf skin makes the wearer, in their own understanding and their community's, temporarily not themselves and therefore not accountable in the usual way.

The berserkers used it deliberately. The wolf-coat was the point: a man in a pelt was licensed to behave in ways an ordinary man could not.

Our article on where the werewolf myth originated covers how those traditions became the modern creature.

What survives today

The rituals persist in a form nobody has to believe in: costume.

Halloween is the descendant of exactly this. Putting on a wolf face for one night, behaving unlike yourself, and taking it off again is the old bargain with the theology removed.

Our wolf halloween costume collection covers full werewolf outfits for adults and children, and our wolf mask collection carries realistic werewolf masks alongside stylised Japanese pieces.

For something worn year round rather than for one night, our wolf ring collection includes designs drawing on the same imagery.

Sleeping on it

If the closest you want to get to lycanthropy is a bedroom, our wolf comforter set collection covers full bedding in sizes from Twin through King.