Free Love and Sleep by John Crowley Page A

and looked up, hearing voices calling to him from below: Joe Boyd, Warren. They would wait.
    Werewolves were known to antiquity, of course, and appear both in literature and medical texts, where the condition is described as Morbus lupinus and is always understood as a delusion, as it would not later be. There are Werewolves all through the Dark Ages as well, but there is a sudden and distinct increase in reported sightings and depredations of Werewolves in the later 16th C. and the early 17th. In Burgundy, in Hungary, in Bohemia, in Moldavia, men and women are charged with being Werewolves, the deaths of domestic animals and children are blamed on them. Great wolf-hunts are licensed and organized; Werewolves are captured and sentenced to horrifying deaths. These are also the years in which WITCHES (q.v.) also are discovered everywhere, tried, tortured and burned in vast numbers. Bodin the encyclopAEdist believed the plague of witches was due to the operations of the overreaching magicians of his day, who irresponsibly let loose crowds of dAEmons that then seized upon and possessed the unwary.
    Suddenly struck with the presence of that double letter, “AE", which he saw often in this book and in the pages of his missal, and nowhere else. Was a dAEmon a demon? What was the difference? Where was AEgypt?
    We typically think of Werewolves as creatures of evil, despoilers of the herds and of the herders too, who are able to take on animal form as witches took on the forms of cats or mice. But there is evidence that the Werewolves may not, or may not always, have thought of themselves in that way. There took place in Jurgensburg in 1692 the trial of a certain Thiess, a man in his eighties, who confessed to being a Werewolf, and astonished his judges by claiming that his kind, so far from being witches, were the natural enemies of witches. The witches, he told them, are the despoilers; they seize the new-planted seed-grains and seedlings from the earth, they steal the ripening harvest, and carry them off to Hell. In the Ember Days of the year, the Werewolves gather at night to pursue and do battle with them, to rescue the grain, and the livestock too and other fruits of the earth which the witches have stolen, and return them safely to the fields. If they fail, if they delay their pursuit, they find the gates of Hell locked against them; and the harvest that year will fail, fish in the sea hide themselves away, the young stock die. Nor were the Livonian Werewolves singular: the Russian and the German Werewolves fought witches in the same way. Thiess was punished for witchcraft despite his story of the enmity of witches and Werewolves, a secret history within the history of witchcraft.
    What if it were true. It could not be: but what if it were. Strange but true.
    A sudden partisanship arose within Pierce's heart, a longing so deep and simple that he could not even be puzzled by it: a longing indistinguishable from grief, that the story ought to be true, and could not be.
    He thought of their sufferings: To be one thing on the outside, another on the inside; to seem nothing and no one, to be despised and ignored, unseen, and yet to be somebody on whom the welfare of everybody depends, even though they don't know it.
    Pierce thought, in those days, that his attraction to the wrong sides, to the losing armies in historical struggles, was a motion of his spirit to take the part of the underdog, a kind of noble motion, like Joe Boyd's attraction to the dove-gray Confederacy: but it wasn't. Often enough the losers he was drawn to weren't the underdogs at all (Pierce leaned to the Tory side of the American Revolution as well as to the South, though he knew as well as Joe Boyd did who had been right in both those quarrels and who wrong). It wasn't taking the underdog's side: it was simply a sneaking desire to reverse the sides, to experience the story as though it had a secret inner logic the opposite of its usual one, the goodguys now the