The Beast of the Gevaudan:Werewolf or pre-historic Survival?Your Opinions....

[Eddie Quist]

:) Personally ,I tend to go with the accounts that relate to it's eventual slaying by a consecrated silver musket-ball.
Sounds like your traditional classic werewolf to me;
but I'd like any feedback you others might have as well..... :)

Your pal,
Eddie the Mangler :)

[TheBlueWolfW.W.]

Here we go...

NOT WEREWOLF. Look at how many killings the Beast did. I don't think even a werewolf would bother to kill so many people! And the full moon didn't follow it, and neither did it follow the moon. Plus if it was a werewolf...someone would have noticed or mentioned something somewhere in ancient wirtings.

I think that the Beast was most likely just an animal, probably a striped hyena or some other canine. Sure, one probably wouldn't be able to kill so many people. Maybe there was more than one, which is probably likely.

Not werewolf. Period.

[Eddie Quist]

:) Didn't the whole full-moon thing come up only when Hollywood started making films about werewolves,and needed a deus-ex-machina to transform their lycanthropes?
As far as I'm able to recall,werewolves were able to ''shift'' millennia before Hollywood ever heard of them,when the legends were handed down orally,and in ancient manuscripts,and no real mention of the full moon as an agent in the metamorphosis.

My take on the tenuous connection between ''folkloric'' werewolves and Hollywood lycanthropes,comes from one small mention in an ancient Roman treatise on the subject.

It mentions merely that werewolf activity was more prolific and bloody during certain lunar cycles ,such as the full moon,and that they happened more frequently in the month of February.
{watch out,you Pisces out there....}
Just FYI,with no reproach to your contribution.

Your pal,
Eddie the Mangler. :)

[TheBlueWolfW.W.]

Yes, you're right about the full moon. Werewolves can shift whenever they want to kill whatever they want. But not over 300 humans in a very short time.

[Eddie Quist]

It might have been a pack of them running rampant,you know......

[TheBlueWolfW.W.]

maybe...not hehe...I'm not sure.

[Hoplite]

saw a little bit of it in Discovery couple of days ago...there they tried to investigate wether it was a werewolf, but the results were pretty negative...they even thought of an enraged wolf....there's a wolf presereve (can't remember the perfect word) in Gevaudan....the experts there concluded that there's little chance of that beast being a wolf...they're saying that a normal wolf would never be so aggressive, specially to human...according to them a wolf would be so ferocious when it has rabies...but still the beast has been terrorising for 3 years, and a wolf with rabies will hardly survive 9 days, so the beast wasn't a rabies infected wolf.........their conclusion is that they don't know what the beast was, but they say the answer might still be laying in forests of Gevaudan...

[Eddie Quist]

:) True,although so much time has passed that we may never really know the truth.

Some theories relate to the creature being everything from a giant hyaena,to a surviving dire wolf of some type.

It certainly was huge;the dimensions of a medium-sized calf in some accounts.
It had a long tail with a brushy end to it,like a lion's.
And accounts have it displaying either striped or spotted markings on it's pelt.

There was one prehistoric predator that fit the bill for these descriptions.
It was called Andrewsarchus mongoliensis.

Andrewsarchus had the same wolf-like body on a larger scale. It was probably about 4-5 metres long, standing nearly 2 metres at the shoulder, making it arguably the largest terrestrial carnivorous mammal that has ever existed. It probably averaged over 1500 kilograms in weight with some exceptional animals over 2000 kilograms, making it usually about twice as heavy as the most obese modern brown bears. The legs and feet would have somewhat resembled those of a rhinoceros.

Despite having hooves,this critter most resembles the description of La Bete.
The size,probable markings,and long tufted tail make it a desirable candidate,but the creature and most of it's close relatives have long since become extinct,say around 3-6 million years gone.


Race memory?
Prehistoric survival?
Total hoax all the way round?
Or genuine werewolf?

Your pal,

Eddie the Mangler. :)

[TheBlueWolfW.W.]

Considering that this happened so long ago, there could be a chance that this may have been a surviving "prehistoric" creature, as you said. But I wonder how that could be.

[Eddie Quist]

:) A slim chance exists that any species could survive,given enough time to engender a viable population large enough to spread widely.
Some of them could have hidden in natural
refuges,underground frbidding mountain ranges that mankind had never breached.

Any of these scenarios are possible,though improbable,and are not a substitute for hard evidence;they are merely supposition.

What I am trying to say is that anything is possible,given that we know next to nothing about the actual history of life on this planet,ansd the varieties of life that once existed,or may still exist.


Your pal,

Eddie the Mangler. :)

[Foxhound66]

Keep in mind that France at this time had a type of "Werewolf-mania." Thousands were killed for being so called werewolves.

[Eddie Quist]

:) Indeed.
I have read much on the subject,including the court records of the Inquisitorial tribunals,and not much of it makes any coherent sense.
Many of the so-called ''werewolves'' that were tried and then executed were poor wretches that somehow got on the bad side of the power-elite of the times,and were murdered for their trouble.

Some were definitely what we would today diagnose as schizophrenics,delus ionals,and Munchhausen's Syndrome,amongst other disorders.

Porphyria is also referred to sometimes as the ''werewolf disease'',along with hypertrichosis,the ''wolfman'' disease,that causes the body to be covered in hair like a beast.

Ergot fungus on bread in those times also caused people to hallucinate all sorts of wild things,and the ingredients of many witch's brews and ointments were highly mind-altering.

So,I could see a bit of mindblowing on each side of the coin in the bloody accounts of the medieval lycanthrope,and on the part of the so-called civil authority.




Read a book called ''The Werewolf Delusion''.
It will give you some insights into the history of the kangaroo trials and use of spectral evidence in witchcraft trials.Read in particular the case of Peter Stumpf.
They gave him the real deluxe treatment.
Some of the people back then WERE nuts.


Your pal,

Eddie the Mangler. :)

[Xanderous_kyo]

:) Didn't the whole full-moon thing come up only when Hollywood started making films about werewolves,and needed a deus-ex-machina to transform their lycanthropes?
As far as I'm able to recall,werewolves were able to ''shift'' millennia before Hollywood ever heard of them,when the legends were handed down orally,and in ancient manuscripts,and no real mention of the full moon as an agent in the metamorphosis.

My take on the tenuous connection between ''folkloric'' werewolves and Hollywood lycanthropes,comes from one small mention in an ancient Roman treatise on the subject.

It mentions merely that werewolf activity was more prolific and bloody during certain lunar cycles ,such as the full moon,and that they happened more frequently in the month of February.
{watch out,you Pisces out there....}
Just FYI,with no reproach to your contribution.

Your pal,
Eddie the Mangler. :)

well i looked up some books with friends (cant remeber the names) but the "oldest" or "original" lore states that shifting ccurred druing the night or times of intense anger

k thats my input

[Dog of Heaven]

The Beast of Gevaudan was not a pure-breed wolf or a werewolf. It was supposed to be a dog-wolf hybrid.