Genuine werewolves in the contemporary society are those who come to mental hospitals as patients and participate in ritual ceremonies of American Indians. Doctors call people of both sexes who imagine or feel they are werewolves ‘lycanthropes’. So, today the word ‘lycanthrope’ is a professional medical term indicating a pathological condition; and the word ‘werewolf’ is a word used in fiction, films and as a characteristic of criminals.
Werewolves and their terrible doings were known already in the time when Rome was being founded. People in Ancient Greece also feared the scary creature. But werewolves as well as vampires were particularly scary for people in Eastern Europe where the only mentioning of a werewolf made peasants turn white and look around numb with fear.
Unlike vampires that got out from their coffins to suck blood out of living people, werewolves do not belong to the other world. The werewolf is an absolutely earthly phenomenon. It is highly likely that the turning of humans into wolves was connected with some disease, and anyone could be affected with the disease. It was for sure that a werewolf bite would make a victim diseased. But nobody knew when and under what conditions the terrible werewolf symptoms could reveal themselves. And this fact explained the wild fear and mass executions in the Middle Ages when people suspected of being werewolves were burnt or executed with swords. When the mass fear sweepingly spread, people known as batty or those having something wolfish in their features could be immediately prosecuted as werewolves.
People suspected of lycanthropy found themselves in a really terrible situation. Such attacks as a rule entailed a huge range of moral and religious problems in the epoch when the church played a really important role in the everyday life of all people.
The tradition of that time was to start open legal proceedings with tortures against those declared werewolves, and then the latter were executed which was usually burning. It is not known exactly how many people were executed by hanging or burning on the charges of lycanthropy. However, ancient written evidence proves that the number was quite considerable indeed.
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