As we learn from historic sources, the peoples living adjacent to the Slavs believed that their neighbours occasionally turn into wolves. People who take on animal form are in Slavic folklore called “vukodlaci”, werewolves, who are sometimes equated with vampires. There are two ways in which a man can turn into a werewolf. One is connected to a particular kind of magical practice similar to astral projection, when the soul leaves a man’s body and enters into the body of an animal; on the other hand, the other way is connected to the ancestor cult, especially the Serbian ancestor cult. We have already mentioned the Ukrainian Prince Višeslav who turns into a wolf at night and with his “wolf sprint” runs the Moon’s path faster than the Moon. Višeslav was clearly gifted with the ability to send his soul into the body of a wolf, which is typical of shamans from all over the world. Slavic fairy tales are full of descriptions of similar occurrences and there are heroes who turn into snakes, princesses who turn into frogs &c. There’s a belief in Serbian folklore that there are people who are born with extraordinary abilities – they are know as alovit, zmajevi ljudi or zduhače. At night, a person with these abilities would turn into a dragon, spirit of the air – zduh, or animals, and in those forms protect their village, attack a neighbouring one, or perform other magical acts.
The belief in werewolves is present with all the Slavic peoples. The Bulgarians call this entity v’lkolak’ (влъколакъ), the Russians volkodlak (волкодлак), the Czechs vlkodlak, the Poles wilkolak, and the Serbs and Croats vukodlak. This noun is made up of two words: namely, wolf and hair, denoting thus a man in wolf skin, i.e. a wolf’s form. A similar etymology can be found in the Nordic word ulfsark, where the noun ulf means wolf, and sark skin or a shirt. These nouns imply a man of similar traits – a man who’s by power of will turned himself into an animal, either in life or, as is the case with Serbs, after death; a man who has become possessed by his animal nature. Vukodlak and ulfsark are clearly in some way connected to the lupine totem, meaning that unlike many others, these people have a very strong blood or spiritual connexion with their animal ancestor. Because both the Slavic and the Nordic folklores mention people morphing into other animals; those people are the Slavic zduhači or aloviti mentioned above, just like Nordic berserkers, men who are partially transformed into bears.
In the Serbian folklore, the werewolf is connected to the cult of the ancestors, that is the belief that a dead relative will turn into a bloodthirsty wolf-like creature after death. This creature is also called a vampire, and its main quality is the unquenchable thirst for blood. Why did the Serbs believe that the dead man will take on the form of a wolf in particular, and not another animal? Because a long time ago, the chief God of the Serbs was Dažbog, God of the Sun and the Underworld, whose animal form was a wolf. It is then perfectly natural that Dažbog, ruler of the dead, will take under his power a man who belonged to his lupine kind, i.e. that the Serb animal ancestor will take under his wing his deceased ancestor. One must bear in mind that a vampire has not completely entered the world of the dead, and that he’s in a way still living, and that he still has his bodily manifestation. And it is that very materialization that has the characteristics of both worlds; the human, because the werewolf is still half man, and the underworld, because that man has the attributes of a chthonic animal. Therefore, the werewolf is a being residing on the border of the two worlds. Serbs believe that a man will become a werewolf if a bird flies over his tomb, or a fowl crosses it. After forty days the man “becomes a vampire” and begins strangling people in their homes and drinking their blood. From all that blood the vampire or werewolf becomes quite bloated and red; there’s even a phrase “red as a vampire”. Beside that, the vampire goes to his widow and has relations with her, the result of this, it’s believed, is a boneless child. To discover whether one of the recently buried men has become a werewolf, the peasants bring a spotless foal and lead it from grave to grave. When the foal stops at a werewolf’s grave, the peasants take a wooden stake (made from the hawthorn shrub) and repeatedly stab the corpse. Here we can again notice some common places from Slavic mythology and folklore. The foal has always been used in divinations, given that it was a widely spread belief in the old Europe that horses, particularly white ones, or in any way “clean” (spotless), are a link between the human and the spirits worlds. The hawthorn is a plant that’s always been considered as having protecting powers; other plants used for protection were garlic, the birch and the service (sorbus) tree. Apart from the lupine characteristics, the vampire is depicted as a man carrying on his back his death-shroud, and beside graveyards and his home, he’d frequent watermills, granaries and other shaded spots. An unbaptized child buried in his mother’s womb can also become a werewolf. After seven years it grows into a wolf, however somewhat more cruel and ferocious. In Bulgaria it was believed that a man buried in the clothes made from wool that was spun on Mratinci, the wolf holiday, becomes a werewolf after death. Because of that Bulgarian widows were very careful never to dress their dead husbands in clothes made from such wool. The ancestors among Serbs and Russians don’t turn solely into wolves. They can become snakes, cocks and other fowl, which tells us that the wolf is not the only chthonic animal in Slavic folklore. As in the case of a man’s projection into an animal, laws whose nature has yet to be explained rule here, laws that probably have their foundation in the frail or strong connexion between man and his animal ancestor, as well as the nature of man himself, which is certainly to some degree an animal nature.
    

Vanadis

                                                            translation: Uroš Rajčević