Silver bullets, full moons, and infectious bites would have baffled a 15th-century werewolf hunter. This deep dive strips away the cinematic polish to trace where the myth actually comes from, starting with Proto-Indo-European warrior bands whose young men wore wolf pelts as a rite of passage, and moving through the Greek myth of King Lycaon, Arcadian rituals recorded by Pliny and Ovid, and the Roman soldier in Petronius who strips, urinates in a circle around his clothes, and runs off as a wolf. In these early stories, clothing is the fragile anchor to civilization.

As Christianity spread, the church reframed shape-shifting as demonic illusion or divine punishment, though sympathetic tales like Marie de France's Bisclavret lingered. Between the 15th and 17th centuries the werewolf became a deadly accusation, culminating in cases like Peter ...