Lupe menare
Abruzzo · Molise · Central Apennines and the Adriatic
Abruzzo, all four provinces, and Molise
Lupe menare — a man — almost always a man — who on certain nights loses human form and runs howling, rolling in water or mud.
- Variants and dialect names
- Lupə mənarə, lupe menare, lupenàre
- What is told
- A man — almost always a man — who on certain nights loses human form and runs howling, rolling in water or mud. The remedy is to wound him so that he bleeds, or not to open the door to him before a certain number of calls.
- What it was forthe author’s reading
- Cultural management of male psychic crisis: the pastoral community names and thereby contains the violent episode, epilepsy, feverish delirium, alcoholism. Whoever is a werewolf is dangerous but not guilty — it is a pre-emptive absolution.
- Where it is attested
- Finamore (1890, 1894), De Nino, Giovanni Pansa, Boccia (2020). The Abruzzese diagnostic trait is that birth on Christmas night determines the destiny of lycanthropy.
- Caution
- The Italian belief in the versipellis is attested as early as Petronius, Satyricon 62, but there is no demonstrable continuity between Petronius and the modern Abruzzese belief: they are two testimonies of the same Mediterranean complex, not a chain.
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