Did Augustine believe in werewolves? Oddly enough, that is not a silly question imposed on an ancient theologian by people who have watched too many horror movies. Augustine actually discusses stories of men becoming wolves in The City of God, and he spends enough time on the problem to propose an explanation for what people claimed to have seen. His answer, however, is considerably more complicated than either “of course werewolves are real” or “ancient people believed ridiculous things.”
Hear our conversation on the Church Fathers and monsters.
Augustine explicitly rejects the literal transformation of a human body into a wolf. A man does not cease to have a human body while some new lupine substance replaces it, and demons do not possess the creative power necessary to accomplish such a transformation. Yet Augustine is not willing to conclude that every report behind the stories must therefore be invented. Some experiences, he argues, might involve demonic manipulation of perception and what he calls the human phantasticum, while the actual human body remains physically unchanged.
So Augustine’s werewolves are not really werewolves, at least not in the ordinary meaning of the word. There are no full moons, silver bullets, or hairy neighbors developing unfortunate dietary habits. But there may, in Augustine’s view, be something behind some reports of human beings appearing in animal form, and that possibility belongs to his much larger theology of demons, bodies, perception, and the limits of created power.
Augustine, Werewolves, and the Arcadian Story
The discussion occurs in City of God XVIII.17–18, where Augustine is working his way through pagan histories and traditions while comparing the history of the earthly city with the City of God. Chapter 17 turns to stories reported by the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro. Among them is an old Arcadian tradition about human beings becoming wolves.
This is not quite the werewolf story familiar from modern folklore. The transformation is connected with Arcadia, sacrifice, Zeus Lycaeus, ritual boundaries, and the prohibition against eating human flesh. Daniel Ogden’s The Werewolf in the Ancient World places these stories within a much larger ancient world of witches, ghosts, demons, magical transformations, and traditions involving persons appearing outside the ordinary activity of their bodies.
Augustine gives Varro’s story at enough length that there is no question about what sort of transformation is being alleged. He is not vaguely alluding to people behaving like wolves or adopting wolf imagery. This is what Augustine wrote:
To support this, Varro recalls other things no less incredible. He tells of the famous sorceress Circe, who changed the companions of Ulysses into beasts, and of certain Arcadians who were chosen by lot, swam across a particular pool, and there were changed into wolves, living with similar wild beasts in the wilderness of that region. If they did not eat human flesh, then after nine years they swam back across the same pool and were restored as men. He even names a certain Demaenetus, who tasted the sacrifice in which the Arcadians customarily offered a boy to their god Lycaeus, was changed into a wolf, and in the tenth year was restored to his own form.
Augustine then reports that Demaenetus supposedly became a boxer and won an Olympic contest after returning to human form. Varro also connected the traditions with the title Lycaeus, associating it with the Greek word for wolf, lykos. Whatever we make of the historical details behind these traditions, Augustine understood perfectly well what Varro was claiming: according to the story, a real human being physically became a wolf and later became a human being again.
Augustine Does Not Simply Dismiss the Stories
At this point it would be easy to turn Augustine into an early skeptic who tells his readers that the whole thing is nonsense. He does not do that. In fact, the opening of chapter 18 makes the question considerably stranger.
Augustine says that while he was in Italy he heard reports about women who supposedly practiced magical arts at inns. According to the stories, they would give travelers something in cheese that caused them to become beasts of burden, carry loads, and later return to human form. He immediately associates the story with Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, in which Lucius becomes an ass while retaining a rational human mind.
Augustine’s first judgment is restrained. These accounts, he says, are either false or so unusual that there is good reason not to believe them. That qualification needs to remain in the discussion, because Augustine plainly regards skepticism as reasonable rather than impious.
But he does not stop there. Augustine had heard extraordinary stories from people whom he did not regard as obvious liars, and he was unwilling to solve every difficult report merely by accusing the witnesses of fabrication. The question therefore becomes narrower: if something unusual really did happen, what sort of thing could have happened?
Testimony and interpretation are not the same thing. A person may sincerely report an experience without correctly explaining what produced it. A man might sincerely believe that he saw another man become a wolf while the conclusion that human substance literally became wolf substance still does not follow from what he saw.
What Demons Cannot Do
Augustine begins his answer by setting a theological boundary. God is Creator, while demons are creatures. No amount of malice, intelligence, antiquity, or spiritual power turns a creature into a second creator.
The crucial claim appears in City of God XVIII.18. Augustine allows a great deal more demonic activity than most modern readers probably would, but he draws the line at the creation or genuine alteration of natures. Here is what Augustine wrote:
These things are either false or so unusual that they are rightly disbelieved. Yet we must firmly believe that Almighty God can do whatever he wills, whether in judgment or in mercy, and that demons can accomplish nothing by their natural power unless God permits it. Demons do not create natures, even if they do something of the sort now under discussion. Rather, they alter things only with respect to appearance, so that what the true God created seems to be what it is not. Therefore I cannot believe that either the mind, or even the body, can truly be changed by demonic art or power into the members and features of a beast.
That passage settles the central question. Augustine does not believe demonic power can literally turn a human body into a wolf. He is remarkably explicit about what he rejects.
His reason is not that supernatural events are impossible. Augustine’s supernaturalism is governed by a doctrine of creation, and that doctrine forces him to distinguish divine power from demonic power. Demons may act upon creation within limits, but they cannot create a new nature or simply rewrite something God has made.
This distinction fits Augustine’s broader treatment of demons elsewhere in The City of God. In Books VIII and IX he engages Platonist accounts of demons as rational beings associated with the air and possessing abilities beyond ordinary human capacities. He refuses, however, to turn unusual capacities into divinity, moral superiority, or a reason for worship.
Fresh Ground Theology has dealt with the biblical side of those categories in What Does the Bible Teach About Demons and the Kingdom of God? and Can Demons Oppress Christians? What the Bible Actually Shows. Augustine is working with a distinctly late-antique philosophical vocabulary, but the governing distinction is recognizable. Demons may be real, dangerous, intelligent, and powerful without becoming rival creators.
Then What Did People See?
This is where Augustine becomes genuinely strange to modern readers. Having denied literal bodily transformation, he proposes that the human phantasticum can appear under another form while the person’s actual body remains somewhere else. The term is difficult to reproduce neatly in English, since Augustine is describing the image-forming dimension of human consciousness associated with dreams, mental images, and representations of things not immediately present to the senses.
In Augustine’s proposed scenario, the body may lie alive while its ordinary senses are overwhelmed or suspended. Meanwhile, the person’s phantasticum somehow assumes an apparent bodily form that can be perceived elsewhere. Augustine does not claim to understand the mechanism, and his uncertainty here is worth retaining rather than smoothing over.
He even tries to account for reports in which the supposedly transformed animal performed physical labor. Suppose someone claimed that an apparent donkey had carried real sacks of grain from one place to another. Augustine’s answer is that demons might carry the actual burdens while simultaneously producing the deceptive appearance of the animal, joining a real physical event to a false perception of who or what performed it.
The distinction is important. Someone may have seen an animal, actual goods may have been transported, and the supposedly transformed person may later remember participating in the event. None of those observations by itself establishes that human flesh literally became animal flesh.
Augustine illustrates the possibility with a story concerning the father of a man named Praestantius. The father supposedly ate enchanted food, fell into an unusually deep sleep, and afterward remembered being a pack animal carrying provisions with other beasts. Augustine reports the story because the man’s remembered experience allegedly corresponded to events that occurred while his ordinary body remained asleep.
Again, Augustine does not conclude that the man’s soul literally entered an animal body. He does not conclude that the sleeping human body transformed, walked away, carried the provisions, and later returned. He is trying to account for a reported correspondence between an internal experience and an external event without granting an actual metamorphosis of human nature.
Modern readers do not have to accept Augustine’s explanation in order to see the logic of the argument. He is trying to hold together three judgments: the witnesses are not necessarily lying, human beings do not literally become animals through demonic power, and demonic deception may be more complicated than a private hallucination. That is a much narrower claim than saying simply that Augustine believed in werewolves.
Augustine’s Wider Demonology Explains His Answer
The werewolf discussion makes more sense once it is placed inside Augustine’s larger demonology. He does not imagine demons as limitless supernatural beings capable of doing whatever a story requires. Their powers remain creaturely powers, subordinate to divine providence and constrained by the created order.
In City of God VIII, Augustine works extensively with Apuleius’s description of demons as rational beings associated with the air. He is willing to discuss unusual capacities connected with their mode of existence, but he refuses the conclusion that superior sensory or physical abilities make them spiritually superior to human beings. Creatures can excel human beings in particular capacities without becoming worthy of worship.
Gregory D. Wiebe’s Fallen Angels in the Theology of St Augustine is useful here because it traces Augustine’s developing account of fallen angels, demonic embodiment, appearances, and the limits of demonic activity. Augustine inherits older philosophical language about demons and bodies but places those ideas inside a Christian doctrine of creation and providence. The result is a demonology in which demons can possess capacities unavailable to ordinary human beings without possessing divine creative power.
That distinction controls the werewolf passage. Augustine is certain about what he thinks demons cannot do even when he admits that he does not know exactly how an extraordinary appearance might be produced. He is willing to leave the mechanism uncertain rather than fill the gap with a power that his theology will not permit demons to possess.
The same pattern appears in Augustine’s other discussions of demons. He can take seriously claims about unusual demonic knowledge or activity without treating that knowledge as omniscience or that activity as divine power. The category “supernatural,” as we commonly use it, does not erase Augustine’s distinctions between Creator and creature.
Illusion Does Not Mean “Nothing Happened”
One modern category can easily distort Augustine’s position: illusion. If we say that Augustine thought werewolves were illusions, a modern reader may hear that people merely imagined something that was not there. Augustine’s account is more complicated than that.
For Augustine, demonic deception may involve the senses, dreams, mental images, external appearances, and even physical events arranged in such a way that a false conclusion becomes persuasive. The appearance is false with respect to what the observer thinks is present, but every part of the event does not therefore have to be imaginary. Something may really happen while the witness remains wrong about what kind of thing happened.
This is why Augustine’s position should not simply be reduced to hallucination. Hallucination is a modern psychological category, while Augustine proposes the possible activity of an intelligent external agent. The discrepancy between reality and appearance may itself have an external cause.
His reasoning also places a useful limit on what testimony can establish. If someone says, “I saw a man become a wolf,” Augustine can allow that the person may sincerely have seen something extraordinary while rejecting the witness’s interpretation of the event. The report of the appearance and the claim about what physically happened are separate claims.
Augustine is therefore not arguing that every ancient werewolf story contains a demonic event underneath it. Some stories may simply be false, and he says so without hesitation. His question is whether Christian theology has room for unusual testimony without granting demons the ability to overturn the nature of things created by God.
So, Did Augustine Believe in Werewolves?
If by werewolf we mean a human being whose actual flesh and bones physically transform into the body of a wolf, Augustine’s answer is no. He explicitly says that he cannot believe a human body can truly be converted into animal members and features through demonic power. There is very little ambiguity on that point.
If by werewolf we mean a sincere report in which a person appears to become a wolf, experiences himself as an animal, or is perceived by others in animal form, Augustine is less dismissive. Such stories may simply be false, and Augustine leaves that possibility open from the beginning. But if some of them rest on genuine experiences, he thinks demonic manipulation of appearances and the phantasticum offers one possible explanation.
The most accurate answer, then, is not that Augustine believed in werewolves. He believed that some reports of apparent animal transformation might preserve real experiences of demonic deception while denying the one thing that ordinarily defines a werewolf story: an actual human being physically becoming a wolf. His position preserves the extraordinary report only by rejecting the explanation supplied by the folklore.
Ogden’s work helps place Augustine inside the wider history of ancient transformation stories. Ancient werewolf traditions interacted with stories about witches, ghosts, demons, dreams, magical transformation, and persons who appeared in forms different from the bodies that remained behind. Augustine inherited that world of stories but subjected it to a Christian account of creation and demonic power rather than simply accepting its assumptions.
That move also helps explain why City of God XVIII.18 became important in later Christian discussions of metamorphosis. The possibility of deception remained open, while the power to change one created nature into another was sharply restricted. Later Christian writers could therefore take reports of apparent transformations seriously without granting demons the ability to recreate human nature.
Augustine Was More Interested in Christ Than in Werewolves
There is an easy way to miss Augustine’s purpose by becoming fascinated with the mechanics of his explanation. He is not writing The City of God in order to construct a catalogue of paranormal phenomena. His larger concern is where power belongs, what demons are, and why no apparent demonic wonder gives human beings reason to worship them.
That point runs through his wider treatment of pagan religion. Demons may know things human beings do not know, move in ways human beings cannot move, deceive the senses, and produce effects that seem astonishing. None of those capacities changes what they are.
They remain creatures. Whatever they accomplish occurs within a world they did not create and under a God whose authority they cannot escape. Augustine’s answer to the werewolf problem therefore reinforces the same theological architecture that governs his larger demonology.
Fresh Ground Theology recently examined that broader early-Christian confidence in Christ’s authority over hostile spiritual powers in Holy Oil in the Early Church: Healing, Exorcism, and the Fight Against Demons. Augustine belongs to the same Christian world, although his account of perception and the phantasticum has its own philosophical vocabulary. The unseen world is real for him, but it is neither autonomous nor ultimate.
The old Arcadian stories said that human beings became wolves. Augustine’s response is more carefully bounded: perhaps some stories are false, perhaps some witnesses encountered something extraordinary, and perhaps demonic deception accounts for at least some apparent transformations. What he will not allow is the conclusion that demons can remake human nature.
So yes, Augustine really wrote about what we would call werewolves. He took the stories seriously enough to ask what sort of reality, if any, might lie underneath them, while refusing to give demons creative powers that Christian theology reserved for God. His answer is strange enough to be interesting, skeptical enough to resist the folklore, and supernatural enough that nobody is likely to mistake Augustine for a modern rationalist.
Primary Sources and Further Reading
The principal primary text is Augustine, The City of God XVIII.17–18. A public-domain English text of Book XVIII can be read through New Advent, including the chapters in which Augustine reports the Arcadian wolf traditions and then considers what Christians should believe about apparent transformations. Those two chapters should be read together, since chapter 17 supplies the stories while chapter 18 supplies Augustine’s theological judgment.
For the wider ancient context, Daniel Ogden’s The Werewolf in the Ancient World collects and analyzes Greek and Roman werewolf traditions and places them alongside other ancient stories of magic, transformation, projected selves, ghosts, and demons. Ogden is especially useful for seeing that Augustine was entering an existing ancient debate rather than inventing an isolated curiosity. His historical reconstruction should be distinguished from Augustine’s own theological explanation, but the comparison clarifies the kind of material Augustine inherited.
For Augustine’s demonology, Gregory D. Wiebe’s Fallen Angels in the Theology of St Augustine provides a sustained study of fallen angels, demonic bodies, appearances, and Augustine’s developing account of demonic activity. Wiebe helps locate City of God XVIII.18 within Augustine’s larger effort to define what demons are capable of doing and, equally important, what they are not capable of doing. That distinction is ultimately what determines Augustine’s answer to the werewolf question.
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