Sunday, 5 October 2025

D D Home was accused of being a werewolf?!











In a section dealing with nineteenth-century Spiritualism in Chasing the Dark: Encounters with the Supernatural (2025), Ben Machell makes the startling claim about the medium Daniel Dunglas Home that “among other things he faced accusations of being a werewolf” (p. 30).  He does not elaborate, and as there are no references in the book he does not indicate where he obtained this information.

However, the section detailing which books and online resources he found useful cites Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (2006) as a major source for his information on the early years of the Society for Psychical Research.  In it, Blum refers to “a proposal by an anthropologist that Home was actually a werewolf ‘with the power of acting on the minds of sensitive spectators’” (p. 46).

Like Machell, she does not name the source or the anthropologist, but she was referring to an 1872 article in Nature by Edward Burnett Tylor, ‘Ethnology and Spiritualism.  Tylor, who had sat with a number of mediums, including Home (see Stocking, 1971; Kalvig, 2017), was not someone likely to suggest that a human could literally transform into a werewolf.  So, what did he actually say?

‘Ethnology and Spiritualism’ was a tart reply to Alfred Russel Wallace’s review in The Academy (15 February 1872) of Tylor’s two-volume Primitive Culture (1871).  Wallace had taken issue with Tylor’s discussion of werewolves.  In Primitive Culture, Tylor argued that what we would call paranormal beliefs – such as magic, witchcraft, animism, sorcery and mediumship – were not genuine supernatural events but misinterpretations of natural experiences.  He addressed the belief that humans could transform into creatures such as werewolves and suggested two explanations: it was consistent with notions of the transmigration of souls; alternatively, it was a delusion, individuals erroneously believing they had transformed into one:

“It may be noticed, however, that such a notion [i.e. of werewolves] is quite consistent with the animistic theory that a man's soul may go out of his body and enter that of a beast or bird, and also with the opinion that men may be transformed into animals; both these ideas having an important place in the belief of mankind, from savagery onward. The doctrine of werewolves is substantially that of a temporary metempsychosis or metamorphosis. Now it really occurs that, in various forms of mental disease, patients prowl shyly, long to bite and destroy mankind, and even fancy themselves transformed into wild beasts. Belief in the possibility of such transformation may have been the very suggesting cause which led the patient to imagine it taking place in his own person.” (Primitive Culture, vol. 1, p. 279)

Among other criticisms of the book, Wallace’s review argued that Tylor had overlooked the possibility of mesmerism, with mesmerists implanting the idea in susceptible individuals’ minds that they had seen werewolves.  Wallace wrote in The Academy:

“We find at times great looseness of statement when Mr. Tylor attempts to account off-hand for superstitions … A recognition of the now well-established phenomena of mesmerism would have enabled Mr. Tylor to give a far more rational explanation of were-wolves and analogous beliefs than that which he offers us. Were-wolves were probably men who had exceptional power of acting upon certain sensitive individuals, and could make them, when so acted upon, believe they saw what the mesmeriser pleased; and who used this power for bad purposes. This will explain most of the alleged facts without resorting to the short and easy method of rejecting them as the results of mere morbid imagination and gross credulity.” (p. 70)

In his reply, perhaps stung by the charge that his method was “short and easy” and insufficiently rational, Tylor dismissed Wallace’s suggestion as inadequate to meet his twin explanations, though he added that Wallace had helpfully addressed an aspect not dealt with in the book, in which Wallace was “possibly on the track of explaining much of the power belonging to sorcerers, savage and other.”  Tylor added that he had never disputed the role of mesmerism in medical practice; thus, he was not dismissing the reality of mesmerism per se.  He continued:

“Now, without committing myself to Mr. Wallace's idea, beyond saying that it is plausible and worth pursuing, I proceed to apply it somewhat farther. Granting that a were-wolf, in virtue of being a person capable of exerting mesmeric influence, can delude people, and even assemblies of people, into fancying that they perceive monstrous unrealities, the question arises, Was any one with this were-wolf-faculty present in the room when Mrs. Guppy made her celebrated aerostatic entrance? Is Mr. D. D. Home a were-wolf? Is a professional ‘medium’ usually or ever a person who has the power of acting on the minds of sensitive spectators, so as to make them believe they see what he pleases?”

Further on, he fairly jeers at Wallace’s contention:

“Mr. Wallace, as the most eminent scientific man who has taken up what are known as modern ‘spiritualistic doctrines,’ no doubt has the ear of all who hold these doctrines. I think it may bring about investigations leading to valuable results if Mr. Wallace will inform spiritualists with the weight of his authority that he believes in the existence of a class of men who, in his words, have exceptional power of acting upon certain sensitive individuals, and can make them, when so acted upon, believe they see what the mesmeriser pleases, and who use this power for bad purposes.”

Where in this dispute about werewolves did Home come in, not to mention Mrs Guppy’s famous “aerial transit”?  Wallace wanted mesmerism to be taken seriously when explaining extraordinary phenomena such as werewolves, crediting it with extensive capabilities.  Tylor was not describing the werewolf as someone undergoing a literal transformation, but rather as someone possessing the ability to exercise a massive mesmeric influence of the kind Wallace had indicated.  Could it, Tylor asked, be applied to the dramatic accounts of mediums like Home and Mrs Guppy to explain their alleged achievements?  Given he chose to publish his response in Nature, he would have been confident of his readers’ sceptical assessment of the proposition.

Tylor pushed Wallace’s approach to the point of absurdity: if one accepted the idea that mesmerism could account for extreme tales of werewolves, by the same logic one could treat the remarkable modern stories told about Home and Mrs. Guppy in the same way.   Obviously, he wasn’t accusing Home of being a werewolf, he was posing a rhetorical question and expecting the answer to be negative.  This would have included Wallace’s, as someone who considered mediums to be genuinely communicating with spirits, not making sensitive individuals believe they saw what the medium, or someone else present, pleased.  In Tylor’s view, Home could not possess the degree of mesmeric power necessary to account for the werewolf, therefore the explanation had to be found elsewhere.

Tylor’s Nature response defended his interpretation of werewolf beliefs having developed from ideas about soul-body transformations and delusions due to mental illness.  His analysis was based on individual psychology and cultural traditions that reflected a pre-scientific attempt to understand the world, rather than on mesmerism’s insufficient power to explain the phenomenon.  If mesmerism could not explain physical mediumship, it could not explain the werewolf.

If Tylor thought this was the end of the matter, he was mistaken, because Wallace replied in the 7 March 1872 issue of Nature (pp. 363-4).  He disputed the association of mesmerism and mediumship, distinguishing them in two respects.  Firstly, the person in a mesmeric trance was completely unaware of the physical surroundings and did not doubt the suggestions made by the mesmerist.  Unlike the “mesmerised patient,” however, “the assistants at the séances of Mr. Home or Mrs. Guppy are not in this state … they do not lose memory of the immediately preceding events; they criticise, they examine, they take notes, they suggest tests – none of which the mesmerised patient ever does.”  Secondly, the mesmerist could influence “certain sensitive individuals” (not “assemblies”), and these were few in number; but there was no such limit to those who could witness mediumistic phenomena: “The visitors to Mr. Home or Mrs. Guppy all see whatever occurs of a physical nature, as the records of hundreds of sittings demonstrate.”

The inference could be drawn that it was illegitimate to suggest, as Tylor had, that for mesmerism to account for the werewolf, it should be used as an explanation for the reported achievements of Home and Mrs Guppy, and that if it was not suitable in one case, the other could be dismissed.  Wallace could still argue that mesmerism explained the werewolf without having to concede that it had to account for the events reported to have occurred in the presence of Home and Mrs Guppy.

For some reason, Blum misunderstood what Tylor was saying when he referred to Home, and Machell followed suit without checking the original articles (which would have been easy to do), despite the assertion being bizarre.  Machell relied heavily on secondary sources and perhaps placed too much reliance on Blum for the nineteenth-century background, which led him to reproduce her error.  Home was credited with some remarkable feats, but was not accused of being a werewolf.

 

References

Blum, D. (2006) Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death. New York: Penguin Press.

Kalvig, A. (2017) ‘“Necromancy Is a Religion”: Tylor’s Discussion of Spiritualism in Primitive Culture and in His Diary’, in Tremlett, P-F., Harvey, G. and Sutherland, L.T. (eds.) Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion and Culture. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 49–64.

Machell, B. (2025) Chasing the Dark: Encounters with the Supernatural. London: Abacus Books.

Stocking, G.W. (1971) ‘Animism in Theory and Practice: E. B. Tylor’s Unpublished “Notes on Spiritualism”’, Man, 6(1), pp. 88–104.

Tylor, E.B. (1871) Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. 2 vols. London: John Murray.

Tylor, E.B. (1872) ‘Ethnology and Spiritualism’, Nature, 5(116), pp. 242–244.

Wallace, A.R. (1872) ‘[Review of Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, by Edward Burnett Tylor]’, The Academy, 15 February, pp. 69–70.

Wallace, A.R. (1872) ‘Ethnology and Spiritualism’, Nature, 5(121), pp. 363–364.