Thiess of Kaltenbrun

A German woodcut of a werewolf from 1722. Thiess claimed to be a werewolf, although he asserted that in doing so he served God rather than the Devil, in contrast to common werewolf beliefs of the time.

Thiess of Kaltenbrunn (Kniedini), also spelled Thies, and commonly referred to as the Livonian werewolf, was a Livonian man who was put on trial for heresy in Jürgensburg, Swedish Livonia, in 1692. At the time in his eighties, Thiess openly proclaimed himself to be a werewolf (wahrwolff), claiming that he ventured into Hell with other werewolves in order to do battle with the Devil and his witches. Although claiming that as a werewolf he was a "hound of God", the judges deemed him guilty of trying to turn people away from Christianity, and he was sentenced to be both flogged and banished for life. According to Thiess' account, he and the other werewolves transformed on three nights a year, and then traveled down to Hell. Once there, they fought with the Devil and his witches in order to rescue the grain and livestock which the witches had stolen from the Earth.

Various historians have turned their attention towards the case of Thiess, interpreting his werewolf beliefs in a variety of different ways. In his book The Night Battles (1966), the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg compared Thiess' practices to those of the benandanti of northeastern Italy, and argued that they represented a survival of pre-Christian shamanic beliefs. Ginzburg's ideas were later critiqued by the Dutch historian Willem de Blécourt. In 2024, the Latvian Radio Choir, led by conductor Kaspars Putniņš, premiered a concert-play centred on Thiess' life and trial.

Thiess' trial

Origins Swedish Livonia in the 17th century, at the time of Thiess' trial. In 1691, the judges of Jürgensburg, a town in Swedish Livonia, brought before them an octogenarian known as Thiess of Kaltenbrun, believing him to be a witness in a case regarding a church robbery. They were aware of the fact that local people considered him to be a werewolf who had consorted with the Devil, but they initially had little interest in such allegations, which were unrelated to the case at hand. Nonetheless, although it had no bearing on the case, Thiess freely admitted to the judges that he considered he had once been a werewolf, but claimed to have given it up ten years previously.

Thiess told the judges of how ten years previously, in 1681, he had also appeared in court, when he had accused a farmer from Lemburg of breaking his nose. According to the story that he had then told, he had travelled down to Hell as a wolf, where the farmer, who was a practicing Satanic witch, had beat him on the nose with a broomstick decorated with horses' tails. At the time, the judges refused to believe his story and laughed him out of court, but one of the judges did verify that his nose had indeed been broken.

A depiction of a werewolf devouring children, by the German artist Lucas Cranach der Ältere, 1512.

Thiess also told the judges of how he had first become a werewolf, explaining that he had once been a beggar, and that one day "a rascal" had drunk a toast to him, thereby giving him the ability to transform into a wolf. He furthermore related that he could pass on his ability to someone else by toasting them, breathing into the jug three times and proclaiming "you will become like me." If the other individual then took the jug, they would become a werewolf, but Thiess claimed that he was yet to find anyone ready to take over the role of lycanthrope from him.

The judges of Jürgensburg were confused, asking Thiess why the werewolves traveled to Hell if they hated the Devil. He responded by telling them that he and his brethren had to go on their journey in order to bring back the livestock, grains and fruits of the Earth which had been stolen by the witches. If they failed in their task, Thiess opined, then that year's harvest would be bad. For the judges, this blessing was seen as criminal because it encouraged clients to turn away from Christianity, and so they sentenced Thiess to be flogged and banished for life. and it did not appear in English-language overviews of European werewolf beliefs like Montague Summers' The Werewolf (1933). According to Dutch historian Willem de Blécourt, Thiess' case was first brought to the attention of English-speaking scholars by the German anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr (1943–) in his book Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization (1978, English translation 1985). Duerr briefly discussed the Livonian werewolf in a chapter of Dreamtime entitled "Wild Women and Werewolves" in which he dealt with various European folk traditions in which individuals broke social taboos and made mischief in public, arguing that they represented a battle between the forces of chaos and order.

Carlo Ginzburg The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg (1939–) discussed the case of the Livonian werewolf in his book The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1966, English translation 1983). The Night Battles was devoted primarily to a study of the benandanti folk tradition of early modern Friuli in northeastern Italy, in which local Friulians fell into trance states in which they believed that their spirits left their bodies to battle malevolent witches, in doing so protecting their crops from famine. Ginzburg believed that there were definite similarities between the benandanti and the case of Thiess, noting that both contained "battles waged by means of sticks and blows, enacted on certain nights to secure the fertility of fields, minutely and concretely described."

In Ginzburg's view both the benandanti tradition and Thiess's werewolf tradition represented surviving remnants of a shamanistic substratum that had survived Christianization.

In his 1992 paper on the life and work of Ginzburg, the historian John Martin of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas expressed his support for Ginzburg's hypothesis, claiming that Thiess' role was "almost identical" to that of the benandanti. In a similarly supportive vein, the Hungarian historian Éva Pócs noted the existence of "werewolf magicians" who were aligned to "European shamanistic magicians" in a paper on Hungarian táltos.

Other academics were more cautious than Ginzburg in directly equating the Livonian werewolf with shamanism. Dutch historian Willem de Blécourt noted that in Dreamtime, the German anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr had refrained from making an explicit link between shamans and werewolves, although he did acknowledge the similarities between Thiess and the benandanti.