Thies

Thies appears in a historical account of a werewolf community in what is now Latvia, where his testimony joins bodily transformation to seasonal obligation and communal ritual. At 80, he still identified as a werewolf; rather than treat the identity as a chosen disguise, the account emphasizes a power he had inherited and could not simply put aside.

Identity and Initiation

In a case dated to 1691, Thies, an old farmer, spoke at length about the customs of the werewolf community to which he belonged. He described its members’ transformation into wolves and the powers they believed they possessed when facing real or imagined enemies, attacking animals, or escaping dogs. The account presents him not merely as a solitary figure with a strange belief, but as a participant who could explain the community’s practices.

Thies said an older farmer had initiated him and given him a wolf pelt. The initiation established a connection that endured: after receiving the pelt, he had to become a wolf at particular times of year. The pelt thus marks both the beginning of his role and the transmission of a power that was not represented as wholly under his control.

Seasonal Transformation and Inheritance

The account singles out the summer and winter solstices as especially important occasions for Thies’s transformation. He could not choose whether to take on the power, nor could resistance free him from it. The narrative’s emphasis on compulsion makes his werewolf identity a condition imposed by seasonal recurrence as much as a capacity he possessed.

At 80, Thies intended to transfer this power to a younger man through a special initiation before he died. His story therefore has a prospective ending: the practice is represented not as ending with him, but as something that could be handed on. The passage does not say whether the initiation took place, leaving the intended succession distinct from a confirmed outcome.

Theft, Sacrifice, and Fertility

Thies also supplied a cultic interpretation of the community’s thefts. Stolen food and drink, along with animals torn apart, could be understood as offerings; the account says the sacrifice might be given voluntarily or involuntarily. In this framework, theft was not only an offense but a ritual exchange associated with fertility.

The book places this explanation alongside accounts of the Oskorei and the Perchten, whose raids and demands could likewise be connected with offerings and hopes for prosperity. It also notes a historical change in how such conduct was understood: as the ritual background faded from memory, communities could cease to regard disguised figures as beings associated with the dead or fertility and instead see them as trouble-makers. Thies’s testimony preserves the older explanatory logic, in which transgression and offering could belong to the same practice.