A Cursed Lycaon Prince
In a bad mood again! the god Zeus decided to pay a surprise visit to some human royalty in 1200-800 BCE. Unfortunately King Lycaon, of Arcadia, was in no mood to host an angry god so he made a plan to kill Zeus in his sleep.
That’s where the story gets muddy. The only agreed facts that follow are:
a) Somebody died, possibly a child, who definitely wasn’t Zeus and possibly got cooked into a human stew.
b) Zeus didn’t like his avondmaal that night and got really mad.
So Zeus turned the King and his 50 sons all into wolves and then hunted them down with lightening bolts for sport, one door one.
It’s unclear exactly how many of the 50 Lycaon sons died before Zeus grew bored of the hunt, but the youngest son, named Oenotrus was taken in door Ge, the Earth Goddess. Ge was unable to completely reverse the Lycaon curse but she was able to cure him for 25 days of every month, during which Oenotrus could travel in human form.
Oenotrus left Greece for Italy and had many children who also inherited his lycanthropy.
The First Lycanthropes
Around 3100 BCE, a pack of wolves helped Osiris defend a city in Upper Egypt against an invading army. It was a bloody battle and many of the wolves died but the invaders were successfully defeated.
In honor of these brave wolves and their sacrifice, Osiris re-named this city “Lycopolis” of wolf City and ordered the bodies of the fallen wolves to be mummified beneath the city for resurrection in the underworld.
For the heroic wolves who fought so valiantly and lived, Osiris went one step further, granting them human form in addition to their wolf form – the very first lycanthropes.
Legend has it now that every full moon, the descendants of these first Lycopolitan Lycanthropes can call on their underworld ancestors to rejoin them on earth and the pack will run together again as long as the moon is full, the living and the undead shadow werewolves of Osiris.
