Thiess of Kaltenbrun: The Livonian Werewolf Who Claimed to Fight the Devil and Meant It as a Defence

In 1692 in Livonia, the region that is now Latvia and Estonia, an old man named Thiess was brought before a court on a charge of idolatry. He was not accused of being a werewolf. The werewolf part came out during the trial when Thiess, unprompted and apparently unconcerned about the implications, explained that he was one, had been one for years, and that his werewolfism was a service to God rather than a pact with the devil.

The court was not prepared for this. Every framework they had for understanding werewolves — the diabolical pact, the devil’s belt, the predation on the innocent — Thiess contradicted point by point. He said the werewolves of Livonia went to hell three times a year to fight the devil and his servants and recover the grain, livestock, and prosperity they had stolen from the land. The werewolves were the hounds of God. They were on the right side.

The case is one of the most discussed in the academic history of werewolf belief because it suggests the existence of a popular religious tradition in which werewolves were understood as benevolent figures whose supernatural abilities served the community rather than threatened it.

The Trial

Thiess was around eighty years old at the time of the trial and showed no particular anxiety about discussing his activities. He had been a werewolf, he said, but had given it up some years previously. He described going to hell with the other werewolves on the nights of St Lucy, Pentecost, and St John, transforming into wolves, and fighting the devil’s servants with iron whips. The witches and sorcerers who worked for the devil tried to steal the harvest from the land above, and the werewolves fought them to get it back. The prosperity of Livonia’s harvests, Thiess said, depended on these fights. When the werewolves lost, the crops failed.

He had a broken nose, which he explained had been caused by a local sorcerer named Skeistan, who had hit him with a broomstick wrapped with a horse’s tail during one of these underground battles. Skeistan had apparently died since and gone to hell himself, where he continued to work against the werewolves. Thiess was matter-of-fact about all of this.

The court tried repeatedly to get Thiess to admit that what he described was diabolical. He refused every time. He was not in league with the devil. He was fighting the devil. The distinction was important to him and he maintained it throughout a long and somewhat baffled interrogation.

What Thiess Believed

The historian Carlo Ginzburg, in his influential study Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, placed Thiess in the context of a broader pattern of European folk belief in benevolent shamanistic figures who fought supernatural battles on behalf of their communities. The Benandanti of Friuli in northern Italy described very similar activities: going out in spirit form, fighting witches, protecting the harvest. The Scottish Cunning Folk sometimes described comparable protective activities.

Ginzburg’s argument is that Thiess was not an isolated eccentric but a representative of a genuine folk religious tradition, pre-Christian in origin, that had survived in Livonia and that understood certain gifted individuals as protectors of the community who engaged with the supernatural world on the community’s behalf. The werewolf form in this tradition was not a mark of damnation but a tool, the animal form appropriate for the battle being fought.

Whether this interpretation is fully correct is debated, but the Thiess case at minimum demonstrates that werewolf belief in early modern Europe was not as uniform as the trial records of Peter Stumpp and Gilles Garnier suggest. There were traditions in which the werewolf was the hero rather than the monster.

The Verdict

The court, unable to fit Thiess into any of its standard categories, sentenced him to ten lashes and banishment for idolatry. Not for werewolfism. Not for a diabolical pact. For idolatry, the closest charge available for a man who described a religious practice the court did not recognise as Christian but could not quite classify as diabolical given that he had spent the whole trial insisting he was fighting the devil.

It was, by the standards of the period and the charges that werewolves typically faced, a remarkably light sentence. Thiess walked away from a werewolf trial in 1692 with ten lashes and an order to leave the area. He had argued his case successfully enough that the court could not bring itself to execute him for what he had described doing.

For more on the werewolf tradition, the Peter Stumpp article covers the most infamous werewolf trial, where the outcome was considerably less lenient. The Jean Grenier article covers the French case where a court similarly struggled with what category the accused belonged to. The Werewolf Trials of Europe article covers the full history of werewolf prosecution.