There are plenty of movies about “werewolves”, and at least one about a “wererabbit.” You might think that the “were” part has to do with something like “you were a human but now you’re a [fill in the blank].” But that’s not it at all. “Were” is a very old word (predating Old English) meaning “man.”
The word goes back so far that it’s even found in ancient Sanskrit, so it’s generally thought to come from “proto-Indo-European,” the theoretical language that came before every language we know about from India to Europe. The earliest version ever found in print is from the Laws Ælfred, sometime before the year 900.
One of the interesting things about a word this old is where you can find versions of it. In the case of “were,” you can find it in Lithuanian, Gothic, Icelandic, Gaelic, Latin, Old Norse, and Old Frisian, as well as Sanskrit. Another interesting thing to trace is other derivations of the word.
Besides “werewolf” (which also dates back to Old English), one odd location for “were” ancestry is the name of “wormwood.” It’s a plant — really a whole category of plants, and quite a number have “wormwood” in their common names: “wormwood senna,” “Roman wormwood,” and so on. It became notorious starting in the 1700s when it began to be used to make absinthe, which is an extremely strong liquor. Absinthe is up to 76% alcohol, which is much stronger than nearly anything else, and because of the wormwood, it contains another chemical that’s a bona-fide hallucinogen and also poisonous: “thujone.”
Absinthe was first distilled in Switzerland, and gained its notoriety in Paris in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when it was a favorite of the artistic elite including James Joyce, Baudelaire, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Proust, and more. It was supposed to drive people crazy, theoretically from the hallucinogen in wormwood (although the actual chemical wasn’t isolated until later). More recent tests have shown that there’s actually just a trace amount in absinthe, so alcohol poisoning would get you long before you could ingest enough thujone to make a difference.
Nevertheless, the myth of absinthe — and wormwood — spread, and in the early 20th century it was banned in all sorts of places, including England and the US. There’s been speculation that it was really banned because of its association with the bohemian artist community in Paris.
But of course now we know the real story — it was banned because far, far back in its past, “wormwood” got tangled up with “werewolves,” and everybody knows how dangerous those guys are. Not to mention wererabbits.
Wallace as a wererabbit from The Curse of the Were-Rabbit starring Wallace and Gromit.
