Pricolici

In Romanian folklore, pricolici (also priculici, pricorici and, in Bukovina and Moldavia, tricolici) is the name the strigoi receives when it walks in animal form, and above all in that of the wolf or the hound. Tudor Pamfile put it down plainly in Mitologie românească (1916): in many parts it is believed that the strigoi also go about in other guises, such as kids, cats, dogs, piglets, rats, hounds and wolves, "which seem to be called pricolici or pricorici, that is, strigoi embodied in animals". The word therefore names a condition rather than a species: the same dead man who will not rest, or the same living man whose spirit goes out at night, at the moment he takes the body of a beast. That is why the pricolici shares almost everything with the strigoi (the grave it rises from, the cattle it milks or bleeds, the family it returns to) and differs from it in one thing that changes everything: the pack. Lazăr Șăineanu, quoted by Pamfile himself, sums up the pair of names with which Romanian renders the European werewolf: vârcolaci and pricolici, "wolf-men" (Werwolf, loup-garou), and adds that, since the dead who leave the grave to suck blood sometimes show themselves in animal shape, in the Balkans the vârcolac ended up identified with the vampire. That crossing of wolf and dead man is the exact place of the pricolici on the map of Romanian creatures: not a third figure, but the point at which the other two are one and the same. On the origin of the word there is no agreement: dictionaries give it as of uncertain etymology, and the comparison with the Latin lycus (wolf) that circulates today is no more than a guess.

Pamfile gathers in two pages (146-147) the beliefs about who ends up a pricolici, and they do not all say the same. According to some, it is the ninth of nine "moon-born" brothers, that is, all born in the same month of the year (Gorovei, Credințe, p. 281). According to others, whoever drinks human urine: since the folk remedy against erysipelas prescribed rinsing the mouth with it, people were warned to do so carefully so as not to swallow it (Gorovei, p. 334). According to others, one of the spouses of a marriage between relatives (manuscript 3419 of the Romanian Academy). Of the tricolici it was said that it was born of a natural child, or of the daughter of a girl who had gone astray, herself born of another such: three generations of one fault. The body gives it away: the pricolici has its front legs shorter than its hind legs (Gorovei, p. 281), and Simion Florea Marian recorded in Înmormântarea la români (1892, p. 419) that the dead believed to be strigoi or pricolici are recognised, according to some, by having a tail; those are buried face down, garlic and stones are put in their mouths, a stake is driven into their hearts or their heads are cut off, so that they cannot rise from the grave. The transformation has its rite. Marian describes it in Tradiții poporale române din Bucovina (1895, p. 343): "every man who is a tricolici, when his hour comes, be it day or night, goes to a place where he believes himself safe from the eyes of the world, there he turns three somersaults, changes his human shape and becomes a wolf or a dog, and in that state he then causes a multitude of harms, evils and injuries to other men, who are not tricolici like him". And there is one more road, that of the dead man: the strigoi that nobody pierced with the stake eats its relatives for nine years and, the nine fulfilled, becomes a pricolici hound and joins the wolves.

What makes the pricolici a figure and not a definition are the tales, and Pamfile transcribes several. The first (Popescu-Ciocănel, Brașoave, p. 264) is that of the newlywed: a young man who was a pricolici from birth marries a girl from another village and, a week after the wedding, yokes the oxen to the cart to take her to her parents' house. On the way he warns her that some wild beast may come out to meet them, and that she should not be frightened but grab the axe and strike until she draws blood. On reaching a small wood he stops the oxen, goes in without her suspecting, strips, turns three somersaults and becomes a red foal with a human head; he comes out and leaps at his wife to eat her. She, who has seen him from afar, splits his ear open with a blow of the axe. As soon as he bleeds he flees into the wood, turns the three somersaults again, dresses and returns to the cart saying he knows nothing and that she did well to strike with the axe, because had she not drawn his blood he would have eaten her. At her parents' house she tells what happened in secret and shows the bleeding ear; the parents understand that their son-in-law is a pricolici and keep their daughter. The second (Șezătoarea, III, p. 156) is that of the man who became a strigoi and went thirteen years with the wolves, until at a sheepfold the dogs of some shepherds caught him and made him bleed: he turned back into a man shouting "come out and save me, the dogs are eating me", and they found him naked. The third (Șezătoarea, III, p. 157) is that of the dead man: one who was a strigoi died without anyone piercing him, ate his relatives for nine years and, at nine, became a pricolici hound and joined the wolves. With twelve wolves in his band he howled before a stone cross, and God granted them leave to go and eat a stallion from a herd on the far side of the Olt; before dawn they had eaten it. On the way back the dogs of some shepherds bit him, and as soon as they drew his blood he became a man and told them everything about the wolves. In another story from the same book (p. 173), a strigoi whose hand a girl had cut off returns years later to the priest's house turned into a wolf, "because he had become a pricolici"; bloodied by the dogs he becomes a man and asks for the daughter as his wife, and she recognises him by the severed hand. All of them tell the same thing in three ways: spilt blood undoes the enchantment.

Before Pamfile, the written sources knew above all the living pricolici, and it is worth dating it so as not to mix the two figures. Wilhelm Hertz, in Der Werwolf (1862, pp. 129-130), summarising the Walachische Märchen of the Schott brothers (1845), describes it thus: "a being related to the werewolf and to the vampire is the Wallachian Priccolitsch: a living man who at night roams as a dog and who on his rounds kills horses, children, sheep, pigs, hens and the like merely by brushing against them, and draws their vital juices to himself, which is why he always looks healthy and blooming. He has a veritable dog's tail as an extension of the spine". The female he calls Priccolitschone, and he adds that the pricolici "is said to be far more frequent than the murony (the Wallachian vampire); the fact that he roams alive in changed shape brings him close to the werewolf, and the fact that he absorbs the vital juices of others in order to look fresh and blooming himself brings him together with the vampire". Twenty years later Emily Gerard, in Transylvanian Superstitions (1885), writes that "first cousin to the vampire, the long exploded were-wolf of the Germans is here to be found, lingering yet under the name of the Prikolitsch", and that "sometimes it is a dog instead of a wolf, whose form a man has taken either voluntarily or as penance for his sins". Gerard records three cases: that of the man who, driving home from church on a Sunday with his wife, suddenly feels that the time for his transformation has come (the same tale Pamfile will print with the axe and the ear); that of the man who asserted he had gone for more than five years in the form of a wolf leading a troop of them, until a hunter struck off his head and restored his shape; and that of a botanist whom some villagers took for a Prikolitsch because they had seen him change his appearance in an unaccountable manner. So in 1845, 1862 and 1885 the pricolici is above all a living man who walks as a dog and drinks life, and it is in 1916, with Pamfile, that the dead man of the grave fully enters the word. The two layers coexist in the folklore; what must not be done is to read the one through the eyes of the other.

Neither in Schott, nor in Hertz, nor in Gerard, nor in Pamfile do the full moon appear as a trigger or the silver bullet as a remedy. They are borrowings from twentieth-century cinema that have stuck to the pricolici because of its likeness to the screen werewolf, and they are no part of its tradition: what turns it back into a man is the wound that bleeds, whether from the bride's axe, the sheepfold dogs or the hunter who cuts off the head; and what keeps the dead man from rising is the same as for the strigoi: burial face down, garlic, stake and beheading. Nor is it the vârcolac, even though Șăineanu puts the two names together as "wolf-men": the vârcolac of peasant belief is the devourer of the sun and the moon, the cause of eclipses, and it comes out of no grave. Against the strigoi, the difference is one of form: the strigoi that returns keeps the features of a person, while the pricolici always goes as a wolf or as a dog, and in the tales its life among the wolves is counted in years, nine or thirteen. Lastly, the modern encyclopaedias that have the pricolici born of the child suckled after weaning are not to be trusted: in Romania that motif belongs to the strigoi, and Pamfile does not attest it for the pricolici. What the sources give are the nine brothers, the taboo of the body, the marriage between relatives, the three somersaults and, above all, the blood.