Homo homini lupus, or in its unabridged form Homo homini lupus est, is a Latin proverb meaning “A man is a wolf to another man,” or “Man is wolf to man.”
It refers to situations where people are known to have behaved in a way similar to a wolf (hence ‘lupus’). The wolf is thought to be predatory, cruel, and inhuman i.e. more like a monster than a human.
While most of us have become “domesticated” and listen to the inner voice of conscience that has been strengthened by moral and spiritual values and cultivated over centuries of civilized behavior, those individuals who have succumbed to the more vicious seed of the wolf within them walk among us today as those sadistic sex criminals who slash, tear, rip, rape, mutilate, and cannibalize their victims.
When one compares the details of the offenses charged to alleged werewolves during the witchcraft mania of the Middle Ages with the offenses attributed to such sex criminals as the Chicago Rippers, Harry Gordon, Richard Ramirez, Henry Lee Lucas, and Jeffrey Dahmer, it becomes clear that there exists a true werewolf psychosis that can cause people to believe that they are transformed into wolves or can cause them to commit cruel and vicious crimes as if they were wolves scratching, biting, and killing their prey.
While the werewolf as sex criminal constitutes a very grim reality and a serious physical threat to unsuspecting members of society who are its potential victims, the werewolf as a creature of superstition poses a psychic threat to those who may trespass beyond the boundaries of logic and reason into the dangerous and uncharted regions of the supernatural.
The werewolf of tradition is the deliberate creation of a human who, motivated by a desire for power or revenge, has sought to release the beast within and accomplish the transformation of human into wolf.