According to myth, King Lycaon -- derived from Greek lykos 'wolf' -- received Zeus disguised as a beggar. Lycaon, suspecting the beggar's identity, tested him by offering a human sacrifice (Apollodorus, 3.8.1). The heinous sacrifice angered Zeus. He threw over the offering table and metamorphosed Lycaon into a wolf (Hyginus, Fab. 176).
From the Lycaon myth, the Lycaea took its redemptive practices in the form of a sacrificial quest. The festival convened atop Mount Lycaeon probably every 9th year. Only priests were allowed to enter the temple where mysterious, including human, sacrifices were performed. A single priest, chosen by lot to perform the sacrifice, was afterward compelled to shed his clothes and swim across a lake. While swimming, he turned into a wolf. The wolf/priest would then wander the earth for 9 years. If he did not kill another human in these 9 years, he was allowed to swim back across the lake, reclaim his clothes, and resume his human form, now having rid himself of his symbolic taint. These practices continued until the second century A.D.
Brought to Rome, Lycaea was renamed the Lupercalia festival, where it changed progressively from a practice of pleasure and symbolic fertility to a seeming misogynistic and eventually more conservative, pious form.
Sources:Adkins and Adkins. Dictionary of Roman Religion.
Hornblower and Spawforth. The Oxford Classical Dictionary.
Seyffert. A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities.
