Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the
Speaker 2: Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow
Speaker 2: Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.
Speaker 2: Having just returned from another visit to New Orleans, I
Speaker 2: thought I might consider a creature from the traditions of
Speaker 2: French and Creole Louisiana, the shape shifting monster known as
Speaker 2: the rugarou. Sometimes simplified in modern understanding, it's a sort
Speaker 2: of cage and werewolf. It's a little more complicated than that, however,
Speaker 2: the Rogharu is arguably the most well known South Louisiana monster,
Speaker 2: but as Nathan J. Ravoulais discusses in his excellent book
Speaker 2: Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana, despite the monster's
Speaker 2: popularity in literature and pop culture, there's not much folkloric
Speaker 2: meat on the bone. Here. He points out that primary
Speaker 2: sources and first person accounts are relatively scarce compared to
Speaker 2: more obscure creatures and figures of the region, with no
Speaker 2: common cycles of motifs or specific tale types associated with it.
Speaker 2: While a shallow understanding of the Roguaru seems to permeate
Speaker 2: South Louisiana traditions. Many aspects of the monster were seemingly
Speaker 2: codified by the popular nineteen forty five folk tale compilation
Speaker 2: Gumbo Ya Ya. So let's get to know this monster
Speaker 2: first off? Is it a werewolf? Well? On one hand,
Speaker 2: it undeniably draws from European werewolf traditions, particularly those of
Speaker 2: the French Lugaroo, brought over to the Americas by French colonists.
Speaker 2: Many of those traditions are more closely aligned with European werewolves,
Speaker 2: which we've discussed on the show before, focusing on monstrous
Speaker 2: transformations that bridge the worlds of human civility and destial wildness.
Speaker 2: Though some of the Lugaro tales of French folks had
Speaker 2: their own unique twists, such as those related in Brad
Speaker 2: Steiger's The Werewolf Book, in which a drunken abbot is
Speaker 2: saved from a clouder of murderous cats by a wolfman
Speaker 2: who turns out to be a high ranking member of
Speaker 2: the church and later admonishes the abbot for his over indulgence.
Speaker 2: But speaking of transformations, interesting transformations and mergers tend to
Speaker 2: occur when a folkloric tradition travels across an ocean for starters.
Speaker 2: While conflict between man and wolf is long standing and
Speaker 2: well documented in Europe as well as in French Canada,
Speaker 2: where the traditions also spread, wolves were an uncommon sight
Speaker 2: in South Louisiana. Populations of the southwestern red wolf in
Speaker 2: Louisiana were declared extinct in the wild by nineteen eighty,
Speaker 2: though reported sightings continue to occur. So while the creature's
Speaker 2: mainland European ancestors were seen as werewolves, the South Louisiana
Speaker 2: rugaru is often not described as a wolf, or even
Speaker 2: partially wolf at all, but rather a dog or even
Speaker 2: an owl. Rabelais points out that the roogaroo is equally
Speaker 2: integral to the folklore of the indigenous home of people
Speaker 2: of what is now Louisiana and Mississippi, thus injecting older
Speaker 2: local concepts about the relationship between humans and native animal
Speaker 2: species into the mix. While we lack great central narratives
Speaker 2: of the rugaroo, the basic sketch tends to follow a
Speaker 2: certain pattern, that of a bite transmitted lacanthropy of sorts
Speaker 2: that mainly seems to originate as a curse for one's
Speaker 2: individual sense. But here's the interesting thing. While you might
Speaker 2: expect this to dramatically manifest, as say, a murderer curse
Speaker 2: to transform into a murderous beast, the actual attributed transgressions
Speaker 2: are generally far less severe, such as skipping Catholic mass
Speaker 2: to go hunting or swearing too much. In other accounts,
Speaker 2: the creatures actually hunt violators of length. According to Rabelais,
Speaker 2: In some tellings, the curse of the rugaroo is disturbingly
Speaker 2: tied to marrying outside of one's own race, so it
Speaker 2: would seem that on the whole, the curse befalls not
Speaker 2: those who commit mortal sins, but casual church skippers, cursors,
Speaker 2: and those not engaging in sin at all, but rather
Speaker 2: violating racist values and racist secular laws. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: while European tales of the werewolf are typically bloody, murderous affairs,
Speaker 2: the Roguaru's main threat is one of transmission by bite.
Speaker 2: While they are to be avoided, they're not murderous or
Speaker 2: innately evil creatures, though they may be employed as nursery
Speaker 2: bogies by parents to scare children into good behavior. Instead,
Speaker 2: the roguaru seems to occupy a moral gray zone between
Speaker 2: wildness and humanity, between urban and rural, between sin and salvation.
Speaker 2: Thinking back to the tale of the drunken French Abbot,
Speaker 2: we don't seem to see tales of the roguaru in
Speaker 2: the clergy, but as rabbola At points out, we might
Speaker 2: actually detect a strong anti clerical sentiment in the tales
Speaker 2: of this particular creature, as we see in much of
Speaker 2: South Louisiana folklore. Perhaps the harshness of the curse in
Speaker 2: response to slight or non existent sins is in fact
Speaker 2: the point of the stories. Dark misfortune visited not on
Speaker 2: the most deserving of human sinners, but rather those who,
Speaker 2: by following their passions, cross slightly over some perceived societal
Speaker 2: line or dogmatic norm of the church. The werewolf is
Speaker 2: generally a point of contemplation on the liminal, and so
Speaker 2: in this the traditions of the roguaru would seem quite fitting.
Speaker 2: Tune in for additional episodes of the Monster fact the
Speaker 2: Artifact were animaliustupendium each week. As always, you can email
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