The Monstrefact: The Kratt

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the Kratt from Estonian folklore…

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The
Monster Fact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your
Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.
In today's episode, I want to talk about a creature
that I was reading about in Carol Rose's Giants, Monsters,
and Dragons. This is a text I frequently turn to

(00:33):
for my monsters and spirits. There are a number of
related spirits, and they have different names. There's the Puck
of Germany, the Puckis of Latvia, and the Lithuanian Cacus
or Atvaris, and it's also commonly known as the Estonian
Krot or Tulehand. According to Rose, its origins go back

(00:57):
to at least the 16th century as a folk tale
concerning the sudden suspicious accumulation of wealth. The magical explanation
for this happening in your village or neighborhood is that, okay,
you have a fellow villager who is suddenly living above
their assumed means. What's going on here? Is it possible

(01:17):
that they've made a blood pact with the devil for
a magical household spirit? that then steals things from their
neighbors on their behalf. That's basically the idea here. The
cost of acquiring such a creature, again, from the devil, is,
of course, one's soul. Plus, you have to keep feeding

(01:38):
it omelets. It hatches from the egg of a seven-year-old cockerel.
And in other tellings, one has to make the body
of the creature out of household materials and contribute drops
of blood to its body. After this, it essentially haunts
the home like a household spirit with a single, all-encompassing mission.

(01:59):
Make its master rich by any and all means necessary.
And this generally means stealing food and gold from your neighbors.
It resembles a black cockerel or black cat, but when
it takes to the air and flies, it may assume
the form of a dragon or a flying serpent, perhaps
with fiery motifs. In some tellings, it also guards the

(02:19):
treasure hoard that it accumulates for its master and and
may only be exercised from the home with great effort
and only by the pious. So if you get buyer's remorse,
there's no easy way out. And I believe some of
the tales about getting rid of such an entity are
rather bittersweet because you may have finally rid yourself of
the creature, but there's no getting your soul back. Or

(02:42):
at least that's the way it is in the tellings
I was looking at. Now in the Estonian usage, there's
apparently an added wrinkle. The krat, as they call it,
must stay busy. Once the owner of the krat doesn't
actually need or want it stealing from neighbors anymore, you know,
that's the kind of thing that could get you in trouble,
it still needs to be kept busy. So the master

(03:04):
will give the krat additional impossible tasks to achieve, things
that it can never actually finish, but it has to
remain busy. And this keeps the krat out of trouble.
In modern usage, Estonians apparently have taken the krat as
a potent metaphor for for artificial intelligence technology. And it's
even used on governmental websites. Certainly, given our current headline

(03:29):
cycle concerning industry warnings about AI advancements, rogue agents, and
AI misuse, perhaps this is an instructive metaphor for all
of us to say nothing of LLMs and their scraping
of content from our neighbors in order to give us
desired riches in the form of some sort of generated

(03:50):
imagery or text. And once the pact has been made,
it may be difficult to send the spirit packing once more.
Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The Artifact,
or Animalio Stupendium each week. As always, you can email
us at contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
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