The Monstrefact: The Rougarou

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the legendary shapeshifter of French and Creole Louisiana known as the Rougarou…

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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.
Having just returned from another visit to New Orleans, I
thought I might consider a creature from the traditions of
French and Creole Louisiana, the shape shifting monster known as

(00:34):
the rugarou. Sometimes simplified in modern understanding, it's a sort
of cage and werewolf. It's a little more complicated than that, however,
the Rogharu is arguably the most well known South Louisiana monster,
but as Nathan J. Ravoulais discusses in his excellent book
Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana, despite the monster's

(00:56):
popularity in literature and pop culture, there's not much folkloric
meat on the bone. Here. He points out that primary
sources and first person accounts are relatively scarce compared to
more obscure creatures and figures of the region, with no
common cycles of motifs or specific tale types associated with it.

(01:16):
While a shallow understanding of the Roguaru seems to permeate
South Louisiana traditions. Many aspects of the monster were seemingly
codified by the popular nineteen forty five folk tale compilation
Gumbo Ya Ya. So let's get to know this monster
first off? Is it a werewolf? Well? On one hand,
it undeniably draws from European werewolf traditions, particularly those of

(01:39):
the French Lugaroo, brought over to the Americas by French colonists.
Many of those traditions are more closely aligned with European werewolves,
which we've discussed on the show before, focusing on monstrous
transformations that bridge the worlds of human civility and destial wildness.
Though some of the Lugaro tales of French folks had

(02:00):
their own unique twists, such as those related in Brad
Steiger's The Werewolf Book, in which a drunken abbot is
saved from a clouder of murderous cats by a wolfman
who turns out to be a high ranking member of
the church and later admonishes the abbot for his over indulgence.
But speaking of transformations, interesting transformations and mergers tend to

(02:22):
occur when a folkloric tradition travels across an ocean for starters.
While conflict between man and wolf is long standing and
well documented in Europe as well as in French Canada,
where the traditions also spread, wolves were an uncommon sight
in South Louisiana. Populations of the southwestern red wolf in
Louisiana were declared extinct in the wild by nineteen eighty,

(02:45):
though reported sightings continue to occur. So while the creature's
mainland European ancestors were seen as werewolves, the South Louisiana
rugaru is often not described as a wolf, or even
partially wolf at all, but rather a dog or even
an owl. Rabelais points out that the roogaroo is equally
integral to the folklore of the indigenous home of people

(03:07):
of what is now Louisiana and Mississippi, thus injecting older
local concepts about the relationship between humans and native animal
species into the mix. While we lack great central narratives
of the rugaroo, the basic sketch tends to follow a
certain pattern, that of a bite transmitted lacanthropy of sorts
that mainly seems to originate as a curse for one's

(03:30):
individual sense. But here's the interesting thing. While you might
expect this to dramatically manifest, as say, a murderer curse
to transform into a murderous beast, the actual attributed transgressions
are generally far less severe, such as skipping Catholic mass
to go hunting or swearing too much. In other accounts,

(03:50):
the creatures actually hunt violators of length. According to Rabelais,
In some tellings, the curse of the rugaroo is disturbingly
tied to marrying outside of one's own race, so it
would seem that on the whole, the curse befalls not
those who commit mortal sins, but casual church skippers, cursors,

(04:11):
and those not engaging in sin at all, but rather
violating racist values and racist secular laws. On the other hand,
while European tales of the werewolf are typically bloody, murderous affairs,
the Roguaru's main threat is one of transmission by bite.
While they are to be avoided, they're not murderous or
innately evil creatures, though they may be employed as nursery

(04:34):
bogies by parents to scare children into good behavior. Instead,
the roguaru seems to occupy a moral gray zone between
wildness and humanity, between urban and rural, between sin and salvation.
Thinking back to the tale of the drunken French Abbot,
we don't seem to see tales of the roguaru in
the clergy, but as rabbola At points out, we might

(04:56):
actually detect a strong anti clerical sentiment in the tales
of this particular creature, as we see in much of
South Louisiana folklore. Perhaps the harshness of the curse in
response to slight or non existent sins is in fact
the point of the stories. Dark misfortune visited not on
the most deserving of human sinners, but rather those who,

(05:19):
by following their passions, cross slightly over some perceived societal
line or dogmatic norm of the church. The werewolf is
generally a point of contemplation on the liminal, and so
in this the traditions of the roguaru would seem quite fitting.
Tune in for additional episodes of the Monster fact the

(05:40):
Artifact were animaliustupendium each week. As always, you can email
us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
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