INTRO:

Hello and welcome to Myth Monsters, my name is Erin and I’ll be your host for these little snack bite size podcasts on folklore and mythical monsters from around the world. 

These podcasts focus on the actual cryptids, folklore and mythic monsters from global mythology, rather than focusing on full stories of heroes and their big adventures.

I’ll also be dropping in some references that they have to recent culture and where you can see these represented in modern day content so you can learn more, and get as obsessed as I am about these absolute legends of the mythological world.

DESCRIPTION:

In today’s episode, we’re looking at the legend of La Llorona from South and Central American mythology. She’s a ghostly figure mostly derived from Mexican folklore, and I’m aware that we’ve never covered ghosts before so this is exciting!

She’s generally described as a ghost who wears a long white wedding dress, and has a skeletal face who haunts rivers and lakes.

The story goes that a beautiful woman called Maria marries a rich Ranch owner or ranchero in Espanol, and they have two kids. Eventually, Maria catches her husband with another woman and in her distress, she takes the children and drowns them in the nearby river. She immediately regrets this, screams ‘ay mis hijos’ or ‘oh my children’ and jumps in, but she’s unable to save them. Consumed by guilt, she drowns herself, but can’t enter the afterlife without her children.

She’s now known as La Llorona, which roughly translates to “the weeping woman.” In another version of the story, the children are illegitimate, the partner still cheats on Maria and she drowns them so that their father can not take them away to be raised by his wife. 

Now, the legend says, she wanders near bodies of water, forever weeping as she searches for her lost children. 

Will La Llorona attack you, I hear you ask? 

Well apparently, she kidnaps and attacks children and it’s also said that she attacks and kills cheating husbands - but generally if you hear wailing, you should probably just get outta there. 

She’s also used as a spooky bogeyman figure for South American children, to stop them going near open bodies of water or wandering around alone in the evenings. And she generally is very well known and feared within the hispanic community.

ORIGIN:

La Llorona’s legend is first mentioned in a 19th century sonnet by Mexican poet Manuel Carpio. However, this makes no reference to the murder of the children, and instead of being Maria, La Llorona is the ghost of a woman called Rosalia who was murdered by her husband. 

In contrast, apparently La Llorona is sometimes linked to a woman called La Malinche, who was a Nahua woman who served as Hernán Cortés' interpreter. Now I’m going to give you a history lesson, so BUCKLE UP.

Hernan Cortes, was a Spanish explorer, and he led the expedition which led to the very literal fall of the Aztec Empire. Otherwise known as the Spanish-Aztec War, this raged between the Aztecs and the Spanish who wanted to conquer them, and lasted from 1519 to 1521, and the Spanish even convinced the indigenous people, who to be fair, were being used for a lot of sacrifices, to team up and defeat the Aztec emperor Cuauhtémoc. They took the capital city, destroyed it and made it into what we know now as the capital of Mexico, Mexico City. Oh and the Nahua were some of the indigenous people of Mexico and El Salvador before the Spanish came and conquered them, and this is what La Malinche was. 

Swerving back into folklore, La Malinche is considered both the mother of the modern Mexican people and a symbol of treachery for helping the Spanish conquerors. Now she was Hernan’s mistress, but she was given to him with another 19 women as slaves when they conquered Tabasco, like the sauce, and ended up having a son with him. This boy is considered one of the first Mestizos, which are people of mixed European and Indigenous American ancestry. 

Why does this link back to La Llorona I hear you ask? 

Because this all links to the way that indigenous women were treated by their new Spanish conquerors. There was a shortage of Spanish women who came to the new world as it was penned, which means that the Spanish men would marry these Mexican women. This was generally celebrated throughout the 16th century, and lots of mestiza babies were born, until the European ladies started to come over and outnumber the natives.

This meant that the native women were shoved aside for the more favourable Spanish women, and their mestiza children were often taken away from them, with some of them abused and killed, some abandoned, and some sent across the pond to Spain. This was derived from a Spanish tradition of reliving ‘wayward’ women of their children, but really was just a bit of xenophobia, racism and jealousy. Also the women were very literally just chucked aside, as the Aztec’s practised polyamory, so they were seen more as mistresses, and were just used and abused. See why I’m talking about this now, huh? 

It actually got worse though, the children that lived were taught that their mother’s heritage and culture was inferior to the Spanish, and some were actually told that they were Spanish, instead of native as it was deemed as better. By the end of the 17th century, both the Mestizos and the Creole populations were attacked by a growing popularity in racial purity, and they stopped letting the children of these Spanish fathers have any inheritance or legitimacy. It’s a really horrid history, and apologies if there are any Spaniards listening, this certainly isn’t a ‘everyone should hate the Spanish’ kind of retelling, but retelling history accurately with all the nasty bits in is really important, and accepting that none of the European countries are innocent is especially crucial - hey I’m from England, trust me, I know the feeling.

Anyway, back to our monster. There are ideas that the origin of La Llorona is linked to two Aztec goddesses. This comes from the Florentine Codex, an encyclopedia on the Nahua written in the 16th century by a friar, called Bernardino de Sahagún. The first goddess is Ciuacoatl, which means snake-woman, she’s described as ‘a savage beast and an evil omen’ who ‘appeared in white’ and walked around at night ‘weeping and wailing’. She’s also been described as the ‘omen of war’ but she is the goddess of motherhood and fertility.

Within this same book, is the tale of the 10 omens of the Conquest of Mexico, which is that Spanish-Aztec war we talked about earlier. Apparently there were 10 signs that this was going to happen, apparently the sixth omen was the voice of a woman heard wailing at night, crying about the fate of her children. Which reflects the horrible injustice we talked about with the indigenous children and their mothers earlier.

However, stories of weeping female ghosts are common in folklore in quite a few ancient mythologies, as well as Cihuacōātl of Aztec mythology, which we discussed earlier. You’ve got Lilith or technically Eve, as in Adam and Eve, of Hebrew mythology, who seduced men in forms of their wives, have their children and then kill them in revenge for staying with their actual wives. 

She also rings a similar tune to the ancient Greek story of Lamia, who was one of the many consorts of Zeus. In this story Hera, Zeus’ wife (and the goddess of marriage and jealousy, and famously very jealous) learns about Zeus’ affair with Lamia and kills all of the demi-god children they had together. After this Lamia is driven mad with jealousy from other people’s children and goes on a rampage, killing children.

There are also links to the famous Medea and Jason - yes Jason from the Argonauts, Medea who was jealous of Jason’s affair with the Princess of Corinth, so she poisoned a cape and gave it to her for a present, but the King ended up touching it too and they both died in front of Jason. Medea then stabbed Jason and her children to death before ascending to Olympus on a golden chariot - screaming obscenities at Jason as she went.

She’s also linked to the Irish myth of the Banshee’s, which we’ll cover in a few weeks, that scream as a forewarning of a tragic death or event happening to a family. 

Lastly, there is also a consistent link to her and the Day of the Dead or Dia De Las Muertos, which is an amazing South American festival held on the 2nd November every year. This is a celebration of the dead, rather than a traditional mourning, and they leave offerings, play music and sometimes even unearth their dead relatives. I think it’s a lovely idea and I’ve always been fascinated with this, and would love to go!

Actually, one of the most popular Dia de los Muertos events in Mexico is the annual "la Cihuacoatl, Leyenda de la Llorona" festival in Xochimilco, there’s a lovely performance of a theatre show of the same name along the canals. This borough of Mexico is a whole bunch of canals and islands and on one of them, there’s also a statue of La Llorona. Also fun fact, one of the other islands is the famous doll head island, with a whole bunch of toy dolls hung up on trees.

CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE: 

Okay so we’ve kind of talked about cultural significance already, but there are so many bits of media!

Firstly, art wise, there’s a famous Mexican artist, Alejandro Colunga, who has a lovely painting with La Llorona called ‘La boda del chamuco y la llorona’, painted in 1984. It’s a really visceral painting, definitely worth checking out.

There’s a 1917 play called La Llorona, by Francisco C. Neve, which looked at the involvement with La Malinche and Hernan Cortes. I’m a huge theatre nerd, if you didn’t know - and I saw a lot of Spanish plays when I was at uni so I’m going to try and find this somewhere.

Movie wise - we have mostly horrors, you’ve got the most recent and big movie, The Curse of La Llorona, made in 2019, as part of Conjuring universe - apparently good, but it’s the worst in the series. There’s also a film called La Llorona, also made in 2019 in Guatemala and this had a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so it sounds like it’s pretty damn good. It sounds like she was really popular in 2019, blimey. Lastly, the earliest film about La Llorona came out in 1960, and the poster is like, very traditional theatrical posters.

In TV, La Llorona is in the first ever episode of Supernatural and is a big baddie in the TV show Grimm - makes sense with the name of the show too. Video games! She’s in Hunt: Showdown, they have even made a specific DLC for La Llorona; it’s a PvPvE game that has very positive reviews on steam. Lastly, there’s a mobile phone game called La Llorona, which is built like Slender the game, and is apparently very scary.

Right FINALLY, book recommendation this week is The Sea-Ringed World: Sacred Stories of the Americas by Maria Garcia Esperon, which is about folklore from the US, Central and South America - it’s got some really lovely illustrations too! Speaking of illustrations, if you’ve got kiddiwinks, I would recommend La Llorona, the Weeping Woman by Joe Hayes - it has both English and Spanish translations and according to reviews, is awesome!

DO I THINK THEY EXISTED? 

Now it’s time for, do I think they existed? She in this case, I think because of the historical relevance - it makes sense that people believe in her. Also any boogeyman myth is going to work for frightening kids, just like most of the monsters we’ve covered over the last few weeks.

Ghosts are always tricky to cover because there are so many mixed messages about whether they exist or not, there don’t seem to be any recorded sightings of this one for what I can tell, but then again, if a tree falls in a forest and no-one is around, does it make a sound? WHO KNOWS.

But this one, can we truly call her a monster? She’s based off of these amazing native women who had everything taken from them, their husbands, children, status and even their culture and told it was trash - is she really the villain here? There are also no reports of anyone actually seeing La Llorona hurting anybody, just that she warns people off, so again, is she really the villain? Or just a guardian angel keeping kids away from the water so they don’t suffer the same fate as hers? I’ll leave you with that question.

OUTRO: 

I think this one is really interesting, there’s so much colonising history behind her origin and she’s linked to so many famous other myths, so it’s a real meaty week full of knowledge tidbits you can take with you!

Speaking of knowledge, next week we’re heading back over to Greece to talk about the clever Centaurs, these half-men, half-horses were well known throughout history as being teachers, healers and ruthless fighters. Trot in next Thursday to learn all about them with me. I’m sorry I try and come up with a relevant line every week and they’re just getting worse haha.

For now thank you so much for listening, it’s been an absolute pleasure. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give it a rating on the service you’re listening on - I’ve got the twitter for any questions, or suggestions on what monsters to cover next and I’d love to hear from you. The twitter is @mythmonsterspod or the instagram is @mythmonsterspodcast. Or you can email me, old fashioned-style on mythmonsterspodcast@gmail.com And share this with your pals, they might love me as much as you do.

Stay spooky and I’ll see you later babes.