La Llorona is your Monster Of The Week. On Monday we look at the origins of this weepy, slutty, murderous ghost story. Wednesday, we explored how you too can utilize terrifying legends to control your kids.

Whether it’s used to keep the kiddies alive or families together, La Llorona’s bawling downstream trek and the drowned bodies she leaves in her wake share certain narrative earmarks with other cultural-specific legends from around the globe. Some scholars have theorized that La Llorona is an updated version of the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl, who appeared just prior to the conquistadors’ arrival and swooned through the Aztec cities, weeping continuously over the loss of her children. The woman’s stuttered, pitching sobs served as a wailing death omen, resounding off the high walls of the ziggurats and signaling the imminent cataclysmic arrival of bullets and alien disease. The figure of a wailing woman whose tortured cries presage ultimate doom is all too familiar to the ancient Irish. The Irish Celts believed in shrieking otherworldly messengers called banshees, whose ear-splitting laments were said foretell the death of a culturally significant figure (later, banshees became equal opportunity augurs, crying out to anyone on the brink of bucket kicking).

The ancient Greeks passed around a li’l campfire story about a beautiful woman named Lamia, who knocked boots with the mighty Zeus and bore him some younglings. Hera, Zeus’ no-nonsense spouse, was none too pleased to discover the infidelity, and forced Lamia to eat the children. In the end, post-baby-snarfing Lamia was so horrified and grief stricken over what she’d been forced to do, she went nuts, turned demon and began wandering the Earth devouring any child she encountered. (In some versions of the tale, Zeus tries to calm Lamia down by giving her the ability to remove her eyes. Something to keep her hands busy, I guess?) Of course, this directly parallels La Llorona’s post-infanticide tailspin into continued child murder.

The Lamia story is also, along with the tragedy of La Llorona, one of the few legends to offer a supernatural villain who works double duty in the threat department – children fear encountering Lamia and La Llorona, while young women fear transforming into either of them. (Of course, of the two, Lamia isn’t really showing up in the urban legend Top 40 these days [although you can still see her boobs in a bunch of paintings]). This duality is what sets La Llorona apart from the other marauding specters and bogeymen that run riot through modern folklore. No one drives safely out of fear of becoming the hitchhiking ghost and no one minds their hands around machinery to prevent transformation into a hook-handed madman; these tales seek to shape behavior by positing listeners as unknowing victims. La Llorona gets to the very heart of the naïve, un-self-conscious darkness inside of all people and suggests that one bad decision can make someone an unknowing victimizer – one false step can make someone a monster.

Twitter this