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Carnival and "Mardi-Gras". [French Folks Traditions] part 2 : Masks and disguises.
If they are rudimentary, they generally symbolize the abolition of social and sexual barriers, but also animal and human. Men dressed as women (and vice versa), paper masks, widespread accoutrements, blackening of the face or even part of the body with shoe polish or charcoal (a well-known Celtic tradition), animal adornments (such as animal skins, horn crowns), are common.
In the Vallespir valley (Pyrenees) for example, the bear is honored in a dramatization that depicts its hunt while it tries to capture a woman.
[schembartläufer-nuremberg-facsimile-published-in-1897]
The Cavalcades : Rabelais (in his Quart Livre) speaks of a mannequin named "Mâche-croutte" ~ "Chew-the-Crust" ~ who was paraded in Lyon. This (popular) dragon was a "monstrous, ridiculous, hideous and terrible effigy in the eyes of small children : it had eyes larger than its belly, a head larger than the rest of its body, with large and horrific, very serrated jaws [...] which are regularly snapped in a terrifying way."
A few centuries later (18th century) Mâche-Croute, who no longer appears in the Carnival, becomes a bogeyman used to scare children.
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["Carnival, history and traditions", Van Gennep and M. C Delmas, arranged and translated by me. If you want precises ref, DM-me.]
Realizing with the means to dump raws I could probably keep this type of bogeyman for future modded runs... be it they wouldn't be Crumbledgrowl.
any way here's an art dump of Crumbledgrowl and bogeymen I did after the last bogeyman post with a comic based on one of the many botch attempts at convincing Crumbledgrowl to join in adv mode where they just ambush the adventurer from the sky and just turn into a bear and drop down.
Antjie Somers [South African folklore]
Bogeymen are one of the most common recurring character types among folktales: an evil monster, ghost or undead human that comes out at night and takes misbehaving children. Sometimes to eat them and sometimes just dragging them off to an unknown (yet likely unpleasant) fate. In South Africa, children were told similar tales about Antjie Somers, a local folk character originating from the 19th century. Though she checks all the boxes of a typical bogeyman character, there is one thing that sets her apart from the others: Antjie Somers is human with no clear supernatural traits.
As the story goes, there once was a man named Andries Somers. He worked on a fishing vessel (interesting note: in some variations, he was a slave rather than a conventional fisherman) and was known for his exceptional work ethic: when Andries hauled in his nets, his skill and strength put his fellow fishermen to shame. Aside from being talented and diligent, Andries was also brave and kind-hearted, as he had saved people from drowning on several occasions.
Alas, his diligence bred jealousy in his comrades until one day they decided to teach him a lesson. The fishermen banded together and surrounded Andries on a beach, intending to rough him up. But Andries was a man of exceptional strength and knocked all of his assailants to the ground. When the dust settled however, he saw that one of his attackers couldnât get up: the man had hit his head falling down and died on the spot. Knowing that he would be charged with murder if he stayed, Andries saw no choice to flee.
He stole a kopdoek (a kind of headscarf) and a dress from his sister and ran away disguised as a woman. After fleeing far away, he eventually found new work in a settlement somewhere over the mountains, where his former comrades would never find him. Andries worked in a vineyard and it wasnât long until his employer noticed his exceptional work ethic and put him in charge of the other workers. But here his sad past repeated itself, and he soon found himself the target of jealousy and anger from his co-workers. Eventually, they found the dress and kopdoek Andries still kept in his hut, and mocked him endlessly about it. They called him Antjie (a feminine name) and poked fun of him for crossdressing. He endured these childish taunts for three days, before packing his stuff and leaving under the cover of night, full of anger and disappointment.
Andries was never found, but after a while, children who had been sent to the forest to collect lumber started telling stories of a strange elderly woman dressed in a striped dress and kopdoek, wearing a sack over her shoulder. The woman was always angry and would threaten kids with her knife, threatening to kill them and stuff their corpses into her sack. Their parents connected the dots and assumed this mysterious woman to be Antjie Somers, as they had taken to calling Andries. From then on, people would warn their kids to behave, lest Antjie Somers stab them and take them away in her sack.
This story actually has some political context, as it originated in a period of tension between workers and farmers following the then-recent abolishment of the slave trade. I wonât go into the details here, but there is quite a bit of historical context to this tale if you want to read up about it.
Though Antjie/Andries is the protagonist of the story, this character was later demonized further and turned into a demonic monster, a goblin, a monstrous woman with animal-like characteristics or a witch in some retellings. In this last version, Andries quite literally became a woman when he turned evil, which also has some political subtext. In fact, because the character was crossdressing and gender-nonconforming, Antjie Somers is sometimes regarded as a queer character, though I assume this is more of a modern interpretation (he only donned the dress to disguise himself, after all). The moral of the story however remains quite simple: donât leave children unattended in creepy woods.
Sources: Steenekamp, M., 2011, Antjie/Andries Somers: Decoding the bodily inscriptions of a South African folklore character, research report submitted to the University of the Witwatersrand in fulfilment of the requirements of the Masterâs degree of Arts, Johannesburg, South Africa. Croeser, C., 2020, A wilting whisper of Antjie Somers: a meditation on the witchery and gender-non-conformance of Afrikaans Folklore Figure Antjie Somers, Scrutiny2, 25(2). Gorelik, B., 2021, Cross-dresser as a bogey: on the gender ambiguity of Antjie Somers in South African folklore, South African Journal of Cultural History, 35(1). (image source 1: Anja Venter) (image source 2: Galago on Deviantart)

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Could you tell us more about the boogeyman camel?
Why of course! The camel with a sack or baeer bu kharitah (بؚŮŘą ب٠؎عŮء؊) is described in detail in Al Musallam (2017) Emirati Superstitious Creatures, and I am eternally thankful for an ABC reader for providing that source!
The camel with a sack appears during siesta time and catches Emirati children who are foolishly playing outside at that time. It traps them in its sack, either white (saliva) or red (the fleshy sack that camels extrude).
It carries the children around and releases them somewhere else after a period of time. They can be heard crying inside the sack at night. When they are released, it is often far away, and they forget their parents, so they cannot return home and they never stop crying.
The best way to escape it is to climb to the top of a palm tree, but then you face the problem of getting back down.
A bogeymanâs half-life is shortened a tiny bit every time that bogeymanâs name is invoked. Eventually the bogeyman becomes a tired clichĂŠ and often can devolve into a farce.
Red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthyâs obsessive hunt for alleged communists gradually became a joke about things such as looking for communists under beds.
The more often Republicans use woke now, the sooner it will degenerate into self-parody. So if Republicans can be baited into blaming everything on woke this year, it will sound boring and ridiculous to everybody outside the MAGAsphere by mid 2024.
2022 Reading Log, pt 29
My life has been tough lately, so I do what makes me happy. Read books about monsters.
141. The Old Snatchengrabberâs Big Book of Child Eating Monsters by Mike Rosen. This is not beloved British childrenâs author Mike Rosen, or asshole Republican pundit Mike Rosen. This is a different one. This book is a collection of folkloric bogeymen, illustrated in a cartoony style. Most of these are European, but some from around the world do appear. Some liberties have been taken with the monsters at hand, mostly in the artâthe yara-ma-wa-yho, for example, is an amorphous blob instead of a hairless monkey-frog, and Krampus is both female and thicc. Brief, but pleasant.
142. The United States of Cryptids by J. W. Ocker. Iâve quite enjoyed Ockerâs Season of the Witch and Cursed Objects, and I quite enjoyed this book as well. The book is as much about crypto-tourism as it is about actual cryptozoology. As such, it takes a pretty broad view of what a cryptid is, including various UFOlogical entities, as well as folkloric entities like the wendigo or Navajo shapeshifters, if they have places to visit or sell merchandise for. Itâs also pretty respectful, acknowledging that those aforementioned Navajo shapeshifters, for example, are taboo to a lot of Navajo people still. Ocker has clearly done his homework, and acknowledges that creatures like the Ozark Howler are modern hoaxes, as well as suggesting some very obscure monsters that are ripe for becoming tourist attractions (such as the Derry Fairy, the Prime Hook Swamp Creature and the Kodiak Dinosaur).
143. The Enemies of Rome by Stephen Kershaw. In some ways, this is the best whirlwind tour of Roman history I could imagine, covering events from the mythical foundation of Rome to the last of the Western emperors. It is most interested in what the Romans thought of the various people they fought and usually defeated, and how Romans built their own identity as separate from âbarbarianâ, even though they themselves were barbarians from the point of view of Greek culture, which they wholeheartedly appropriated. A lot of time is spent in the late Republic era, which I appreciated. Too often, books about Rome written for a popular audience skip straight from the Punic Wars to Julius Caesar. One thing I didnât like, however, was its constant use of modern neologisms. âFake newsâ, for example, shows up more than five times before I stopped counting. It was cute once, but rapidly became irritating.
144. Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws by Adrienne Mayor. This is a collection of short articles written for various magazines and websites by Mayor, collected and occasionally updated. Most of them are on the subject of weird ephemera of the classical world, often times animal themed. Examples include several articles on tourism in Greece during Roman times, a history of Roman perfumes, the use of weasels as household mousers in the Classical world, and of course writings on Greek and Roman monsters. The book includes her original article proposing that the griffin is based on Protoceratops fossils, and the argument is pretty much just âI went looking for a real animal that looks like a griffin, because I couldnât imagine that it was a symbolic hybrid, and this is what I foundâ. Â In the foreword, she refers to that essay as âembarrassingâ, although whether because she has repudiated that (very poorly supported) hypothesis or merely because of its fannish tone addressed to Jack Horner, remains unsaid. I canât say I recommend this book, but I didnât consider reading it a complete waste of time.
145. Eaters of the Dead by Kevin J Wetmore Jr. If I could describe this book in one word, it would be âsloppyâ. It is a survey of folklore and mythology related to cannibals and man-eating monsters. It seems, at least at first, to be arguing for a hypothesis that all cannibal monsters are embodiments of fears of survival cannibalism, but seems to give up on that thesis half way through. Possibly because the author realizes itâs a non-starter. For example, he claims that ghouls represent a fear of survival cannibalism in the Arabian Desert, before revealing that modern authors consider the corpse-eating and grave-robbing aspect of ghouls to be a Western appropriation in gothic literature, as opposed to an authentic folkloric belief. It also pairs some ideas in very odd ways and acts as if they make sense, like discussing both feeding the dead to vultures (as the Zoroastrians and Tibetans do) and Polyphemus in the Odyssey in the same chapter. It also seems weird to write a book about man-eating monsters, spend an entire chapter on ghouls, but dismiss zombies in two paragraphs. Thereâs some interesting ideas in here, and some good sources, but I think I would rather read those sources than this book (and in some cases, I have!).