The European history of “Le Loup Garou” is tangled with epidemics of witchcraft and heavy-handed cures from the Roman Catholic Church; grim accounts of men and women transformed into the likeness of wolves either willingly or as punishment for promises broken date back to the 12th century. Whether these tales descend from rumors that bear little resemblance to the original version, crimes so unfathomable to peasants’ sensibilities that they defied human tastes or, similarly, the twisted actions sprung from pathological minds, the fear that came to grip entire regions of France hurled fact into lore. Loup-Garou stories crossed the Atlantic with settlers, convicts and merchants seeking fresh opportunity in the French Canadian territories known as Acadie. After the Acadians’ refusal to swear fealty to the Church of England and British crown, the loup-garou legends fled south to Louisiana where it morphed, took on similarities to Native American shapeshifter myths and came to be known as the “rougarou.”
 
12”x16” gold ink on black paper
 
Open edition.
 
Each print comes numbered, dated and signed by the artist Kathryn E. Mills.