The President's Seventh Sons and the Lobizón: What the 1973 Decree Says, and What It Doesn't

Every Argentine president has a long list of godchildren. All are seventh sons or seventh daughters. And the tidy explanation that goes with it, that it was invented to save such boys from becoming werewolves, doesn't appear in the law.

What the press says

On October 26, 2016, the Entre Ríos outlet Elonce explained why the president sponsors the seventh son. In Argentina, "especially the rural Argentina," it says, a seventh son was a kind of curse: on full-moon nights in adulthood, he would become a lobizón, "an evil spawn of a wolf." The belief was so feared that the president's sponsorship was instituted "to uproot the stigma." It traces the idea to Catherine the Great's "imperial sponsorship," says Juan Manuel de Rosas offered sponsorship to rural families, and says the first presidential baptism came in 1907, when a Russian couple, Enrique Brost and Apolonia Holmann, wrote to President José Figueroa Alcorta asking him to stand in for the Tsar.

It is a good story, and Elonce offers no source for the Rosas or Catherine claims.

What the decree says

The decree is public. Decree 848/1973, signed December 24, 1973 and published in the Boletín Oficial on January 18, 1974, opens with a request from the province of Tucumán to include girls, since the president already sponsors "the seventh son." It notes that in 1907 President Figueroa Alcorta granted the first request, from "a resident of the country, of Russian nationality," and that every president since has done so "at the request of the party," until it became "a traditional custom." The decree then makes it formal and extends it to women "on equal terms."

Read it in full and look for werewolves. There are none. Nor is the word lobizón. The only thing the text provides is a commemorative gold medal, a presidential representative at the baptism, and an article saying the sponsorship creates no rights or benefits for the godchild. The current text, as amended by Decree 1416/2009 (published October 7, 2009), adds unmarried parents and partners, allows non-Catholic baptism, and says the status is lost on a final criminal conviction. It also lets the president's office contribute to the child's "wellbeing."

Elonce's account has two details that this text does not support. It says the extension to daughters came in 1974, under Isabel Perón, and then that Decree 1416/09 "included the seventh daughters." The 1973 decree already extends to women, and the 2009 decree changed eligibility and the baptism rule.

The dispute

The link with the werewolf is argued, not documented.

The Guardian's Uki Goñi, on December 29, 2014, quotes historian Daniel Balmaceda saying there is "no link." In his telling, the custom began in 1907 when Brost and Holmann, Volga German emigrés, "wanted to maintain a custom from Czarist Russia" in which the Tsar sponsored seventh sons. The lobizón, he says, is a separate myth of the gauchos, adapted from European werewolf legends: in the Argentine version it becomes a mix of pig and dog on Tuesday and Friday nights, and passes its curse "by passing between the legs" of victims, not by biting.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency's Diego Melamed answered on January 5, 2015 that the two traditions are "almost certainly" connected. He points to historian Horacio Vázquez Rial's unpublished book The Last Werewolf, which describes the Russian werewolf myth and the czarist protection of seventh sons, to the Coronel Pringles municipal website, and to a 2010 statement by a provincial legislator, Ana María Corradi de Beltrán, that the law "comes from the myth of the werewolf." Melamed adds a caution: Kirchner is not shown to have believed in werewolves.

Note the shared roots. The Elonce, Guardian and JTA tellings of the 1907 origin all go back to the same Brost-Holmann story. They are not independent confirmation of the werewolf claim. JTA, whose own first report said the law dated from the 1920s, corrected itself to the 1970s. The cleanest statement of what the record supports is this: a Russian-born couple asked the president to sponsor their seventh son in 1907; a tradition grew; a 1973 decree formalised it, and the decree never mentions a curse. Whether the 1907 request was meant to ward off a lobizón is a historian's argument.

In practice, December 2016

A Salta local blog, Gral. Güemes, reported on December 13, 2016 the baptism of a seventh son as the president's godchild, with an army lieutenant general representing the president and the town's mayor present. It says such sons are godchildren "by law" (the instrument is a presidential decree) and says nothing of any lobizón.

Versalles has its own

A smaller legend sits in Buenos Aires. The August 1, 2016 Gaceta de Versailles ran the second of three instalments of "Un lobisón suelto en Versalles," a story it says authors Guillermo Barrantes and Víctor Coviello tell in their book Buenos Aires es Leyenda 3. The gazette calls it a cuento. In it, rival origins for the neighbourhood werewolf are gathered: the old Municipal Market at Bruselas and Arregui, opened in 1932 with part of its structure shipped from England, which supposedly brought a "wolf-man" with it; a rabid Siberian husky that escaped a kennel in the 1950s and "promoted a certain panic"; and film-crew members on Esperando la carroza who "said they had seen" a figure "like a huge dog" run past 20 metres away. The narrators also float that the rumour already existed. No witness, date or evidence of any creature is given, and the story is a fiction-framed folklore retelling.

Bottom line

Argentina's presidential godparenthood for seventh children is real, dated to a 1907 request and a 1973 decree, and the decree never mentions werewolves. Elonce says it was created to remove the lobizón stigma; historian Balmaceda says the two are unrelated; JTA says they are almost certainly linked. The retellings share one origin story and no one has produced a document that settles it. Versalles's lobisón is a neighbourhood tale with no stated witness.

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Attribution / source table

• Claim: Seventh son becomes lobizón; presidential sponsorship "to uproot the stigma"; Catherine the Great, Rosas, 1907 Brost and Holmann; later decrees and benefits
  Attribution: Elonce, Oct 26, 2016
  Link: Elonce
• Claim: Original decree: dated Dec 24, 1973, published Jan 18, 1974; 1907 reference; extension to women; gold medal; no rights or benefits
  Attribution: Decree 848/1973, Boletín Oficial no. 22834, as published at argentina.gob.ar
  Link: Decree 848/1973
• Claim: Amendments by Decree 1416/2009 (B.O. Oct 7, 2009)
  Attribution: Updated text of Decree 848/1973, argentina.gob.ar
  Link: Updated text
• Claim: "No link" per historian Daniel Balmaceda; lobizón as pig-and-dog gaucho myth; 1907 Brost-Holmann
  Attribution: The Guardian (Uki Goñi), Dec 29, 2014
  Link: Guardian
• Claim: Argument for a link; Vázquez Rial; Coronel Pringles website; legislator's 2010 statement; JTA's own correction
  Attribution: JTA (Diego Melamed), Jan 5, 2015
  Link: JTA
• Claim: Baptism of a seventh son in General Güemes; "by law"
  Attribution: Gral. Güemes blog, Dec 13, 2016
  Link: Güemes blog
• Claim: "Un lobisón suelto en Versalles 2": market, husky, film crew
  Attribution: Gaceta de Versailles, Aug 1, 2016
  Link: Gaceta
• Claim: Related Monstrum post on the Argentine werewolf boy
  Attribution: Monstrum Athenaeum, 2015
  Link: Related post

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Legal / disclaimer footer

Entertainment and cryptid-news commentary only. Nothing here confirms a werewolf. Legal text is quoted from the published decree; folklore, historical and origin claims belong to their sources and are attributed as published; Spanish passages are translated by the desk. The map location is approximate to city level.