Boi-tatá

In May of 1560 a Jesuit sat in São Vicente writing home about souls and sugar, and somewhere in the long letter he stopped to describe a thing on the beaches. It kept to the places where the sea met the rivers. There was no body to look at, he wrote, nothing but a shimmering torch that ran here and there across the sand. It came at people quickly and it killed them, the way the curupiras did. Then José de Anchieta set down the sentence that makes the whole passage worth trusting: what this is, nobody yet knows for certain.

He wrote the name as *baetatá*. In Old Tupi that is *mba’e*, a thing, welded to *tatá*, fire. The thing of fire. No coils, no scales, no eyes, only light with an appetite, moving along the tideline where the ground stays wet.

The serpent came later, and it came through the language rather than through the swamp. Tupi also holds *mboi*, snake, and the two words sit close enough that the compound slipped its moorings over the following centuries. Eduardo de Almeida Navarro’s dictionary of Old Tupi traces the drift plainly: the thing of fire was pulled sideways by interference with the word for snake until it became, in every mouth in Brazil, the fire snake. The entity’s entire history is contained in one sound change.

By 1876 the change was complete. Couto de Magalhães, who spent years collecting Tupi narrative in the língua geral, set the mboitatá down in *O Selvagem* as the spirit that guards the open country against anyone who sets it alight, and noted that the word itself says so. He filed it in the retinue of Jaci, the moon, whom his arrangement made the protectress of everything that grows. A being that in 1560 killed at random had acquired, over three hundred years, a job.

The story that Brazilian children learn is younger still, and it has an author. In 1913 João Simões Lopes Neto published *Lendas do Sul*, and its opening piece, *A Mboitatá*, gave the creature the origin it has carried ever since.

His telling begins on a night that would not end. No moon, no wind, no dew, no smell of ripe pasture or of flowers out in the scrub. There was no meat to roast, so the men ate unsalted canjica and sat watching the coals go down, hoarding what tinder they had left, their eyes so dulled by darkness that they stared at the red embers for hours without seeing them. Only the téu-téu kept singing, somewhere out in the black, calling for a sun that was taking far too long.

On the last afternoon there had been sun, a downpour came through and did not stop. The fields drowned, the lagoons ran together into one sheet, and the animals crowded onto the high ground in a single terrified truce, calves beside pumas, partridges beside foxes. Ants balled up in the crowns of the butiá palms. Snakes coiled in the tangle of floating water hyacinth. The flood reached into every burrow, including the one where the boiguaçu, the great snake, had lain asleep for many hands of moons. She woke, and she came out lashing.

What she ate was eyes. Only eyes, taken from the carcasses that thickened as the water fell, first a handful, then a portion, then armfuls. The boiguaçu had no hair like the ox and no scales like the dourado, no feathers, no shell, no thick hide like the tapir, so there was nothing to hide what was happening inside her. Her body turned transparent. Each crushed eye left behind its own small ration of the last light it had seen, and she filled with thousands of them until she was a glare without any flame in it, a cold yellow blaze shot through with blue. When the men saw her again they did not know her, and they gave her a new name.

Lopes Neto measures her at more than three lassos laid end to end. Crispim Mira, writing up Santa Catarina in 1920, describes something else entirely, a creature the size of a bull with feet like a giant’s and one enormous eye in the middle of its forehead, burning like a brand pulled out of a fire. The oldest source of all gives no body whatsoever. Any description of the boitatá is really a choice of century.

Luís da Câmara Cascudo, cataloguing it for the *Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro*, found the name spread across the whole country and worn down differently in each place: baitatá and batatá in the south, biatatá in Bahia, plain bata in Minas Gerais, batatão through the northeast, and in Sergipe and Alagoas the odd francophone corruptions Jean de la foice and Jean Delafosse. Cascudo also supplied the unglamorous answer. What people were seeing was marsh light, the ignis fatuus, gas rising off buried and rotting matter and catching by itself in the air, which is exactly why the thing haunts riverbanks, mangroves, graveyards and old killing grounds. Running from it displaces air, and the moving air pulls the flame along behind.

The powers are consistent across every version, which is unusual for a creature this scattered. It blinds. Meeting it out on the grass can cost a man his sight, his wits or his life, and the reason is built into what it is made of. A thing assembled out of stolen eyes goes on wanting eyes, and living ones are better than dead ones. In the gaúcho telling it circled the camps at night, and the men who came out to gape at it wept, which was the worst thing they could have done, because tears hold light too.

For all that, it is a poor predator and a poorer immortal. Light taken from eyes carries no nourishment, and the boiguaçu died of pure weakness with her body full of it, thrashing across the carrion heaps until she came apart like anything else that belongs to the earth. What she let go went back into the sky as the returning sun. The fire she left behind cannot warm the water of a spring or catch dry grass. It sleeps hidden through the winter and only runs the fields after the sultry heat of summer. Two things get a man out alive: standing absolutely still with his eyes screwed shut and his breath held until it drifts away, or, on horseback, throwing a wide loop over it and galloping off with the rope dragging loose, because it follows the iron of the ring, and the first tussock of dry scrub it strikes breaks it into powder, and it has to gather itself again slowly out of the moving air.

Lopes Neto ends with practical advice rather than a moral. Move the cattle off the ground the boitatá works, because the grazing there turns bad. Then he signs it in two words: I have seen it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Boitatá?

The Boitatá is a giant fire serpent of Brazilian folklore whose body is made of light rather than flame. In the best known version it was once an ordinary great snake that ate the eyes of animals killed in a flood and became transparent and luminous from the light stored inside them. It is most often described as a guardian of fields and forests against people who burn them.

What does the name Boitatá mean?

It comes from Old Tupi. The oldest form, *baetatá*, joins *mba’e*, meaning thing, to *tatá*, meaning fire, so the original sense was thing of fire rather than fire snake. The serpent reading came later, when the first element was reshaped by *mboi*, the Tupi word for snake.

Who first wrote about the Boitatá?

The Jesuit José de Anchieta, in a letter sent from São Vicente in 1560. He described a thing that lived near the sea and the rivers, appeared on beaches as nothing but a shimmering torch running about, and killed people quickly, and he admitted that nobody knew what it actually was. Anchieta’s version has no snake in it at all.

What happens if you look at the Boitatá?

Meeting the Boitatá can leave a person blind, mad or dead. The gaúcho telling gives two escapes: stand completely still with the eyes shut tight and the breath held until it moves off, or, if mounted, throw a wide lasso loop over it and gallop away with the rope trailing, because it follows the iron ring until it strikes a tussock of dry grass and scatters.

Is the Boitatá evil?

Not straightforwardly. The earliest record has it killing at random with no motive given, but from Couto de Magalhães in 1876 onward it is written as a guardian that punishes people who set fire to fields and forests. Its danger to humans comes from appetite rather than malice, since a creature built out of eaten eyes keeps hunting eyes.

Related Entries

Boiúna, Cobra Norato, Curupira, Anhangá, Caipora, Iara, Saci, Jaci, Tupã, Mapinguari, Lobisomem, Sachamama, Mbói Tu’ĩ, Will-o’-the-Wisp