Boiúna

In the beginning there was no night. Day went on and on without a break in it, and the night lay asleep at the bottom of the water, in the house of the Cobra Grande. That is where the oldest written version of the great Amazonian serpent puts her, in a Nheengatu text that Couto de Magalhães took down from tapuio narrators and printed in Rio de Janeiro in 1876. The serpent had a daughter, the daughter had married, and she would not sleep with her husband while the world had only daylight in it. Her father had night. She sent for it up the great river, and it came back to her sealed inside the stone of a tucumã nut, the seam closed with pitch, under a warning that if the stone were opened everything would be lost.

Three servants carried it home. Somewhere out on the water they began to hear a noise inside the shell, ten, ten, ten, which was the crickets and the little frogs that sing after dark. The pilot told them to keep rowing. They kept rowing for a while. Then they crowded into the middle of the canoe, lit a fire, softened the pitch off the seam, and looked in, and the dark came out of it all at once.

What follows is a creation. Everything scattered through the forest turned into animals and birds; everything scattered on the river turned into ducks and fish. A carrying basket became a jaguar. A fisherman and his canoe became one duck between them, his head the head and bill, the hull the body, the paddles the legs. Then the daughter of the Cobra Grande saw the morning star and said she was going to divide the day from the night. She wound a thread and made the cujubim from it, whitening its head with clay and reddening its legs with urucú so that it would call at every dawn from then on, and she wound the thread again, threw ash over it, and made the inambú to call at the separate hours of the night. The three servants she left as monkeys, up in the branches for good. The black mouths and the yellow band on their arms are the pitch that ran over them when they melted it.

In that text she is Boia-uaçu, the big snake. On the same rivers she is also Boiúna, from the words for a snake and for black, and along the lower Tocantins and the lower Amazon the names cover one being: the enormous dark serpent who owns the water and everything that happens under it.

The record is oddly uninterested in her face. In 1876 she is a householder with a daughter and a locked stone full of night, and not one line describes her body. The oldest printed Boiúna story, “A boiuna do Atuá” in Hygino Amanajás’s *Contos e Lendas Paraenses* of 1900, opens a bedroom door on an enormous coil of snake and says nothing more. That is very nearly the whole physical record. She is black, she is far too large, and the tellings gauge her the way people gauge weather, by what gives way. The two great yellow eyes flashing like lightning belong to Dalcídio Jurandir’s novel *Três casas e um rio*, and a novelist is allowed to see more than a witness.

The Atuá story sets the pattern that everything later follows. A house on Marajó, the long feast for Santo Antônio that ran from the twelfth of June to the day of São João on the twenty-fourth, and on the third night a young man walking into the room who was better looking and better mannered than anyone had a right to be. After a while he asked Joaninha, the daughter of the house, eighteen years old, for somewhere to sleep. She was to lock the door from the outside, keep the key, call him through the keyhole at four in the morning, and not be startled if she saw something out of the ordinary. Then, he said, they would both be happy, and she would be the reason. She let the hour slide. The cockerel had crowed three times before she remembered, and when the keyhole showed her nothing she opened the door. The house came down. For years afterwards people passing that stretch said they could still hear a party under the water, animals, voices, and the same cockerel.

The pattern repeats often enough that it has made geography. On the island of Pacoca near Abaetetuba a girl screamed and the serpent said that she had lost herself and condemned him before the hut folded and went into the water. On the Guajará the same failure of nerve is credited with making the lake, and in João Vianna’s telling the drowned house comes back at night as a lit vessel working the water with its musicians still playing and its cockerels still crowing. Boat and serpent are not really separable here. She appears in the records as an ordinary snake, as an enchanted person, and as a ship, and the third is as steady as the other two.

None of this floats free of religion. The beings of the fundo, the deep, live in an encante, in the pools and sandy places and in cities beneath the river, and they take people; the word for it is sequestro, and children are said to be their favourites. Some of the taken come back with the dom and spend their lives praying over other people’s sickness. In the Bragantina country of northeast Pará the women who do that work describe the snake as a door rather than an animal. One of them cannot pray for cobreiro, the ringing skin complaint, because cobreiro is the young of the snake of the enchanted deep, and if it closes its circle around a person’s waist that person does not get up again. Another says the massage she gives is the embrace of the sucuri, and that the water snake sent her a shadow to walk beside her for years.

The most famous shape the Boiúna takes is her own children. A woman is enchanted and bears two snakes instead of two babies, and they are thrown into the river. The brother, Honorato, is decent and keeps his sister from sinking boats; the sister is not decent at all, and eventually he kills her. On some nights he comes ashore as a young man who dances beautifully, and to break the spell somebody has to cut him with an unused blade, pour milk on the wound, and not run. Nobody would, until a soldier at Cametá did. Câmara Cascudo makes the father not a snake but the boto, the river dolphin and the great seducer of those waters, which is one way of accounting for the dancing.

The story is wonderful and it is not old. No nineteenth-century collector names Honorato anywhere. The earliest printing anyone has traced is the Atuá tale of 1900, and by 1910 the traveller Ignácio Baptista de Moura was already dismissing him as a fable that had entertained him as a boy, a snake born to a mestiça girl and grown so prodigiously that it was seen the length of the Cametá district, turning into a handsome lad to dance at the folguedos without letting on what he was. The folklorist José Carvalho called the legend relatively modern and said plainly that it belongs to Pará.

Her powers all follow from the one fact that she owns the water. She held the night before there was night, and handed it over on her own terms. She can put a river’s weight against a hull, wear a canoe or a steamer or a clean white shirt, take a house down whole and keep it running under the surface, and carry a living person into the encante to keep or to send back changed.

Her limits are the limits of an enchantment, which means they are mostly procedural. She binds herself with the terms she sets: the hour, the blade, the milk, the promise not to flinch, and she has to stand by them. What defeats her is fear, and it defeats her in the wrong direction, because the frightened girl at the door does not kill the serpent, she doubles the spell and drowns a houseful of people. A clumsy rescue is worse than none. In one Bragança version the soldier is drunk when he comes to cut the tail, goes too deep, reaches the spine, and the enchanted one dies rather than goes free. When a disenchantment does work the discarded snake skin is burned, and in José Carvalho’s telling the body was burned and reduced to ashes, which is the only thing in the whole cycle that nobody can undo.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Boiúna?

The Boiúna is a colossal black serpent of Amazonian folklore, also called the Cobra Grande, who owns the deep water of the Amazon and its tributaries. She is a shapeshifter, appearing as a snake, as a human being, and as a boat, and she is held responsible for capsized vessels and for houses that vanish into the river. Her name comes from the Tupi words for snake and for black.

Is the Boiúna the same as the Cobra Grande?

Yes. Boiúna, Cobra Grande and Boiaçu are names for the same being in Amazonian tradition, with the first stressing her blackness and the others her size. The oldest written version, collected by Couto de Magalhães and published in 1876, calls her Boia-uaçu, while the oldest printed story to use the name Boiúna appeared in Pará in 1900.

What does the Boiúna have to do with the origin of night?

In the 1876 account the Boiúna, as Cobra Grande, kept night asleep at the bottom of the water when the world had only daylight. Her married daughter sent for it, and the serpent released it sealed inside a tucumã nut with a warning not to open the nut. Her daughter’s three servants opened it anyway, darkness escaped, and scattered objects across the forest and river turned into animals, birds and fish.

Who is Cobra Norato and how is he related to the Boiúna?

Cobra Norato, also called Honorato, is the serpent son born of a woman enchanted by the Boiúna’s line, along with a destructive sister he eventually kills. He is the most famous form the Cobra Grande cycle takes in Pará, coming ashore on some nights as a young man who dances well and asking to be disenchanted with an unused blade and milk. The Norato legend is comparatively recent, with no nineteenth-century record of it, and its earliest known printing dates from 1900.

How is the Boiúna’s enchantment broken?

The person chosen has to wound the serpent with an unused blade and pour milk on the cut without showing fear. Failure makes things worse rather than neutral: a frightened witness doubles the enchantment and can bring a whole house down into the water, and in one version a drunk soldier cuts too deep and kills the enchanted one instead of freeing him. After a successful disenchantment the shed snake skin is burned to ashes.

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Cobra Norato, Boi-tatá, Iara, Curupira, Mapinguari, Anhangá, Caipora, Encantado, Jurupari, Yacuruna, Sachamama, Amaru, Mbói Tu’ĩ, Teju Jagua