Broxa

Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Jewish Mythology, Portuguese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A shapeshifting, blood-drinking creature that flies through the dark, slips between the shape of a bird and the shape of a person, and feeds on goat’s milk and human blood.
Role in Mythos: It is the unseen night predator blamed for drained livestock, wasting victims, and sudden deaths in the communities it haunts.
Relation to Humans: The Broxa preys on people directly, taking the blood it needs to survive and passing among them disguised as an ordinary neighbour by day. Communities feared it as both a killer of animals and a murderer of the sick and the sleeping, and they built up remedies meant to expose it, wound it, and keep it in the ground once it was buried.

The goat is found at first light with its udder slack and its milk gone, though no kid has nursed and no hand has reached the pail. Something came while the household slept, settled close in the dark, and drank. By the time anyone stirs there is nothing to find but a few black feathers snagged on the fence and a coldness in the straw where warm bodies ought to be. In the Jewish communities of medieval Europe, and later among the Sephardim who carried their stories into Portugal, that something had a name, and the name was the Broxa.

In its oldest form it is a bird. It comes for the milk of goats first, and then, when the milk is not enough, it comes for blood. The thirteenth-century *Sefer Ḥasidim*, the great book of the Ashkenazi pietists attributed to Judah the Pious of Regensburg, sets the creature beside the estrie, the blood-drinking witch-demon of the same tradition. There the line between bird and woman dissolves. The estrie flies, changes her shape, drinks the blood of the living, and does not stop simply because someone has killed her. The texts tell of such creatures returning to their victims after death, climbing back to feed, which is why the people who feared them learned to bury them carefully.

The word itself is the Portuguese for witch, and it is in Portugal that the Broxa took on its fullest and most human shape. There it was not only a bird but a shapeshifter made by witchcraft, a thing that wore the face of a woman through the daylight hours and went hunting once the sun was down. In female form it was reckoned a witch; in male form, a demon. It looked like anyone. The neighbour drawing water, the old woman at the edge of the village, the quiet figure who kept to herself: any of them might be the one who rose into the night sky and went looking for a sleeper to drain. This is the detail that gives the legend its particular dread. The danger was not far off in a cave or a forest. It lived in the next house and smiled at you in the market.

The Inquisition kept records of where that fear led. In 1585 a woman named Margarida Lourenço stood trial in Lisbon and confessed to anointing herself with an ointment the Devil had given her, by which she turned into a great black bird and flew to gatherings in the dark to take part in blood rituals and the worship of demons. Whether she believed it, or was made to say it, the testimony shows how completely the Broxa had settled into the imagination of the time. A woman could be accused of being one, tried as one, and describe the transformation in her own voice.

How a person became a Broxa depended on who told the story. In the Jewish accounts the creature is closer to a demon by nature, a thing that simply is what it is. In the Portuguese telling it is made, conjured through witchcraft, a human being remade into a predator that needs blood the way the living need bread. The making is the horror in one version and the nature is the horror in the other, but the result is the same in both. It took blood, and it kept taking it.

Its powers follow from what it is. It flies. It changes shape, sliding from woman to bird to demon and back, which lets it hunt unseen and hide in plain sight. It drains milk and blood, and in the estrie strain of the legend it shrugs off its own death and returns to feed again, which makes a simple killing useless. Its weaknesses follow just as closely. To be recognised was to be weakened: in the lore tied to the estrie, a wounded one would waste away unless she was given bread and salt from the very hand that hurt her, and a dead one had to be buried with her mouth packed full of earth so she could not rise and climb back to the living. The creature that could not be stopped by an ordinary death could still be stopped by knowledge, by salt, by a grave made carefully enough to hold it.

Some who study where vampires come from point back to creatures like this one, the night-flying woman who drinks blood and will not stay dead. The Broxa is one of the shapes that fear took before it had the word for what it feared.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Broxa?

The Broxa is a shapeshifting, blood-drinking creature from Jewish folklore and the folklore of medieval Portugal. In its oldest form it is a night-flying bird that sucks the milk of goats and the blood of humans, and in the Portuguese tradition it is a witch or demon that can take human shape by day and hunt by night.

Where does the Broxa come from?

The Broxa appears first in medieval Jewish folklore, where the thirteenth-century *Sefer Ḥasidim* links it to the estrie, a blood-drinking witch-demon. It became especially associated with Portugal, where its name is simply the Portuguese word for witch, and where it was imagined as a human being remade into a vampiric predator through witchcraft.

What does the Broxa do to humans?

The Broxa drains blood from sleeping or vulnerable people to sustain itself, and it is blamed for wasting illnesses and sudden deaths. Because it can pass as an ordinary person during the day, it was feared as a hidden killer living unrecognised within the community before flying out to feed after dark.

How can the Broxa be killed or stopped?

In the estrie lore tied to the Broxa, an ordinary killing is not enough, because the creature can return from death to keep feeding. A wounded one was said to waste away only if given bread and salt from the person who hurt it, and a dead one had to be buried with its mouth filled with earth so it could not rise from the grave.

Is the Broxa connected to vampires?

Yes, the Broxa is often counted among the early folkloric ancestors of the vampire. Its core traits, night flight, blood-drinking, shapeshifting, and the refusal to stay dead, line up closely with later European vampire legends, and some researchers trace part of the vampire tradition back to creatures like it.