Broxa

Around 1257, in the Dominican house of Arabic studies at Tunis, a Catalan friar called Ramon Marti was building a dictionary and reached a word out of his own childhood. He wrote down bruxa. Then he had to explain it, in Arabic, to readers who had never met it, and he did so with three glosses. Habiba, the lover. Qarina, the female demon born alongside a person at birth, jealous of them for life, killer of the unborn and the newly born. Kabus, the thing that settles onto a sleeper in the dark and presses the breath out of them. Three borrowed words for one idea, and not one of them meant an old woman with a broom.

That entry in the Vocabulista in arabico is the oldest surviving use of the word, and the three glosses set the shape of everything that followed. The broxa began as a weight in the dark, not as a person.

The spelling wandered as the word spread. Castilian and Portuguese kept bruxa, Provencal made it bruesche, and Aragonese and Catalan clerks wrote broxa and broxo with equal confidence. Du Cange, cataloguing the Latin of the Middle Ages, found the word set into a court formula for the women a tribunal intended to prosecute, the maleficent and fortune-telling little women commonly called broxae. Behind that Latin lay something older and simpler. The word first named a bird, an unwholesome one that came at night, and it then made exactly the journey the Latin strix had made before it, out of the branches and into the accusation.

Rome had already libelled a real bird along that road. Pliny wrote up a creature he called the caprimulgus, a night thief about the size of a large blackbird, which flew to the udders of goats to drink, spoiling the udder and blinding the animal it milked. That bird exists. It is the nightjar, and it comes to livestock for the moths that gather around warm bodies, with a bill too small to take milk from anything at all. The slander outlived the Empire, and in modern retellings it has fastened itself onto the broxa, who is now widely described as a creature that drains goats. No medieval source says so. The goat and the milk belong to Pliny’s nightjar. The broxa came for the children.

The word travelled sideways as well as forward. Joshua Trachtenberg, whose 1939 study of medieval Jewish folk religion is still the standard account, gave a section of it to what he called the foreign demons, the names that Jewish communities in France and Germany took wholesale from their Christian neighbours and then argued about in Hebrew. Four recur more than the rest: the estrie, the broxa, the mare and the werwolf. By the thirteenth century they had settled so deeply into Jewish demonology that rabbis were fitting them into the old Talmudic scheme, disputing which of them had been among the spirits created at dusk on the eve of the first Sabbath and caught bodiless when the Sabbath fell. The broxa herself surfaces in the Toledot Adam veHavah, a fourteenth-century legal compendium written in Provence, in the same breath as the estrie. Trachtenberg drew the plain conclusion from that pairing. The estrie was known above all in a woman’s body, so the broxa was too.

The estrie stories carry the temperature the word had by then. In the Sefer Hasidim, a woman lay ill and two neighbours sat up with her through the night. One dozed. The sick woman got out of bed, shook her hair loose about her head and began to rise, reaching for the sleeper’s blood. The other woman screamed, they wrestled her back down between them, and by morning she was dead, because she had needed that blood to go on living and had not been allowed to take it. Elsewhere in the same collection, a wounded one can only recover by eating bread and salt from the hand that struck her, and a man who has beaten off a cat in the night is warned by an old neighbour not to be generous when the woman comes asking for it the next day.

Nobody in the medieval record ever says what a broxa looked like, and the silence is consistent enough to be a finding rather than a gap. What the documents supply instead is a short list of verbs. She goes out at night. She travels through the air and across the land. She comes in through the holes.

Those phrases are quoted rather than imagined. The earliest surviving copy of the confessors’ manual of Martin Perez is a Portuguese version of 1399, and it lays down a penance for anyone who believes that women go out at night, fly through the air and the lands, enter through the holes and eat and suck the children. Forty days, and seven years. Castilian copies made from it in the following decades revise the noun rather than the belief. First the women become bruxas and estrias, and then, by 1437, they simply become bruxas. The belief did not change. The word for it did.

By that point the courts had it. In 1419 the episcopal court of Barcelona questioned a midwife named Sanca de Camins over the death of an infant, and the surviving record of her interrogation is headed De bruxes. The first thing they asked her was whether she had ever gone about with the women who are called bruxes. Later in the century the Aragonese town of Barbastro issued a local ordinance titled Qualiter bruxe puniantur, setting out trials without right of appeal for anyone suspected of being a broxo or broxa, a fetillero, a metzinero or a sortilego. A gloss in a friar’s dictionary had become a heading in a statute, and the statute took away the appeal.

The cellar mattered as much as the cradle. Confessions from the Pyrenean trials run to a fixed and domestic order of events: the women get into the house, eat, take bread, go down to the cool of the cellar and draw wine from a vat, spill the grain out of the chest, and crush the child. A witness at an Aragonese trial in 1572 repeated an exchange between a mother and her daughter that puts the whole belief into a sentence. The girl said there were no witches about any more. The mother told her it was not the season for walking around, because there was little wine, and that when there is plenty of it the wine-vat broxas smother the children.

Her powers follow from that pattern rather than from any bestiary. She flies at night with her hair unbound. She gets into a shut house through a chink or a keyhole. In the northwest of the peninsula she was said to turn herself into a goose to do it. Once inside she can lie on a sleeper’s chest until the breath stops, or take an infant out of its bed and leave finger marks and dark bruises on the small body for the family to find at dawn.

Her weaknesses were supplied, in the end, by the men who did not believe in her. Lope de Barrientos, a fifteenth-century Castilian bishop, put the question that mattered and answered it himself: do these bruxas leave their bodies behind when they go, or take them along? Neither, he said. A body with three dimensions cannot pass through a gap that small, souls do not leave the living at will, and women do not turn into geese. Then he added the sentence that gives the whole business away, advising mothers to take better care of their babies and, if a child died of poor keeping, not to excuse themselves with the broxas who came in through the crack. He was right about the physics. It made no difference to the trials.

There is a last irony buried in the name. The bird etymology is the famous one, but the earliest Catalan uses of the word are all about crushing and suffocation, which has led to a proposal that bruxa descends instead from an Indo-European root meaning to smash or to break. Not a night-bird at the bottom of it, on that reading, but the weight on the chest.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Broxa?

A broxa is the night-flying witch-spirit of medieval Iberia, known in Catalan, Aragonese, Castilian and Portuguese sources and borrowed into medieval Jewish demonology. She was believed to enter closed houses at night through chinks and holes, smother sleepers, plunder the cellar and kill newborn children.

Where does the word Broxa come from?

Broxa is a spelling variant of bruxa, the Iberian word for a witch, first recorded around 1257 in the Arabic-Latin dictionary of the Catalan friar Ramon Marti. The word originally denoted an unwholesome night-bird and shifted to mean witch, the same shift the Latin word strix had already made.

Does the Broxa really suck the milk of goats?

No medieval source says so. The goat-milking night-bird is the caprimulgus described by Pliny, a slander on the ordinary nightjar, and it was attached to the broxa only in modern retellings. In the medieval record the broxa takes children and wine, not milk.

What is the connection between the Broxa and Jewish folklore?

Medieval Jewish communities in France and Germany borrowed several demon names from their Christian neighbours, and the broxa was one of them, alongside the estrie, the mare and the werwolf. The broxa appears in the fourteenth-century Toledot Adam veHavah and was equated with the estrie, the blood-drinking night-woman of the Sefer Hasidim.

Was anyone actually tried for being a Broxa?

Yes. The midwife Sanca de Camins was interrogated by the episcopal court of Barcelona in 1419 under a record headed De bruxes, and the Aragonese town of Barbastro later issued an ordinance allowing anyone suspected of being a broxo or broxa to be tried without right of appeal.

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