Carbuncle

Also Known As: Spanish carbunclo, carbunco; Portuguese carbunculo; Guarani anagpitan, glossed by Martin del Barco Centenera as “the devil that shines like fire”; from Latin carbunculus, “little coal”
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: South American Mythology, Chilean Mythology, Chilote Mythology, Guarani Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A small nocturnal animal that carries a burning gem in its head and can shut its own light off, either by dropping a lid over the stone or by closing a hinged shell around it.
Role in Mythos: It walks over buried ore and betrays where the ore is, which makes it the most valuable animal in the mining folklore of the southern cordillera.
Relation to Humans: Prospectors and canal diggers hunt it for the stone and for the gold said to line its shell, and the hunt is old enough that a sixteenth century chaplain and a nineteenth century labourer both left accounts of trying. Two men in the record got close, one lost his in a river and the other killed his in a hurry and got rich without ever looking at it properly.

On a moonless night in the Coquimbo hills a light comes down the slope, low to the ground, white with a blue edge to it, and steady where a fire would jump and gutter. It is strong enough to pick out the stones from a league away. It halts. It moves again. Somewhere in the dry brush an animal is walking to the river for water and lighting its own road there, and every prospector in the valley who sees it is already doing arithmetic.

Carbunclo is Spanish for a live coal, from the Latin carbunculus, and jewellers had been using the word for the garnet and the ruby long before anybody attached it to something with legs. The stone came first by centuries. The animal came out of the Indies, and it arrived in the written record already carrying an argument about whether it existed.

The first man to set it down was Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, who did not believe in it. In the twentieth book of his history of the Indies he passes on what a cleric told him: that at a certain port two animals were seen on land at night, and those who saw them said they were carbuncos, and the stones they carried lit up like a pair of burning candles. A watch was posted. Once the Spaniards began taking real trouble to catch them the animals never showed themselves again, though before that they had come three or four nights running. Then Oviedo does something his century rarely bothered with. He says flatly that he can find nothing written anywhere about such an animal; Isidore gives certain dragons a jewel in the brain that will not shine unless it is cut out while the dragon lives, and Pliny writes at length about carbuncle stones, but neither of them puts one inside a beast.

Martin del Barco Centenera, chaplain to the Rio de la Plata expedition and later archdeacon, was less careful and much more useful. In the third canto of La Argentina, printed in Lisbon in 1602, he claims to have seen the carbunclo with his own eyes more than once and asks not to be judged a man chasing fancies, since he went about ready to catch one. A little animal, he says, on the small side, with a mirror in its forehead shining like a coal alive in a heavy log, and it runs and leaps, quick and businesslike. In the margin he notes what the Guarani called it: anagpitan, the devil that shines like fire. He suffered a thousand pains and a thousand vexations following it and never got his hands on one.

The next line is the cruelty at the centre of the whole business. The instant the animal is struck it knits its brow, and the mirror goes cloudy. A dead carbuncle is worth nothing at all. If the stone is to be any use it has to be cut out while the creature is still breathing, which is the dragon lore of the bestiaries transplanted whole into a South American thicket.

Ruy Diaz Melgarejo told Centenera to his face that he had owned one, a beautiful one. He was travelling by canoe, in high spirits, and the canoe went over, and the carbuncle went into the water with the rest of his gear. Centenera watched him grieve about it afterwards. If I had not lost the carbuncle, Melgarejo kept saying, I would have served the great Philip with it.

What the thing actually looked like has never settled, and the versions do not so much contradict each other as belong to separate eras. The chronicler Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas reported small dogs with a shining stone set between the eyes and an eyelid they drop over it at the least sound. Covarrubias, compiling his Spanish dictionary in 1611, described a stone bred in the head of an animal that draws a frown across its brow to cover the light when it senses hunters. Three centuries later in the Chilean north the machinery has changed entirely. There the traditions agree in seeing a creature made of two shells or valves that it can open and shut, with the fire held in the hidden middle, the light very keen, blue-white, visible for more than a league. Eulogio Rojas watched one from a metre away in 1879 and followed it a long stretch to see it properly. It had joints, he said, and light came out through them, not red like burning wood but blue and white, and it had the form of a small ear of maize, and more than four legs.

Gaspar Huerta was cutting a canal at Las Tunas, in Quile, when he turned one up out of the ground. He killed it at once, hurrying and rattled, so that the other labourers would not see what he had and want it, and afterwards he could recall nothing about the animal except that it was a bit bigger than a mouse and that it had a shell. Huerta got rich. The entire scientific record of that specimen is one sentence in a provincial newspaper.

Further south, in Chiloe, the carbunco stops being a curiosity and takes up a post. It is the jealous guardian of the metals and treasure the ground hides, and it shows itself on the dark still nights around the June solstice, sometimes as a tiny and very handsome white dog inside a reddish green halo, sometimes as nothing but a brightness, sometimes as a glowing bivalve. It comes up out of the earth like a flare, holds for a moment, and the instant it is looked at squarely it is swallowed by the ground or bolts into the nearest scrub. Anyone who does see it and keeps his nerve is supposed to throw it a cord or a sash, which the animal seizes and carries off. At dawn the next morning the thrower goes back and hunts for his sash, and finds a hand’s breadth of it sticking out of the soil, usually at the root of a thorny calafate bush. That marks the treasure. Digging it out is a longer business: a new shovel, midnight, an old widow standing by with a black cat, and the cat pitched into the hole at every yard of depth, vanishing as though wiped away and reappearing in the old woman’s hands before the next yard is cleared. Skip the cat and the digger dies in his own pit, choked by the vapours the buried metal gives off. Show fear at any point and the treasure turns to rock.

The great Chilean drought of 1924 and 1925 brought a run of sightings on moonless nights, and around 1925 a whole family of carbuncos was reported coming down off the hills of Tulahuen towards the Rio Grande. That the animal travels at night to find water is the oldest and least glamorous thing said about it, and the only detail on which every teller agrees.

Its gifts are simple and enormous. The light carries further than a man can shout, and it burns over ore, which is why miners who see it go back and prospect the ground the light crossed. Set into its head, or packed inside its shell, is enough wealth to end a life of digging. Its hearing is so acute that it registers a footfall before the man making it has seen anything at all.

Every one of those gifts is also the flaw. The light that makes it worth hunting is the only reason anyone knows it is there. The shell that saves it works by blinding and silencing it, so it survives by consenting to be mistaken for a common stone. Its stone dies with it, so the one prize worth taking cannot be taken by force. And whatever wealth is supposed to be in its belly does it no good whatever; the accounts are firm that the armour is made of the treasure, which means the animal is walking around wearing the exact thing that guarantees it will be pursued for as long as anyone in those hills is poor.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Carbuncle?

The Carbuncle, or carbunclo, is a small nocturnal animal of South American folklore that carries a burning gem in its head and is believed to hold gold or precious stones inside its body. Its name comes from the Latin carbunculus, “little coal,” a word already used for the garnet and the ruby. It is reported from Paraguay and the Rio de la Plata under the Guarani name anagpitan, and from the mining districts of northern Chile and the islands of Chiloe.

Where does the Carbuncle story come from?

The carbuncle gem is ancient, but the carbuncle animal is a product of the Spanish conquest of South America. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo recorded the first account in his history of the Indies and noted that he could find no earlier writer who described such a beast, only Isidore of Seville on dragons with a jewel in the brain and Pliny on fiery gemstones. The creature reached English-speaking readers largely through the Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, whose carbuncle entry appears in the English edition of 1969 and not in the original Spanish.

Has anyone ever caught a Carbuncle?

Two men in the record came close. Ruy Diaz Melgarejo told the chaplain Martin del Barco Centenera that he had owned a fine one and lost it when his canoe capsized, and a labourer named Gaspar Huerta unearthed one while digging a canal at Las Tunas in Quile, killed it immediately to keep it from his workmates, and became wealthy. Huerta was in such a hurry that he remembered nothing about the animal except that it was slightly bigger than a mouse and had a shell.

What does the Carbuncle look like?

Descriptions differ by period and region rather than converging on one animal. Early Spanish chroniclers describe a small dog with a shining stone between its eyes covered by an eyelid, or a swift little creature with a mirror set in its forehead. Chilean accounts from the nineteenth century onward describe a jointed body shaped like a small ear of maize, with more than four legs and blue-white light escaping through the joints, enclosed in two shells that can open and close. In Chiloe it also appears as a tiny white dog ringed in reddish green light.

How is the Carbuncle’s treasure recovered in Chiloe?

Chilote tradition prescribes an exact procedure. The finder throws the animal a cord or sash, which it snatches and carries away; at dawn he returns and locates the sash half buried, usually at the foot of a thorny calafate bush, and that spot marks the treasure. He must dig it up at midnight with a new shovel, accompanied by an old widow holding a black cat, and throw the cat into the hole at every yard of depth, or he will die in the pit from the vapours the buried metal releases. Any sign of fear turns the treasure to rock.