Erchitu

Past midnight the drumming starts, thin and out of time, and the dogs in the lanes stop barking all at once. What comes up the street is an ox the colour of bone, wide enough to fill the gap between two granite house fronts, and the horns catching the moon are not horn at all but steel. Figures walk with it in mismatched colours, one of them beating a drum, and where the ox stops they stop.

It halts in front of a door. Then it bellows, three times, and the sound goes into every house in the village at the same moment. By morning the women will have worked out which door it was. The man who sleeps behind it is sentenziadu, sentenced, and the tellings give him a year at the outside, sometimes three months.

The ox is a man. In the villages of Barbagia the transformation was not a random misfortune but a verdict, and it landed on someone who had done something grave and got away with it. Usually a killing. Usually one that no court ever heard about, because the witnesses were frightened into silence or because there had been none. Human justice missed him, and the other one did not.

The oldest surviving account of it comes from a nineteenth-century Sardinian manuscript in the Comparetti collection, later edited and published by the demologist Enrica Delitala, and it describes the change from the inside rather than from the road. The man is lying down when the knocking comes. He asks who is there and a voice answers that it is the king, and the sound of it makes him shake like a reed. He dresses and opens the door ready to hand himself over, and finds that this is the other justice. His legs go first and become a bull’s. Two great horns push up through his forehead with steel at the points. His arms drop into hairy forelegs, a tail comes out behind him, and the noise that starts coming out of his throat is not his.

Then he goes out and walks with them. At the head of the company is a large horned devil, another carries the drum, they are dressed each in a different colour, flame comes out of their mouths and their nostrils, and every one of them has a steel horn set in the middle of his forehead. Where the leader gives the order, the ox has to bellow. The company halts and plays a flourish in honour of the poor wretch who is going to die. In some tellings the devils fix two lit candles to the horns, so the whole procession moves through the lanes with two small flames swaying above it at head height.

At four in the morning he is a man again and back in his own bed. Other versions make the return harder work, and require him to roll on the ground in front of three churches, or in front of the cemetery, before he is allowed back into his own shape.

Men caught one, once. They got it into a stable and tied it by the horns to an iron hook, and in the morning they went to check that it had not broken loose. What was tied to the hook was a man they knew, sitting on the floor, weeping.

The fullest story is about two students who shared a house and a bed. One of them, Antonio, left the bed every night at midnight and came back at four, and would not say why. After months of it he finally told his friend: he had a bad temper, he had come to insulting words with a companion during a game, he had gone over the top of him and killed him, and the others had been too afraid of him to say a word. Since the justice of the world could not punish him, the justice of Heaven had. He also told him the cure. Someone had to take an axe of good steel, wait at a certain corner, and take off both horns with one stroke. He said he could not imagine finding a man brave enough to look at him and swing. His friend went and found the axe. At one in the morning he heard drums and horns coming, and then the thing itself, an ox as big as a single-storey house with horns like pitchforks, and it put two bellows into him at close range. He lifted the axe with both hands and brought it down and tore both horns out at once. They fell in the road, and Antonio was standing there.

What the erchitu can do is narrow and horrible. He carries, through walls and shuttered windows, a sound that every household hears at once and that nobody mistakes for cattle. He names the doomed by standing still. He is enormously strong, armoured at the one point where an ox is dangerous anyway, and he cannot be reasoned with, because the man inside is not driving.

The horns are also the whole of his weakness, which is neat for a creature whose entire meaning is a yoke. Both of them, one blow, and the sentence is discharged. Where the candles appear instead, the same logic holds: someone strong and clean enough to put out both flames in a single breath ends it. The severed horns were not thrown away afterwards. People kept them and used them against pain in the spleen.

The name shifts from village to village, and in some places the being shifts with it. At Mamoiada and Lula the word used is Boe muliache, which elsewhere covers a related but different affliction, a man who takes on ox shape through bad luck rather than guilt, and the two get confused constantly. At Ottana in the carnival, men still put on ox masks carved from wild pear wood, white sheepskins, a rack of cowbells at the neck, and let themselves be roped through the streets by keepers in black faces carrying a leather whip called a soca. The ox fights the rope, gets dragged down, and gets up again.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Erchitu in Sardinian folklore?

The Erchitu is a man cursed to turn into a huge white ox with steel-tipped horns and roam his village at night, escorted by devils. The curse falls on someone guilty of a serious crime, usually a murder that human courts never punished. He returns to human form at dawn.

What happens if the Erchitu stops at your house?

The Erchitu halts in front of a chosen door and bellows three times, loudly enough for the whole village to hear. The head of that household is sentenziadu, condemned to die, generally within the year, though some accounts shorten it to three months.

How is the Erchitu’s curse broken?

Someone has to cut off both of the ox’s horns with a single stroke of a steel axe, which restores the cursed man to himself permanently. In the versions where devils fix lit candles to the horns, blowing out both flames in one breath does the same job. The severed horns were kept as a remedy for pain in the spleen.

Is the Erchitu the same as the Boe Muliache?

They are close but not identical, and Sardinian sources treat them as distinct even though the names overlap in some villages. The Erchitu is a punishment for a specific unpunished sin. The Boe Muliache is a man who takes on ox form because of an adverse fate rather than any particular guilt.

Where does the Erchitu legend come from?

The Erchitu belongs to the mountain villages of Barbagia in central Sardinia. A nineteenth-century manuscript in the Comparetti collection preserves first-hand village testimony about it, later published by the folklorist Enrica Delitala, and the belief is recorded across a spread of towns under different local names.

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