Huaychivo

Also Known As: also written Huay Chivo, Uay Chivo, Wáay Chivo
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Mayan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A living person who has learned the evil prayers, put off his own head, and taken the body of a goat for the night.
Role in Mythos: In Yucatec Maya villages the wáay is the shape immorality takes when it walks around after dark, and the goat is one of its commonest bodies.
Relation to Humans: He is not a stranger from the forest but a neighbour, which is the whole point of him, and the harm he does is mostly theft, ruined food, dead livestock and terror rather than murder. People guard against him with crosses of huano leaf, images of the saints, holy water poured in a ring around the house, and salt.

The road out of the village runs white under the moon, limestone dust and low scrub, and somewhere past the last thatched roof a dog stops barking and starts screaming. There is a goat standing in the lane. It is not tethered and it is not grazing, and when the flashlight finds it, it does not move. The man holding the light will not sleep tonight. In the morning a neighbour will find three kids dead in a pen whose fence has not been touched.

The name is half Maya and half Spanish, which is a fair description of the creature. Wáay, in Yucatec Maya, is the word for a person who can put on an animal’s body, and chivo is simply the Spanish for goat. Sorcerer-goat. The word is very old, and the goat is not. Wáay appears in the hieroglyphic script of the Classic Maya centuries before any European reached the peninsula, and it turns up again in the Calepino de Motul, the great Maya-Spanish dictionary compiled by the Franciscan Antonio de Ciudad Real, where vaay is glossed as the familiar kept by necromancers and witches, an animal into which they convert themselves by a pact made with the devil, with one further clause that has never stopped mattering: whatever harm comes to the animal comes also to the sorcerer whose familiar it is.

The goat itself arrived on a Spanish ship. Goats, pigs, cattle, sheep and horses were introduced to Yucatán after the conquest and taken up by the villages, and when anthropologists sat down in Maya-speaking towns and counted which animals people said the wáayo’ob become, the list came back as an inventory of the farmyard: the dog first, the goat close behind it, then the pig, the cat, the cow, the horse. Nobody is haunted by an animal they never see. The huay chivo is an old Maya idea wearing an imported body.

Becoming one is not an accident of birth. The power is learned, from a teacher or from private study, and the only real entrance requirement is a willingness to turn away from God. The transformation is done with prayers that are described flatly as evil, meaning not that they are wicked in effect but that they are addressed to the wrong party. And there is a physical obstacle. The head cannot be changed, because the holy water of baptism sits in it and will not let the prayers through, so the head has to come off and be left behind. The Yucatec phrase for what a man does when he transforms means, more or less, that he ruins himself. The phrase for turning back means that he repairs himself.

A herbalist in Chemax told the story this way. A husband hears that his wife goes out at night, so he says he will sleep three days at his cornfield, and instead climbs into a tree above the crossroads behind the town. Near midnight his wife walks out to the crossing, bends down, and the others leap over her, thirteen times, and what stands up is not his wife. He goes home and finds her head sitting on top of the chicken cage. He rubs ground chilli and salt into the cut. Before dawn the animals come whining back down the road, and the head will not go on.

That is the whole mechanism in one telling, and it explains the defences. Salt is smeared on the abandoned head so the man cannot return to being a man. A green cross, or the small crosses of huano leaf that hang over a doorway, will turn a wáay back at the threshold; so will the images of the saints, and holy water poured in a circle right around the house. Sandals left upside down beneath a hammock, or clothes put on inside out, work on the same logic of inversion. The bark of the tankasche’ and the leaves of the siipche’, which the j-men uses in his own ceremonies, are the one defence in the list that owes nothing to Europe.

Left to himself, he throws sleep. He jumps nine or thirteen times over the sleeper in the hammock, or circles the house nine or thirteen times, and then he does as he likes: spoils the food, wrecks the room, takes what he wants, and in the goat’s case goes for the animals in the pen. Killing people is not usually the point. Frightening them is. He also stinks, badly enough that the smell alone can fog a person’s head, and he trails a bad wind that leaves headache and nausea behind him without his ever intending it.

The older Yucatecan writers gave him blazing red eyes and limbs too long for the body. The people who actually live with the belief say the opposite: he looks like a goat. An entirely ordinary goat, which is the intelligent way to move through a village where everyone knows everyone. Both versions are frightening, but only one of them lets you walk past it.

The story now told in the Yucatán press, in which a lovesick boy bargains with Kisín for a goat’s shape to win the girl who tends the herd, is a recent and rather charming addition. It is not what the ethnographic record shows. In the record a wáay is made by study and refusal, not by heartbreak, and he is somebody’s uncle. Since the 1990s he has also had competition, and dead livestock in the peninsula gets blamed on the huay chivo and the chupacabra more or less interchangeably, depending on who is writing the headline.

He can be killed, but only with a bullet that has been blessed or has a cross cut into it, and even then he does not fall. He walks home, puts his head back on, lies down and dies there of the wound. Which is why, in these villages, a shot fired at a goat in the dark and a neighbour who is suddenly and unaccountably ill are not two events. They are one, and in Sisbicchen and Chemax that arithmetic has put men in jail.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Huaychivo?

The Huaychivo is a Yucatec Maya sorcerer who takes the body of a goat at night in order to steal, terrorize and kill livestock. The name combines the Maya word wáay, a person able to transform into an animal, with the Spanish chivo, meaning goat. He is a living neighbour rather than a spirit, and the transformation is learned rather than inherited.

How does a person become a Huaychivo?

He learns the necessary prayers, either from a teacher or on his own, and he agrees to reject God. The transformation is performed at night, because a wáay’s powers do not work in daylight, and it requires him to leave his own head behind, since baptism is held to protect the head and block the change.

How do you protect yourself from a Huaychivo?

Crosses are the most common defence, whether a wooden Santísima Cruz or the small crosses of huano leaf hung above a doorway, along with images of the saints and holy water poured in a ring around the house. Sandals left upside down under the hammock and clothes worn inside out are also used. The bark of the tankasche’ and leaves of the siipche’ are the indigenous elements in an otherwise Christian toolkit.

How can a Huaychivo be killed?

He must be shot with a bullet that has been blessed with holy water or marked with a cross, and even then he does not die where he is hit. He returns to his house, resumes human form and dies of the wound at home, which is why a sudden illness in a neighbour after a night-time shooting is treated in Yucatán as evidence rather than coincidence.

Is the Huaychivo the same as the chupacabra?

No, though they have been confused since the 1990s. The Huaychivo is a Maya sorcerer in animal form with a documented history reaching back through colonial dictionaries to the Classic period, while the chupacabra is a modern Latin American cryptid. Because both are blamed for dead livestock, reports in the Yucatán press slide between the two names.