La Mojana

Also Known As: also La Mohana; the feminine of Mohán, and the name carried by a river, by a subregion of the Momposina Depression, and by the story itself
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Colombian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: She rules the water she lives in, takes children and young men down into it, and in at least one telling swims off as a mermaid when her pool runs dry.
Role in Mythos: She is the female of the Mohán, the woman at the bottom of the river in the flooded country where the Magdalena, the Cauca and the San Jorge run together.
Relation to Humans: Along the rivers and the ciénagas she is the reason children are not left alone in the shallows, and mothers have tied cord around a child’s neck and waist to keep her from carrying it off. Where the story is gentler she takes nobody at all and simply vanishes when anyone walks toward her.

At midday the light on the water at Arroyo de Piedra goes flat and white, and that, the old men in Luruaco say, was her hour. There was a cave in the north of the settlement, wide-mouthed and once full of water, with streams running over its lip into a fall that dropped the better part of a hundred metres to the foot of the grotto. A woman would be sitting on the wet stones at the edge of the pool, washing. Her hair was very long. Some say it was gold; others say the gold was the comb in her hand and the hair was only hair, which is the kind of correction people make in a place that has been telling the same story since before anyone thought to write it down.

She is La Mojana, and the first difficulty with her is that the name will not sit still. It belongs to a river. It belongs to a whole drowned subregion of the Momposina Depression, the inland delta where the Magdalena, the Cauca and the San Jorge come together and spend eight months of the year on top of the land instead of inside it. It belongs to the story. And it belongs, most of all, to the fact that she is the female of the Mohán, the hairy, tobacco-smoking water spirit whose name is a kind of gravitational centre in Colombian river folklore. Almost every version of her begins by placing her next to him.

The written record on her is thin, and everyone who has worked on it says so. What survives comes mostly from departmental folklore inventories, and they contradict each other on the most basic point. The Atlántico record gives a diminutive woman whose golden hair falls all the way to her feet, and whose feet are turned backwards. The Bolívar record gives a tall woman with white skin, long hair and bright eyes, and calls her a guardian of the natural world rather than a menace to it. Both are held to be the same being. Nobody in the region seems troubled by this.

Her house is the detail that stays with you. It is built of stone, under the water, and she keeps animals there: not fish, not caimans, but domestic livestock, the ordinary stock of a riverside yard, penned somewhere below the current. She bathes with a totuma of gold, a gourd bowl beaten out of the metal the Zenú goldsmiths of the San Jorge were famous for. Picture the housekeeping of it. She dips the gourd, pours, dips again, and the animals move about her in the green underwater light while a hundred metres of muddy water sits on the roof.

The danger is specific and it is aimed at children. If she finds one bathing in her stretch of water she takes it, and it goes home with her to the stone house. Mothers along those rivers answered this in the plainest way available: cord tied at the child’s neck and cord tied at the waist, a tether to the bank, so that when she reached the child could not be carried. It is a defence with the weight of practice behind it, the sort of thing a woman does with her hands while thinking about something else.

Where she came from is a matter of inference rather than record. She belongs to the Zenú floodplain, the country those people engineered with a lattice of artificial canals across more than half a million hectares of marsh, and some researchers read her name simply as the land where the Mohán lives, the Zenú god of the waters, who steals young women bathing at the edges of the ciénagas and who drives off anyone hunting for his cave with a ferocity that includes, in the tellings, flatulence. Another version puts her higher than that: not the country of a god but a goddess herself, wife of the Mohán, described as libidinous, tangled and fertile. For most people along the water, though, she is neither. She is a fright, a reason not to swim.

That downgrade is the most interesting thing about her. A figure who might once have made the water sacred now mostly makes it frightening, and the men of an amphibious culture, people who have been fishermen and boatmen and herdsmen by turns for centuries, are warned off the element that defines them. Her powers were never grand ones. She commands only her own reach of river, takes only what wanders into it, and in the Luruaco telling, when the falls dried up at the end of the rains, she had to go: down to the lagoon, changed into a mermaid, because a water spirit with no water is nothing at all.

Her limits are as domestic as her house. A cord defeats her. Approach defeats her too, in the version the fishermen of Arroyo de Piedra prefer, where she does no harm and takes nobody and simply dissolves the moment anyone comes close enough to look properly. And the largest limit is not in the stories at all. The subregion that carries her name is losing its ciénagas and its caños to cattle and rice, the fishing that gave her a congregation is going, and she is going with it, remembered chiefly as a warning and a place on a map.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is La Mojana?

La Mojana is a water spirit of Colombian folklore, found especially along the Magdalena and Cauca rivers and in the flooded Momposina Depression. She is described as a woman with very long, often golden hair and large bright eyes who lives in a stone house beneath the water. She is generally identified as the female counterpart of the Mohán.

What does La Mojana do to children?

If La Mojana finds a child bathing in her stretch of water, she seizes it and carries it down to her house below the surface. To prevent this, parents along those rivers tied their children with cord at the neck and at the waist so they could not be taken. Not every version is hostile, and in some local tellings she harms no one.

Is La Mojana the same as the Mohán?

No. La Mojana is consistently described as the female of the Mohán rather than as the Mohán himself, and in one version she is his wife. The two are separate beings in the same river world, and hers is by far the thinner record of the two.

Where does La Mojana live?

She lives underwater, in a house built of stone, where she keeps domestic animals and bathes using a gourd bowl of gold. In the Luruaco version from the department of Atlántico she appeared at a cave fed by a waterfall, and when the water dried she was said to move to the Luruaco lagoon in the form of a mermaid.

Was La Mojana originally a goddess?

Some researchers identify her as a goddess of the waters in the Zenú world, one version calling her the wife of the Mohán and describing her as libidinous, tangled and fertile. Others read her name as referring simply to the country the Mohán inhabits. For most people along the rivers today she is not a goddess but a fright that keeps them out of the water.