Lobisomem

Also Known As: Portuguese lobo, wolf, plus homem, man; also written lobishomem and lobis-homem; called the corredor, the runner, in parts of Portugal; the Spanish American cognates are lobizon and lobison
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Brazilian Mythology, Portuguese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A living man under an inherited fate who takes an animal body at night by rolling in the bedding of animals, and returns to his own body before morning.
Role in Mythos: He is the neighbour the community has quietly decided is not entirely a neighbour, and the reason the roads belong to nobody after dark.
Relation to Humans: He is one of them, usually named, usually known, and the stories are told about people the tellers could point to. He frightens far more often than he harms, and drawing his blood ends the transformation and hands the man back.

In March 1793 a court clerk in Obidos, on the lower Amazon, took down what a sixty-three-year-old landholder named Constantino Manoel Marinho had to say about his own parish priest. The vicar of Vila Franca, Domingos de Lira Barros, had been going about telling the Indians in his charge that the town’s director was a lobizome. A second witness supplied the detail that made it stick: the man changed into different figures, and one of them carried wheels of fire. A third, who signed his statement with a cross because he could not write, said the vicar had told him the director struck fire from his eyes when he changed shape. The director, Jose Cavalcante de Albuquerque, a Bahian with a Coimbra degree in law and mathematics, assembled seven witnesses and eleven pages of self-defence to get the charge off his name, and he succeeded. Nobody in that file thought the accusation absurd. They thought it false, which is a different thing.

Colonial correspondence out of the lower Amazon almost never bothers with what people believed, so the paper survives as an accident. What it shows is the creature already fully arrived, already useful, and already available to a priest who wanted a rival discredited. Who takes orders from a lobisomem?

He came over with the Portuguese, and the wolf came with him only as a word. Fieldworkers out of the University of the Algarve have recorded two hundred and thirty-five Portuguese versions of the belief, from the north down through the Alentejo and out to the Azores, and five of them mention a wolf. The rest give a horse in the northern half of the country, a donkey or a dog in the south, and past that a pig, a goat, a sheep, and once a duck in the Serra da Estrela that specialised in stealing water out of irrigated fields. Brazil kept the pig and made it the commonest form of all. The name is a fossil of an animal the thing hardly ever is.

What makes a man one is usually his place in a line of brothers. The seventh son born in an unbroken run of sons carries it, and the arithmetic shifts by district: the second son in central Portugal, the sixth or ninth or eleventh in the Algarve, the eighth or thirteenth in the Azores. The cure is administered at the font. The eldest brother stands as godfather to the seventh, which folds the surplus child back into his own family and cancels the inheritance. Brazilian parents baptised out of the fear that an unbaptised child would turn on a Friday in Lent, and every Friday after that. Camara Cascudo records other roads in as well, chiefly incest and grave moral offence, the body paying for what the family did.

The change itself happens on the ground. At night the man undresses, hangs his clothes in a tree, in northern Portugal the tallest one within reach, and rolls naked in the dirt where animals sleep. Whatever last wallowed in that spot is what he becomes. Pliny described the identical procedure in Arcadia: clothes hung on an oak, a swim across a marsh, nine years as a wolf, and then the swim back to the same clothes.

In 1939 a six-year-old girl called Zenaide Silveira Cunha woke in the night at Limoeiro do Norte, in the Ceara backlands, because something outside would not settle. Her mother crossed to the kitchen and looked through the gap under the door. There was something in with the pigs, churning up their bedding, working itself into whatever it was becoming.

What people report seeing, when they see anything, tends to be low and wrong. Jose Helio Gomes said his brother met one under the acacia at his own gate and described it afterwards as round, like a coiled rope, smooth rather than hairy, with a large mouth, something on the order of a very big pig; he went indoors backwards rather than turn his back on it. Odorico Nogueira Nunes said his was long, close to the ground, and extremely hairy. In Recife, Gilberto Freyre collected one that was strangely white, repulsively pale, and stank of a corpse. Portuguese tradition gives the man himself yellow skin and blames drink and lost sleep for it.

One night in 1953 Odorico was cycling home over the bridge between the Riacho Seco and the Jaguaribe when he saw it at the roadside. His lamp ran off the wheel, so he propped the bicycle on its stand and spun the wheel by hand to throw some light, and each time he stooped to the wheel the thing came at his back and he had to straighten up again. He waited, judged it, and cut at it with a knife. He never knew whether he connected. It ran.

Running is most of what the night is for. The phrase people use is that the man runs his fate, and in some districts they call him simply the runner; the run lasts around an hour, occasionally only minutes, and it takes him through the roads, the squares and the churchyards, the parts of the country that belong to the living in daylight. He is fast, he passes through fences and yards that would stop a man, and he can be almost any farm animal he has found a bed for. He does not, as a rule, hunt. In the Ceara stories nobody is ever eaten.

The way out of him is blood. Cut him, prick him, draw it, and the animal collapses back into a man who is generally somebody’s neighbour and generally humiliated. The instrument is local: an ox goad in northern Portugal, a knife in the south, a needle or holy water in the Azores. Burning his clothes works as well, and works best in a bread oven. Brazil is looser about it, and more interesting for being loose, because there the threat is frequently enough on its own. Zenaide’s mother fetched her dead husband’s shotgun, fired through the crack in the door, missed, and Zenaide’s telling still ends with the man giving up the life for good. A woman in Recife called Josefina got clear of one by praying to Nossa Senhora da Saude. Odorico’s knife may never have touched anything, and he came away certain of only one thing, which was that it had been a person.

The full moon is what most people in Portugal now name as the trigger, and it is also the one element the folklorist who gathered those two hundred and thirty-five versions suspects of having come out of the cinema rather than the countryside. He says outright that he cannot prove it either way. The older calendar is duller and more particular: Tuesday nights in the northern half of Portugal, Friday nights in the south, Wednesday only in the middle, and almost never at the weekend. Some of his informants had a plainer account of where the lobisomem had gone. Electric light.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a lobisomem?

The lobisomem is the Luso-Brazilian werewolf, a living man under an inherited fate who takes an animal body at night and returns to his own before morning. The belief crossed to Brazil with Portuguese settlers and is documented there as early as a 1793 court case on the lower Amazon. Despite the name, which joins the Portuguese words for wolf and man, the animal he becomes is rarely a wolf.

How does someone become a lobisomem?

Most commonly by birth order: the seventh son in an unbroken run of sons inherits the condition, though local traditions name the second, sixth, eighth, ninth, eleventh or thirteenth instead. The recognised remedy is to have the eldest brother stand as godfather to the seventh at baptism. Camara Cascudo also records incest and grave moral offence as causes.

What animal does a lobisomem turn into?

Usually a pig in Brazil, and a horse in northern Portugal or a donkey or dog in the south, with goats, sheep and other farm animals also attested. Of two hundred and thirty-five Portuguese versions collected by fieldworkers at the University of the Algarve, only five mention a wolf. The man transforms by hanging his clothes in a tree and rolling naked in an animal’s bedding, and becomes whatever last lay there.

How do you stop a lobisomem?

Draw his blood and the animal form ends, handing back the man underneath. The tool varies by region: an ox goad in northern Portugal, a knife in the south, a needle or holy water in the Azores. Burning his clothes, ideally in a bread oven, also breaks the transformation, and in Brazilian accounts a serious threat or a prayer is often enough to end the episode.

Is the lobisomem dangerous?

Less than his reputation suggests. He runs rather than hunts, and in the Ceara accounts collected from elderly witnesses in the twentieth century nobody is ever killed or eaten; the encounters end in fright, a raised weapon and a fleeing animal. What he threatens is the road at night rather than the person on it.