Mapinguari

Also Known As: also Mapinguary; kida harara, “laughing beast,” and kida so’emo, “black-faced beast,” among the Karitiana; segamai among the Machiguenga of Peru
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Brazilian Mythology, Amazon Mythology, Cryptids
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Its hide turns bullets everywhere but the navel, its feet point backwards so that its trail leads hunters away from it, and its stench arrives long before it does.
Role in Mythos: It is the man-eater of the deep Amazon forest, the thing the rubber tappers of Pará, Amazonas and Acre feared meeting in the green half-light of a working day.
Relation to Humans: It eats people, usually beginning with the head, and it is said to choose Sundays and holy days to hunt, so that a man who works the forest on a day of rest is already a dead man. Several traditions hold that it was once a person, an elder who lived too long, which makes it less an animal than a warning about what waits at the far end of a human life.

The smell comes first. Rubber tappers who claimed to have met one described it as rot and dung and something worse underneath, a stink thick enough to stop a man where he stands, and by the time he has thought about running his legs have generally settled the question for him. Then the roar. It is a long, unhinged, laughing sort of scream, and it is the last thing many people in these stories ever hear properly.

Most monsters have the decency to wait for dark. This one does not. It stands in the green underlight of the deep forest in the middle of the day, in that dim wet air below the canopy where the light has been filtered through sixty metres of leaves and arrives the colour of pond water, and it waits for someone to walk into it.

What that someone sees is a giant. Taller than a man, thick through the chest, covered in long matted black hair, with arms too long for the body and claws like a jaguar’s. The hide beneath the hair is armour, compared by the people who tell these stories to an alligator’s back or the shell of a turtle. The feet are wrong in a way that changes depending on who is talking: turned backwards, so that the tracks lead away from the creature rather than toward it; or the reversed hooves of a donkey; or blunt round stumps like the end of a pestle, like the woody husk of a Brazil nut. It has one eye. Sometimes the eye sits in the middle of the forehead. Sometimes it sits in the belly. And in the middle of it all is the mouth, which is not where a mouth should be at all: a vertical slit running from the face down to the navel, opening like a wound.

Luís da Câmara Cascudo, who spent a career mapping Brazil’s monsters, thought the mapinguari was assembled rather than born. The giant stature he traced to the Gorjala, the strange feet to the Pé de Garrafa and to the Curupira with its famous reversed heels, and that appalling mouth to the Quibungo, the Afro-Brazilian monster into which old Black men were said to turn. He also thought the creature was young, as these things go. The colonial chroniclers do not mention it. It belongs to the seringueiros, the rubber tappers, and to the forest camps and river stations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The name itself is older than the creature: a Tupi-Guarani compound, mbaé-pi-guari, the thing with the crooked foot.

Where it comes from depends on which river you are standing beside. In Acre they said that an indigenous man who reached a great enough age would turn into one. The Macuna of Colombia said the same, and it was reported that along the Yotahy the very old were killed before they could make the change. An old headman told the writer Mário Guedes, plainly and without elaboration, that the mapinguari was the ancient king of the region. Whatever else that is, it is not a description of an animal.

The best-known story is a small one. A rubber tapper on the Purus fancied hunting on a Sunday. His hutmate objected, on the grounds that Sunday is not a day for that, and the hunter answered that a man still has to eat on Sunday. So they went. In the forest they separated, and the hunter came back through the trees to find his companion in the arms of the thing, being eaten. It fed him in head first, into that long vertical mouth, and chewed slowly. Another man, a court clerk in Amazonas who had been a tapper himself, put it more economically: it chewed the head like a plug of tobacco. In some tellings the mapinguari eats only the head and leaves the rest. In the version Silva Campos collected in 1928, it tore the body into pieces and worked through all of them.

The Sunday is not decoration. Cascudo noted the Catholic logic sitting inside the tale like a stone in fruit: the mapinguari deliberately prowls on Sundays and days of precept, and the hunter who takes game on those days is a dead man. The forest and the catechism agreed to punish the same offence.

Its powers follow from what it is. The hair and the plated hide turn bullets, and every account agrees that the only soft place on it, the only spot where a shot will go in, is the navel, which is to say the mouth. The backwards feet make it untrackable by the men whose whole craft is tracking. The scream scatters dogs and hunters alike, and the stench does half the work of the scream. It does not need speed, or cunning, or the night.

Its limits follow just as neatly. A creature that announces itself with a smell you can taste at fifty paces is a creature you can sometimes avoid, and the stories are full of men who did, by turning around and walking quietly the other way. Its armour has a hole in it, and that hole is the same organ it kills with. And it is bound to the deep forest. It has no power in the town, no interest in the river settlements, no reach beyond the trees.

The people whose forest it actually is have their own names for it. The Karitiana call it kida harara, the laughing beast, and kida so’emo, the black-faced beast, and also Owojo, grandfather. The Mura say it has one eye in its head and its mouth in its belly.

And then there is the sloth. In 1993 David Oren, an American-born ornithologist at the Goeldi Museum in Belém, proposed that the mapinguari was not folklore at all but a surviving giant ground sloth, an animal officially extinct since the end of the Pleistocene. It was a better argument than it sounds. Mylodontid sloths carried bony plates called osteoderms embedded in their skin, a genuine internal armour, which is a remarkably good explanation for a hide that stops bullets. They were huge, they were clawed, and they were rank. Oren spent years in the Tapajós basin collecting testimony, and he was told of hunters who had kept the hair and claws and then thrown them away because of the smell. He never produced the animal. The hair samples that reached a laboratory turned out to belong to agoutis and anteaters. The famous piece of sloth skin from the Cueva del Milodón, once thought fresh, has been dated to roughly thirteen thousand years old. Nobody has ever produced a mapinguari.

Others kept pulling at the thread. The ethnologist Glenn Shepard, working with the Machiguenga of Peru, thought their oshetoniro, the mother of spider monkeys, might carry the same buried memory; Manuel Lizarralde suggested the same of the shaaroba, the enormous red monkey of the Barí. Mário Ypiranga Monteiro, more prosaically, suspected the spectacled bear. Any of them might be right. But the oldest layer of the story is not zoological at all. It is about a man who gets old, and keeps getting older, until the forest no longer recognises what he has become.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Mapinguari?

The Mapinguari is a man-eating monster of Amazonian folklore, best known from the rubber-tapping regions of Pará, Amazonas and Acre in Brazil. It is described as a hairy giant with a single eye, backwards-turned feet, an armoured hide and a mouth that splits its torso from face to navel. Its most famous feature is its stench, which is said to reach a person long before the creature does.

Where does the Mapinguari live?

The Mapinguari belongs to the deep Amazon rainforest, and the stories place it in the Brazilian states of Pará, Amazonas and Acre, with related beliefs recorded among the Karitiana and Mura of Brazil, the Machiguenga of Peru and the Macuna of Colombia. It is not a creature of towns or open country. Unusually for a monster, it hunts by day, waiting in the dim light beneath the canopy.

How do you kill a Mapinguari?

According to the folklore, the Mapinguari’s hair and hide turn bullets everywhere except the navel, which is the one place a shot will penetrate. That vulnerable spot is also where its mouth is. Most survivors in the stories do not fight it at all; they smell it, turn around and leave.

Is the Mapinguari a giant ground sloth?

There is no evidence that it is. In the 1990s the ornithologist David Oren of the Goeldi Museum argued that the Mapinguari was a surviving mylodontid ground sloth, pointing out that such sloths had bony plates in their skin that could explain the creature’s bulletproof hide. He collected extensive eyewitness testimony but never produced a specimen, and the hair samples that were tested came from agoutis and anteaters.

Why is the Mapinguari said to have been a person?

Several traditions hold that the Mapinguari was once human. In Acre it was said that an indigenous man who lived to a great age would become one, and a similar belief was recorded among the Macuna of Colombia, where the very old were reportedly killed to prevent the transformation. One old headman told the writer Mário Guedes that the Mapinguari was the ancient king of the region.