Boitatá, the Fire Serpent

The Boitatá is the fire that runs across the fields at night, and it is one of the oldest things anybody wrote down about Brazil. At the end of May 1560, in a Latin letter sent from São Vicente, the Jesuit José de Anchieta reported that along the shores, near the sea and the rivers, there were beings the Brasis called Baêtatâ — res ignis, a thing of fire. By night, he wrote, nothing appears but a sparkling fire darting here and there; it attacks the Indians and kills them, as the Corupira does, "and what this may be is not yet established". There is no snake in that paragraph, and nothing is being protected. The serpent arrives three centuries later, through books: a novelist gave it burning eyes in 1874, and in 1876 an army general turned it into cobra de fogo, the spirit that guards the open grassland against those who set fire to it. The version taught in Brazilian schools today — the endless night, the eyes of the dead animals, the light trapped inside the body — was written by a named author in Rio Grande do Sul in 1913, and it ends with the Boitatá dead.

Almost everything about the Boitatá can be dated, which is rare in folklore, and the dates do not run the way the legend says they do. The oldest record is a letter. At the end of May 1560 the Jesuit José de Anchieta wrote from São Vicente — "the last settlement of the Portuguese in Brazilian India facing south", as he signs off — a long naturalist's report to his superior: ants, manatees, anteaters, stones, a storm at sea. He wrote it in Latin and it stayed in manuscript for two and a half centuries. At the very end comes a short section on "nocturnal apparitions, or rather demons, with which the Indians are accustomed to terrify themselves", and in it three beings in a row: the Corupira of the woods, the Igpupiara of the rivers, and then this, in the 1812 Lisbon printing, with the long s normalised: "Sunt et alii in litoribus maxime, secus mare et flumina versantes, qui Baêtatâ, hoc est res ignis appellantur, quod idem est, ac si dicas, aliquid quod totum est ignis. Apparet noctu nihil aliud, quam ignis scintillans huc illuc discurrens, celerrime invadit Indos, et necat, sicut et Corupira: quid hoc sit, adhuc non constat." There are others as well, chiefly on the shores, keeping near the sea and the rivers, who are called Baêtatâ, that is, a thing of fire, which is the same as if you said something that is entirely fire. By night nothing appears but a sparkling fire running this way and that; it attacks the Indians very swiftly and kills them, just as the Corupira does: what this may be is not yet established. Read the sentence for what is not in it. There is no snake. There is no field, no forest and nothing guarded; the thing kills, and that is all it does. And the man writing, who translates every other Tupi name he uses, ends by saying he does not know what this one is. The name carries the argument, and it can be checked without leaving the letter. Anchieta glosses it himself — res ignis, a thing of fire — and he is scrupulous with these compounds. Seventeen printed pages earlier he runs through the snakes of the province and translates every name: Bóicininga, "id est coluber tinniens", the rattling snake; Bóiquatiára, "id est colubri picti"; Bóipéba, "hoc est colubri plani"; Bóiroiçanga, "id est colubri frigidi"; and further on Bóiquíba, "hoc est colubri pediculos", snake-lice. Five times boi, five times coluber. His annotator spelled the rule out in 1812: "Boi, seu Boia inter Brasiliae Indigenas nomen est appellativum Serpentium" — among the natives of Brazil, boi or boia is the general name for snakes. For the fire on the shore Anchieta does not use it. In 1560 the word is baê. The Latin went to press in Lisbon in 1812, in the first volume of the Academia Real das Sciencias' Collecção de noticias para a historia e geografia das nações ultramarinas, annotated by Diogo de Toledo Lara Ordonez — the same edition our Curupira file works from. Portuguese readers waited longer still. The translation everyone quotes, made by Teixeira de Melo with Martinho Corrêa de Sá, ran first in the first volume of the Anais da Biblioteca Nacional, pages 275-305, and then, corrected, in the Diário Oficial of Rio de Janeiro on 22, 24 and 26 December 1887 and 2 and 7 January 1888. That chain comes from the editorial note 1 of the 1933 Rio edition, which does not date the Anais printing; the dated appearance is the Diário Oficial one. By then the snake had already arrived, and it arrived through literature. In 1872 the word is in a gaucho ballad inside Apolinário Porto-Alegre's novel O Vaqueano, used as a figure for a man worn to a shadow. In 1874 José de Alencar, in Ubirajara, has an elder name a guest Boitatá "because he has the eyes of the great fire serpent that flies like the lightning of Tupã". Two years later, in 1876, General Couto de Magalhães printed in O Selvagem, page 138, the sentence the whole country has repeated since: "O Mboitatá é o gênio que protege os campos contra aquelles que os incendeiam; como a palavra o diz mboitatá é: cobra de fogo; as tradições figuram-n'a como uma pequena serpente de fogo que de ordinário reside n'agua. Às vezes transforma-se em um grosso madeiro em brasa, denominado méuan, que faz morrer por combustão aquelle que incendeia inutilmente os campos." Notice where that stops. The campos — open grassland — not the forest. Seven lines further down the same page Couto hands the forest to somebody else: "O Curupira é o deus que protege as florestas", who punishes whoever fells or needlessly spoils trees. The two paragraphs are on one page of one book. In most modern retellings, ours included, there is nothing between them at all, and the Boitatá has quietly inherited the Curupira's job. Notice the size, too: Couto's fire serpent is pequena, small, and lives in the water. The giant of the picture books is Alencar's. The version most Brazilians can recite is younger still and has an author. In 1913, in Pelotas, João Simões Lopes Neto opened his Lendas do Sul with "A M'boi-tátá". It is not a flood story: it begins with a night so long it seemed daylight would never come, and the downpour that follows only floods the burrow of the boiguaçu, the great snake, and drives it out. It eats the eyes of the carrion and nothing else. Having no hair, no scales, no feathers, no shell and no thick hide, it turns transparent, lit from inside by the last of the daylight the dead animals had kept in their eyes, and the men who see it fail to recognise it and rename it: boitatá, cobra de fogo. Then comes the ending nobody repeats. The boitatá starves — light is not food — and it dies among the carcasses, its body rots, the trapped light is loosed across the fields, and the sun comes back. What runs over the summer grassland afterwards, cold and yellow-blue, is not the snake. It is what the snake was carrying.

There is nothing to visit. The Boitatá is a light on wet ground at night, and it has no cave, no ruin and no shrine; our map pin is a convention, not a place where the story happens. The documents, on the other hand, are all free, and most of the work of this file was done with a browser. The Latin original is in the first volume of the Collecção de noticias para a historia e geografia das nações ultramarinas (Lisbon, 1812), which the Biblioteca Digital da Câmara dos Deputados in Brasília serves as a single PDF of about 105 MB; the Baêtatâ paragraph is at the end of §XLVI, printed page 162, and Lara Ordonez's notes are on printed page 178, where two consecutive and contradictory notes are both numbered 86. Warning from experience: the automatic text layer of that scan renders the long s as f, so a search for "sunt" finds nothing while "funt" finds everything. Read the page images, or search with the eighteenth-century spelling. A faithful Portuguese translation, with useful notes, is Caderno nº 7 of the Série Documentos Históricos of the Conselho Nacional da Reserva da Biosfera da Mata Atlântica, "Carta de São Vicente 1560", published in the spring of 1997 and downloadable free; it reprints the 1933 Civilização Brasileira text edited by Afrânio Peixoto, and its note 78 is the one on the Baetatá. Couto de Magalhães's O Selvagem (Rio de Janeiro, 1876) is a free PDF of about 123 MB at the Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin of the University of São Paulo; page 138 has the Mboitatá and the Curupira, one above the other. O Vaqueano and Ubirajara are transcribed on Portuguese Wikisource, and Lopes Neto's Lendas do Sul circulates freely in a digitisation of the Globo edition. If you want a building, the closest honest one is the Museu Anchieta at the Pateo do Collegio, Praça Pátio do Colégio 2, in the historic centre of São Paulo — the Jesuit house of the man who wrote the word down. It opens Tuesday to Saturday, 09:00 to 16:45; admission is R$26, R$13 for students and teachers, R$6 for state-school pupils, pensioners and the elderly, and free for children under seven and for disabled visitors. Nothing in it is about the Boitatá, and São Vicente, where the letter was actually signed, is a separate town down on the coast. The thing itself, if it is still there, is where Lopes Neto put it: flat wet pasture, after dark, in summer, over ground where animals have died. Do not go looking for it alone at night in unfamiliar marshland. The historical risk of the Boitatá has always been the ditch, not the snake.