📜 LEGEND · EXP. Nº0270
ACTIVE
The Headless Mule
The Headless Mule is told across Brazil as the punishment of a woman who loved a priest, and it is always introduced as very old.
Where does the legend of The Headless Mule come from?
- Location
- Minas Gerais, Brazil
- Kind of legend
- Creature legend
- Coordinates
- -19.917, -43.935
- Last updated
LOCATION
What is the legend of The Headless Mule?
Its documented life is shorter and more interesting than that. The oldest printed appearance located here is a poem of 1865, in which the mule is a beheaded countess who loved a bishop and ate her husband. In Bernardo Guimarães's novel O Seminarista (1872) a village girl states the belief in her own words and describes a three-legged animal that prowls the alleys on Friday nights, with no fire and no bridle. The fire appears in 1913, on the tail; the seven parishes, the crossroads and the Thursday night appear later still. Two folklore collectors file the mule immediately after the werewolf, which is the same idea told for the other sex. This article follows that chain work by work and dated passage by dated passage, traces the version told today, and sets out what Portugal does document: the seven parishes and the crossroads attached to the werewolf in 1882, and one passing mention of headless mules recorded in the Algarve in 2005.
What is the history of The Headless Mule?
The Headless Mule is always introduced as something very old: a medieval Iberian belief that the colonists carried across the Atlantic. Its documented life in print is Brazilian, and the earliest printed appearance identified so far is in a book of poems published in Rio de Janeiro in 1865.
That year B. L. Garnier published Bernardo Guimarães's Poesias, and on pages 269-283 stands "A orgia dos duendes", a graveyard revel in which each monster steps into the ring and confesses. When the mule brays her way in, the company claps and shouts "Viva, viva a Sra. condessa!" — long live the countess. Then she tells her own story. She loved a bishop, and her husband, boiling with jealousy, killed him; tired of the marriage, she cut her husband into pieces and ate him "aos bocados", mouthful by mouthful; and she ended, "bella e nobre condessa", losing her head on a block "entre as mãos do carrasco", in the executioner's hands. In this earliest printing the mule has no head because the law took it, and the churchman she loved is a bishop.
Seven years later the same author put the belief itself into a novel. O Seminarista, Rio de Janeiro, B. L. Garnier, 1872, is the story of Eugênio, pushed into the seminary of Congonhas do Campo by his parents, and of Margarida, the girl he grew up with. In chapter IX she refuses to be the reason he takes orders: "de mais a mais não quero ser mula sem cabeça, não... cruz! Deus me defenda." He laughs, and she explains: "pois não sabe que toda a mulher que quer bem a um padre, vira mula sem cabeça?" Her mother has seen one in the village. It is "um bicho muito feio, do feitio de uma besta, que tem só três pés, dois atrás e um adiante, e não tem cabeça" — three legs, two behind and one in front — and "todas as noites de sexta-feira para sábado anda rondando os becos, correndo o seu fadário e assombrando a gente", prowling the alleys and the graveyards on Friday nights, "batendo a ferragem", clattering its shoes. Eugênio objects that a headless animal cannot have ears; Margarida answers that it must keep them on its neck. There is no fire in this mule, no seven parishes, no bridle and no Thursday. (Quotations follow the critical edition prepared by Luana Batista de Souza at the University of São Paulo in 2017, which modernises the spelling and collates the thirteen editions printed between 1872 and 1949.)
Guimarães wrote a novel against compulsory celibacy, and in it the creature is a belief that punishes the woman who loves a priest, told by that woman while the seminarian laughs at her. In chapter X, serving at the altar and catching Margarida's eyes on him, Eugênio remembers the story and it gives him "a mais desagradável e horripilante impressão".
After that the mule enters the folklore collections, and it changes on the way. Sílvio Romero's Cantos populares do Brasil (1883) gives it one line in a list of country beliefs — "acreditam no lobisomem, na mula sem cabeça e na mãe d'água, animais encantados" — with no priest and no description. João Simões Lopes Neto's Lendas do Sul (Pelotas, Echenique & C., 1913) devotes item 14 to it: "diziam também que as mulheres de má vida, relacionadas com padres, se transformavam, tarde da noite, em mula, sem cabeça, e conduzindo na cauda um facho de fogo, que nenhum vento ou chuva apagava antes de romperem as barras do dia." The fire is real here, and it is on the tail. Item 13, immediately before, is the werewolf: men who had "relações impuras com as suas comadres" and went out on Friday nights as dogs or pigs. The two beasts are consecutive entries because they are the same idea twice, once for each sex.
Monteiro Lobato repeats that pairing. In the thirty-three-chapter O Saci — the version he rebuilt in 1932 out of the nine-chapter O Sacy of 1921, read here in the eighth edition, São Paulo, Companhia Editora Nacional, 1941 — chapter 24 is "Lobishomem" and chapter 25 is "A mula sem cabeça". And Lobato's origin story has no priest at all: a queen who used to visit the cemetery at night was caught by her husband eating a dead child, and screamed, and turned into the mule on the spot. The boy Pedrinho then asks the only sensible question — "mas como será que vomita fogo pelas ventas, se as ventas estão na cabeça e ela não tem cabeça?" — which is Eugênio's joke about the ears, sixty years later.
The version told today — seven parishes a night, the change at a crossroads under a full moon on the night from Thursday to Friday, the bridle, the pinprick that draws blood and lifts the curse — appears in none of these. The seven parishes are in print by 1908: the philologist João Ribeiro wrote in Frazes feitas (Rio de Janeiro, Francisco Alves) that "a molher de padre, ao cabo de alguns anos, vira mula sem cabeça e corre todas as noites sete freguezias", and in Portugal the same seven parishes a night belonged to the werewolf. The usual authority for the full synthesis is Luís da Câmara Cascudo's Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro, Instituto Nacional do Livro, 1954). In its eleventh edition (São Paulo, Global, 2001) the entry says that the mule "corre sete freguesias em cada noite" and that she is also called "Burrinha-de-padre".
Timeline: the documented record of The Headless Mule
- 1865 B. L. Garnier publishes Bernardo Guimarães's Poesias in Rio de Janeiro. On pages 269-283, the poem 'A orgia dos duendes' brings the Headless Mule on stage as a speaking character in a graveyard revel: she loved a bishop, her jealous husband killed him, she cut her husband up and ate him piece by piece, and she lost her head on the executioner's block. This is the oldest printed appearance of the creature I have been able to locate, and in it her headlessness is the work of the law, not of a curse.
- 1872 Guimarães publishes the novel O Seminarista (Rio de Janeiro, B. L. Garnier). In chapter IX the girl Margarida states the belief in her own words — any woman who loves a priest turns into a headless mule — and describes the animal: three legs, two behind and one in front, no head, prowling alleys and graveyards on the nights from Friday to Saturday, clattering its shoes. There is no fire, no bridle and no seven parishes. The seminarian laughs and asks how a headless beast can have ears.
- 1883 Sílvio Romero's Cantos populares do Brasil records the mule in a single line of its introduction, among country beliefs: people believe in the werewolf, the headless mule and the mother of the waters, 'animais encantados'. No priest, no description and no place — the first time the creature appears in a folklore collection rather than in literature, it appears as a bare name.
- 1913 João Simões Lopes Neto publishes Lendas do Sul in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul. Item 14 is the mule: women of bad life involved with priests turn late at night into a mule without a head, carrying on its tail a torch of fire that no wind or rain puts out before daybreak. The fire is there, and it is on the tail. Item 13, immediately before, is the werewolf: men who sinned with their comadres and went out on Friday nights as dogs or pigs.
- 1932 (read in the 8th edition, 1941) Monteiro Lobato rebuilds O Saci, expanding the nine chapters of the 1921 O Sacy to thirty-three. Chapter 24 is the werewolf and chapter 25 the headless mule, the same pairing Lopes Neto had used. Lobato's origin story contains no priest at all: a queen caught by her husband eating a dead child in a cemetery screams and turns into the mule. The boy Pedrinho asks how she can spew fire through nostrils she has not got.
- 1954 The Instituto Nacional do Livro publishes Luís da Câmara Cascudo's Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro in Rio de Janeiro. It is the work that later retellings, including both Wikipedia articles on the creature, cite for the modern canonical version — the seven parishes, the bridle, the blood. In the eleventh edition (São Paulo, Global, 2001) the entry says the mule 'corre sete freguesias em cada noite' and gives 'Burrinha-de-padre' as another name for her. The seven parishes were already in print in 1908, in João Ribeiro's Frazes feitas.
- 12 December 2013 A Wikimedia Commons contributor signing as OrsettoGommoso2 uploads the image that illustrates this page. It is not a photograph and not a piece of folk art: it is a digital collage made by combining two public-domain images already on Commons, a rider on horseback and a flame. It was released into the public domain the day it was made.
- 2017 Luana Batista de Souza defends at the University of São Paulo a critical edition of O Seminarista collating the thirteen editions printed between 1872 and 1949. It fixes the first edition (B. L. Garnier, Rio de Janeiro, printed by the Typographia Franco-Americana, second half of 1872) and records that Guimarães sold the rights on 27 July 1872, after which he could no longer alter the text.
- 16 August 2026 Searching the 2020 copy of the Arquivo Português de Lendas, catalogued by the University of the Algarve, through the Arquivo.pt full-text index returns no headless mule, while the control term for its male counterpart, 'lobisomem', returns about 142 hits. The live catalogue, searched on 8 October 2026, holds one passing mention: a crossroads ghost story recorded in Albufeira in 2005 (APL 1998) that lists 'mulas sem cabeça' among the apparitions; that narrative is not among the archived pages. The seven parishes, the crossroads and the drawing of blood are documented in Portugal in 1882, for the werewolf.
Is there a rational explanation for The Headless Mule?
There is nothing to disprove here in the ordinary sense: nobody claims a mule without a head has been photographed. What can be checked is the sentence that usually opens the story, that the legend was born of the colonial Catholic imagination and came over from Iberia, and that check can be measured.
The Arquivo Português de Lendas, a catalogue of Portuguese legends built at the Centro de Estudos Ataíde Oliveira of the University of the Algarve and published online as Lendarium, sorts its material into subgenres — sacred legends, historical legends, urban legends, aetiological legends, legends of the supernatural. On 8 October 2026 the site's own search returned 69 entries for "mula", linking to 61 distinct narratives. One of them mentions the creature: "A encruzilhada da alma penada" (APL 1998), told by Graça Sousa to the collector João Coelho in Albufeira in 2005, which recalls that people used to say that at crossroads "apareciam almas penadas e mulas sem cabeça e fantasmas" — souls in torment, headless mules and ghosts. It is a passing mention in the story of a hanged man's ghost, with no priest and no tale of its own. The other sixty are mules of other kinds: a rock called "A fraga da mula", the mule of the Nativity cursed by the Virgin, a witch ridden through the night from Rome, a family's mule said to be the devil. The control run the same day is the mule's male counterpart: "lobisomem" returns 120 narratives, and the werewolf category holds 146. The Portuguese literary corpus behaves the same way: in Portuguese Wikisource, searched on 16 August 2026, the sibling names "mula ruça", "muladona" and "mula ânima" returned nothing, and "burra ruça" returned exactly one text, Gil Vicente's Auto de Mofina Mendes of 1534, where it is a literal grey she-donkey and no legend at all. The same archive searched through its 2020 copies in Arquivo.pt, in August 2026, had returned no headless mule: the Albufeira narrative is not among the pages that copy holds, and the text uses the plural.
What Portugal does document is the machinery of the modern Brazilian mule attached to a different creature. José Leite de Vasconcellos's Tradições populares de Portugal (Porto, 1882) collects the werewolf beliefs of the north: the lobishomem rolls on the ground at crossroads, the curse is broken by drawing its blood, children of compadres and comadres become werewolves, and in Vila Real "os lobishomens correm sete freguezias cada noute", the werewolves run seven parishes every night. The Brazilian philologist João Ribeiro joined the two in 1908, in Frazes feitas: "A molher de padre, ao cabo de alguns anos, vira mula sem cabeça e corre todas as noites sete freguezias", with a footnote that cites Leite de Vasconcellos for the seven parishes. The motifs therefore have a documented Portuguese past, on the werewolf; the mule herself has, in that archive, the single Albufeira mention of 2005.
The second thing that can be measured is that the details do not agree with each other. The legs number three in 1872 and four in the later texts. The nights run from Friday to Saturday in 1872, carry no weekday in 1913, and run from Thursday to Friday in the modern retellings. The fire is absent in 1872, rides on the tail in 1913 and comes out of the missing nostrils in Lobato. She herself is a beheaded countess who loved a bishop in 1865, a living neighbour the girl's mother knows by sight in 1872, "mulheres de má vida" in 1913, and a corpse-eating queen with no priest in Lobato. The dictionary disagrees with the novel about whether she is alive: the Aulete entry, which marks the term Brazilian, has the woman transformed "depois de morta", after she is dead. And that same entry gives a second sense that explains a good deal: sense two of mula sem cabeça is simply "concubina de padre", and Cascudo's dictionary records "Burrinha-de-padre", the priest's little she-ass, as another name for the creature. The phrase is an insult before it is an animal.
The version told today is easy to trace, and it is recent. The English and Spanish Wikipedia articles on the creature carry between them the seven parishes, the change at a crossroads on the night from Thursday to Friday under a full moon, the fire, the bridle, the needle-prick that draws blood, and Minas Gerais. Their bibliographies give Cascudo's dictionary, the English one in the 1972 Tecnoprint reprint with no page. The English article also states, sourced to the Dictionary.com website, that the term "was first recorded in the 1940s", and, sourced to Theresa Bane's Encyclopedia of Beasts and Monsters (2016), that the myth is believed to be medieval, "around the 12th century". The first is contradicted by 1865, 1872, 1883, 1908 and 1913; for the second, neither article cites a medieval text.
Can you visit The Headless Mule?
The pin for this legend sits on Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais (19.917 S, 43.935 W), and it marks the state by convention: none of the sources cited in this file ties the mule to that city. The texts that carry her come from opposite ends of Brazil. Bernardo Guimarães wrote about Minas Gerais in 1865 and 1872, and João Simões Lopes Neto published his version in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, in 1913.
Her documented history can be read online, in full and free of charge, in Portuguese Wikisource. She is in Guimarães's Poesias of 1865, in the poem "A orgia dos duendes" on pages 269-283; in chapters IX and X of his novel O Seminarista of 1872; in one line of the introduction to Sílvio Romero's Cantos populares do Brasil of 1883; at item 14 of Lopes Neto's Lendas do Sul, immediately after the werewolf at item 13; and in chapters 24 and 25 of Monteiro Lobato's O Saci, in the eighth edition of 1941. Luana Batista de Souza's critical edition of O Seminarista, a thesis defended at the University of São Paulo in 2017 that collates the thirteen editions printed between 1872 and 1949, is a free PDF in that university's thesis repository.
The Brazilian newspapers of the decades before 1865 are digitised in the Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira of the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro. The Lendarium, the catalogue of Portuguese legends built at the Centro de Estudos Ataíde Oliveira of the University of the Algarve, survives in copies of 2020 held by the Arquivo.pt web archive, whose full-text search can be restricted to that site.
The town with a documented tie to the story is Congonhas, in Minas Gerais, about 65 km (40 miles) south of Belo Horizonte in a straight line. It is the Congonhas do Campo to whose seminary Eugênio's parents send him in O Seminarista; in chapter IX Margarida tells him she does not want to become a mula sem cabeça, the fate the belief reserves for a woman who loves a priest. The town is known for the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos, whose forecourt holds the twelve soapstone prophets carved by Aleijadinho, and which UNESCO inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1985.
Sources consulted
- Bernardo Guimarães, «Poesias — «A orgia dos duendes», pp. 269-283» — Rio de Janeiro: B. L. Garnier, 1865. Read in the transcription of that edition in Portuguese Wikisource, 1865 book
- Bernardo Guimarães, «O Seminarista, chapters IX and X» — Rio de Janeiro: B. L. Garnier, 1872 (first edition). Quotations follow the 2017 critical edition, which modernises the spelling, 1872 book
- Luana Batista de Souza, «Grande é o poder do tempo: edição crítica de O Seminarista, de Bernardo Guimarães» — Tese, Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo, 2017 — collation of the thirteen editions printed between 1872 and 1949, 2017 academic
- Sílvio Romero, «Cantos populares do Brasil — Introdução» — 1883. Read in Portuguese Wikisource, 1883 book
- João Simões Lopes Neto, «Lendas do Sul — no. 14, «A Mula sem cabeça» (with no. 13, «O Lobis-homem»)» — Pelotas: Echenique & C. Editores, 1913. Read in the page-by-page transcription of that edition in Portuguese Wikisource, 1913 book
- Monteiro Lobato, «O Saci — chapters 24 «Lobishomem» and 25 «A mula sem cabeça»» — 8th edition, São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1941. The thirty-three-chapter text dates from Lobato's 1932 reworking; the 1921 first edition had nine chapters, 1941 book
- Aulete Digital (Novíssimo Aulete), ««mula sem cabeça», entry with two senses (folkloric creature; popularly, a priest's concubine)» — Consulted 16 August 2026, 2026 web
- Centro de Estudos Ataíde Oliveira, Universidade do Algarve; searched through the Arquivo.pt web archive, «Arquivo Português de Lendas / Lendarium — full-text search of the site's archived pages» — Searches run 16 August 2026 for «mula sem cabeça» (8 hits, none the creature), «mula» (15 hits, none the creature) and the control «lobisomem» (c. 142 hits). Snapshots of 2020; the live site did not answer over HTTPS, 2026 archive
- Luís da Câmara Cascudo, «Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro» — Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional do Livro, 1954, 660 pp. First edition not consulted; the entry is quoted from the eleventh edition (São Paulo, Global, 2001), listed separately, 1954 book
- Wikipedia contributors, ««Headless Mule» (English) and «Mula sin cabeza» (Spanish) — the wording our previous description followed» — Consulted 16 August 2026. Both articles cite Cascudo's dictionary without a page, the English one in the 1972 Tecnoprint reprint; the English article also cites Dictionary.com and Theresa Bane (2016) for the dates, 2026 web
- Wikimedia Commons contributor «OrsettoGommoso2», «File:Mulasemcabeca.JPG — file page, description, authorship and upload date» — Uploaded 12 December 2013, 11:47 UTC; digital collage of two public-domain images; 524 × 600 px, 2013 web
- Enigma Atlas, search log, «Portuguese Wikisource full-text searches: «mula sem cabeça» (17 texts), «mula-sem-cabeça» in wikitext (4), «burra ruça» (1: Gil Vicente, Auto de Mofina Mendes, 1534), «mula ruça» / «muladona» / «mula ânima» (0), control «lobisomem» (38)» — Searches run 16 August 2026 on pt.wikisource.org, main namespace, 2026 archive
- José Leite de Vasconcellos, «Tradições populares de Portugal, § 348 (the lobishomem: crossroads, drawing blood, 'os lobishomens correm sete freguezias cada noute'), pp. 262-264» — Porto: Livraria Portuense de Clavel & C.a (Bibliotheca Ethnographica Portugueza). Read in the Internet Archive full text, 1882 book
- João Ribeiro, «Frazes feitas: estudo conjectural de locuções, ditados e proverbios — 'Mula sem cabeça', pp. 81-82 ('A molher de padre, ao cabo de alguns anos, vira mula sem cabeça e corre todas as noites sete freguezias')» — Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Francisco Alves. Read in the Internet Archive full text (Harvard copy digitised by Google), 1908 book
- Arquivo Português de Lendas (Centro de Estudos Ataíde Oliveira, Universidade do Algarve), ««A encruzilhada da alma penada», APL 1998 — narrative mentioning 'mulas sem cabeça' among crossroads apparitions; informant Graça Sousa, collector João Coelho, Albufeira, 2005» — Lendarium, live site; site search for 'mula' (69 entries) and control 'lobisomem' (120) run 8 October 2026, 2026 archive
- Luís da Câmara Cascudo, «Dicionário do folclore brasileiro, 11th edition, entry 'Mula-sem-cabeça' (full-text search hits: 'corre sete freguesias em cada noite'; 'Chamam-na também Burrinha-de-padre')» — São Paulo: Global Editora, 2001 (11. ed. rev. e atual.). Lending copy; read only through the Internet Archive / Open Library full-text search, 8 October 2026, 2001 book
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-16 · How we verify our content
📎 Source: Enigma Atlas
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