Bruxa

The bruxa of north-west Iberia is neither a ghost nor a dead woman: she is a living woman from the neighbourhood itself, singled out by those who live beside her, who goes out at night to suck the blood of children in the cradle. Teófilo Braga and José Leite de Vasconcellos gathered the belief in the last third of the nineteenth century, when it was still taken for true in the villages of the Minho, Trás-os-Montes and the Alentejo, and in neighbouring Galicia, where the name lives alongside that of the meiga. Tradition does not explain her with a grand pact for immortality, but with something more domestic and more unsettling: one is a bruxa by inheritance from mother to daughter, by being born on a marked night, or by having learned it from another, and in many versions she cannot die in peace without first passing the gift on to someone who accepts it. Sucking blood does not make her immortal: it is what she does, and that is why the terror of these tales lies not in a distant sabbath but in the house next door.

In the tales she does not look like a witch. She is a village woman, of any age, who by day spins, goes to Mass and greets you on the road; the hunched crone with red eyes belongs to the iconography, not to what was told in the villages. What changes is at night: she leaves the house as a night bird (the coruja or barn owl, the mocho or little owl, sometimes the raven) and comes in through the window of the room where the child sleeps. It is the flight that makes her fearsome, for no door can be barred against it. From this comes the motif that closes nearly every version: someone wounds the bird in the wing or the foot, and next morning a neighbour appears with her arm or her foot bandaged. The mark is the proof, and it is also the sentence: the woman marked that way was never an ordinary neighbour again.

The Bruxa possesses supernatural powers including physical transformation, silent nocturnal flight, blood sucking with fangs to regain youth and strength, and inducing nightmares and illnesses in victims through magical curses. She can slip through open windows or chimneys as an animal, avoids sunlight that burns her, preferring attacks on dark nights or windy ones. Her weaknesses include cold iron that prevents transformations, holy water or cross that burns her skin, decapitation or burning the corpse during her daytime sleep in human form, and sometimes poppy seeds or garlic hung at doors to confuse her. In Portuguese traditions, salt or boiling water is used to repel her, reflecting Christian and folk symbols of protection against evil.

The bruxa is what remains when the fear of infant death is given a neighbour's name and face. In villages where babies died without explanation, a mark on the skin, a bruise or a child wasting away were enough to turn misfortune into an accusation, and the woman singled out was usually the one who lived alone, old or poor, on the margins. The Portuguese Inquisition tried cases of feitiçaria for three centuries, though death sentences for witchcraft in the Peninsula were far fewer than in central and northern Europe: the Iberian Holy Office tended to treat such matters as the superstition of ignorant folk rather than as a proven demonic pact. And she was not fought in court but at home: the jet figa hung round the child's neck, the scissors left open in a cross beneath the cradle, garlic, salt, the broom set behind the door. In Galicia the same fear left a saying still repeated with an uneasy smile: «eu non creo nas meigas, pero habelas hainas» (I don't believe in witches, but they do exist).