Boitatá

Brazil
Rio Grande do Sul, open country and the Missões; a second area in Paraná, where the form «baetatá» denotes a ball of fire and not a serpent

Boitatá — what defines it is not «fire serpent»: it is the link with the eyes of the dead.

Variants and names

Tupi mboi (serpent) + tatá (fire); forms attested M'Boi-Tátá (1913), boitatá, baetatá, baitatá. Aguilera proposes an alternative etymology from ma'e «thing» + ta'ta «fire», with boi- by folk etymology

What is told

What defines it is not «fire serpent»: it is the link with the eyes of the dead. In the 1913 text the serpent devours the eyes of the animals and men killed by the flood and becomes light — «é um fogo amarelo e azulado, que não queima a macega seca», a fire that does not burn the dry grass. This is what separates it both from the European will-o'-the-wisp and from the Amazonian Cobra Grande, which is mass and water and not light.

What it was forthe author’s reading

To give shape and cause to the light that crosses the field at night, and to tie it to a fault: the eaten eyes. The schoolbook version of the serpent that protects the forest from those who set fires is recent and appears in none of the older sources.

Where it is attested

The version everyone repeats is J. Simões Lopes Neto, «A M'Boi-Tátá», in Lendas do sul, Pelotas, Echenique & C., 1913. But there is an earlier printing, not his, and it is this that holds the entry up: José Bernardino dos Santos, «Boitatá, lenda rio-grandense», Revista Mensal da Sociedade do Partenon Literário, no. 3, 1869, pp. 13-17, signalled and analysed by Henrique Perin, Revista do IHGRGS no. 168, 2025. Lexical dating: baetatá 1706, boitatá 1872 (Cunha 1994, in Vanderci de Andrade Aguilera, «O baetatá existe realmente?», in Latin American Narratives and Cultural Identity, New York, Peter Lang, 2004, pp. 201-216).

Caution

Here the author did not invent: he rewrote. The note prefaced to the 1913 volume states that the legends were given «forma expositiva», and the book is dedicated to men of letters within a gaúcho regionalist project. The difference from the Negrinho do Pastoreio lies entirely here: for the Boitatá an earlier printing in another hand exists, for the Negrinho I have not found one. To be discarded: that Anchieta in 1560 describes «the Boitatá» — the name in the cited passage is baetatá, the passage reaches us through Cascudo, and Aguilera argues they are two distinct beings —, that it is «the oldest Brazilian myth», and the ecological function of forest guardian, which is in no early source.

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