Erchitu
Sardinia · The islands
Central Sardinia, Barbagia and the Nuoro area
Erchitu — man who has committed a grave and hidden sin and who, on nights of the full moon, turns into a white ox with great horns.
- Variants and dialect names
- Erchitu; the related form Boe muliache, «bellowing ox»
- What is told
- A man who has committed a grave and hidden sin and who, on nights of the full moon, turns into a white ox with great horns. He stops in front of a house and bellows three times: the bellow is heard by the whole village and the master of that house will die within the year. Demons fix lighted candles to his horns.
- What it was forthe author’s reading
- An omen of death that gives communal form to the anxiety about sudden mortality, and a hidden moral sanction: it signals that someone in the community has committed an unconfessed sin. It is a particularly effective device of social control because the sin remains anonymous.
- Where it is attested
- Istituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico, Novelline popolari sarde dell'Ottocento, 1999.
- Caution
- He can be redeemed by whoever has the courage to blow out the candles or to cut off his horns with a precise blow.
The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.