Mula sem cabeça

Brazil
Minas Gerais and the rural Brazilian interior, with the São Francisco valley (Januária) as the earliest dated point of collection; the belief is also recorded at Cuiabá, in São Paulo and in Rio Grande do Sul, and the Iberian origin, Portuguese or Spanish, is a scholars' hypothesis rather than an attestation

Mula sem cabeça — the woman who took a priest for a lover, condemned to run the nights from Thursday to Friday as a mule without a head that neighs all the same, an iron bit in her mouth

Variants and names

Portuguese mula-sem-cabeça, «headless mule». Cascudo records as synonyms Burrinha-de-padre and simply Burrinha, and gives the current phrase anda correndo uma burrinha, which «every sertanejo understands». In the same entry he cross-refers to Cavalo-Sem-Cabeça and Burrinha: Amadeu Amaral, in O Dialeto Caipira, notes that in São Paulo the cavalo-sem-cabeça is also called mula-sem-cabeça, while in other records the horse is the forsworn priest and the mule his woman.

The Spanish-American cognates are listed by Cascudo himself: Mula Ánima, Alma Mula, Mula sin Cabeza, Mujer Mula, Mala Mula between Mexico and Argentina, and Malora in Mexico; Efraín Morote Best, in his Peruvian monograph of 1952, gives the same series with Mulánima added and Matera for Mexico, and ascribes to the belief «un fondo español».

As to why a mule, there is no etymology to reconstruct but a documentary argument that Cascudo takes from Gustavo Barroso: the mule was the mount reserved to prelates, and Barroso quotes twelfth-century formulas — mulam corporis mei… meam mulam, in qua ego ambulo — while the horse stayed caparisoned for battle. Cascudo also recalls Alexandre Herculano, who has Leonor Teles say: «Aqui só tens a mula do teu corpo para seguires jornada».

What is told

In the sources she is the punishment of a priest's concubine. Cascudo defines her as «a forma que toma a concubina do sacerdote»: on the night from Thursday to Friday the woman becomes a strong animal, «of controverted identification in oral tradition», and gallops, terrifying whoever she meets. She throws sparks of fire from her nostrils and her mouth, her hooves are as though shod with iron, and the violence of the gallop and the shrillness of the neighing are heard far off; at times she sobs like a human creature. They call her headless, but the neighing is unavoidable. In her mouth she carries an iron bit: the enchantment falls if someone has the courage to tear it from her head, and then she reappears naked, weeping in repentance, and will not turn mule again as long as whoever found her lives in the same parish. She runs seven parishes a night, and in certain states it is enough to draw her blood, even with the point of a pin. In the São Paulo version collected by Alceu Maynard Araújo she runs until the third cock-crow and comes home at dawn covered in bruises, her foaming mouth rimmed with blood from biting the bit.

What it was forthe author’s reading

The punishment falls on the woman, not on the cleric, and it is the cleric himself who administers it: so that his manceba will not turn into a burrinha, her lover must curse her seven times before celebrating mass, and Manuel Ambrósio gives a far higher number of times. It is a double device. It keeps female sexuality in check in a country of isolated parishes, where «mulher de padre» was a current insult — in 1898 it is shouted in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, to laughter — and at the same time it keeps watch on the rural clergy: the mule running at night tells the village that the priest is not chaste. In the masculine, in the same collections, the cavalo-sem-cabeça is the priest who has forgotten his vow of chastity.

Where it is attested

The earliest printed record I have been able to read in full is literary and from Minas: Bernardo Guimarães, «A orgia dos duendes», in Poesias, Rio de Janeiro, B. L. Garnier, 1865, pp. 269-283. At the sabbath the mula-sem-cabeça comes braying into the ring and the company hails her «Viva, viva a Sra. condessa!»; then she sings her stanza: she loved a bishop, her jealous husband killed the bishop, she cut her husband to pieces and ate him mouthful by mouthful, and she ended beheaded on the block by the executioner. Then come the passing mentions: França Júnior, Folhetins, 1878, p. 83, beside the saci; Sílvio Romero, in the Revista Brazileira of 1879, p. 202, lists among the sertanejo's beliefs «a mula sem cabeça e a mãi d'agua, animaes encantados»; Mello Moraes, Os ciganos no Brazil, 1886, p. 56, writes that «ao portuguez devemos o Lobis-homem, a Mula-sem-cabeça, o Pesadelo». The regional collections cited by the folklorists are Manuel Ambrósio, Brasil interior. Palestras populares — folk-lore das margens do S. Francisco, Januária (Minas), 1912; Daniel Gouveia, Folclore brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro, 1926; J. Simões Lopes Neto for the South; Gustavo Barroso, Sertão e o Mundo; Alceu Maynard Araújo, Documentário folclórico paulista, 1952. The standard entry is Luís da Câmara Cascudo, Dicionário do folclore brasileiro, 1954, which cross-refers to his Geografia dos mitos brasileiros, José Olympio, 1947.

Caution

Grade B. I read the earliest dated record in full, in the scan-backed transcription of the 1865 Garnier edition on Wikisource, and I read Cascudo's entry word by word in the complete OCR of the 1988 edition deposited on archive.org. But the regional collections Cascudo cites — Manuel Ambrósio 1912, Daniel Gouveia 1926, Simões Lopes Neto, Gustavo Barroso, and Alceu Maynard Araújo 1952 — I know only through him and, for Ambrósio, through the catalogue record of the Arquivo Público Mineiro; the Geografia dos mitos brasileiros I did not open; Romero 1879 and Mello Moraes 1886 I saw as fragments of the scanned page on Google Books, not in the volume.

The fire from the neck does not hold. In Cascudo the sparks come «pelas narinas e pela boca»; the flame where the head should be, now repeated as though it were the defining trait, comes from popularising websites and picture books, not from the collections. «Calling her by name» does not hold either: in the sources one tears off the iron bit, or draws blood with a pin, and the preventive curse is the priest's business. Nor does the indigenous or Tupi origin, which circulates in school lists of «lendas indígenas»: the name is Portuguese, the figure runs across the whole of Spanish America, and as early as 1886 a Brazilian ethnographer gave it as a Portuguese inheritance. Nor does the equation with the lobisomem: Cascudo says the procedure for breaking the spell is identical, not that the figure is the same. And in Portugal, where the root is supposed to lie, I found no nineteenth-century printed record of the name: the Iberian derivation remains a scholars' hypothesis.

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.