#brazillian folklore

🇺🇸. Introducing a little of the brazillian folklore🪇🎉

Curupira🔥

And Saci Pererê🌪

Basically, if you are a boy who:

- Is the thirteenth child

-Is the eight child and the seven previous children were women

-Is the eight child period

-Is the seventh child out of thirteen

-Is the  seventh child of the seventh child

-Was born on Good Friday at midnight

-Is the child of a incestuous relationship

-Is the child of a relationship between a woman and a priest

-Wasn’t baptized

-Has anemia

you will become a werewolf once you turn 13. 

Only men become werewolves. (I couldn’t find any source saying that if a person is attacked by a werewolf and survives will also become a werewolf). Also, the curse is hereditary. 

You can identify a werewolf if a man is easily annoyed, barely eats (but when he does, is usually spicy and/or salty food), is usually tired and is lazy, and is thirsty all the time. Some versions say that a man who is pale and has a large nose and ears is also a werewolf. 

 The transformations happen every Friday; the full moon is rarely mentioned. The victim goes to a crossroad, becomes a werewolf and does his thing, then goes back to that crossroad before dawn to turn human again.  Curiously, becoming a werewolf doesn’t necessarily means that you will become a wolf or a wolf hybrid. Sometimes you just become a dog or even some unspecified animal ( even a pig counts). The main victims or werewolves are animals, in some regions non baptized babies are also included. Most versions say that the werewolf only drinks their blood. 

 In some regions, you cut off the paw of a werewolf, you will cure him. You can also make a werewolf turn human again (not necessarily cure him) by cutting him with a knife or a sharp object, enough to draw blood. Silver bullets also kill werewolves, but in some regions a regular bullet, covered with the wax of a candle used in a mass will do the trick. You have to shoot the werewolf through the heart to kill it.  Another way to get cured is, on your first night as werewolf, you have to visit seven graveyards until sunrise. A possible result of not being able to do this is staying in werewolf form forever. 

Christ i just opened my ask box and i noticed i forgot to answer this, you probably don't even come here anymore and will see this ask aahh. i'm so so so sorry! I was gonna do a list with all the ones that have body horror and the ones that don't and do a resume of each, but i lost motivation when i ended up losing the list after making it so elaborated and have been writing for so long.

Body horror is very very common in brazillian folklore, and even the ones that aren't heavy body horror have some small element that's just not right (Curupira-not a folkloric myth, but reconized as one past colonization, i'm giving him as an example because most brazillians will refer to him as a folkloric myth so if you were to research it it's undeniable you'll see him-having his feet backwards for example), and there are a lot of creatures that are shapeshifters or somewhere between human and animal. I won't do a list with all of them right now, 1 because of adhd, 2 because i'm not sure if you are still reading this. But if you are interested in knowing more about the culture and history but don't want to search it because of the body horror, send me a text and i'll resume them and try to water down the body horror aspect.

I think it's overall very very difficult to find brazillian folkloric legends that don't have body horror, or some level of violence. A lot of folkloric legends were used as a way to scare people into not doing something(almost of those are the ones with the portuguese roots), are about nature protectors that wouldn't hesitate in harming people if needed(almost all of those are the ones with indigenous roots, post colonization), or are legends that have hope in miracles but won't shy away from the violence the characters face before the miracle comes(almost all of those have african roots, post colonization). I think if you want to avoid heavy violence, read the afro-brazillian legends with caution as they have elements from slavery and might include torture or animals dying. If you want to avoid ocasional murder and creatures that are shapeshifters and might have features that can be off putting, read the indigenous-brazillian legends with caution. If you want to avoid creatures that just kill a lot of people for the sake of killing and have no humanity in their behaviour, read the european-brazillian legens with caution.

Of course, that isn't for all legends. There are some that are just fun! and the ones that are violent, unless they are white legends, do not focus on the violence but rather on the intention and actions. They have a story to be told in them.

Of course it can be a bit hard at first to reconize the roots from each, i just manage to do so because i had an hyperfixation on it and the more legends i read the more i started noticing elements in common. It becomes even harder to tell the roots when a lot of the indigenous legends have become washed out and whitened, such as our modern versions of Iara and Boto, both having indigenous elements but the story telling being very clearly white(why does Iara kill? why does Iara attract the fishermen? she once was more, she once was Mãe d'agua, she was once a protector, but soon after she was appropriated into a siren who just kills for the sake of killing.), or some that try hard to pass as indigenous and are enough to fool a lot of people but if you see the pattern you can tell they have been white washed as well, such as Vitória-Regia(how come she's just "an indigenous girl from a tribe" and nothing more? does the moon simply revives her for the sake of making the story feel more magical? i believe it's a story that maybe could have once been indigenous, but it does not tell me anything about the beliefs and culture being presented, it is said with a lot of distance like it's an outsider's perspective. a story from a "long, long time ago about an ancient civilization". sketchy, ain't it?). Afro-brazillian legends have also been whitened through time, but in a different way than indigenous ones. They're slightly more subtle.

It's fascinating! Especially since the exact origins are so hard to trace.

The book on water spirits I have talks of "Oiára" and calls them beautiful water maidens with long black hair that they with entwine morenú flowers and that have the tail of a porpoise. They lure young men with their song, embrace them and drown them.

But then someone else names the Uauyará, who is male but transforms himself into either a river porpoise or a handsome man who seduces women. Which sounds more like the shapeshifting boto/pink river dolphin. (Maybe he is also a descendant of the Cobra Grande?)

Another entry calls the Yara a "water-witch" and states that her singing causes a sort of sickening, melancholy longing that causes their victims to join her in the water.

and I believe he started out as a genuinely mischievous creature, who would trick and hurt travelers, go through kitchens in a tornado, making a mess out of everything, scare farm animals and braid the hair on horses, but since he became a character in a very popular brazillian book series for kids, and later the show based on the book, he eventually just became a playful spirit. My favorite brazillian creature was always the Boitata. It was said to be a giant snake that always appeared to be on fire, and scared away harmful hunters. Lobisomens are normal werewolves, except that instead of being turned by a bite, it was said that, if a family had a number of daughters, and then a son(either six daughters and then the seventh a son, or twelve daughters and the thirteenth a son), he would become a werewolf. One brazillian folklore I forgot to talk about is Cuca, mostly because she's not really like the other figures. I think she first appeared on a lullaby thats goes "sleep, baby, so that Cuca will come get you"(those kinds of popular nursery rhymes everyone knows but no one knows where it came from(though I'm sure there must be research on it)), so she became known as a witch that captures misbehaving kids, and then she appeared as the main villain on the same kids' show as Saci, as an alligator woman with blonde hair(you might have seen her, she became kind of a meme) and has been that since then. I actually don't know the origins of her.

That's so interesting! I love odd figures everyone knows and no one actually knows.

Connected to your remark about the folklore being a particular mixture of influences; I've always found it fascinating that when discussing cultural folk beliefs with a Brazilian friend, they feel almost familiar. Bits of it seems very similar to the things I learned about in Curaçao, probably because there is a comparable mishmash of African, Indigenous South American and European going on. I even remember a lullaby in Papiamentu urging the child to go to sleep quickly, or The Cow would come to eat them...

So many magical reptiles! And you don't encounter many female characters that turn into reptiles or amphibians, that's really cool!