What is a bruxa?
In the game The Witcher, the bruxa is a beautiful and deadly female vampire. In the folk belief of northern Portugal, Galicia and Asturias, she is something else: a woman who changes her shape at night, usually into a bird or a moth, and gets into houses through cracks and keyholes. People feared her most at the cradle. Unexplained infant deaths were blamed on her.
An old family tree
The name is the Portuguese and Galician word for witch; in Spanish it is bruja. The figure behind it is very old. The ancient historian Daniel Ogden traces the line back to the Roman strix, the night bird that attacks children in their cradles in Ovid. That makes the bruxa, the Polish striga and the Romanian strigoi descendants of the same idea.
Sources
In 1880, Oswald Crawfurd described the bruxa belief in northern Portugal in Portugal, Old and New. José Leite de Vasconcelos began collecting Portuguese folk traditions in 1882. For Galicia, Carmelo Lisón Tolosana’s 1979 study is the standard work.
Witch belief and witch hunts
Where people believed in night witches, suspicion could fall on any neighbor. That is why the bruxa episode also turns to the Basque witch trials of Zugarramurdi and to the inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías, who brought witch burnings in Spain to a halt.
Episodes on this topic
- The Bruxa: The Monster With a Thousand Names (Witcher 4/4)
- The Witches of Zugarramurdi: The Largest Witch Trial
Further reading
- Oswald Crawfurd: Portugal, Old and New, 1880.
- José Leite de Vasconcelos: Tradições Populares de Portugal, 1882.
- Carmelo Lisón Tolosana: Brujería, estructura social y simbolismo en Galicia, 1979.
- Daniel Ogden: The Strix-Witch, Cambridge University Press 2021.
- Julio Caro Baroja: Las brujas y su mundo, 1961.