The Tlahuelpuchi – Bloodsucking Witches of Tlaxcala

When

c. 1960 date from records made at the time

Where

Rural communities of Tlaxcala at the foot of La Malinche volcano, Mexico

Verdict

Explained

In Tlaxcala's villages, the sudden deaths of infants were blamed on the tlahuelpuchi, a bloodsucking witch. The anthropologist Hugo Nutini studied dozens of such cases.

What happened

In the beliefs of the Nahua people of the central Mexican highlands, especially in the state of Tlaxcala, a tlahuelpuchi is a person – usually a woman – born with a curse, who at night can turn into an animal or a mist and feeds on blood, above all the blood of babies. The belief blends pre-Hispanic ideas about nahuales, shape-shifters, with European tales of witches and vampires. When an infant died suddenly in the night and bruises were found on its body, the family would say it had been ‘sucked by the witch’. The most extensive study of the phenomenon was carried out in the 1960s by the anthropologist Hugo Nutini, who did fieldwork in the rural communities of Tlaxcala. With John M. Roberts he described it in the book Bloodsucking Witchcraft (1993), analysing dozens of documented infant deaths attributed to tlahuelpuchis – who diagnosed them, how the family and community reacted and what protective measures were taken. He also recorded that people suspected of being tlahuelpuchis had in the past sometimes been killed.

Witnesses

Families of the dead infants and residents of rural Tlaxcala; the anthropologist Hugo G. Nutini, who recorded their accounts in the 1960s.

Explanations and hypotheses

Nutini and Roberts concluded that the deaths blamed on tlahuelpuchis had entirely natural or human causes: accidental suffocation of sleeping infants (for example when sharing a bed and tightly swaddled on cold nights), sudden infant death syndrome and, occasionally, concealed infanticide. Belief in a bloodsucking witch allowed families to explain an incomprehensible tragedy and to free themselves of guilt. It is an example of how anthropology approaches ‘vampirism’ – as a way a community copes with the deaths of children.

Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.

Sources

More: Wikipedia (en)