Alight with bioluminescence as  they float through the night sky, the firefly is a mystical, enchanting  creature for many cultures.

But not so for the West African Ewe  peoples of Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, and Togo.

For them, fireflies can cause great anxiety.

In Ewe mythology, fireflies may be the form taken by an evil entity called the Adze.

While there are very few folk stories about the ‘Adze’ as a physical monster, mostly  just passing references and descriptions, ‘adze’ as a belief is more complex.

So why has the idea of a flying, nocturnal, blood-sucking firefly endured?

I'm Dr. Emily Zarka.

And this is Monstrum.

A nebulous monstrous spirit, adze can take  on many guises, the firefly among them.

The Ewe peoples believe that this nocturnal force is  almost always ill-intentioned, and if called upon through malevolent sorcery, may enter the body  and empower the sorcerer with special abilities.

While under the influence of malignant adze, these  individuals are called an adzetos or azetowos.

While possessed, the adzetos are compelled  into nocturnal shapeshifting.

A floating ball of light or a flame emerges from the possessed  person’s nose or mouth or may appear through the top of their head.

Often, the flame takes the  form of an owl, firefly, or a kind of beetle.

This allows the possessed to travel great  distances by flight, which comes in handy because the spirit also compels the adzetos  to feed on the life force of other humans, usually their blood or their flesh.

The word ‘adze’ however itself has a bit of a complex etymology, especially amongst  west African people like Theon the mean the Shante and so many others who live  in Togo, Benin, Ghana, and Nigeria.

That’s Helen Nde, researcher and  curator of Mythological Africans, an online community that explores mythology  and folklore from the African continent.

In one context, as they are understood  as a creative genius and spiritual power, especially as embodied and wielded by women,  Adze is also understood as a bad sorcery, so creative genius and spiritual  power wielded for harm.

So to hurt other people out of jealousy or envy, or  just sudden for design to see them suffer.

Helen taught me that all adze aren’t  bad or  malevolent.

It's more about the intention of the person who wields this force.

The capital “A” Adze monster we are talking about  is just one manifestation, a very frightening one.

The monster Adze’s ability to appear as an  insect makes it particularly threatening.

They could be anywhere and everywhere.

Their small size allows them to enter  seemingly closed spaces through keyholes, cracks, and under door frames.

And  insect-borne illness is already a threat.

In some variations of Adze lore, the  monsters have an appendage like an elephant trunk or ant-eater -like nose used  to slurp up the blood of their victims.

If blood isn’t handy, the creatures will drink  palm oil, coconut water, or coconut milk, so these fluids can be offered to appease  an Adze monster and protect one’s community.

Flying, nocturnal, blood-sucking  insects—you would think the mosquito would be the most common form, so why fireflies?

If you start with the understanding of as a, as a flame-like entity, which comes out of people's  noses and mouths or out the top of their heads and flies around at night, looking for other people  to stop blood from and cause death or disease to then it makes sense that the firefly would be one  of the creatures associated with this entity.

It flies around at night, it glows in the dark.

A flying insect that appears to glow like a small flame makes sense.

It’s also possible  that the belief in the monstrous Adze developed as a response not only to illness more  broadly but to disease-carrying insects like mosquitoes, which could explain the  proboscis-like appendage of the creature.

But let’s not forget, ‘adze’ mostly refers  to malevolent sorcery, not a monster.

The main misconception about that, I would  like to dispel is this understanding of it as simply a blood sucking vampiric entity.

Adze  cannot be understood outside of its context as a manifestation of bad sorcery.

So you have the  entity, but the entity comes out of the efforts of a bad actor using occult powers.

Um, blood sucking  is also just one of the ways in which they will break havoc on a person's life.

They also cause  illness and death.

They cause mental distress and they can cause loss of job, loss of property,  or just lots of good standing in society.

Ewe practitioners of this bad sorcery, in  general, may be associated with cannibalism and consumption because they prey on the resources  of the community to the detriment of all.

Often associated with contentious familial  and community relationships, in Ewe culture adze attacks pose a constant threat, most  predominantly to wealth and  fertility.

And another valuable resource—blood.

The Adze monster’s preferred victims are children.

In fact, in some Ewe traditions, they  only hunt the most beautiful children.

My theory around this is that physical  attractiveness is, uh, an enviable quality.

And one of the motivating forces behind using  Adze is jealousy and envy and wanting other people to suffer.

So, uh, people who  have qualities that another person envy become targets for Adze, and it's not just beauty.

There is intelligence and charisma and wealth, and anything that a person might possess that  other people might, might, might want or feel jealous towards them and want them to suffer for.

The Adze are active at night, and some people say they see them in their dreams.

If you manage to  catch one of these creatures, it will transform into a human and attack you.

So it’s possible that  they can be killed in this mortal form.

They believe, however, that if you were to catch  an Adze and a transforming into a human being, it will plead for its life and offer you all kinds  of things to make sure that you don't kill it.

And if you spirits life, then it becomes your  friend and it doesn't bother you anymore.

There are groups within Ewe culture that  work against the use of malevolent sorcery, neutralizing or punishing the  accused—sometimes with death.

Someone can be accused of being a blood-sucking,  possessed firefly or a traveling flame and also look like a human during the day—and therefore  there’s a possibility that real innocent lives can be taken in the name of Adze destruction.

Long a part of oral traditions, one of the Adze’s first appearances in written literature  is in an ethnographic book written in 1906 by German missionary Jakob Spieth.

While his description isn’t incorrect, he is very quick to label adze as  ‘witchcraft,” a complicated term in Africa.

Over time, you know, with colonization  and the introduction of Christianity and, and other spiritual belief systems.

The  fear of Adze has only become more complex.

Now it is impossible to situate this outside  of the context of colonialism, because, what happened with the wave of colonial enterprise  that swept across much of the African continent is that traditional ways of organizing community  belief systems and political systems were destabilized.

And this had a profound effect  on the physical, emotional, and psychological wellbeing of communities.

And there is research  which shows that, where this, this destabilization brought by colonialism, the inequities  and operations caused by that, that system where they, where they happened, there is an  increase in complex beliefs, such as witchcraft.

Helen and I both found that identifying the  Adze as a vampiric spirit doesn’t occur until the 20th century, in Matthew Bunson’s  1993 book The Vampire Encyclopedia.

So the Adze gained the “vampire” moniker not  from the culture from which it originated, but from an attempt to contextualize the entity  to a broader, largely Western, audience.

It’s so important that we trace back to  and understand the origins of this monster.

Without that the true meaning is lost and muddled.

There is a resurgence in mythology and  folklore from the African continent, which is good, but it also carries the risk  of misunderstanding and misinterpretation, especially since many of the documented sources of  these mythologies and folklores that are available were done by people who are not themselves  African.

So, it is well known that myths and folklore are not just stories.

They are containers  of cultural beliefs and values and practices.

And, and so they are used to preserve and plum  to expand cultural knowledge and practices.

And I believe that myths and folk will offer a  great opportunity to learn what we have thought about ourselves in the past and explore the  possibilities of who we can be in the future.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Studying  monsters isn’t about what you think you know because of something you’ve seen or read,  but  investigating what that creature means to the  culture in which it was created.

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