In September, the leaves have fallen and the vermilion and tangerine flowers stand out across the landscape. Anyone passing through the northeastern caatinga at that time of year may not know it, but this tree carries, beyond its beauty, a cultural richness that has been quietly forgotten in Brazil’s cities. Perhaps it is time to open our eyes to it.
Mulungu (Erythrina mulungu) is one of the best-documented medicinal plants in the Brazilian flora. Known in the northeast of the country as corticeira — a nod to the cork-like texture of its bark — it appears in the Brazilian Pharmacopoeia since its fifth edition. Anvisa, the national health regulator, recognises it as an approved phytotherapeutic agent, and the Ministry of Health has placed it on Renisus, the national list of medicinal plants of interest to the public health system. Pharmacological studies have confirmed what generations of healers already knew: the bark carries sedative, anxiolytic and anticonvulsant properties, through erythrinic alkaloids that act on the receptors of the central nervous system. In a country that consumes benzodiazepines the way other nations drink tea, there is a particular irony in having a native anxiolytic growing by the roadside without anyone knowing its name.
But mulungu is not merely pharmacology. It is an archive. Into it were deposited, layer upon layer, centuries of knowledge from peoples who came together on this land under tragic and extreme circumstances.
To understand the plant, it helps first to understand the genus. Erythrina is vast: some 130 species spread across the tropical and subtropical regions of the planet, from sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia, from Central and South America to the Pacific. In virtually every culture within its range, at least one species of the genus found its way into local medicine — as sedative, painkiller, fish poison or ritual marker. The generic name comes from the Greek erythros, red, a reference to those flowers already mentioned.
In Brazil, the medicinal reference species is E. mulungu, also catalogued as E. verna, found along an arc running from the northeast — where it grows within the caatinga scrubland and the highland forests — down to the south, across the Atlantic Forest and the transitional zones of the cerrado savannah. It is a medium-sized deciduous tree that can exceed fifteen metres, flowering between August and October precisely when it sheds its leaves. It grows along forest edges and riverbanks. It is not rare. It is simply invisible to those who were never taught to see it.
The origin of the name holds a story within the story. The Tupi people called the tree mussungú or muzungú long before the arrival of Europeans and the forced transatlantic migration of Africans. They used the bark to treat insomnia and toothache, and the plant’s alkaloids — close chemical relatives of curare — to stun fish in the igarapés, making them easier to catch. On the African continent, Bantu peoples knew their own Erythrina species — E. abyssinica, E. caffra, E. senegalensis — by the name mulungo. When enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil and encountered, in an unfamiliar flora, a tree they recognised by its effects and its form, the two sounds came together almost naturally: the Tupi muzungú and the Bantu mulungo were too close not to merge. What emerged was mulungu — a name that shows how two distinct worlds arrived, independently, at the same plant and fused around it.
The most widely told story about mulungu involves a third name, one weighted with the full horror of slavery: amansa-senhor, or “tames the master.” The account goes like this: enslaved people prepared infusions of the plant to sedate plantation owners and overseers, creating space for nighttime movement, forbidden gatherings, some brief relief inside the unbearable. The story circulates in folklore records, oral histories and ethnobotanical essays. Direct documentary evidence is scarce; historians treat it with care, not as invention, but as the kind of practice that, for obvious reasons, would leave no paper trail. What is not disputed is the name. And a name, very often, is the best document that remains.
The incorporation of mulungu into Afro-Brazilian practice went beyond a pharmacology of resistance. In candomblé and umbanda, the plant entered as a ritual element. It is associated with Oxalá, the orisha of creation and peace, and with spiritual entities connected to restful sleep and calm. It appears in herbal baths and offerings — a presence that inscribes the plant within a system of knowledge with its own rigour and its own criteria for what works.
Those who prepare the infusion at home today will find, in the experience, something no package insert describes. The dried bark, steeped in hot water, releases a deep amber liquid somewhere between caramel and tobacco. The aroma is earthy and woody, with a sweet undertone that many liken to vanilla — plausible, given the phenylpropanoids present in the bark. The flavour partly keeps that promise and partly undoes it: there is bitterness, the tannin bitterness of any alkaloid-bearing plant, but it is not aggressive. It gives way quickly. What lingers is a mineral trace, something like an over-extracted tannic wine. Thirty or forty minutes after drinking the cup, something shifts in the muscles around the shoulders. It is not sudden drowsiness. It is a gradual release of tension the body had been holding without realising. A pleasant weight settles in. Those who drink at night sleep. Those who drink during the day need to sit down.
The same efficacy that makes mulungu remarkable demands caution. The plant is not recommended for pregnant or breastfeeding women, for children, or for those taking antidepressants or antihypertensives, as the overlap of sedative and hypotensive effects can be problematic. People with arrhythmia or heart failure should also avoid it. These are restrictions any herbalist knows and that the buyer of a packet from an online retailer is unlikely to find clearly printed on the label.
The regulatory position of mulungu in Brazil is simultaneously its recognition and its maze. Because it is classified as a phytotherapeutic rather than a food, the plant cannot be sold as a supermarket tea or stocked on natural health shop shelves. Anvisa’s RDC 267/2005 excludes from the food category any plant species with medicinal or therapeutic purposes. In 2025, the agency suspended coffee brands that had added mulungu to their formulas without authorisation — an episode that illuminates the regulatory logic at play: the plant works, which is precisely why it cannot circulate as casually as chamomile. The practical result is that chains such as Mundo Verde have found it increasingly difficult to keep mulungu on their shelves without falling foul of the rules.
Finding it, though, is not hard. A quick search on Amazon Brazil turns up dozens of listings for dried, shredded bark: Granoi sells 500-gram bags with brewing instructions; Toplife Naturais e Veganos offers a kilogram for under fifty reais; brands such as Dietsz, Iamaní, Rocha Saúde and Nutrichás round out what is clearly an active market. None of these packages can legally state, under food-category rules, what the product is actually for. They say “traditional use” and “relaxation.” Buyers who want to know more will have to look elsewhere.
We have reached the twenty-first century with the plant still most commonly found at street markets, in bundles of dried bark sold for a few reais. In that context, recognition by the Pharmacopoeia and by Anvisa already matters — it opens a regulatory door that may eventually free mulungu’s use from exclusive dependence on oral transmission, a chain that breaks a little further each time a farmer’s son moves to the city and starts buying from a pharmacy. The road ahead, though, remains long. Mulungu has yet to join the short list of Brazilian botanical exports — copaiba oil, cashew, açaí — that the world has learned to name and seek out.
It still needs to flower.
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