Anhangá

The fire beside the grave was not for light. On the Brazilian coast in the middle of the sixteenth century, a family that buried its dead kept a hearth burning near the body and set out food beside it, and both were tactical. The food was there so that something would eat it instead of eating the dead. The heat was there because the dead get cold and because the thing in the dark does not care for flame. The living would call out to grandparents already arrived in Guajupiá, the good country beyond death, telling them to keep their own fires lit. Archaeologists digging Tupiguarani burial sites still find the bark hearths, ringed around the urns, packed with charcoal.

What they were guarding against was Anhangá. The word comes from the Tupi for soul, and in its earliest sense it barely describes a creature at all. It describes a condition: the dead, loosed from the body, still in the world and furious about it. The French who came to Guanabara Bay wrote the name down as Agnan and Aygnan. Hans Staden, held captive by the Tupinambá for nine months and paying close attention for obvious reasons, heard igangue. All of them reported the same thing, which is that these people were more frightened of this than of anything else in their lives, and that simply remembering what it had done to them was enough to start the torment over again.

Luís da Câmara Cascudo, who spent a career sorting Brazilian folklore into its layers, called Anhangá a myth built on verbal confusion. The original, he argued, was anga, the wandering soul: no body, no shape, no face, just the bad thing, the formless dread that kept the timid inside the house beside the fire through the long tropical night. Everything that came afterwards, he said, was added. It is a bleak reading and the evidence is on his side.

The addition, when it came, was magnificent. Across Tupi country Anhangá acquired the body of a deer, white, with eyes that burned red, and a job to go with it: protector of the game. It walks where the hunters walk. When a man tracks a doe with a fawn at her flank and loses her in the undergrowth, and finds instead a white stag standing very still in the green half light, watching him, the tracking is over and both of them know it. If the animal got away, people said Anhangá had taken it away. The deer favours females with young, which is the tell that this is a rule about hunting and not a story about a monster.

Shoot at it and the shot goes wrong. It comes back as fever, or as madness, or worse, as a bullet that turns in the air and finds someone the hunter loves. Cascudo’s own summary is the sharpest description anyone has managed: it does not devour and it does not kill, it avenges the animals destroyed by the hunters’ greed. There is no negotiating with it and no offering that buys it off. There is only the question of how much meat a man actually needed.

The Jesuits found all this extremely convenient. José de Anchieta, arriving in 1553 and setting about the translation of Christianity into Tupi, had already given God the name Tupã, the thunder, and needed an adversary to stand opposite him. He took Anhangá. Alfredo Bosi’s reading of that choice is that it had little to do with any diabolical quality in the spirit itself, which was neither good nor evil in the Tupi understanding, and everything to do with the terror the name already carried. Anhangá became the prince of darkness and the author of every habit the mission wanted stamped out. Its fire, ratá, was pressed into service as hell, a place of endless burning that meant nothing whatever to the people being warned about it. In Anchieta’s play at Guaraparim the demon comes on stage and speaks Tupi verse in defence of exactly the customs the Church had come to end, and the audience, sitting in the mission village, was expected to laugh at him and be frightened of him at the same time. Anchieta also coined Anhangupiara, enemy of the anhangás, and handed it to an angel.

The graft took. By 1618 a Jesuit confessional manual was teaching priests to recognise the phrase Anhanga xe reraçóbo, may the devil carry me off, which is a Portuguese oath wearing Tupi clothing. Dictionaries hardened it further: gênio mal das matas, evil genius of the woods. António Vieira preached about Añangá from the pulpit. The word outlived the religion it belonged to. It is still on the map, too. A stream once ran through the middle of São Paulo called Anhangabaú, from anhangobá’y, water of the devil’s face; the water was culverted a century ago and the valley kept the name. The Romantic poets finished the job. In Gonçalves Dias, Anhangá is cruel, pitiless, and an ally of the colonisers, which is the missionary’s version of the spirit set to music and sold back to Brazil as its own heritage.

Upriver the older shape survives. Among the Sateré-Mawé of the middle Amazon the anhangás are plural, a rank of demons in Jurupari’s train, and they change form in order to trick people, curse them, take possession of them, carry them off and eat them. They have one clear limit: they will not enter the water, because Sukuyu’wera, the protecting spirit of the rivers, is their enemy and they are afraid of it. Fire on one side, water on the other, and a strip of forest in between where the thing has the run of the place. Neopentecostal churches in Sateré-Mawé communities around Manaus now preach against Anhangá as a manifestation of the devil, to be driven off with prayers and hymns, which is Anchieta’s argument arriving four and a half centuries late and in a different accent.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Anhangá?

Anhangá is a spirit from Tupi belief in Brazil, originally understood as the restless soul of a dead person and later as the protector of forest game. The Tupinambá of the sixteenth-century coast feared it more than anything else and took elaborate precautions to keep it away from their dead. Its name comes from the Tupi word for soul.

What does Anhangá look like?

In its best-known form Anhangá appears as a white deer with fiery red eyes. The oldest accounts give it no body at all, describing only an invisible tormenting presence, and the folklorist Câmara Cascudo argued that the deer shape was a later regional addition to a formless original. It is also said to take the shape of whatever animal a hunter is pursuing.

Does Anhangá kill people?

Anhangá punishes rather than kills. Hunters who take more game than they need are struck with fever, madness or a shot that goes astray and injures someone they love, and Cascudo described the spirit as avenging animals rather than devouring anyone. Hunters who kill sparingly are left alone.

Why did the Jesuits call the devil Anhangá?

José de Anchieta chose Anhangá as the Tupi word for the Christian devil in the 1500s because the name already carried enormous fear, not because the spirit resembled Satan. Tupi supernatural beings were neither good nor evil in the European sense. The choice stuck so thoroughly that by 1618 Jesuit confessional manuals recorded Tupi speakers using the name in a translated Portuguese curse.

Where does the name Anhangabaú come from?

The Anhangabaú in São Paulo takes its name from the Tupi anhangobá’y, meaning water of the devil’s face, according to the tupinologist Eduardo Navarro. The stream was culverted in the early twentieth century, but the valley in the centre of the city still carries the spirit’s name.

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Curupira, Caipora, Jurupari, Tupã, Boi-tatá, Iara, Boiúna, Saci, Guaraci, Jaci, Mapinguari, Encantado, Yacuruna, Pombero