Anhangá

Anhangá or Anhanga (Tupi: Anhang

It particularly afflicts hunters with madness and fever, especially if they target females (does) with young, as it is a guardian of wildlife game in the open field (or the forest, according to modern sources), and as such, usually appears in the guise of white deer with fiery eyes.

[11] Those of African banto descent in Brasil thought Anhanga might derive from their mother tongue due to coincidental similarities,[12] but this is an instance of folk etymology and false cognate.

[21][30] The missionary André Thevet writing in the 16th century records that the natives while traveling over water believed that the noise of tempest or hurricanes heard were caused by "the souls of relatives and friends", associated with the agnan.

[32][33][34] The "red devil" (Portuguese: anhangapitã, Spanish: añangapitanga) has been regarded as synonymous with the carbuncle creature and the teiniaguá by some authorities, namely lexicographer Daniel Granada, and Augusto Meyer after him.

It was the evil-thing, the fear without form, convulsive, trapping the shy ones inside theirs ocas [indigenous houses] by the heat of the fire, surrounded by the dark night of the tropics.

The Anhanga of with eyes of fire and the body of a deer is a numen, the protector of the species, totemic convention, the Tupi's regional superstition, for it hadn't been transmitted to other indigenous peoples and, through passing it to the ones of mixed-race, had lost his function as a patron of the field hunts.

Hence there are said to be subtypes mira-anhanga (human-faced), tatu-anhanga (armadillo), suaçu-anhanga (deer), tapira-anhanga (ox), tapira-pirarucu (pirarucu fish), iurará-anhanga (turtle), nhambu-anhanga (inambu or tinamou bird), occurs in Cascudo's folklore dictionary (1s ed., 1954).

[49][43] An alternate, somewhat detailed description given by João Barbosa Rodrigues (d. 1909), whereby the incarnation of the Anhanga appearing before a human "is always in the form of a deer, red in color, with antlers covered in hair, with a fiery gaze, a cross on its forehead, known as Suessú anhanga.."[15] The Jesuit missionary José de Anchieta, in his auto Tupi-Medieval, gives the name Anhangupiara, " a word created from the agglutination of the nouns anhangá and jupiara", to an angel, whose meaning in the Latin translation of the Anchietan Tupi would be the enemy of the anhangás.

[52] In more modern times, Neo-Pentecostal churches with a strong presence in the Mawé communities reinterpret Anhangá as an announcement of evil and a demonic manifestation, to be fought by prayers and chants.

In the poems "O Canto do Piaga (Song of the shaman)" and "Deprecação (Deprecation)" from his 1846 anthology,[53] Anhangá is characterized as a cruel and merciless entity, allied with the colonizers.

[56][57] Machado de Assis, in Americanas [pt] (1875), alerts to the fact that it follows the grammar prosody oxytone because it is commonly used in poetry, but that the true pronunciation of the word would be a paroxytone.