Curupira

In the original it speaks of “quosdam Daemones, quos Brasiles vocant Corupira”: certain demons, in the plural, a class of beings rather than a character, who set upon the Indians in the woods, flog them and kill them. Anchieta gives them no feet, no hair and no forest to protect, and the two sentences that follow — the Jesuits who claim to have seen the dead, the feathers and arrows left as an offering on a hilltop — are almost always cut. The backwards feet arrive three centuries later. The word can be followed from that letter through Vellozo's dictionary of 1795, Bates in 1863, Couto de Magalhães in 1876, Barbosa Rodrigues in 1890 and Stradelli in 1929, to the cryptozoological encyclopedia that in 2002 turned a forest demon into a surviving Pleistocene monkey.

The Curupira has a first appearance that can be dated to the month, and almost nothing that is said about it today is in that first appearance. The document is a letter by the Jesuit José de Anchieta, and the first thing to say about it is that it is not in Portuguese. Anchieta wrote it in Latin, and it stayed in manuscript for more than two centuries: it was printed for the first time in Lisbon in 1812, by the Academia Real das Sciencias, as number III of the first volume of the Collecção de noticias para a historia e geografia das nações ultramarinas, under the title Epistola quamplurimarum rerum naturalium, quae S. Vincentii (nunc S. Pauli) provinciam incolunt, sistens descriptionem. It is a naturalist's letter — ants, manatees, anteaters, thunderstorms, stones — written to a superior who had asked for whatever was remarkable or unknown to the Old World. The Corupira turns up at the very end, in the paragraph before the one on deformities, and it reads, in the 1812 printing (long s and ligatures normalised): "Notum est, et in omnium ore versatur esse quosdam Daemones, quos Brasiles vocant Corupira, qui saepe in silvis adoriuntur Indos, flagris caedunt, macerant, et necant." That is: it is known, and it is in everyone's mouth, that there are certain demons, whom the Brasis call Corupira, who often set upon the Indians in the woods, flog them, batter them and kill them. Four things in that sentence deserve to be read slowly. The word is spelled Corupira, with an o. It is plural: quosdam Daemones, "certain demons", a class of beings. Anchieta gives it no body at all: no feet, no hair, no eyes, no height. And it does not protect anything; it kills. The letter is meticulous about anatomy elsewhere — the tapir's three-toed feet, the monkeys' hands, a bird whose feet sit so far back that it cannot hold its own body up — so the silence about the Corupira's shape is the silence of a man who had nothing to describe. The sentence almost never travels alone in the original, and almost always does online. Two more follow it. First: "Hujus rei fratres nostri, qui aliquoties ab eis interfectos viderunt, testes sunt" — our own brothers are witnesses, having several times seen people killed by them. Then the ritual: on a path that runs through rough forest and steep hills into the interior, at the summit of the highest hill, the Indians leave bird feathers, fans, arrows and similar things by way of an offering, "Corupira ne sibi noceant summopere deprecantes" — begging the Corupiras, in the plural again, to do them no harm. Anchieta files them alongside two other classes of being: the Igpupiara, "aquam incolentes", who drown people in the rivers, and the Baetata, "res ignis", a thing that is all fire and runs about the shore — the Boitata. The letter is signed "Exaratum Sancti Vincentii ... anno Domini 1560 sub finem mensis Maii": São Vicente, in the year 1560, at the end of the month of May. It gives no day. The dates of 30 May and 31 May that circulate on the internet contradict each other, and neither is in the letter. Between 1560 and the nineteenth century the word survives in vocabularies rather than in stories. Frei José Mariano da Conceição Vellozo's Diccionario Portuguez e Brasiliano (Lisbon, 1795) gives it four words: under "Diabo, Jurupari" comes the sub-entry "que appareça no mato, Curupira" — the devil that appears in the wood. Still no feet, no hair, no forest to defend. In 1863 a naturalist compares the Curupira to an animal. Henry Walter Bates, eleven years on the Amazon collecting insects, wrote in The Naturalist on the River Amazons that "the Curupira is a mysterious being, whose attributes are uncertain, for they vary according to locality. Sometimes he is described as a kind of orang-otang, being covered with long, shaggy hair, and living in trees. At others he is said to have cloven feet, and a bright red face." Bates gives cloven feet and a red face; the backwards feet and the red hair come later. The comparison is made by the man who would later give his name to Batesian mimicry. The backwards feet, the forest guardianship and the punishment of loggers arrive together, thirteen years later, in Couto de Magalhães's O Selvagem (Rio de Janeiro, 1876). His words, on pages 188-189: "O Curupira é o deus que protege as florestas. As tradições representam-n'o como um pequeno Tapuio, com os pés voltados para traz, e sem os orifícios necessários para as secreções indispensáveis à vida, pelo que a gente do Pará diz que elle é mussiço." And: "Todo aquelle que derriba, ou por qualquer modo estraga inutilmente as arvores, é punido por elle com a pena de errar tempos immensos pelos bosques, sem poder atinar com o caminho da casa." Couto was building a system: he files the Curupira as a god subordinate to Jacy, the moon, next to the Saci Cerere, the Mboitata and the Urutau. The pantheon is his. In 1890 João Barbosa Rodrigues published the Poranduba Amazonense, the great nineteenth-century collection of Amazonian narrative, and did something no summary since has bothered to repeat: he broke the creature back down into the places it came from. A small tapuyo four spans high at Santarém; bald at Santarém, covered in long hair on the Rio Negro; one-eyed on the Tapajós; legs without joints on the Rio Negro; solid and without an anus in Para; blue or green teeth and big ears on the Solimões; "e sempre com os pés voltados para traz". He also issued a warning that reads today like a diagnosis: "três mythos differentes, Korupira, Tatacy e Çacy ou Maty, têm sido confundidos sob a denominação de Kaapora". Three different myths, being fused under one name. And he mapped the figure outward: the Máguare in Venezuela, the Selvage in Colombia, "no Perú o Chudiachaque" — the chullachaqui — and the Kauá of the Cocamas in Bolivia. Stradelli's entry is the last of the classical ones and the richest. Ermano Stradelli died in 1926 and his Vocabularios da lingua geral portuguez-nheêngatú were published posthumously in 1929, in volume 158 of the Revista do Instituto Historico e Geographico Brasileiro. On page 434 he glosses: "Curupira — Corpo de menino — de curu abreviação de curumi e pira corpo", and describes "um menino de cabellos vermelhos, muito peludo por todo o corpo e com a particularidade de ter os pés virados para traz e ser privado de órgãos sexuaes". Then the hunting ethic: "Sob a sua guarda directa está a caça, e é sempre propício ao caçador que se limita a matar conforme as próprias necessidades." Woe, he adds, to whoever kills for pleasure, or kills pregnant females, or destroys the young. The three books were first set side by side in a document that can be dated. In 1933 the Civilização Brasileira published Anchieta's Cartas, informações, fragmentos históricos e sermões, edited by Afrânio Peixoto, with a faithful Portuguese translation of the 1560 letter — plural demons and offerings intact — and a footnote, number 164, hung on the word corupira. That note quotes Couto de Magalhães on the god of the forests and the backwards feet, then Stradelli on the game under his direct guard, then four incompatible etymologies in a row. In that note the god of the forests and the guardian of game hang from Anchieta's plural demons, as if they were glosses on the 1560 letter.

The pin on this page sits at 23.963° S, 46.392° W, which is São Vicente on the coast of São Paulo state, the same position the English Wikipedia gives for the town. São Vicente was founded on 22 January 1532 as the first permanent Portuguese settlement in the Americas, and it is the province from which Anchieta wrote the letter carrying the first known mention of the Corupira. The lore itself was collected some 2,550 km away, in nineteenth-century Amazonia, river by river: Santarém, the Rio Negro, the Tapajós, the Solimões, Pará. Barbosa Rodrigues's equivalents extend the same figure into Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia and the Peruvian montaña, where it is the chullachaqui. Any single dot on a map of Brazil is a decision about which record to follow, and the decision made here is the written one. No cave, road or lake is attached to the figure, and there is no marker anywhere. What can be visited is the paper trail, and all of it is free. The Latin original is the place to start, because almost nobody reads it. The Internet Archive holds the 1812 Lisbon volume (Collecção de noticias para a historia e geografia das nações ultramarinas, Tomo I, Núms. I, II e III, Typografia da Academia Real das Sciencias); Anchieta's letter is item number III and the Corupira paragraph falls on printed pages 177-178, with Lara Ordonez's note 85 on page 178 of the notes. The scan's OCR renders the long s as f and Daemones as "Dxmones", so the page images are the usable part. The Portuguese translation everyone quotes is in the 1933 Rio de Janeiro edition of the Cartas, informações, fragmentos históricos e sermões, edited by Afrânio Peixoto, digitised by the Biblioteca Nacional of Brazil and downloadable in full; note 164 is the relevant one. For the nineteenth-century material: Couto de Magalhães's O Selvagem of 1876 and Barbosa Rodrigues's Poranduba Amazonense of 1890 are both on the Internet Archive with full text. Stradelli's 1929 Vocabularios are hosted as a scanned PDF by the Biblioteca Digital Curt Nimuendajú; the file has no text layer, and the Curupira entry runs from page 434 of the printed pagination to the top of page 435. Vellozo's 1795 Diccionario Portuguez e Brasiliano is likewise on the Internet Archive, with the Curupira gloss placed under "Diabo". Three archives that this kind of search would normally use are out. Chronicling America and HathiTrust returned 403 to this project in August 2026, and Trove now sits behind an anti-AI barrier; nothing above depends on them, which is why a nineteenth-century Brazilian newspaper trail for the Curupira stays outside what this page offers. The painting is O Curupira, oil on canvas, 96 × 157 cm, by the Brazilian modernist Manoel Santiago, dated 1926. The Wikimedia Commons file carries only a United States public-domain tag, and Santiago died in 1987, so in Brazil and in the European Union the painting remains in copyright.