thumb|280px|Aygnan (Anhangá) in the forms of birds and beasts, and other oddities, in Léry ''Histoire d'vn voyage'' (1580 edition). Anhangá or Anhanga (Tupi: <; Sateré-Mawé: or ; , ) is a type of spirit present in the cosmovision of several native groups from Brazil and Indianist literature.
thumb|280px|Aygnan (Anhangá) in the forms of birds and beasts, and other oddities, in Léry ''Histoire d'vn voyage (1580 edition). Anhangá or Anhanga (Tupi: <; Sateré-Mawé: or ; , ) is a type of spirit present in the cosmovision of several native groups from Brazil and Indianist literature.
The spirit is believed to torment the soul of the dead, manifested in nature as tempestuous noises. It also constantly afflicts the living, with torment which feels like beating, appearing in the forms of birds and beasts and other strange beings (also as armadillo, the pirarucu fish, etc. according to modern collected lore). 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. People also feared the presence of Anhangá during funerary rituals, where the virtuous dead are supposed to journey to the elysian Land Without Evils.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).