"Zé Pilintra Day: Rio de Janeiro’s Sainted Malandro" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Exu & the Quimbanda of Night and Fire" and "Pomba Gira & the Quimbanda of Mbumba Nzila"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
July 7
Zé Pilintra Day: Rio de Janeiro’s Sainted Malandro
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This morning, at the foot of the Ladeira de Santa Teresa, in the shadow of the old aqueduct arches of Lapa, devotees will gather in white before a shrine no larger than a garden shed. They’ll leave cigars, small glasses of cachaça, white carnations, and coins in a box in front of a portrait of a man in a spotless white linen suit and a red tie, his panama hat cocked at an angle no respectable citizen of his era would’ve dared. On this day in 2022, the Rio de Janeiro City Council made it official, signing Lei nº 7.549 into law and establishing July 7th as the Dia do Zé Pelintra—a municipal holiday for a spirit whose devotees had already been keeping the date, in one form or another, for the better part of a century.
Zé Pilintra belongs to a
category this column has touched on before but never fully unpacked: the
malandro, the sharp-dressed, silver-tongued street hustler of
early-twentieth-century Rio, elevated into one of Brazilian popular religion’s
most beloved spirits. He is Umbanda’s most famous rogue, Catimbó’s wandering
saint, and, improbably, the direct visual template for a certain cartoon
parrot. His story runs through drought and orphanhood, through the bars and
back alleys of old Lapa, and into a religious classification so slippery that
even the priests who serve him can’t fully agree on what, exactly, he is.
The Sertão
The most widely repeated version of Zé Pilintra’s life places his birth in the drought-scarred sertão backlands of Pernambuco in the late nineteenth century, under the name “José dos Anjos.” When the drought worsened, his family fled to Recife looking for water and work; there, legend holds, an unnamed illness swept through and took every member of his family but him. Orphaned and alone in a coastal city that had no particular use for him, the boy who would become Zé Pilintra did what the poor and unclaimed have always done in Brazil’s cities: he learned to get by on nothing but nerve, charm, and a sharp eye for an opportunity. He drifted south to Rio de Janeiro in the early twentieth century, drawn by the same cultural ferment that was turning the capital into a laboratory for samba, capoeira, and the underworld glamour of neighborhoods like Lapa and Estácio.
He lived, by every account, exactly the life his iconography still claims: bars, cabarets, backroom card games, the company of the downtrodden and sambistas and capoeiristas who occupied Rio’s respectable classes only as a source of anxiety. This was malandragem—not simple criminality, but a whole philosophy of getting by through wit rather than labor, immortalized decades later in the sociology of Roberto DaMatta and in the lyrics of samba composers like Ismael Silva, whose narrators openly announced they’d rather starve than clock in for a wage. When death eventually caught up with José dos Anjos, the story doesn’t end. In the language Brazilian spiritists use for a soul who has moved on to become a guide, he didn’t simply die—he encantou: he became encantado, enchanted, elevated to spirit.
Ask three different terreiros what Zé Pilintra actually is, and there’s a real chance you’ll get three different answers, each defended with total confidence. In Umbanda, he’s widely held to be a form of Exu, the orixá who governs crossroads, communication, and the boundary between the material and spirit worlds. In Catimbó—the older, Northeastern tradition that produced him in the first place—he’s understood instead as a wandering human spirit, chief of an entire phalanx of malandro entities, closer to a folk saint than to any Yoruba-derived orixá. He is also, uniquely among Umbanda’s spirits, comfortable working both sides of the house: he manifests in the Linha da Esquerda, the left-hand or “shadow” line governed by Exu, and equally in the Linha da Direita, the right-hand line, where he keeps company with Pretos Velhos and Caboclos—entities of unambiguous light. Few spirits in the entire Afro-Brazilian pantheon are granted that kind of dual citizenship.
His devotees don’t experience this
ambiguity as a contradiction so much as a demonstration of range. His
salutation—“Salve Seu Zé Pilintra! Salve os Malandros! Salve a Malandragem!”—is
shouted with equal enthusiasm whether he arrives with a cigar and a wink or
with the grave, unhurried wisdom of an elder. Practitioners describe him
clearing negative energy, protecting the poor and the socially marginal
specifically, and dispensing advice in street slang and gambling metaphors,
treating life itself as a card game you’d be a fool not to learn the rules of.
It’s worth noting, too, that this is a spirit built almost entirely from below:
as one Brazilian scholar has observed, the honorific “Zé” (short for José,
Brazil’s single most common given name) marks him explicitly as one of the
common people, an ordinary man elevated to the sacred not by church doctrine
but by the accumulated devotion of people very much like him.
The Lapa Shrine to Disney’s Parrot
The little sanctuary tucked beneath the Arcos da Lapa has become the closest thing Zé Pilintra has to a home address, a pilgrimage site for devotees from across Brazil and, increasingly, well beyond it. Rio’s cultural institutions have folded him into the city’s own self-mythology: Chico Buarque modeled the central figure of his Ópera do Malandro directly on Zé Pilintra’s visual style and manner, and the composer Itamar Assumpção wrote him into song before his death in 2003, promising that when Zé Pilintra shows up in the village, the whole town starts to sway.
And then there’s the detail that tends to stop people cold the first time they hear it: Walt Disney’s Zé Carioca, the cigar-smoking, sharp-dressed parrot who charmed Donald Duck through Rio in 1942’s Saludos Amigos, borrows his entire visual and verbal persona from Zé Pilintra’s iconography: the white linen, the debonair swagger, the effortless charm of a man who’s never once been in a hurry. Given that the parrot itself is a creature closely associated with Exu in Afro-Brazilian iconography, it’s hard not to wonder whether Disney’s animators had, whether they knew it or not, wandered into a terreiro at some point on their 1941 goodwill tour of South America. Ninety years on, one of the most recognizable characters in American animation is still, in a sense, doing an impression of a Brazilian spirit of the crossroads—never wearing black, never in a rush, and always, somehow, exactly where he’s needed.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS: DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to
present today’s "Daily Occult Review" from our ongoing series—as
part of the newly-launched Occult
Reads... In honor of Zé Pilintra and the Exus of the crossroads...
Exu and the
Quimbanda of Night and Fire
By Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold |
Scarlet Imprint
8vo (234 × 156 mm)
352 pp., 10 pen & ink portraits by Enoque Zedro, and over 120 pontos
riscados. Issued in 4 editions
Frisvold’s study is the standing
English-language reference on Exu as Quimbanda understands him: not the malandro
of the Umbanda terreiro exactly, but a closely related current within the same
sprawling family of Brazilian crossroads spirits that produced Zé Pilintra
himself. Frisvold, an initiate writing from inside the tradition, traces Exu’s
lineage through Angolan sorcery, Kardecist Spiritism, and, more surprisingly, European
grimoire tradition and the iconography of Eliphas Lévi’s Baphomet, arguing for
a genuinely syncretic magical current rather than a simple import. The book is
frank about the tradition’s more dangerous corners, including its warnings
about obsession and psychic vampirism, and doesn’t flinch from presenting
workings, offerings, and songs exactly as they’re used by practitioners.
Readers drawn in by Zé Pilintra’s cigar-and-cachaça charm should know his
cousins in the Quimbanda current keep considerably more serious company.
Pomba Gira
& the Quimbanda of Mbùmba Nzila
By Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold |
Scarlet Imprint
8vo (234 × 156 mm)
232 pp., 13 erotic pen & ink studies by Enoque Zedro, and over 40 pontos
riscados. Issued in 4 editions
Frisvold’s companion volume turns
to Pomba Gira, Exu’s female counterpart and, by most accounts, the
single most widely venerated spirit in the entire Quimbanda current—a fitting
pairing for a week spent with Zé Pilintra, since devotees frequently describe
him keeping company with Pombagiras of his own line during Linha da Esquerda
work. Where Zé Pilintra is remembered as roguish but essentially protective,
Pomba Gira’s reputation runs hotter: patroness of love, vengeance, and the
women society was least inclined to protect, described here in what reviewers
consistently call the most complete English-language treatment of her cult
available. Taken as a pair, Frisvold’s two volumes make the case that the
crossroads spirits Rio has spent a century sanitizing into charming folk-icons—Zé
Pilintra very much included—were never quite as tame as the postcard version
suggests.
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