Saci

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Names & Creature Profile

Saci, or Saci-pererê, is the quick, troublesome presence behind many Brazilian stories of disturbed animals and household disorder. The municipal account from Monteiro Lobato describes a figure with one leg, a red cap and a pipe. In the Pedra Branca neighbourhood, his interference reaches from animals to the kitchen seasonings. The familiar portrait belongs to a much larger company of tellings: the name can summon a frightening visitor, an ingenious prankster or a companion in children’s fiction. [1][7][4]

In the 1918 collection O Sacy Perêrê: resultado de um inquérito, contributor João Corisco remembers first learning about Saci from Joanna, the woman who raised him. Her figure was Black, about a metre tall, wearing red shorts and a white cotton shirt open at the chest. A pointed red cap, hooked nose, little black beard and long fingernails completed the portrait. Joanna’s remembered description gives him the particularity of a person someone might recognize, down to his clothes. [7]

Tales & Encounters

Corisco’s other great authority was Chico Rio Grandense, an old muleteer and former soldier in Osório’s army. To the child listening, he was a hero: he knew more stories of apparitions and Saci’s exploits than anyone else. His account of one journey begins near Faxina, on a dark night along the way to São Paulo. As Chico passed a gate, Saci sprang onto the horse behind him. The horse bolted. Chico lost awareness of what happened next. [7]

When he came to himself, daylight had arrived and he was lying stretched out on the road. His horse was gone. In Chico’s telling, Saci had taken it. The experienced traveller who had supplied so many stories becomes the victim of one himself, left without the mount on which his journey depended. [7]

Another contribution, signed only L. P. S., remembers a childhood on a farm near the border of Minas Gerais. There, an older Black storyteller called Nhô Urbano described Saci as a black figure with ember-bright eyes, an upturned nose and one leg ending in a round foot. The child heard that Saci rode the horses through the pasture at night and tangled their manes. In the morning he examined the braids for himself, taking them as confirmation of what Urbano had said. Only later was he given a different explanation, involving bats. [8]

One evening the family went to a village celebration, leaving the child in the old farmhouse. Already frightened by the stories, he would not sleep alone. Urbano came to keep him company and lay on a mat beside the bed. He entertained the child with more Saci stories. Suddenly a dark shape passed between them and the lamp went out. The child describes remaining motionless, his heart pounding, while several minutes passed in silence. At last Urbano asked where the matches were. The child did not know and told him to look.

Homeland & Tradition

The printed inquiry drew contributions from São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, as historian Gabriela Pellegrino Soares documents. Corisco’s farm memories and L. P. S.’s borderland childhood belong to that collected world. Their geography is personal: a road a muleteer travelled, a farm where someone grew up, a neighbourhood with its own remembered disturbances. [2][7][8]

Guarani writer Olívio Jekupé, of Krukutu in São Paulo, distinguishes the two-legged forest protector Jaxy Jaterê from the familiar one-legged Saci. He describes Jaxy Jaterê as living belief, taught to children and carried into his books. His public essay asks that both traditions be valued. The distinction preserves his community’s account beside the nationally familiar figure. [6]

Historical Record

Soares traces Lobato’s project to his irritation with European garden figures in São Paulo. In 1917 his newspaper inquiry invited readers to contribute Saci accounts; a competition also encouraged artists to picture him. The resulting book appeared in early 1918, with an initial printing of two thousand copies. Voltolino designed advertisements that helped finance it. Collecting the elusive prankster thus became a practical publishing enterprise and an argument for Brazilian subjects in art. [2]

The book’s voices are not anonymous in the same way. Corisco supplies a name for Joanna and a memorable identity for Chico, while L. P. S. leaves the reader only initials for himself but a name for Urbano. Each adult contributor looks backward at a childhood shaped by someone else’s narration. [7][8]

Appearance & Signs

The two childhood portraits differ even at the face: Joanna’s Saci has a hooked nose and small beard; Urbano’s has an upturned nose and burning eyes. Urbano also specifies a round foot. A cap alone cannot carry all the distinctions these tellers remembered. Their descriptions give the approaching figure different expressions before he has done anything at all. [7][8]

Literary scholar Míriam Stella Blonski describes José Washt Rodrigues’s 1918 cover figure as a horned adult with pointed teeth and a club. Lobato’s later childlike image loses the horns and weapon. Its changed silhouette prepares the reader for a less threatening companion. [3]

Nature & Powers

Chico’s Saci could ride a horse wildly through the pasture on a Friday night, or sit on a house’s roof whistling and breaking tiles while the inhabitant trembled below. Chico also claimed a way of restraining him: he drove a stake firmly into the ground with a coiled grass rosary hanging from it, and spoke a binding formula. The next day he let the captive go, complaining that the creature would never mend his ways. Even successful capture did not produce a reformed Saci. [7]

In Blonski’s quotation from Lobato’s children’s book, the older character Tio Barnabé blames Saci for tangled thread, hidden scissors, spoiled food and tormented animals. Sewing and cooking become a succession of small defeats. [3]

Landscape & Associations

Chico’s woodland has a distinctive sound. He remembers provocative whistles, laughter and the noise of Saci hopping through dry leaves beneath the moon. The being can be heard without being seen; movement in the undergrowth becomes an unwelcome companion on a long journey. At the farmhouse, by contrast, L. P. S. remembers a frightening silence after the light fails. His story contracts to a bed, a mat and the search for matches. One account unsettles the open road, the other the place prepared for sleep. [7][8]

The Pedra Branca account describes bottles and sieves set as traps in the woods. Such ordinary objects bring an elusive visitor within reach of household ingenuity. [1]

Variants & Kindred Beings

Adrielly Cruvinel Silva and colleagues compare the worlds created by Lobato and cartoonist Ziraldo. In the Lobato version they discuss, a Saci grows inside bamboo for seven years, lives to seventy-seven and becomes fungi. Ziraldo gives his character a floral origin and friends in the Mata do Fundão. The altered origin accompanies a different kind of life: this Saci belongs to a continuing company of characters rather than arriving only to interrupt someone’s work or travel. [4]

Other tricksters unsettle similar routines with different consequences. Púca’s unwilling riders lose command of a journey; the Japanese bake-danuki can turn a household object into an unexpected partner. Curupira’s forest encounters concern hunters and their conduct, while a Korean dokkaebi wrestling match ends with the discovery of ordinary tools where the opponent had been.

Meaning & Belief

Blonski notices the contrast between Lobato’s sarcastic dedication to the fashionable Bar Trianon and his affectionate remembrance of Tia Esméria, who told stories to children on his father’s farm. Public cultural argument and gratitude to a particular storyteller occupy the same book. [3]

The recollection of Urbano holds a more intimate reversal. The child asks for an adult’s courage; when the lamp fails, both are afraid. Their response is shared prayer rather than an explanation that restores the older man’s superiority. In Corisco’s recollection, Chico likewise remains a childhood hero despite his disastrous ride. Neither memory requires its admired storyteller to be invulnerable. Their authority comes through the relationship as much as through the strange events they recount. [8][7]

Later Retellings & Reception

Corisco ends by imagining Saci driven deeper into the countryside as civilization advances, until he changes his life and moves to São Paulo. The editor joins the joke, withholding the identity of the person Saci supposedly became. The clues leave him wealthy, stout and mischievous in matters of art. Then comes a final tease: was the transformed creature really Saci, or the headless mule? The country fright has become an urban insinuation, and the editor has made himself an accomplice. [7]

A century later, Andriolli Costa gives the prankster new equipment in his 2017 editorial: tangled horse manes become knotted earphones, and mobile service fails at Saci’s convenience. The joke has kept its troublesome timing while finding different things to spoil. [5]

Evidence & Open Questions

Costa’s celebration also relays Renato Queiroz’s criticism of the inquiry’s socially privileged contributors and racialized portrayals. Affection for its creature does not erase those conditions of collection. [5]

L. P. S. makes the uncertainty unusually visible. He remembers inspecting the horses’ manes, later hearing another explanation, and declining to claim a direct encounter of his own. Yet those reservations do not remove Urbano from the story. The recollection ends with regard for a man whose conviction the writer cannot simply discard. What survives is not a solved incident but the tension between remembered fear, later doubt and loyalty to the person who first gave the darkness a name. [8]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

The 1918 inquiry preserves Corisco’s and L. P. S.’s distinct childhood recollections. Soares explains its publishing context; Blonski and Silva’s team examine literary reinventions. The municipal account and Jekupé’s public essay retain their particular local and cultural settings. [7][8][2][3][4][1][6]

Lendas — Saci ↗
Municipality of Monteiro Lobato institutional editorial authorship · Municipality of Monteiro Lobato · Portuguese; working English paraphrase
Lendas: Saci, bairro da Pedra Branca; animal/kitchen mischief, bottles and sieves
Checked 2026-10-11
Monteiro Lobato, Juan P. Ramos e o papel dos inquéritos folclóricos na formação cultural e política da nação ↗
Gabriela Pellegrino Soares · Varia Historia / SciELO · 2015 · Varia Historia 31(56); DOI 10.1590/0104-87752015000200006 · Portuguese; working English paraphrase
O inquérito do saci; surrounding national-cultural discussion

Artwork

Illuminated folios

Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.

A small one-legged trickster in a red cap balances beside a country yard while leaves whirl around him. — An original interpretation of Saci-Pererê, choosing the one-legged, red-capped trickster in the Pedra Branca account published by Monteiro Lobato’s municipality. Wind and gesture are artistic choices.

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