Books: Brazil's Great Classic

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REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS—Euclides da Cunha. Translated by Samuel Putnam—University of Chicago ($5).

Around 1870 there appeared at the Brazilian port of Baía a "somber anchorite with hair down to his shoulders, a long tangled beard, an emaciated face, and a piercing eye." He was clad in a blue canvas garment and carried a pilgrim's staff. He was young Antonio Conselheiro. For ten years he had been wandering in the backlands of Brazil (hiding there in shame after his wife had run off with a policeman), eating little or nothing, indifferent to danger, speaking in cryptic, prophetic monosyllables, sleeping in the open, and becoming a terrifying, unforgettable legend. He was crazy.

In 1874 he turned up in the city of Itabaiana. Now he had disciples. They built a temple. Coming into a town, they would hang an image of Christ on a tree, kneel in prayer, lift the image aloft and triumphantly enter the town to the chorus of litanies. Antonio Conselheiro's sermons were barbarous and terrifying, clownish but dreadful, compounded of visions, prophecies, dogmatic counsels, delivered in a dull monotone, with downcast eyes, suddenly interrupted when he turned his eyes on his listeners and hypnotized them with his intensity. He preached:

"In 1898 there will be many hats and few heads."

"In 1899 the waters shall turn to blood, and the planet shall appear in the east with the sun's ray. . . ."

"There shall be a great rain of stars, and that will be the end of the world."

Demoniac Saint. Antonio Conselheiro believed that the Roman Catholic Church was doing the will of Satan. His morality combined the absolute license of free love with chastity exaggerated "to the point where woman is looked upon with horror"— his followers accepted half of this, and practiced free love. Because his disciples renovated abandoned cemeteries, built new churches and restored old ones, the priests "good-naturedly tolerated the excesses of this demoniac saint who at least helped to increase their dwindled revenues." By 1877 Conselheiro was famous, feared, implacable, "a species of great man gone wrong," ascetic, thin, weary-looking, half dead with his mortifications of his flesh, disheveled hair falling to his shoulders and his beard falling to his bosom.