Usually thought of as an answer to what it means to be a Brazilian, the modernist notion of anthropophagy is something that goes beyond this simplistic point of view. We claim here that anthropophagy is a philosophy that originates from multiple sources having, because of that, multiple meanings. In one hand, it is one of the many byproducts of European avant-garde; on the other, we could say it also owns its existence to the Brazilian context of the time of its creation, namely 1928. Because of that, we also claim that anthropophagy is not only a philosophy of culture nor is it only aesthetics or a way of making art: even though it is also those two things, it is not restricted to them, being also a theory with ontological nuances. With that in mind, the present work has one clear objective: to clarify the conditions which were necessary for such a way of thinking to emerge. By doing that, we believe, we will also be exploring the creativity inherent to that philosophy. Our thesis is that anthropophagy is a hybrid thought that lies between ontology and philosophy of culture. One must understand both aspects of this thought in order to understand anthropophagy itself. We also seek to defend the idea that the anthropophagic thought of Oswald de Andrade is an original Brazilian philosophy. Original here means two different things: first, being indebted to Brazilian context in order to exist because it was created to answer what the Brazil of then was all about, so its origin in Brazilian because it originates from Brazil; secondly original because it is also singular and, because of that, unique.