Preface to the English Edition
Published now for the first time in English, this book was originally written in 1985 as my dissertation, for which I received a doctorate in history from the Universidade de São Paulo in May 1986. The first Brazilian edition came out in December 1986; although the book has been reprinted seven times to date, its content has never been altered. It can thus be said that in 2003 The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross enters its eighteenth year of existence true to its original conceptualization.
I conceived this book at a moment when works addressing sorcery and related phenomena were much fewer than they are today and thoughts on the topic were much less sophisticated. Three studies were then regarded as notable classics: Robert Mandrou’s Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle (1968), Carlo Ginzburg’s I Benandanti (1966; tr. The Night Battles, 1983), and Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1980). Remarkable progress has been made since then in studies on sorcery and magical practices. Two of the most important books devoted to the topic date from 1989 and 1997: Storia notturna (1989; tr. Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, 1991) by Carlo Ginzburg and Thinking with the Devil by Stuart Clark (1997). The topic has been debated at a number of international conferences, in Copenhagen (1987), Budapest (1988), Saint-Cloud, France (1992), and Budapest once again (1999). Published proceedings provide an idea of the vigor of current scholarship and the interest elicited by the topic. Further evidence of recent attention to the theme was Brian Levack’s extensive collection of major writings of the past few decades: Articles on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology: A Twelve-Volume Anthology of Scholarly Articles (1992).
This same interest has been expressed with ever greater attention to specific contexts, pointing up regional singularities in what are now England, France, Germany, and Portugal. Examples include Witches and Neighbours (1996) by Robin Briggs; Sorcières, justice et société aux 16e et 17e siècles (1987) by Robert Muchembled; Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria (English tr. 1997 [Hexenverfolgung in Bayern, 1987]) by Wolfgang Behringer; O imaginário da magia (1987) by Francisco Bethencourt; and Bruxaria e superstição num país sem caça às bruxas (1997) by José Pedro de Mattos Paiva. Meanwhile, one of the most thought-provoking books ever written on sorcery appeared in the United States in 1982: Entertaining Satan by John Putnam Demos, which investigated witchcraft in New England. Demos excluded the Salem trials, which had been analyzed from various angles since the publication of Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s classic Salem Possessed (1974); although this work had already come out before I finished my research, I only learned of it after 1986.
In their approaches to witchcraft and sorcery, all of the aforementioned studies fit the European mold, including an identification, on the one hand, with the doctrine of demonology and, on the other, with popular practices that tend to involve demonic intervention or collective rituals (the witches’ sabbat). But a large volume of scholarship also focuses on the magical and religious practices of non-European peoples, particularly those living in the Americas, who were systematically “demonized” by mission work and by the Catholic Church’s repressive actions in general. In this field, considerable progress has come through vertical studies aimed at elucidating the nature of “autochthonous” practices and their surrounding “thought systems”—for example, the work of Alfredo López Austin, most especially The Human Body and Ideology (English tr., 1988 [Cuerpo humano e ideología, 1980]), and that of Linda Schele, above all Maya Cosmos (1993), co-authored by David Freidel and Joy Parker.
I would also like to draw attention to another line of scholarship, concerned with relationships between distinct cultural universes and how these universes came to intermingle and fertilize each other. Relativizing and reworking such polemic concepts as syncretism, acculturation, transculturation, and “cultural hybridity,” this line of research is more horizontal than vertical, consonant with the belief that phenomena are better understood when studied in relationship than alone. In this regard, Serge Gruzinski’s La colonisation de l’imaginaire (1988; tr. The Conquest of Mexico, 1993) is a landmark work in which the author launches the theory that Westernization is a kind of “First-World-ization.” It also introduces the concept of cultural hybridity, further developed in a number of later works. Among studies on relationships between the Meso-American and European cultural universes, two other noteworthy analyses should be mentioned: Inga Clendinnen’s magnificent Ambivalent Conquests (1991) and Fernando Cervantes’s The Devil in the New World (1994). Sabine McCormack has made valuable contributions with regard to the Andean world, especially in Religion in the Andes (1991).
The late 1980s and 1990s also witnessed substantial progress in Brazilian scholarship. Trópico dos pecados (1989) and A heresia dos índios (1995) by Ronaldo Vainfas refined the application of Inquisition sources to the analysis of culture. The first work affords a clearer picture of the part played by magical-religious phenomena in daily life, where they were often confused with breaches of morality. The second book offers one of the finest Brazilian analyses of cultural circularity and casts light on an important episode in indigenous millennialism that took place in Bahia’s Recôncavo region in the second half of the sixteenth century and was demonized by Jesuit indoctrination. In 1992 Luiz Mott brilliantly probed the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, between holiness and diabolic possession, in his seminal case study of Afro-Brazilian religious syncretism, Rosa Egipcíaca: Uma santa africana no Brasil colonial. In another vital contribution, Mott examined the construction of Afro-Brazilian religiosity in “O calundu angola de Luzia Pinta” (1994), an article that engages in a dialog with excerpts from The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross and adds to what I have written here. The same can be said about “Magia Jeje na Bahia: A invasão do calundu do Pasto da Cachoeira” by João José Reis (1988) and “Metrópole das mandingas,” Daniela Calainho’s doctoral dissertation (defended at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in 2001). Calainho’s work portrays the thriving world of black magic and sorcery in Lisbon, capital of the empire—a world linked to the Portuguese colony in America.
In the field of anthropology but following the vein of historical approaches that explore relations between cultural universes, mention must be made of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s fine essay “O mármore e a murta: Sobre a inconstância da alma selvagem” (1992). Two more recent contributions have made significant progress in analyzing Catholic indoctrination and the dialog between Jesuits and native Brazilians: Cristina Pompa’s doctoral dissertation, “Religião como tradução: Missionários, tupis e tapuias no Brasil colonial” (defended at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in 2001), and Adone Agnolin’s research on Tupi-language catechisms used in Portuguese America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (currently in progress as part of postdoctorate work in social history at the Universidade de São Paulo).
I offer this bibliographic preamble in the hopes of illustrating what an impossible task it would be to bring this book up to date by incorporating the vast and important scholarship produced in the nearly twenty years separating this English translation from the first Brazilian printing. It would mean writing another book and pondering issues other than my earlier concerns. In some senses, I feel I accomplished this task in 1993 with Inferno Atlântico: Demonologia e colonização, where, with the new bibliography in mind, I revisited topics first addressed in my doctoral dissertation. The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross is a study of sorcery, magical practices, and popular religiosity in colonial Brazil based on empirical evidence and my own reflections. But I also think the book stands as witness to a certain era and to the mental atmosphere prevailing in Brazil’s universities during the mid-1980s; the dark days of the military dictatorship were waning and the quest was on for new (or at least renewed) directions, following quite specific intellectual traditions, above all the works of Gilberto Freyre and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. I would not like to betray or obscure the historical context of this book, for better or for worse. Nor would I wish to cleanse the text of an enthusiasm and abundance of adjectives that now at times may sound a bit much to me. For these reasons I have left the book as it was first conceived, written, and accepted for publication.
The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross endeavors to understand the phenomenon of sorcery from the perspective of its tangled relations with culture and religion, with daily practices, and with a memory spun over the centuries, when time and again the region now called Brazil was viewed negatively. It is not a specific study of sorcery but rather of the meaning sorcery may acquire in a setting of unique historical relations, woven from the extremely varied cultural traditions of three continents: Europe, America, and Africa. While my debt to major European historians and anthropologists may be obvious (Edward Evans-Pritchard, Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carlo Ginzburg, Jean Delumeau), my greatest debt is to Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Gilberto Freyre, and Roger Bastide, the most Brazilian of the French masters.
These acknowledgments would not be complete were I not to express my gratitude to my U.S. and British colleagues who saw merit in this work and in one way or another contributed to its publication in the United States: Sandra Lauderdale Graham and Richard Graham, Stuart Schwartz, Alida Metcalf, John Russell-Wood, and Susan Deans-Smith. I am particularly grateful to the University of Texas Press and to Virginia Hagerty (for her incomparable efficiency) at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, jointly responsible for publication of this book. Finally, I record here my sincere thanks to Diane Grosklaus Whitty, skilled and dedicated translator, for whom perfection is an obsessively pursued goal.
—Laura de Mello e Souza