Preface to the First Edition

In recent years, some of the major works in historiography have focused on sorcery and witchcraft, a topic appertaining as well to the history of mentalities and to what has become known as the history of culture. Yet so far the subject of sorcery in Brazil during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries has prompted no research. This is not because we lack sources. Magical practices and sorcery caused concern both to the colony’s civil authorities and to ecclesiastical authorities as well. Visitations to Brazil by the Holy Office verified alleged charges and then sent them on to Portugal for judgment by the Inquisition’s tribunal.

When I first thought about making at least some headway in filling this gap, I had in mind a study on sorcery during colonial days, based on the trials of accused Brazilians. This endeavor would broaden the studies I had been developing on socially dispossessed strata and the articulation of power apparatuses in colonial Brazil. When I was working on my master’s thesis (“Desclassificados do ouro”), my attention was called to the notable presence of sorceresses and sorcerers among the poor, marginalized population of Minas Gerais, whose everyday practices—often permeated with magic and witchcraft—were portrayed by the Ecclesiastical Inquiries (Devassas Eclesiásticas). At that time I believed that the sorcery practiced by these poor individuals—free, slave, and freed—displayed primarily African elements. They were the targets of reproach not only from the powerful but also from common people, who by condemning their peers sought to identify themselves with the ruling strata and introjected their ideology. The repression of African magic forestalled possible expressions of a unique culture belonging to black people and, more seriously yet, to slaves, which represented a grave threat to the reigning order.

As I delved deeper into specific works, however, I realized that many of the

cases contained in the Devassas, which I had been reading as evidence of the survival of African practices, in fact involved a substratum common to European sorcery. Of course there were basic differences; the colony was not witness to the huge waves of diabolic possession that occurred in France’s seventeenth-century convents or that were experienced by the inhabitants of Salem, New England (now Massachusetts). Still, sorcery figured markedly in colonists’ daily lives, something that became more evident as I progressed in reading my sources. Of the forty-seven total offenses investigated during the Visitation to Grão-Pará alone (1763–69), twenty-one entailed sorcery and nine, curative magic. On the one hand, colonial sorcery was closely related to the colonists’ urgent daily needs and aimed at solving concrete problems. On the other, it revealed a great proximity to the population’s living religion, and magical prescriptions often took the form of prayers addressed to God, Jesus, the saints, and the Virgin.

A new issue thus emerged: the singularity of the colonial population’s living religion, riddled with folkloric European reminiscences while it gradually acquired new tones through the cultural contributions of black and indigenous peoples. Brilliant and sophisticated analyses such as those of Le Goff (on popular medieval culture); Ladurie (on the daily life of the Cathars); Ginzburg (on popular culture and religiosity in the Early Modern age); and Delumeau (on the religious question during the same period) all led me to a growing conviction that I would not make much progress on this topic if I did not expand my concerns. I also needed to take into consideration the limits of Christianization within popular sectors—limits that have caused certain scholars to embrace the notion of the “imperfect Christianization” of western Europe’s masses.

The nature of the colonial population itself impelled new theoretical concerns, once more changing the direction of my study. These people’s singularity stemmed from the coexistence and interpenetration of populations from different places of origin and of different creeds. A diversity of cultural traditions thus flowed into sorcery and popular religiosity. Accounting for this complexity means understanding it as the place where multiple cultural levels intersected and were reconfigured, as agents in a long process of syncretization.

Colonial sorcery and religiosity thus became associated with the very formation of the colony as such. To detect how and by what means this process transpired, it would be necessary to return to the sixteenth century, when the European colonizer’s imagination had been alternately dominated by both paradisiacal and infernal visions of the colony. Paradise was primarily associated with the new land’s nature and its economic universe, while hell always pertained to its men: indigenous peoples, blacks, and, soon after, settlers. Between the two a third possibility insinuated itself: purgatory. Errors committed in the metropolis were purged in the colony through banishment, while deviant settlers, heretics, and sorcerers were in turn branded with a double stigma, living as they were in a land particularly prone to the propagation of evil. This is the route I follow in chapter 1, “The New World between God and the Devil,” where I endeavor to combine ethnological procedures with a historical approach.

Next a more in-depth exploration of the nature of colonial religiosity was necessary. As the process of colonization moved forward, syncretism intensified. Initially, elements of magic and popular religiosity common to Portugal predominated, as clearly registered during the sixteenth-century Visitation; the sorcery then described was notably European in tone, and expressions of Amerindian religiosity had not as yet become exactly syncretic or were so only within a restricted realm. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the development of the colonizing process fostered greater interpenetration of European, African, and Amerindian religiosity. While Tridentine Europe strove to refine religion and “cleanse” it of folkloric survivals, European colonization of the tropics spurred syncretism. During the eighteenth century—despite catechizing efforts or perhaps because of them—antagonistic processes unfolded on both sides of the colonial system. This is the subject of chapter 2, “Popular Religiosity in the Colony.” These first two chapters, which paint a broad backdrop essential to understanding the sorcery and magical practices, constitute part I, “A Wealth of Impieties: The Colony’s Lot.”

Part II, “Sorcery, Magical Practices, and Daily Life,” is divided into four chapters that describe these practices in greater detail, taking something of an archaeological approach and relating them to daily life: survival, drudgery, fights, conflicts, hatred, love, the yearning to communicate with the other world, and the hope for revelations from the Beyond. The chapters are entitled “Material Survival,” “The Onset of Conflict,” “Maintaining Bonds of Affection,” and “Communicating with the Supernatural.”

The final part of the book, “Culture, Imagination, and Everyday Life,” analyzes the intersection of distinct cultural levels and demonstrates how they diverge while at the same time merging to construct a common object: the stereotype of sorcery—a crossroads where popular concepts are subjugated to elite concepts while in turn penetrating them. This overlapping of discourses was not easy; the ensuing traumas and violence left painful marks on the course of human lives. The final two chapters, “Intertwined Discourses” and “Remarkable Stories: Where Their Roads Led,” are an attempt to cover this subject.

The path that led from the European sabbat to the colonial calundu was long and wide; it stretched over three centuries and encompassed the mightiest economic centers. The object of my study thus dictated a limited period of focus and regional boundaries—if it is possible to speak of drawing boundaries when trying to cover such a broad geographical area. The present study deals with sorcery, magical practices, and popular religiosity in colonial Brazil during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries and covers the regions of Bahia, Pernambuco, Paraíba, Grão-Pará, Maranhão, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro. All but the last two areas received Visitations by the Holy Office, proving once again that “impurities of faith” and colonization went hand in hand. Since these Visitations took place from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, my sources also contributed to delineating the study’s chronological framework.

Finally, two things need to be said about my archival research. It was essentially based on records of Visitations, ecclesiastical inquiries, and trials of accused Brazilians found in the National Archives at Lisbon’s Torre do Tombo. To state that I read all Brazilian trials involving sorcery would be less than truthful and put me at risk of being contradicted by any researcher who has ever worked in this archive (where the classification system is still quite faulty, at least in terms of documentation on the Inquisition). In view of this, I consulted the largest number of trials possible within given constraints. Many must still be lying in wait for new researchers—which is not only an exciting thought but reinforces the idea that there is neither definitive history nor definitive research. Moreover, it is of some consolation to remember that the great Antonio José Saraiva, author of perhaps the most brilliant study ever written on the Portuguese Inquisition (Inquisição e cristãosnovos), believed that the researcher grappling with the inquisitorial documentation in the Torre do Tombo was condemned to “fishing with a hook.”