CHAPTER 2

Popular Religiosity in the Colony

It is unacceptable that systems of ideas like religion—which have played such tremendous roles down through history and into which people of all times have poured their life’s energy—are no more than the stuff of illusions.

—Émile Durkheim, Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse

Overview

Brazil was subject to the jurisdiction of the bishopric of Funchal for over half a century and in the subsequent one hundred years had only one bishopric, Bahia. This meant that Catholicism in the colony was first organized by the Jesuits.¹ Under the Padroado, an institution predating discovery, the Portuguese Crown was the patron of Catholic missions and ecclesiastical institutions in Africa, in Asia, and later in Brazil.² It was the Padroado that encouraged and supported missionaries in colonial lands, moving ahead of the Roman Catholic Church to occupy a void.³ When Bahia’s bishopric was created in 1551, the Council of Trent was already under way (1545–63). But while the council in some ways represented the triumph of southern Christianity, it did not place the overseas world at the top of its immediate agenda.⁴ Not even a single prelate from the colonies attended the sessions, which were focused on Europe.⁵ It was only in the seventeenth century that Rome began concerning itself with the evangelization of the colonial world at a time when it was also endeavoring to restrict the scope of the Padroado’s actions, creating the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide (also known as the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith) in 1622.⁶

Based on these facts, the historiography of colonial religiosity has sought to account for its singular characteristics. The fluid nature of ecclesiastical organizations is seen to have left room for the activities of plantation chaplains, who gravitated around the sugar planters. Paying little attention to the state’s role but underscoring the role of families within the colonization process, Gilberto Freyre includes in his interpretation what he calls “family Catholicism, with the chaplain subordinated to the paterfamilias.”⁷ Religiosity was thus subordinated to the amalgamating and organizational strength of the engenhos, as part of the Mansion–Slave Quarters–Chapel triad. Its greatest singularity was familism, which accounts for the markedly affective attitude and greater intimacy with Catholic symbology that is so characteristically Brazilian. Freyre’s recognition of this facet of Brazilian religiosity is brilliant, and we will return to it later. His explanation, however, relegates indigenous manifestations to the shadowy forests and African manifestations to the insalubrity of the slave quarters.

Mixing white, indigenous, and black blood, it is as if Brazilians had been “condemned” to syncretism because Brazil was not then Roman Catholic: the colony had only one bishopric in one hundred years; there were none of the pastoral visits recommended by Trent (the latter in fact would only be enforced in Brazil in the nineteenth century); and the Constituições Primeiras do Arcebispado da Bahia (1707) represented the sole ecclesiastical legislation of the first colonial period.8 Moreover, the monarchy, a temporal power, meddled in religious affairs through the Padroado and based evangelization more on reasons of state than on reasons of the soul. The result was a church that countenanced slavery, indispensable to colonial exploitation. What made Brazilian Christianity unique therefore lay in this mixing of the races, in its nonconcentric relation to Rome, and in the eternal conflict of condoning slavery as a facet of the colonial system—forging a Christianity marked by the stigma of nonbrotherhood.⁹

Freyre sees religious familism as filling the void left by Trent’s disregard for the colony during its first century of existence. Hoornaert, offering a more complex explanation, attributes unquestionably great weight to the fluid nature of the ecclesiastical structure during the colony’s early days. He even states that until 1750 Brazil was characterized by a medieval spirituality that colored popular religiosity and was evinced in the organization of confrarias [brotherhoods].¹⁰ What seems to go unnoticed is the basic characteristic of Brazilian religiosity back then—precisely its singularly colonial character. White, black, and indigenous, it recast diverse spiritualities into an absolutely singular yet simultaneously multifaceted whole.

If it had been tied to the church of Trent back in the sixteenth century, would colonial Brazil’s religiosity have been any different? Today we know how long it actually took to establish Trent uniformity within Europe itself. Through the sixteenth century parishes failed to gain any true importance in the religious lives of European populations, much to the despair of the archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo (1564–84). The archbishop sought to transform dioceses into “well-organized armies, which have their generals, colonels, and captains,” like St. Ignatius adopting the military organizational model as the parameter that would lend homogeneity to this people’s multifaceted religiosity.¹¹ During the seventeenth century, two different religions cohabited within European Christianity—that of theologians and that of believers—despite the elites’ intensified efforts to crush archaic cultural features that had for centuries survived in the heart of these Christianized masses. The magical conception of the world was found in all social classes, common to “gentlemen and to the bourgeois, to village men and to rural men. Empirical knowledge was shared by all, and Galileo’s physics only spoke to a minority of sages.”12 A famous example that intrigued Lucien Febvre and Robert Mandrou was Jean Bodin, author of both Six livres de la republique and De la démonomanie, proof that he was not unaware of his contemporary universe of popular and peasant beliefs.¹³ The Reformed Church and absolutism would eventually shape the elites in cultural terms, but they would not homogenize the entire population. In the eighteenth century the peasant world still believed it was thanks to the devil’s influence that the allied armies succeeded—as apparent in Mémoires, by Jamerey-Duval, a man of the common people who became librarian for the emperor in Vienna.¹⁴

The violent actions committed under Trent for the purpose of establishing a more uniform faith and ridding religion of its archaic remnants would only achieve any effect in the seventeenth century and be more acutely felt in the eighteenth. Undertaking systematic pastoral visits, eighteenth-century bishops “discovered a rural people that often did not know the basic elements of Christianity.”¹⁵ In 1617, in Folleville, Picardy, St. Vincent de Paul realized the local curé did not even know the words of absolution.¹⁶ This was perhaps more serious than the bare-legged priests in medieval Brittany who celebrated mass using chalices made from horns.¹⁷ Preaching in Lower Brittany in 1610, Michel le Nobletz learned of “delusions and superstitions that brought tears to his eyes.”¹⁸ In 1680 the statutes of the Angers diocese stated that the Christians encountered during pastoral visits “seemed so little instructed in the mysteries of our Religion as if they had always inhabited savage countries unknown to the entire world. They knew nothing of the Trinity, nor of the incarnation of Jesus Christ.”¹⁹ Between 1565 and 1690, thirty-two episcopal orders, council decisions, and synod statutes were directed against superstition in France.²⁰ Around the same time, religious heterodoxy in England coexisted with theoretical uniformity, since the Reformation had failed to do away with popular skepticism. This is what Keith Thomas has termed “religious unorthodoxy.”²¹

It should therefore cause no surprise that priests in the colony did not know the correct order of the members of the Holy Trinity, or the proper way to cross themselves, or whether Christ would come again or not.²² In classifying the colony’s syncretic religious practices as “gross deviations” or “deformed religiosity,”²³ contemporary historians are reproducing Trent’s astonishment over what was deemed an “imperfect Christianization,” which also found itself the target of acrid adversaries in the form of Protestant preachers: the “startling of Christian conscience,”²⁴ the “promotion of the Christianizing will,”²⁵ and the desire to “depaganize” were common to both Reformations.²⁶ “Yet supposedly they all bear the name Christian, are baptized, and receive the holy sacrament, even though they do not know the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, or the Ten Commandments,” an indignant Luther was to state in the preface to his Small Catechism. “As a result they live like simple cattle, or irrational pigs.”²⁷

Based on recent studies, it is known to what degree early modern European religiosity was heavily imbued with paganism and how much violence accompanied Catholic and Protestant efforts to separate Christianity from paganism. The Christianity practiced in people’s daily lives was characterized by a profound ignorance of dogma and by participation in the liturgy detached from any understanding of what either the sacraments or mass itself meant.28 Accustomed to a magical universe, people could barely distinguish between the natural and the supernatural, the visible and the invisible, part and whole, the image and what it represented.²⁹ For the most part, what Trent’s catechizing efforts achieved was at best the rote learning of a few religious rudiments, not always fully understood and even then forgotten within a few years.³⁰ In this sense, fifteenth-century Portuguese religiosity was no aberration within the European context; permeated with paganism, it was the “complex fusion of beliefs and practices, in theory baptized Christianity but in practice quite remote from it,” of which A. H. de Oliveira Marques wrote.³¹ For this author, “hidden behind the facade of Christianity, [this religiosity] lent names of saints and Catholic feasts to the forces of nature and to pagan devotions.”³²

At the same time, the exaggerated penchant for masses and processions known in Brazilian scholarship as “religious externalism” was not so uniquely Portuguese—as many authors have posited³³—but European instead. This religiosity was imbued with magic belief, more inclined to images than to what they represented, to external aspects more than to the spiritual. Nuno Álvares Pereira would usually attend mass twice every day and three times on Sundays and fast thrice weekly.³⁴ When the seventeenth century brought a strong Catholic reaction, bent on cleansing spirituality, European externalism faded away, while in the colony it would linger on for reasons specific to the unique construction of colonial religiosity, as will later be seen. In any case, explaining this externalism as the “fruit of the spiritual childishness of ignorant people who do not explore beyond the simplest evidence of faith” is first and foremost an error that reveals ignorance about the features of popular Christianity in the West.³⁵

The Jesuits Jorge Benci and André João Antonil, members of the same generation, would remain faithful to the inglorious Trent crusade.

Let the parish priests not think that they fulfill their obligation by merely asking the slaves about Lent at the time of release from obligation, whether they know the Prayers and the Commandments of the Law of God; and seeing that they know them, or, better stated, that they recite them (for many recite them but know not what they are reciting), without any further doctrine, they give them the Sacraments. This certainly is not the manner in which these ignorant people should be indoctrinated; because we have not reached the point where slaves may say how many are the members of the Most Holy Trinity and recite a Credo and the Commandments and other Prayers; but it is necessary that they understand what they say, perceive the mysteries in which they shall believe, and comprehend well the precepts they shall keep. And it is up to the parish priest to explain these things to them and make them comprehensible in such a manner that the slaves understand them.

Benci’s words here suggest that Trent was not at such a remove from the colony, contrary to what historians like Hoornaert contend. These clerics also said it was necessary to be patient with these “ignorant and uncultured” people and to illustrate preaching with examples. “If they are taught but once, they will not profit of it; but by teaching them one time and then again, explaining and then explaining once more, then shall it be watered and reaped, even on the hardest stones, namely, the most ignorant of souls.”36

Priests should thus arm themselves with patience and perseverance in order to supplant the slaves’ imperfect Catholicism, says Benci. Antonil, on the other hand, blames the disregard of neglectful masters for flaws in their captives’ Catholicism. They kept them unbaptized and occupied with labor rather than letting them attend mass on Holy Days—in short, as St. Paul said, “being Christians and neglecting their slaves, they are acting worse than if they were infidels.” Even baptized blacks “do not know who their creator is, what they shall believe, what laws they shall keep, how they shall supplicate to God, for what purpose Christians go to church, why they reverence the consecrated host, what they shall say to the priest when they kneel and speak into his ears, whether they have a soul, whether it dies, and where it goes when it leaves the body.” Yet these “imperfections” were not the result of the slaves’ inability to comprehend, says Antonil, more lucid than many contemporary historians. The captives were fully capable of knowing their master’s name, the number of manioc holes they should plant in a day, how much sugarcane must be cut, “and other things pertinent to the regular service of their masters.” Furthermore, they were capable of asking for pardon when they erred and of pleading for clemency. Why then should they not be capable of learning to confess, to say the rosary, to recite the Ten Commandments? “It is all for want of teaching,” the Jesuit responded.³⁷

Antonil was perhaps one of the first to realize how important it was, in terms of social and ideological control, to let syncretic expressions bloom. “To wholly deny them their merrymaking, which is their sole relief from captivity, is to wish them disconsolate and melancholic, with little life and health. Thus, the masters should not wonder at their creation of kings, their singing and dancing honestly for some hours on some days of the year, and their amusing themselves innocently in the afternoon after having in the morning fulfilled the feasts of Our Lady of the Rosary, of St. Benedict, and of the plantation chapel’s saint,” Antonil said.³⁸ In recognizing the legitimacy of the cult of St. Benedict, this Jesuit was ahead of Rome. St. Benedict the Moor had died in 1569; soon afterward he was deemed a thaumaturge and because of his color became the protector of blacks. His veneration, however, remained outside Roman orthodoxy and was only authorized by the church in 1743. “These facts suggest that the worship of black saints or Virgins was initially imposed upon the Africans from the outside, as a step toward their Christianization, and that the white masters regarded it as a means of social control to promote subservience in their slaves.”39

A slave-based colony was thus fated to religious syncretism.⁴⁰ Perhaps first sanctioned by the ruling stratum, the slaves’ Afro-Catholic syncretism was a reality that ended up merging with the maintenance of “primitive” African religious rites and myths. St. Benedict was worshipped, but so was Ogum; and atabaque drums were beaten in the colony’s calundus. Within the social structures imposed upon them, and through religion, blacks endeavored to find niches where they could develop their religious expressions in integrated fashion.⁴¹ Dragged from their native villages, the slaves could not re-create in Brazil the ecological environment where their divinities had taken form. Nevertheless, they rebuilt it within their new milieu, anchored in the mythic system of their origins. “Like a living creature,” Bastide stated, African religion slyly “secreted its own shell.”⁴²

The living African religion practiced by black slaves in Brazil thus came to differentiate itself from their ancestors’ religion. Indeed, not all the slaves came from one same place; nor did they belong to one culture. Gêgê, Anago, Yoruba, Malê, and many others all brought their own unique contribution, reconfigured in response to the needs and realities of a new life, where an African quasi-syncretism was superimposed on an Afro-Catholic syncretism. Why ask for women’s fertility, if they would bear infant slaves in the land of captivity? How could the gods be supplicated to provide good harvests if farming benefited the whites and its fruits went for foreign trade rather than for subsistence? “Better to pray for drought or for epidemics that would destroy the plantations, because for the slave a bountiful harvest simply meant more work, more weariness, more hardship.”⁴³ The first winnowing within the heart of African religion would put aside divinities that protected agriculture, emphasizing instead those related to war (Ogum), justice (Xangô), and vengeance (Exu).⁴⁴

Rife with paganisms and “imperfections” in the colony, as seen above, European-born Catholicism would continue to mingle with elements foreign to it, often multifaceted, like transmigrated African religion itself. As early as its first century of existence, the colony would witness a proliferation of syncretic Santidades on its soil, a mixture of indigenous and Catholic practices. The most famous of these was reported by the Holy Office’s First Visitation to Brazil. Fernão Cabral de Taíde, owner of the Jaguaripe engenho, allowed the indigenous peoples on his lands to hold a syncretic service where center stage was occupied by a woman named Santa Maria and by a man who appeared either as “Santinho” (little saint) or as “Filho de Santa Maria” (the son of St. Mary). The worshippers had a temple containing idols that they worshiped. Some testimonies allude to a pope who lived in the sertão, who “had been left after Noah’s flood and had escaped by hiding in the eye of a palm tree.”45 Followers of the Santidade said “that they had come to amend the law of Christians.”⁴⁶ During their ceremonies, they “gave shouts and cries that could be heard from afar,”⁴⁷ “mocking and imitating the customs and ceremonies that were usual in the churches of Christians, but with everything imitated in their heathen and unfitting manner.”⁴⁸ This Santa Maria—also known as “Mother of God”—would baptize neophytes, all with the permission of Fernão Cabral and his wife, Dona Margarida. The owner of Jaguaripe himself was in the habit of going into the temple and kneeling before the idols. According to one witness, he was a good Christian, and it seemed “that he did this so as to win over the heathens.”⁴⁹ Fernão Cabral can thus be seen as a precursor in the manipulation of syncretism as a form of social control. When Governor Manuel Teles ordered the destruction of the Jaguaripe Santidade, Cabral told his emissary “that he was risking grave danger because the Indians would kill him” and refused to provide the backup personnel requested by the governor.⁵⁰

Fernão Cabral was right to keep all the indigenous people on his plantation under his watchful eye. Indications are that after a certain Silvestre, of indigenous blood, had learned Santidade practices at Jaguaripe, he meandered about the captaincy, teaching these precepts to other native groups. These indigenous people would “rise up with him in the fields, practicing the ceremonies of said erroneous theology, in which they said that this was the time when they had their God and their true saints and that they, the Indians, would become masters of the whites and the whites their slaves, and that whoever did not believe this erroneous theology of theirs, which they called Santidade, would be turned into fish and birds.”⁵¹

The Jewish influence that still existed in Portugal would also persist and grow in the colony. Gilberto Freyre provides a remarkable description of a fifteenth-century procession based on a document from that time:

First we see the procession being organized inside the church: gilt banners and ensigns, dancers, apostles, emperors, devils, saints, rabbis, jostling one another and falling into line. Soldiers with the flat part of their swords taking care of the stragglers. Up in front, a group performing the “judinga,” a Jewish dance. The rabbi carrying the Torah. Then, after all this seriousness, a clown making faces. An enormous serpent of painted cloth upon a wooden framework, with a number of men underneath. Blacksmiths. Carpenters. A dance by gypsies. Another by Moors. St. Peter. Stonemasons carrying little toy-like castles in their hands. Fisherwomen and fishwives dancing and singing. Ferrymen with the image of St. Christopher. Shepherds. Monkeys. St. John surrounded by shoemakers. The Temptation depicted by a dancing woman, swinging her hips. St. George, protector of the army, on horseback and acclaimed in opposition to St. Iago, protector of the Spaniards. Abraham. Judith. David. Bacchus seated on a hogshead. A semi-nude Venus. Our Lady on a little donkey. The Christ Child. St. George. St. Sebastian naked and surrounded by ruffians pretending they will fire at him. Monks. Nuns. Upraised crosses. Sacred hymns. His Majesty. Gentry.52

For a long time, Jews and Christians had lived together in relative harmony on Portuguese soil. Many Christians had consciously or unconsciously adopted Jewish practices; the Old Testament circulated almost freely during the fifteenth century and part of the sixteenth; Christian and Jewish feasts intermingled, because many of the former were part of Jewish tradition. As is well known, when the Inquisition was installed in Portugal, the subsequent persecution of the Jews prompted mass emigration, giving birth to an entire Portuguese colony of Jewish extraction in Amsterdam. Emigration to the East would become unfeasible as of 1560, when Goa inaugurated a tribunal of the Holy Office (the only one in the Portuguese colonial world). From then on, Brazil, alongside the Netherlands, would become the safest refuge for Jews and conversos.⁵³

It would, however, be wrong to state that the Jews and New Christians who set down roots in Brazil continued to practice the Jewish faith fervently. They joined the clergy and became stewards at almshouses and members of religious brotherhoods.⁵⁴ Among those arrested by the Inquisition between 1619 and 1644, the rate of Jewish religiosity was low.⁵⁵ Everything thus suggests that elements of Judaism became blended into the set of syncretic practices that made up the colony’s popular religiosity, constituting one of its many facets.⁵⁶ Yet this process was not simple. Just as the Africans worshipped Catholic saints and orixás, reshaping their old religion to the reality of the new land, very often the New Christians also straddled the fence between two faiths. “He does not accept Catholicism, he does not take part in the Judaism from which he has been distant for almost ten generations. He is considered a Jew by the Christians and a Christian by the Jews. . . . Internally, he is a divided man.”⁵⁷

Catholic, black, indigenous, and Jewish traits thus mixed together in the colony, forming a syncretic, singularly colonial religion. To a certain extent, the history of the Christianization of the West was repeated here. “A whole network of institutions and practices, some of them doubtless very old, made up the warp of a religious life that unfolded on the fringes of Christian worship.”⁵⁸ In Brazil syncretism was tolerated and encouraged when necessary, keeping it within possible limits. In Europe folk expressions were incorporated into official religion with a view to satisfying the needs of popular piety. This was the case, for example, with the institution of the feast of All Saints, which incorporated the cult of the dead.⁵⁹ But the incorporation of popular or syncretic elements did not come about by mere osmosis.⁶⁰ In the colony, the cases of African religiosity and of the New Christian division cited above serve well to illustrate a climate of tension. Incorporated traits carried with them a world of meanings. Assimilation and selections were not arbitrary, as demonstrated in Bastide’s fine analysis showing how the importance of the orixás was reshaped in the colony. Moreover, they were not permanent or definitive.61 The whole set of myriad pagan, African, indigenous, Catholic, and Jewish traditions cannot be viewed as remnants or as survivals, however, for they were still a living part of these people’s daily lives.⁶² It is within this tension between the multiple and singular, between the transitory and persisting, that the colony’s popular religiosity should be understood and its syncretism inscribed.⁶³

Despite some acute perceptions regarding the use of syncretism as a form of social and ideological control—recall the cases of Fernão Cabral de Taíde and of Antonil—condemnation and horror of syncretism almost always prevailed within the culture of the elites. Back in the sixteenth century the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún offered his reflections on the Christianization of Mexico, where syncretism was very strong. He showed the missionaries how paganism remained hidden behind a Christian setting “and that there was a danger of syncretism.”⁶⁴ The Holy Office’s Visitations revealed a tremendous intolerance of syncretic practices, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and less so in the second half of the eighteenth. The same was true of the tribunal at Lisbon when trials were initiated in the colony and the accused were then sent there to be judged. Municipal authorities often found themselves dealing with the popular dramatic representations known as congadas and reisados.⁶⁵ In his Compêndio narrativo do peregrino da América (Narrative Compendium of the Pilgrim of America), Nuno Marques Pereira vehemently condemned those “who go in mask, with indecent dances, at the head of processions, and particularly where the Most Holy Sacrament goes,” suggesting greater repression of “such pernicious outrages.”⁶⁶ The singularity of Catholic religion as practiced in the colony—the worshipping of saints, the exaggerated number of chapels, the theatrical aspect of religion, which was called “religious ignorance” as well as “externalism”—scandalized the foreign travelers passing through Brazil.⁶⁷ These voyagers, particularly the Anglo-Saxons and Protestants, said the Brazilians of color were “distorting Christianity and turning it into a mixture of burlesque and immorality.”⁶⁸

Dogmas and Symbols: Uncertainties and Irreverence

The joyful masses sponsored by sixteenth-century Jesuits—where indigenous peoples “would play and sing” frolicking music “in their manner” to the sound of maracas, berimbaus, and bamboo sticks—seem to have stirred moments of similar religious euphoria: the eighteenth-century baroque festivals of Minas Gerais that became known as the Triunfo Eucarístico (Eucharistic Triumph) and Áureo Trono Episcopal (Golden Episcopal Throne).⁶⁹ The festive processions that Nuno Marques Pereira’s pilgrim commented on in horror also illustrate the joyful side of the colony’s religiosity. But the latter was not constructed solely of colors, rhythms, and sounds. Through its visits to the Brazilian colony, the Tribunal of the Holy Office was responsible for a good share of the tears shed, for the dread, for the fear of persecution. The documentation left by these appalling incursions exposes secrets of daily life along with doubts, uncertainties, anger, and discord that the official religion was unable to settle. The general tone varies from skepticism to a desire to believe, from materialism to reverence for the supernatural forces, and it is almost always tinged with characteristically colonial syncretism. I will endeavor to show, however, that there is no complete uniformity in the signs of religiosity found in Visitations, ecclesiastical inquests, and inquisitorial trials—the three basic types of sources I have used here. Consistencies can be noted over three centuries, but alternations, substitutions, and the disappearance of traits can be detected as well.

“There come the devils of the Inquisition,” exclaimed the New Christian merchant João Batista in the home of the archdeacon of the Salvador See, the same year that the Visitor Heitor Furtado de Mendonça began his inquisitorial journey through the colony’s lands.70 From north to south, the actions of Holy Office personnel were feared. In 1646, writing from Rio de Janeiro to the inquisitors of Lisbon, the Reverend Antonio de Maris Loureiro reported that inhabitants of the captaincy had stoned an inquisitor, forcing him to seek refuge in a church.⁷¹ The anti-inquisitorial tradition of southern Brazil dated back to the sixteenth century. The irate words of one mameluco [of white and indigenous blood] adventurer are well known: reprimanded by Father Anchieta for his heathen practices and threatened with the Inquisition by the Jesuit, the bandeirante [adventurer in search of precious metals, Indians to be taken into slavery, or runaway slaves] “replied that he would pierce two inquisitions with arrows.”⁷²

This wrath against the Inquisition was not a product solely of the fear instilled by its horrendous practices, known to all, which were constant companions of frightened imaginations. It also reflected the ill-will, discontent, and popular irritation with official religion. In this sense members of the clergy were also a target. In 1595 the notary public of Filipéia de Nossa Senhora das Neves (now located in Paraíba), Francisco Lopes—a New Christian and mameluco!—confessed before the Board (Mesa) that he had grown annoyed at the Society of Jesus priests residing in the towns and said “in anger that if it depended on clerics and friars the world would be lost.”⁷³ He felt that priests lied and preached a religion that did not speak to people’s concerns. The shoemaker Baltazar Leal, an inhabitant of Bahia, argued about the resurrection of Jesus with the student João da Costa; he said Christ had not died and that if the priests said the opposite, they did so “to convince us that Christ Our Lord had died, but that he had not died.”⁷⁴

Why were there dignitaries in the church? Maria Gonçalves Cajada, the famous Arde-lhe-o-rabo [“Butt-That-Burns”] of the First Visitation, deaconess of the colonial sorceresses, “had said that if the bishop had a miter, she had a miter as well, and that if the bishop preached from the pulpit, she too preached, from a chair.”⁷⁵

The anticlerical beliefs of the Bahian ropemaker Isidoro da Silva won greater attention from the Holy Office, which saw heresy in them. Isidoro was from the Recôncavo region of Bahia; he had been born in Santo Amaro and resided in Madre de Deus, on the island of Cações, where he lived “from his fishing.” Unmarried, a baptized and confirmed Christian, he had been accused four times of concubinage since 1725, when he was about thirty-five. Once jailed, he complained about the other prisoners’ unruliness and violence, which he claimed had left him “weak in Reason”; it was then that he professed heretical postulates. In 1729 he appeared before the Lisbon Inquisition, where he was further questioned. He petitioned the recall of witnesses and protested that he had always been a good Christian. On May 15, 1732, he was put on the rack and given “all the torment to which he had been judged, in which more than a quarter of an hour would be spent,” while the poor man cried out that, “for the love of God, they should release him and have compassion on him.” Immediately thereafter the verdict was given: like some heretics condemned by the church, Isidoro demonstrated that he felt that

God had asked for tithes to provide for loafers, who were the clergy, and that the sacraments were useless and a deceptive thing, and that there was no need for confessors because he, the Defendant, made his own confession with a mere act of contrition, and that the boys, and other people, who died without baptism went to heaven, and that men did not have in them the power to say I baptize you, and only God could baptize, and not the clergy, and if they did so, it was so that they would have an office by which they earned money without working, and also the sacraments of Baptism and Penance were merely ceremonies, and the words said during them were fantastical.

Judged an offender de levi, he appeared in a public auto-da-fé on July 6, 1732, at the Convent of São Domingos Church in Lisbon, in the presence of Dom João V, the princes, and the inquisitors. From there he was sent to serve a three-year period of exile in the bishopric of Miranda, far from the Recôncavo and the island of Cações.76

Isidoro’s beliefs are similar to those of the miller Menocchio, whose inquisitorial trial has been brilliantly analyzed by Carlo Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms. Like his fellow believer, the ropemaker preached the simplification of religion (e.g., there is no need for confessors, an act of contrition is enough); the abolishment of the sacraments (ceremonies composed of fantastical words, “goods” exploited by the clergy as a tool of oppression); and the belief in God alone and in His powers (only He can baptize). Despite features clearly also found in Anabaptists, Ginzburg detected in Menocchio a representative of “an autonomous current of peasant radicalism, which the upheaval of the Reformation had helped to bring forth, but which was much older.”77 In Isidoro—who was probably white, since the trial records make no mention of mixed blood or black roots—any possible peasant past traceable to Europe (that is, to Portugal) was quite remote, for his father, a lavrador [farmer], was also from the Recôncavo region. Calvinism, on the other hand, was not quite so far away; it had been about one hundred years since the Dutch had left the Recôncavo.

Angered outbursts against the sale of Holy Crusade bulls and other types of papal bulls should be understood as popular expressions not necessarily linked to Calvinism. In 1595 Luís Mendes stated that the Crusade bulls “only came to take money.”⁷⁸ Brás Fernandes, at seventy-one an elderly New Christian and meirinho [bailiff] for the town of Igaraçu, said that “those bulls were passed around to collect money and gather some alms.”⁷⁹ Simão Pires Tavares, living on the fazenda of Guararapes, twenty-seven years old in 1594, doubted that the papal bulls could absolve and save Christians; he also scorned the power of rosaries and of indulgences granted by pontiffs. “They could hold no value for the soul,” he insisted, perhaps seeking a religion with a more purified spirituality. He stated to a number of people that “the offerings that are given to the clergy in church for the rites were not to the benefit of their souls, and that not even God would do good for their souls because of said offerings, further stating that offerings to the clergy had little benefit, because with their singing, souls would not go to glory.”⁸⁰

A conversation that took place at Duarte Dias’s sugar plantation around 1590 is a good example of how far indulgences had fallen into discredit by the end of the century, perhaps still under the influence of the Protestant preaching that Trent had as yet failed to revert, with the council quite recent and not yet a part of colonial life. The conversation took place between the sugar master Manuel Pires and two lavradores, Estêvão Cordeiro (who was part New Christian) and Álvaro Barbalho. Estêvão Cordeiro said that “in Rome the women walked about with their breasts uncovered and that the holy priests granted indulgences to the men who slept with [these women] carnally, with the intent of thus diverting these men from committing the abominable sin.”⁸¹ Protestant and Jewish influences thus joined with the discredit into which Rome and the entire ecclesiastical hierarchy had fallen among Catholics.

Extremely commonplace in the colony were discussions of clerical celibacy, of the superiority of the clerics’ state over that of laypeople, and other analogous issues that appear under the title “order of the wedded being better than that of the clergy.” A good share of those interested in this subject did not even know it was a matter falling within the jurisdiction of the Holy Office and therefore subject to its sanctions.⁸² After all, matrimony brought pleasures and joy and should be as respected by God as divine service. Had God not made people to be happy? For the colonists at least, happiness was their aspiration. Gaspar Dias Matado, known as Barqueiro [“Boatman”], believed that “a good married man does as much service to God in his bed and home as a priest who celebrates mass at the altar.”⁸³ God had created the religious order as well as the conjugal order. “The state of a wedded person was matrimony, which God had made and ordained,” reasoned Beatriz Mendes, daughter of farmers and wife of a carpenter. She concluded: “The other states and orders that exist in the world were made and ordained by the male saints and female saints, and the friars and nuns did no better than the wedded, who lived just as God commanded.”84 Unchaste clerics who ran after women would be better off married, stated the oxcart driver Bastião Pires Abrigueiro. He longingly recalled the time when he himself had been married, when he had led a good and contented life. That is why he professed words that were condemnable from the perspective of the Inquisition.⁸⁵ Diogo Carneiro, a sugarcane worker in Itamaracá, was unaware that it was a sin to acclaim the benefits of wedlock. “He said that God had made the order of matrimony first, and that the order of those who were happily married and who did what God commanded was as good as that of priests, or better, and that he said this for the purpose of speaking about some priests who said whatever they wanted and slandered other men.” He realized his error only when the edicts of the Holy Office were posted.⁸⁶

This discredit into which members of the clergy had fallen was perhaps further kindled by the substantial number of priests notorious for their wicked ways. Such clerics were numerous in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais and were constantly involved in brawls, deflowerings, concubinage, abductions, gambling, drinking sprees, and irreverence toward the faithful.⁸⁷ The priest Manuel de Morais, of São Paulo, “was ‘relaxed’ [handed over to civil authorities] in the auto of 1642, charged with being a Calvinist heretic and with marrying, while a priest, a woman of the same sect.” He was incarcerated, sentenced to wear a sanbenito [penitential habit] for the rest of his life, and permanently defrocked—extremely severe penalties for such a minor offense compared with those of other clerics in the colony.⁸⁸ In the auto-da-fé held on August 8, 1683, in the Terreiro do Paço, in the center of Lisbon, Antonio de Vasconcellos was found guilty “of saying masses, taking confession, and administering the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist although he was not a priest, nor did he have holy orders.” Originally from the island of Madeira, he lived in Salvador, State of Brazil. As part of his punishment, he was prohibited from taking orders “for the purpose of being a priest” and sentenced to floggings as well as six years in the galleys.⁸⁹ Friar Luís de Nazaré was convicted privately, not in a public auto-da-fé; early in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, he had committed all species of follies in the city of Bahia, performing superstitious cures and false exorcisms and taking advantage of women.⁹⁰ A little before that, Father José de Souza de Azevedo, cleric of São Pedro, was condemned to banishment outside of Lisbon for three years for the offenses committed in that city: resorting to superstitious objects and words in exorcisms “and making the devil come into his presence in the form of a tortoise, having a pact with him.”⁹¹ Like the Bahian priest, he received his sentence privately. For members of the clergy, the Inquisition avoided the public embarrassment of an auto-da-fé.

The colonists were often skeptical of the clergy (from the lowest to the highest dignitaries of the church), fearful of and angry at the long arm of the Inquisition, which stretched out to hunt them down in the distant colony—what did they think about the Creation, about God, about Jesus, about the mystery of the Holy Trinity?

Around 1617 a member of the Order of Carmo had said that “when God removed man’s rib to create Eve, a dog had come along and eaten it, and that God had made woman from that which issued from the hind part of the dog, and so God had made woman from the hind end of a dog and not from man’s rib.”92 A first reading of this passage appears to express irreverence toward the Creation, a sexist belittling of the figure of woman. It would be fitting that woman—sinful, infidel, traitor by nature—should issue forth from the dog’s anus, as if she were excrement. This explanation would be consonant with Delumeau’s thesis, which analyzes antifeminism as a component of the fear of women characteristic of the Early Modern age.⁹³ But what may also be implicit in this excerpt is a carnivalization of the Creation, which is not necessarily derogatory but brings to mind popular medieval traditions where obscenity played an important role. Present in religious festivities—lewd dances, vulgar songs, pantomimes loaded with erotic symbology—these traditions were also found in sixteenth-century poetry about the land of Cockaigne. Even more rife with buffoonery, these poems were transported to the context of the New World, as in Begola contra la Bizaria:

    He’s big and fat like a big millstone . . .

    Manna flows from his hind end

    When he spits, he spits marzipan

    And he has fish instead of fleas on his head.⁹⁴

If in testimonies like that of Isidoro, the Bahian ropemaker, God is the central object of popular beliefs,⁹⁵ He can also be the one mainly to blame for the hardships of daily life and, consequently, the object of doubt and questioning. The difficulties of life in the colony inspired reproach and bitterness. The New Christian André Gomes renounced God several times in just one day and extended his wrath to the entire colonial population. He also said that “for this reason the people of this Brazil had much cunning and guile because they were people who had been banished from the kingdom owing to their wicked deeds.”⁹⁶ They were a godless people or a people for whom one god was not enough. For a heterogeneous population like that of the colony, there had to be many gods. “There were more gods than one, because there was the God of the Christians and another of the Moors, and another of the heathens,” stated Lazaro Aranha at the time of the First Visitation to Bahia.⁹⁷

Behind this apparent sacrilege perhaps lay an actual desire to humanize God and draw Him closer. Troubled by heavy rainfalls, many colonists complained of God’s negligence—that He was relieving Himself at their cost. Such was the case of Violante Fernandes, a gypsy in her forties and widow of a gypsy blacksmith who had been banished from Portugal for mule theft. Vexed by the rains, she said that “God pissed on her and wanted her to drown.” Before the Visitation Board, she attempted to amend the offensive words by stating that she knew that “God does not piss, for this is something of man and not of God.”98 As in a game of telephone, the gypsy Tareja Roiz had heard from the gypsy Argelina that the gypsy Maria Fernandes had said “that she was weighed down by God, because it rained so much.”⁹⁹ Likewise endowing God with human features, the gypsy—always the gypsies!—Apolônia Bustamante, upon walking “through rains and mud and landslides,” had declared “with vexations and labors, . . . blessed be the prick of my lord Jesus Christ who now pisses upon me.” Originally from Évora, from whence she had been banished for thievery, and wrestling with blasphemy and marital strife, Apolônia provides an accounting of her insults: she had done so “ten or twelve times, thereabouts,” “in Portugal and Castela, and it seems to her in this captaincy as well.”¹⁰⁰ This pissing, phallic, penis-equipped God of the sixteenth-century Visitations still had much to do with Europe’s medieval religiosity, where it was so hard to distinguish Christian from pagan practices. At the same time, this God was well over a century removed from the distant, unattainable God of the Jansenists.¹⁰¹

For the overwhelming majority of the colony’s inhabitants, disease and the forces and snares of nature appeared indomitable and tenacious. For this precise reason, faith displayed traditional and archaic contours, with the desire for material goods and concrete advantages assuming great importance, as if faith worked like a kind of barter contract. “‘St. Anne, if thou save me, I shall become a monk,’ Luther had sworn in the midst of a storm on his way back from Erfurt. This was the kind of prayer that the Reformer would reject shortly thereafter but that was practiced by the majority of the Christian world,” writes Delumeau.¹⁰²

In the colony, things were no different. Cecília Fernandes, seventy, married to a pottery worker from the captaincy of Pernambuco, had said in rage that “there was no God in the world if God did not take revenge on those against whom she asked for revenge.” Violante Pacheca, a New Christian, forty-four, had had a falling out with her husband and, “vexed, had said that God would not be God if He did not avenge her against her husband and a woman because of whom she had been beaten by him.”¹⁰³ A mameluca married to a fisherman, Domingas Gonçalves, thirty, had suffered from a horrible toothache at the time of her last pregnancy. Given her state, they did not pull her tooth, and the pain would not go away. One night, “inside her chamber, she went before a crucifix and said that a God who did not take that pain from her was not God.”¹⁰⁴ A mameluco son of Jerônimo de Albuquerque, by the name of Salvador, had fought with his slaves and said that “he did not believe in God if they did not do such and such for him.” Fighting with the merchant João de Paz, on João Eanes Street, “likewise with anger and vexation, he had said he did not believe in God if he did not pay him.”105 Manuel de Figueiredo, a 21-year-old student of Grammatics, became somewhat deranged because he had been “tied up naked, with his shirt raised to his upper chest,” and cruelly flogged by three people, while none of the witnesses came to his aid. “With impatience,” he renounced God and Our Lady.¹⁰⁶ Martim Álvares, a 30-year-old native of Biscaia, also found himself faced with unexplained violence. He lived in Itaparica and was seized by Gaspar de Azevedo, who tied his hands behind his back and treated him very badly, though he did not deserve it. Covered with bruises, he “had gone out of his head . . . under the force of passion, and seeing that none of the white people came to aid him, he had said in a loud voice, in desperation, five or six times, that he renounced God and Our Lady the Virgin Mary, and St. Peter and St. Paul, and all of the saints of the Court of the Heavens, and the Priest who had baptized him,” continuing to blaspheme for about four hours.¹⁰⁷ Why were Manuel de Figueiredo and Martim Álvares arrested? The documentation does not tell us. It is certain, however, that colonial life’s ever-present violence fostered disbelief in dogmas.

Afflicted by an interminable disease, with sharp pains constantly traveling from his back to his chest “and many times to his heart,” despairing that he would ever regain sound health, the tonsured cleric Dionísio de Affonseca, twenty-six, born in Vila da Vigia, lost hope in God and doubted divine justice. “Tearing his nails into his head and pulling his own hair,” he asked the devils to take him and for God to bury him in hell, “because he despaired of His Mercy.” He was perplexed by the fact that God would punish “some for a single fault” and not punish “others who had committed countless faults”; many of the former would be lost, while the latter would be saved by making an act of contrition at the hour of their death. For these reasons, “he held God sometimes as unjust, and at the very least wondered whether he was just or unjust.”¹⁰⁸

It is curious that none of the colonists who were discontent with their lot and who renounced and doubted God went to the extremes of two Portuguese condemned by the Inquisition in the seventeenth century. João Fernandes, a tailor from the region of Covilhã, had said that “he owed nothing to God Our Lord because, being able to make him rich, He had made him poor, and giving many goods to others, to him He had given only labor, and that if he reached God, he would have at Him with a knife.” Like Dionísio, he doubted divine justice. But whereas the cleric delved into metaphysical considerations, the tailor went straight to the point: if God was the Creator to be adored, why had He created social inequality? The boatman Luís Roiz, thirty years old (twenty years younger than the tailor), stated that he “owed nothing to God, and if this same Lord did not provide him with food to eat, he would remove His bowels with a knife, and indeed with this knife he made a mark on an image of this same Lord, and if He did not give him the money, he would drown Him in the Tagus.”¹⁰⁹ Without calling into question the existence of God, the two blaspheming Portuguese—who appeared in the same auto-da-fé, on June 21, 1671—doubted His justice because they were poor and barely able to survive. The only difference in their cases was the degree of violence: Luís Roiz’s was greater, expressed in an aggression against the image of God. This confrontation with God was perhaps an early modern feature; the intermediation of the medieval saints (who established a relation between the believer and God while at the same time serving to protect the Supreme Being from the occasional wrath of the faithful) had lost its efficacy.110

Jesus, Son of God, was also the target of people’s discontent. “I put on Christ much shit, and on the host much shit, and on the Virgin Mary much shit” was the response of the licentiate Filipe Tomás de Miranda when asked how things were going for him.¹¹¹ The New Christian Simão Pires Tavares, in addition to doubting the power of the clergy, “said shit on the school of Jesus, and the same filth on Jesus.” He also made a habit of swearing by the bowels and marrow of Jesus.¹¹² People imagined a human Jesus—like the pissing God—complete with intestines, who procreated like any other man. Losing at gambling, the sailor Antonio Nunes, thirty, “had sworn twice by the son of Jesus Christ.”¹¹³ But supernatural assistance was also expected of Him. The Jew Duarte Roiz, upon watching the Maundy Thursday procession pass by the door of his jail, ridiculed the other prisoners’ conformity to their situation, asking “alms for the love of God Our Lord Jesus Christ.” “If it is Our Lord Jesus Christ who goes by there, why does he not remove us from jail?” he asked.¹¹⁴

Christ was also disrespected through the symbols representing him: images and crucifixes. In an atmosphere that recalls joyful medieval religiosity, two New Christians—the licentiate Filipe Tomás mentioned earlier and the peddler Luís Álvares—amused themselves by making observations on the image of Jesus that had passed by in the Procession of the Steps. Without kneeling, “taunting with great laughter,” the licentiate had said: “What a bad face Christ has!” “What a shit beard He has!” Luís Alvares added. “Very shitty indeed,” agreed Filipe Tomás.¹¹⁵

Irreverence toward the crucifix was one of the most common infractions in the colony, above all during the first two centuries. Almost invariably, the accused were Jews and New Christians. Luís Vaz de Paiva and his nephew, both New Christians, stole a crucifix from the small chapel of Nossa Senhora da Ajuda and walked about the streets with it, frightening people at night. When someone would open the door of his home, the two men would stick in just their arms, bearing the crucifix. They carried it to gambling houses and said, “Make it cheaper for this man.”¹¹⁶ A 38-year-old white man by the name of Isidro, allegedly a Jew and probably from Vila de Cametá, had a round face, full body, and braided hair; he was accused before the Board of the Visitation to Grão-Pará of tying a crucifix to a guava tree and lashing it.117 Diogo Castanho, single, was another New Christian; he forced the crucifix to participate in his sexual activities. “When he had carnal knowledge of one of his Negro women he would shove a crucifix beneath her.”¹¹⁸

In the records of the First Visitation to Pernambuco, one of the names that appears most often is that of the merchant João Nunes, accused of constantly having “a crucifix in view of a filthy pot where he relieved himself”¹¹⁹ and of having “in his chamber” a crucifix upon which he urinated, saying, “Here, wash Thyself.”¹²⁰ He had even poisoned to death a mason who had witnessed this heinous crime.¹²¹ However, the testimony of the licentiate Diogo do Couto casts doubt on the manner in which João Nunes really relieved himself. Diogo do Couto was best situated to speak about the case, for he had ordered the arrest of both the mason and João Nunes. He in part negates the charges against the merchant, stating, among other things, that he had no knowledge that João Nunes had relieved himself on a crucifix. To be perfectly honest, the licentiate affirmed, there was a crucifix at the merchant’s house, relatively close to the place that served as his chamber pot but not in the same room. Diogo do Couto further clarifies that the only reason he had ordered João Nunes’s arrest was adultery.¹²²

True or false? It is pointless to wonder. Stories of this kind were fashioned collectively, with each imagination contributing to the construction of a semilegendary tale marked by the presence of centuries-old archetypes that ridiculed symbols, inverted them, denied them, and perhaps sought to create a desacralizing antiorder.

Acts of irreverence against crucifixes are a part of ancient stereotypes, ascribed to various marginal or marginalized social categories down through time. Spitting on the crucifix, dragging it about the house, and trampling it underfoot or urinating on it were offenses ascribed to the Templars in the fourteenth century, part of the monumental process through which Philip the Fair destroyed this order and all its power.¹²³

Very often there was an underlying reality, not always imputed to Jews, however. Besides the Templars, the Cathars were accused of repudiating the cross. “It is worthless; it is a sign of evil,” said Arnaud Vital, a Cathar shoemaker living in Montaillou in the early fourteenth century. Bélibaste, the venerable mayor, frothed with hatred at the wooden crosses scattered over the countryside: “If I could, I would chop them down with an ax; I would use them as wood to boil the pots,” said the holy man.¹²⁴ The sign of the cross was hated as well, and Pierre Authié proposed to Pastor Pierre Maury a formula by which he could fool the Christians when entering the church, without betraying his intimate, secret faith (the Inquisition was greatly feared at that time): “In the summer, Pierre, you can (with the pretext of crossing yourself) swat the flies away from your face; in so doing, you can also say: here is my forehead and here is my beard; here one ear and here the other.”¹²⁵ Considering how the Cathars ridiculed the sign of the cross, there is no escaping comparisons. Diogo Soares, a New Christian and son of a woman who reportedly had died on the gallows, taught a black man to cross himself in this way: “placing his hand on his forehead he said ox, and placing his hand on his chest he said rope, and placing his hand on his left shoulder he said knife, and placing his hand on his right shoulder he said horse, then bowing his head he said, Amen, Jesus.” Diogo Soares and his brother, Fernão Soares, a sugar planter in Pernambuco, burst into laughter.126

In the eighteenth century, in the old kingdom of Congo, the Antonian movement—a reconfigured, wholly Africanized form of Christianity—was exhorted by their prophetess Kimpa Vita (or Dona Beatriz) not to worship the cross “because it was the instrument of the death of Christ.”¹²⁷

Eduardo Hoornaert analyzes the symbolism of the cross as the embodiment of metropolitan power and colonization, where Jesus represents a white aristocrat who suffers as a hero and not as a poor man. “In Brazil, Jesus is not born in a manger but rather in a cradle of gold; he does not belong to the slaves’ quarters but rather to the plantation house.”¹²⁸ Whatever the validity of this commentary, it is interesting to note that the black slaves rarely rebelled against the representation of Jesus on the cross. Rather, it was members of the middle classes or the economic elite themselves who would do so, despite their social position and power, letting a popular substratum of superstitious practices and heretical beliefs rooted in the Old World erupt. To the contrary, the black slaves, who assimilated Christianity as befit their needs and the rules of their logic, had a tendency to use images and crucifixes in their syncretic rites, as did indigenous peoples. In the sixteenth-century Congo, Georges Balandier observed the use of crucifixes in fertility rites and in the magical protection of houses and of individuals.¹²⁹ In twentieth-century catimbós in Paraíba, a wooden cross was essential. “It must be inside a wash basin or on the towel or underneath a taboret.”¹³⁰

As to acts of sacrilege involving the crucifix, I believe a more plausible explanation would follow the lines of Ginzburg’s interpretation of Menocchio’s heretical syncretism. Under the impact of the religious upheavals of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, popular and heretical beliefs blossomed. In their effort to eradicate these beliefs, the two Reformations focused their attention on them and in a way assured their perpetuity.¹³¹

Irreverence toward saints and the Virgin was also part of ancient traditions common to peoples of western Europe. But first in Portugal and later in the colony they acquired singular features that came to distinguish them substantially from their counterparts in other regions of Europe. In the Old World, affective forms of popular religiosity tended to disappear in the late eighteenth century or at least became much more restricted. They were to last longer in the colony, still present at the time of the empire, as Gilberto Freyre points out in Casa Grande e Senzala. Within popular religiosity, this emotional component, or affectivization, is more clearly visible in the cult of the Virgin and, above all, of the saints. In an ambiguous movement (as popular culture is ambiguous), affectivization and detraction often approach each other: the saint who is worshipped and adored, with whom confidentialities are shared, is also the saint who, in the religious economics of the barter system, may be hurled into a corner, cursed, and abhorred in outbursts of anger or dissatisfaction.

In practice since the twelfth century, the Marian cult saw a period of renewed vigor in the fifteenth: Our Lady of Mercy, of Grace, of Good Succor, of the Rosary (whose veneration owed much to Alain de La Roche, a Dominican from Brittany), of the Immaculate Conception.132 The reformers would later grow annoyed by this proliferation of representations of the Virgin. In Apologie pour Hérodote, Henri Estienne wondered which of these many Virgins was truly the mother of God.¹³³

According to Hoornaert, the first Marian images in Brazil were miraclemakers or mediums. One example was Nossa Senhora da Graça, the famous image that Caramuru found in Bahia in 1530, in honor of which Paraguaçu had a chapel built.¹³⁴ Next came warrior images, patronesses of victories over Indians and heretics. Nossa Senhora da Vitória brought triumph over the Indians and the French in Bahia,¹³⁵ while Nossa Senhora dos Prazeres guaranteed the 1656 victory over the Dutch.¹³⁶

Worshipping the Virgin in churches, chapels, processions, and brotherhoods and syncretizing her as colonization progressed (e.g., the black slaves’ extremely popular Nossa Senhora do Rosário, highly revered in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais), Brazilian colonists carnivalized and disrespected Mary in their daily religion. Manuel Dias was a cleric who presided over services at the main cathedral in Pernambuco. One day he was seen in front of the church’s chapel to Nossa Senhora do Rosário, with his leg raised and emitting “a great fart before the lovely image of the Virgin that is on the altar.”¹³⁷ Reprimanded by Rodrigo Soares, the assisting priest, he responded with laughter. But he did fear the rigors of the Inquisition: “On the 10th day of November of 1595, the cleric Manuel Dias came before the Board to confess that in the chapel of the Espírito Santo . . . before other clerics, without respect for the place, he had broken wind.”¹³⁸ Repentant, he asked to be forgiven for his irreverence.

The Virgin’s human, female traits were highlighted. The New Christian Bento Teixeira (author of Prosopopéia?) swore by the Virgin’s pubic hair.¹³⁹ How could Mary’s status as a woman be reconciled with her role as mother of God? Her virginity was constantly questioned. Around 1616 the New Christian Manuel (or Francisco) de Oliveira stated near the São Francisco River that Our Lady had given birth twice. God had seen to this man’s punishment a priori: he was “crippled in his feet and hands.”¹⁴⁰ The sailor Manuel João, a native of Terceira Island and an inhabitant of Bahia, was condemned by the Holy Office “for being a Lutheran heretic and for pronouncing words against the purity of Our Lady Virgin Mary.” On July 10, 1644, he appeared in an auto-da-fé in the center of Lisbon; he was scourged, gagged, and sentenced to three years in the galleys.141 The shoemaker Frutuoso Antunes, a 55-year-old New Christian, went even further, declaring that “Our Lady the Virgin Mary had not been a Virgin before birth, nor at birth, nor after birth.”¹⁴² Here again, it is not the offender’s Jewish roots that account for this irreverence toward Mary. Cathar peasants from Montaillou called the Virgin a “vat of flesh” in which Jesus Christ had come wrapped, yet they nevertheless worshipped her with chthonic force.¹⁴³ They did not believe in her virginity; Christ had been made “through fucking and shitting, rocking back and forth and fucking, in other words through the coition of a man and a woman, just like all the rest of us.”¹⁴⁴ More than blasphemy, what appears here is the desire to make Christ and the Virgin into human beings like any others. Ruled by a sense of the practical, the miller Menocchio also failed to believe it possible for Mary to have given birth and still remain a Virgin.¹⁴⁵

Unequivocally expressing their skepticism about the purity of the mother of God, Manuel de Gallegos and Francisco Mendes, both New Christians, had a one-eyed gray mare that they called Mary or dark-gray Mary. In jest, they would ask the scandalized sugar master Baltazar Pedro: “Have you seen our dark-gray Mary?”¹⁴⁶ Such irreverence was not always ironic, however. At Fernão Cabral’s fazenda, a black woman from Guinea named Petronila, a baptized Christian, struck a blow against a gradine where Our Lady was represented, “declaring that that lady was worthless, that she was of wood, that better was her stone one, from the heathens, that moved when you approached it.”¹⁴⁷ Around 1747, in Conceição do Mato Dentro, captaincy of Minas Gerais, Maria da Costa told a woman with whom she was arguing that she would strike her, for “she was a woman capable of striking Nossa Senhor do Pilar.”¹⁴⁸ Some years later, also in Minas, this time in the town of Sabará, the Mina native Rosa Gomes, “finding herself in despair one day in her home between four walls, alone and wretched, implored to the saints and they did not respond, and finding neither a stick nor a rope with which to hang herself, so desperate and out of her wits, with a large knife she slashed the images of Our Lady, St. Anthony, and even the Christ Child, cutting off their heads and tearing off their arms.” In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Inquisition sometimes proved more complaisant than during the two previous centuries. Rosa was harshly reprimanded but was released, and her confiscated goods were restored to her.¹⁴⁹

Gilberto Freyre captured the affective side of colonial religiosity quite well: sterile women rubbing up against images of St. Gonzalo of Amarante, seeking his aid in this intimate fashion:

    Get me a spouse, get me a spouse,

    Dear St. Gonzalo,

    For to thee shall I pray

    My dear little saint.

Or in another version:

    St. Gonzalo of Amarante,

    Matchmaker of old women,

    Why dost not marry the lasses?

    What harm have they done thee?150

Freyre also underscored the familiarity with St. Anthony. Asked to find husbands and locate lost objects, the saint might be hung upside down inside a cistern or well, or even placed inside an old privy, so that he might fulfill a promise more swiftly.¹⁵¹ Freyre noted the popularity of St. John the Baptist, “feasted on St. John’s Day as if he were a handsome young lad and lover let loose among the marriageable maidens, who address to him such nonsense as this: ‘Whence comest thou, St. John, that thou comest so moist?’”¹⁵² Freyre likewise pointed out St. George’s and St. Sebastian’s roles as holy captains or military leaders, “like any powerful plantation owner.”¹⁵³ He mentioned St. Peter’s ability to marry off widows.¹⁵⁴ Generally speaking, Freyre saw the saints as catalyzing a great procreative tension among the Portuguese, who sensualized saints and religion. This stimulation of love and fertility crept into colonial cuisine and manifested itself in suggestive names: suspiros-de-freiras [nuns’ sighs], toucinho-do-céu [heavenly back fat], papo de anjo [angel’s belly], levanta-velho [raise-the-old-man], língua-de-moça [maiden’s tongue], mimos-de-amor [love’s caresses].¹⁵⁵

In his brilliant interpretation, Gilberto Freyre focused on the cultural expressions of the social elite and of sugar planters (especially in the northeast) while leaving aside the practices and beliefs of Brazilian society’s middle and lower ranks. The adoration of saints had expanded remarkably, starting in the fifteenth century and continuing throughout the sixteenth—“polytheism was about to be reborn,” as Delumeau put it, in exaggerated terms.¹⁵⁶ These saints were relied on as great go-betweens.¹⁵⁷ But in their ambiguity, they could be good or evil, generous or vengeful.¹⁵⁸ They could therefore awaken anger and violence in people—and the harsher the concrete conditions of existence, the more legitimate such reactions. This ambiguity could be seen in the colony as well, where sources document attitudes of affection as well as of wrath and disrespect.

During the 1618 Visitation, the New Christian merchant Domingos Álvares Serpa was accused of saying that St. John the Baptist “had been a sinner, like any other man.”¹⁵⁹ Called before the board, he confessed his guilt. Speaking with friends, “they came to discuss who would be the greatest saint in heaven.” Pero Vilela, a barber, had said the ranking fell to St. John the Baptist—the plantation maidens’ handsome saint. The merchant “replied that St. John the Baptist had sinned.”¹⁶⁰ Around the same time, the priest Hieronimo de Lemos declared before witnesses that “when St. Peter had slashed Malcolm, he had had two drops, implying that St. Peter had had his fill of wine.”¹⁶¹ At Nossa Senhora da Ajuda Church, during Holy Week, the New Christian Duarte Álvares pulled at the beard on an image of St. Peter—the solicitous widows’ matchmaker—and told “how this wicked villain would raise the wine bag back when he was a fisherman.”162 Of the blessed St. Francis, Gaspar Roiz said that “the saint had gone some leagues to see a handsome woman.”¹⁶³ Lázaro Aranha invoked the aid of St. Anthony while playing cards and thanked the saint, calling him “that little scalawag” when he drew the desired card.¹⁶⁴ Antonio da Costa, a 40-year-old mameluco, vowed to celebrate a mass to St. Anthony should he get a runaway slave back; as soon as he had his hands on the black man, he “said that little scalawag St. Anthony was a lecher for he knew full well that [the saint] did not want him to come upon the Negro till after he had promised the mass.”¹⁶⁵ Finding himself in a similar spot, Lázaro Aranha, mentioned earlier—who must have been a devotee of this saint—promised St. Anthony a coin as alms should he find a vanished black man. But once he had found the slave, he tricked the saint, saying ironically: “That rascal St. Anthony thought I would give him a cruzado!”¹⁶⁶

In this affective relationship with religion, an effort was made to draw it into daily life. Associations were even made between saints and living, known people. Diogo Lopes Franco, a 26-year-old New Christian merchant, admitted to having compared the figures of the apostles arranged in the countryside chapel of Nossa Senhora da Ajuda during Lent “with some men of this land, and of one of these it had been said that he resembled the Meirinho do Mar [bailiff of the sea].”¹⁶⁷ In a way reflecting the blurring of the sacred and the profane that was so typical of the Middle Ages and that lasted into the Early Modern age, this identification with the saints at times went even further. Domingas Fernandes, from the Portuguese town of Aveiro, wandered begging about the fields of the Recôncavo, in the company of the famous Maria Gonçalves, known by the sobriquet Butt-That-Burns. Maria would tell people that her traveling companion was a saint “and that touching her or being touched by her was a virtue.”¹⁶⁸ Arguing with a man about some of the figures in his account books, the Old Christian merchant Manuel Barroso said that “just as the evangelists had spoken the truth in the Gospels, so did he . . . speak the truth in the additions in his books.”¹⁶⁹

José de Jesus Maria, or José de Moura, took this association with the saints even further. A hermit from Montemor and inhabitant of Lisbon, he was banished to Brazil after being imprisoned, tortured, and tried by the Inquisition; he appeared in an auto-da-fé held on October 22, 1656. He himself had come before the Tribunal of the Holy Office to report the extraordinary things that had happened to him. While he was praying before images, particularly those of the Virgin and of Jesus Christ, when “something presented itself to him in his heart, he would inquire of the Holy Images whether it would be good to do so, or refrain from doing so, and they would indicate that yes he ought to, or no he ought not to do that which presented itself in his heart, and he would comply with this, and he had never been wrong.” The images expressed their sentiments by nodding or shaking their heads and also through eye movements. The hermit had been inspired to seek their counsel for a wide variety of motives: if he should make a certain white and blue habit, “with a belt to gird himself”; if he should or should not go into a certain church, follow a certain procession, change his name, practice self-mortification. It is not known whether José de Jesus Maria continued his eccentric practices in the colony.170

As seen earlier, relationships with the saints were predominantly affective and characterized by a desire for closeness and greater intimacy. But as likewise underscored above, there were moments of anger and strife, within the framework of a religious economics where an act of barter may not have been reciprocated. Francisco Lopes, the curious New Christian mameluco from Pernambuco who despised priests, was enraged by some oxen that had entered his pasture and damaged it. He directed his wrath toward the saints, renouncing all of them indiscriminately.¹⁷¹ Cristóvão Dias Delgado, a 27-year-old bachelor who worked as an overseer for his brother, a farmer, discharged his family tensions onto the saints. On the morning of Our Lady’s day, before mass, the butcher Jorge André went to his house to collect eleven mil-réis “that he had lent him for some business of his said brother. And since his brother then questioned payment of this debt, he, the Confessor, became vexed and in anger said that he renounced his father and his mother and his grandparents and all the Saints that be in paradise.” Saints became mixed up with family in this repudiation of the established powers that oppressed him. The brother-boss rushed to defend order, intent upon reestablishing it: “The said brother hastened to reprehend him . . . and advised him to come forward and accuse himself, and he, the Confessor, then silenced himself, and . . . he asks forgiveness for this offense.”¹⁷²

Besides hatred and rebellion, there was always the carnivalizing approach, perhaps still more irreverent. It was common practice to attribute this kind of attitude to the New Christian, perpetual dissident and critic of established values.¹⁷³ Around 1613 a typical meeting of goodly men took place in the city of Bahia. The host was chaplain at the Santa Casa da Misericórdia, and among those in attendance were a town councilman (the accuser himself); a New Christian, son of a wholesale merchant from Lisbon; and the captain of Fort Santo Antonio, Afonso de Azevedo, who was a member of the Order of Christ and an official at Santa Casa, the almshouse. The conversation was precisely about the needs at Santa Casa. The captain was explaining how critical the situation was, to the point where it would be necessary to sell a church ornament. Manuel da Silva, the New Christian, replied that “he would purchase the said ornament as a feed bag for his horse.” All were scandalized. Holy ornaments were not to be sold for animal feed bags, the captain retorted, perhaps not realizing the New Christian’s good-humored riddling when he offered to save the Santa Casa and, moreover, inverted the significance usually attached to religious ornaments.¹⁷⁴

There was also an archaizing element that blurred the nuances between the representation and what was being represented. Why revere a mere ornament? Why believe in the power of some simple round beads? The New Christian Frutuoso Antunes, skeptical about Mary’s virginity, one night called “his wife to bed.” But since she was praying, she did not want to go. Disappointed, the husband exploded: “[T]he prayer beads were made of wood . . . , one did not pray the words of God with them.”175 Perhaps implicit in his outburst was an idea similar to that of someone else accused by the Visitation Boards: that a Christian served God as well with his wife in his house and in his bed as did a cleric in divine service. Analogies with medieval religiosity, replete with the vitality of life, are again inevitable, especially in such heretical manifestations as those of the Cathars, advocates of free love.

A certain sensualization of religious matter at times bloomed more intensely. Three young men who worked at Dom Jerônimo de Almeida’s house were discussing the dogma of the Most Holy Trinity, inspired by a picture one of them had nailed on the wall, “with Our Lady and the Holy Spirit above and some angels in a circle around.” Suddenly their attention was diverted to the sensuality of the little angels’ plump legs, “those angels that were painted there with fat little legs.”¹⁷⁶ They then returned to the topic at hand: what was the order of the persons in the Most Holy Trinity? If, when crossing yourself, you said, “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” the last must be the third person, said one of the fellows. Another thought the Holy Spirit would be the second person, for that is how he was portrayed in the picture.¹⁷⁷ How can one abstract what is being represented from its meaning?

Dogmas contained in the body of doctrine, such as the Last Judgment, Everlasting Life, and the existence of purgatory, were also the object of daily discussions among the colonists, who simplified them and stripped them of the abstractions common to theological ponderings, rendering them more concrete by bringing them into their daily lives.

The gypsy Tareja Roiz denied the existence of Judgment Day, and for this she was again accused before the Board of the First Visitation to Bahia.¹⁷⁸ Antonio Dias de Morais, a New Christian, did not believe there would be a Judgment “once the body died.”¹⁷⁹ The subject came up in a conversation with an Old Christian, Francisco Pinheiro, who had said they should not work so hard, for “some ten years from now, Judgment Day shall come.” The New Christian replied that “it would be when God so willed, and that once dead we become a bit of rotten flesh of the basest content there is, and that there is no Judgment.”¹⁸⁰ This episode is interesting because it shows a certain convergence in the two men’s conceptions, suggesting that what mattered more than Jewish roots was the interpretation of different beliefs that, in the final analysis, wove the fabric of colonial religiosity. The old Christian declares that it is useless to work so hard—after all, everyone will die anyway, with Judgment Day coming in ten years (Sebastianist millennialism?), and what matters is the here and now. The New Christian retorts that it is God who decides everything and that we are worthless once we die—which is another way of saying that nothing but life matters! “Popular religion does not concern itself with eternal salvation but endeavors to attend to the multiple—even if modest—exigencies of daily life.”181

Once the body is dead, the soul dies, Menocchio said in northern Italy in the late sixteenth century. He was arrested twice and executed on the second occasion. In the first year of the seventeenth century, a deponent informed the inquisitor from Friuli—Menocchio’s home—that at the time of the miller’s execution he had come across an innkeeper in Pordenone who told him that in that place lived a certain Marcato, or Marco, who held that once the body had died the soul did as well. “About Menocchio we know many things. About this Marcato, or Marco—and so many others like him who lived and died without leaving a trace—we know nothing,” states Ginzburg.¹⁸²

Neither is anything known about those who, like Antonio Dias de Morais, believed the body was nothing more than rotten flesh. Yet there is no doubt these people existed. This radical attachment to the material world and to the pleasures of this life gives a glimpse into their conceptions of eternal life. “In this world may you see how well I live, for in the next you won’t see me suffering,” said Estêvão Cordeiro, who lived on a plantation in the parish of Santo Amaro.¹⁸³ Paulo de Abreu, resident of Igaraçu, believed “there was no other world beyond this one.”¹⁸⁴ And if one did exist, it must be an extension of earth. The mameluco Manuel Gonçalves, sugar master on a plantation in Várzea do Capibaribe, went about with black women and when reprimanded used to say that “they should let him fornicate well in this life, for he would be well fornicated in the next as well”—and this he had heard from others.¹⁸⁵

In the captaincy of Paraíba, around the same time, similar exchanges took place. Gonçalo Francisco, a mameluco sailor, was so young that he barely had a beard, but he was nevertheless very fond of female charms. One day, on his “way to Varadouro, the said Gonçalo Francisco took a brasila [indigenous woman] and he, the Denouncer, told him to leave the black woman alone.” “Be still,” the young man replied, “for whoever does not sleep with women in this world, the devils will sleep with him in the other.” Like the Pernambucan Manuel Gonçalves, he responded to his friend’s reprimand with these words: “he had heard that before from other men.”¹⁸⁶ In evening conversations among men, three friends were talking about a young married woman, “quite handsome” but “very wanton” because, since her husband lived away, “she used her body wickedly,” giving it “to whoever asked her.” Then one of the men, Sebastião Pereira, who made his living by bringing slaves from Angola, pronounced the following words: “Leave her be, leave her be, she does very well, for if she does not get her fill here, she will not make out well for herself in Paradise.”¹⁸⁷

Within popular consciousness—“not very open to the eschatological concepts of the times,” as the historian Aaron Gurevich has pointed out—the content of the story of salvation penetrated the present, that is, each individual’s life. In confronting the present moment with eternity, people moved easily from the world of the living to the kingdom of the dead, as was the case in medieval journeys to the Beyond.188 For this reason it was possible to fornicate in the other world. If the people of the colony recalled the Middle Ages when they brought the eschatological concept of time into their daily life, however, they stood apart from that era when they rejected the holy story, through sacrilege and irreverence toward dogma. In this aspect colonial people were eminently early modern.

Although the idea of purgatory had enjoyed great popularity in the Christian West since the twelfth century, in the colonists’ consciousness it was a matter of some confusion. The notion was a relatively recent acquisition and, moreover, had been the target of harsh criticism from Protestants; Luther spoke of it in ironic terms, calling it the “third place.”¹⁸⁹ In the last years of the sixteenth century, the inhabitants of the captaincy of Pernambuco still were unclear about the place where sins were purged. It would be better to pay for sins in this life than in the next, said one Pero Correia, from Olinda, about the torment meted out by the Inquisition. Disagreeing, the soldier Domingos Ferreira said that the sins not paid for in this life would necessarily be paid for in the next. But he was a bit uncertain: he thought that those who died after confession and communion would not need to pay for their sins in the next life, “nor would they go to purgatory.” Pero Correia detected heretical propositions in his companion’s speech and warned that such words could take him to the gallows. But Domingos Ferreira stood firm in his viewpoint. He told the story “of a thief who confessed to a hermit and that the thief had been saved and the hermit lost.” Before the Visitation Board, he confessed he had always held that “purgatory was not for those who died after confession and communion, but rather for those Christians who died without confession.” He had not heard these ideas from anyone but held them solely out of “his ignorance” and did not even know that they ran counter to the church’s teachings.¹⁹⁰

In 1594 Manuel Pinto, formerly a carpenter but now a farmer, denounced the Flemish man Antonio Vilhete for not believing in purgatory. “Blessed was he who went to Purgatory, for he had hopes of going on to glory,” Manuel Pinto said. Vilhete laughed and scoffed at him, saying: “Purgatory [is] there next to that tree and along that path, and wherever God so wants Purgatory.”¹⁹¹ Probably he was a Calvinist. But what his words underscore is the notion embraced by so many Catholics living at the same time and even much later, like the Jesuit André João Antonil: that the colony was a purgatory. According to the testimony of another witness, Salvador Jorge, the Flemish fellow had said that “there was no separate purgatory because purgatory was next to a tree, or a sugar plantation, or a trail.”¹⁹²

At various times, God’s commandments were relativized in the colony as well. Killing one’s adulterous wife was not a sin, declared Estêvão Barbosa, basing his statement on the Law of Moses.¹⁹³ Baltazar da Fonseca, a stonemason born in Coimbra and now living in Itamaracá, said in anger that it was not a sin to murder a thief; he was “reproaching a man who always stole chickens, suckling pigs, tools, and other things from him.”194 During the 1763–69 Visitation, the mameluco carpenter Pedro Rodrigues and the native Brazilian Marçal Agostinho were charged with spreading the belief that it was not a sin “to kill children inside the womb,” especially among “the women Indians who were great with child.” They said that after the babies were dead their souls would come to speak with them—this according to what the Virgin herself had told them.¹⁹⁵

“Tolerating thoughts was not a mortal sin,” Bartolomeu Barbosa commented in a conversation in Rio Vermelho with the New Christian Bento Sanches in 1615.¹⁹⁶ In the distant colony, the feeling sometimes was that offenses would go unpunished, and these breaches were not necessarily even seen as such. “Fornicate, fornicate to your fill, for the land is of the King, for never did anyone go to hell for fornicating,” Pero Gonçalves happily told two friends after a dinner where he had “eaten and drunk over half a pint of wine.”¹⁹⁷ Sex ranked high among colonists’ concerns, perhaps because of the scarcity of women in the earliest days. Around 1580, at the Santo Amaro plantation in the captaincy of Pernambuco, the manioc farmer Gonçalo Ferreira had come to speak with Domingos Pires about the sin of the flesh. Domingos stated that “sleeping carnally with a Negro woman or a single woman was not a sin and that it was only a sin to sleep with a married woman.”¹⁹⁸

About ten years later, something similar happened on the fazenda of the New Christian Diogo Nunes, in Paraíba, where Antonio de Góis was working as a mason. In 1594 Góis went before the Visitation Board to accuse his ex-boss. One day after lunch, boss and employee had been enjoying a casual conversation about the sin of the flesh, when Diogo Nunes declared that “he could very well sleep carnally with any Negro woman from the town and that in this he would not be sinning if he gave her a shirt or anything.” The employee disagreed, saying that it would be a mortal sin, but the boss insisted, firm in his notions of mercantilized love: “sleeping carnally with a single woman was not a mortal sin, paying her for her work.”¹⁹⁹ Jerónimo de Albuquerque’s mameluco son, Salvador de Albuquerque, mentioned earlier, would dupe women with whom he wanted to have relations by saying that “asking them to sleep with him was not a sin.” This was what he did with Pelônia (Apolônia?) Ramalho, “single woman of the world,” as well as with a number of black women and with his brother João de Albuquerque’s indigenous slaves, Antonia and Felipa. He deliberately fooled them, knowing the carnal act was sinful.²⁰⁰ Gaspar Maciel and Bento Cabral, on the other hand, were uncertain about the matter, which no doubt was quite pertinent to the former, married in Bahia but living in Pernambuco. Bento Cabral believed that simple fornication, namely, “a single man sleeping with a single woman, was only a venial sin, saying that, on the other hand . . . , the sin of copulating with a virgin woman or with a married woman was a mortal sin and was more serious than that of simple fornication.” Gaspar Maciel contradicted him, saying that simple fornication was likewise a mortal sin. “Then he, the Confessor [Bento Cabral], replying to him no further, silenced himself and held in his breast as truth that which the said Gaspar Maciel had told him.”201

We looked earlier at colonists’ uncertainties regarding the state of matrimony versus that of the unmarried clergy. Doubts and hesitations about the other sacraments abounded as well. For example, concerning the baptism of heathens: it must be a sin “to baptize Negroes in Angola, as long as . . . they had the same customs as when they were heathen,” argued the stonemason Antonio Pires in 1595 in Olinda.²⁰² Whoever “received the water of baptism could not go to a wicked place nor lose himself,” believed Diogo Carneiro, sugarcane farmer in Itamaracá.²⁰³ A baptized child would carry with him throughout life a kind of immunity to error. “If later, as a man and sinner, he should come to die with sins, he would not be lost,” he further stated, after being interrogated by the Visitor.²⁰⁴ It was as if the sacraments held a magical power—something the people of the Middle Ages had ascribed to them.²⁰⁵ The New Christian Fernão Pires, known by the epithet Mija-Manso [“Gentle Pisser”], baptized dogs and christened them.²⁰⁶ Here again, it cannot be argued that this practice derived from his ancestors’ having kept the Laws of Moses. In Pontifical Rome itself, in the enlightened eighteenth century, “all quadruped folk” in the city gathered before the church of Santa Maria Maggione on January 18 to receive a blessing in the name of St. Anthony: “oxen, cows, mules, and asses appeared in great number, decorated with flowers and fruit. Domesticated dogs and cats were not excluded. A priest wearing a surplice and stole gave holy water to all of them.”²⁰⁷

The sacramental oils were often renounced: in gambling, as in the case of the farmer Miguel Pires, from Olinda;²⁰⁸ in fights with slaves, as in the case of Isabel Fernandes and Jerônima Baracha;²⁰⁹ in fights with a young son who had gotten into some mischief that shortly thereafter was completely forgotten, as in the case of Bárbara Fernandes, from Itamaracá.²¹⁰ Not much importance was paid to the obligation of partaking of communion on an empty stomach. Francisco Henriques, a New Christian, had imbibed a dipper of water after midnight and taken communion the next morning, with no scruples whatsoever—worse yet, boasting about his deed, he said that “it was not a sin to take communion after having drunk.”²¹¹ Not satisfied with having eaten some bananas at home, Jerônimo Nunes, a 20-year-old New Christian, went to Passé Church eating sugarcane along the way. Indignant, two friends who accompanied him denounced him publicly before all those attending mass. The priest also reprimanded him.²¹² During this same Visitation (the Second), João Garcez accused the ex-field captain Domingos Gomes Pimentel of eating lunch before taking communion.²¹³ The sacraments were thus demoralized, but not as Eduardo Hoornaert has contended; rather, they were disrespected by the colonists themselves, rebellious, skeptical, or stubborn when it came to meanings that seemed absurd to them in the context of their daily lives. Would God be happier if one walked kilometers on an empty stomach or if one heroically passed the night suffering the torment of thirst caused by Bahia’s climate?214

As Philippe Ariès said, pure Christianity was always an imaginary model. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the European masses had felt a real need for religious life, and the Christianity manifested in their religiosity was authentic even though it was basically lived rather than conceptualized.²¹⁵ In the distant colony, always terrified by the possibility of inquisitorial visits but still distanced from the horrifying tribunal by an ocean, these features remained more intact and lingered longer. As I have endeavored to show, religion and its symbols and dogmas occupied a considerable space in the daily concerns of colonial man. And for him, everything that related to consecration and communion—perhaps more than any other religious dogma—was imbued with magic and shrouded in mists that lent these sacraments a high degree of incomprehensibility.²¹⁶

During the First Visitation, in the city of Bahia, two women confessed to similar practices involving the words stated at the moment of consecration. On August 20, 1591, Paula Sequeira, forty, who had Flemish blood on her father’s side and was married to the bookkeeper of the Royal Treasury, confessed not only to practicing homosexual acts but also to using the words of consecration during the sex act. She had learned this twenty-three years earlier from a cleric who was a distant relative, when she was a newlywed and still living in Lisbon. She was supposed to say “the words of the consecration of the mass wherewith the host was consecrated into the mouth of the said husband when he slept, and he would be tamed and would give her all of his affection, and for this end the said cleric had given her, written on a paper, the said words, and she, the Confessor, said the words sometimes into the mouth of the said sleeping husband.” A good while later, in Salvador, Isabel Roiz (or Boca Torta [“Twisted Mouth”], who was accused of sorcery on several occasions, as seen in the next chapter) had told her to say the same words—hoc est enim—under the same circumstances and for the same purposes.²¹⁷ Married to a shoemaker, “daughter of a bailiff of the sea, serving the voyages of ships to India,” Guiomar de Oliveira, thirty-seven, confessed to the same offense on the day following Paula Sequeira’s confession. She had learned the spell from another notorious sorceress, Antonia Fernandes, Nóbrega by nickname. But her version was two words longer: hoc est enim corpus meum was the infallible formula that “a person during a dishonest carnal act” should say into the other’s mouth, “for they would make him mad with love and desire.”²¹⁸

Also in Salvador, the sugar planter Bernardo Pimentel, a married man, went before the board to denounce Violante Carneira. She was the widow of Antonio Roiz Vila Real, a New Christian that the Inquisition had burned in Coimbra. She had “conversation” with Bernardo Pimentel and on two occasions said the holy words into his mouth; “and he, feeling this be evil, found it strange, and she celebrated greatly with laughter, showing that she had already captured him, by having said the words to him, so that he would want her.”219 The next year, two more men who had an “illicit friendship” with Violante Carneira went to denounce her to the Visitor: the widower Cosme Garção, a captain from Itaparica, and the mulato Simão de Melo, master sword-fighter. The woman was arrested around this same time, and from her confession it is known that she was nine months pregnant by the church canon Bartolomeu de Vascogoncelos [sic]. In the trial records—very confusing, out of order, with obviously garbled dates—Heitor Furtado de Mendonça wrote in his own hand that the sentence would be served only after Violante had given birth. She should appear in an auto-da-fé holding a burning candle in her hand, remain standing throughout celebration of the mass, and then hear her verdict read. This auto-da-fé—one of the few held in the colonial territory—took place on January 24, 1593. The offender was sentenced to four years of exile in Itaparica. Eight months later, she asked that her punishment be reduced, alleging that she was very poor, had many children (one of them still nursing—the words of consecration had brought forth fruit!), was always sickly and received no medical care, and was going hungry. She was repentant and asked for forgiveness and “mercy upon the five wounds of Christ Our Lord.”²²⁰ It is not stated whether her request was granted.

These blasphemies and acts of sacrilege can often be separated into groups: against God, the saints, the Virgin, the commandments, the sacraments, and dogma like Everlasting Life, the Last Judgment, purgatory, and Mary’s virginity. But there are times when these offenses are all committed together, out of the mouths of great blasphemers who seem intent upon demolishing the entire structure of faith and religion in one fell swoop, as if they were a sort of “Luso-Brazilian Menocchios.”²²¹

In 1763, in Grão-Pará, the young cafuza [person of indigenous and black blood] Joana Mendes, nicknamed Azeitona [“Olive”], was thrown in jail together with some women friends. One night, perhaps in despair over her misfortune, “she had taken the rosary that hung round her neck and had broken the string, spilling the beads upon the floor” and stomping on them. She renounced the Most Holy Trinity and the Virgin Mary; unmoved by her cellmates’ protests, she insistently repeated these offenses. She lamented not having with her an image of the crucified Christ that she used to keep at home; for if she had it there, she would throw “it out into the street so that all could see that sacrilege.”²²² She wanted her fury to become public.

Two years later, in Belém do Pará, another wrathful prisoner lambasted the dogmas of faith. In front of others in jail, Francisco José, formerly a soldier and tailor, declared that God did not exist, “and that the God that does exist, he trod him under his feet.” He refused to kneel down when the Holy Sacrament passed by outside, turning his back instead, stomping his foot on the ground, and calling it a filthy dog. He denied that he was a child of God; “rather would he be of the devil than of God, for God had no power whatsoever, but only the devil did.” He did not attend mass, “and on purpose and with considered intent . . . for when the priest celebrated mass at the altar outside the jail, and the other prisoners were listening to it, he would turn his back to said altar, at times laughing loudly, and at other times committing the abominable sin of sensuality.” He was an inveterate masturbator, and when they told him this was a most serious offense, condemned by St. Paul, he replied that “St. Paul was a drunkard and an ass who knew not what he said.” He turned his back to the other prisoners when they pulled out a rosary, and no one had ever seen him say any prayer or pronounce any word that might give the slightest hint that he was a Christian. The other prisoners, who were in the habit of kissing the feet of the crucified Lord, asked him to do so as well. Francisco José replied that they should get the image out of his sight “and stick it in the most filthy part of the human body.” He suggested that the same be done with the images of Our Lord of the Navigators and his crown, with the image of Our Lady of the Rosary, and with the palm of St. Rita. He prided himself on having one day gone to confession at the church of the Nossa Senhora do Carmo Convent; “and when they had given him communion, he had taken the wafer out of his mouth, and in truth, he had placed it inside the barrel of a shotgun, so that the devils would take the host.”223 His dissatisfaction with the Catholic religion is crystal-clear. He did not want that God, preferring the devil instead; he did not accept the priests’ prohibitions; he did not worship their saints; he did not believe in the Eucharist; and he hated the symbols of faith. They deemed him a heretic. At no time did the ex-soldier and tailor propose an alternative religion, however, or suggest the merest outline of one. He said he believed in the devil, but more by negation than out of any deep conviction. He expressed a wild, indeterminate rebelliousness and most likely found the passive, well-behaved piety of his cellmates irritating.

In contrast, the old woman Ângela Micaela, who lived on her daughter’s fazenda on the island of Marajó, seemed to profess the rudiments of her own unique faith. She did not worship images but rather left them tossed behind a trunk, covered with dirt, “and this same dirt moistened, and with much indecency.” She insisted that her children not worship God Our Lord, “on the grounds of his being solely God of the dead, and not of the living, for he had died on a cross.” They should instead adore the Sun, the Moon, and the Weather, “for only they ought to be worshipped as lords of the living.” If her children worshipped them, “they would go with her to the next Kingdom, where they would be princes, and she queen, becoming immortal as she already was.” She had friends who came to speak to her at night in the form of figures that climbed to the treetops. She did not pray, saying she had already served God well throughout her entire life, “not needing to serve him longer, for if she died, she would soon be saved.”224 Unlike Francisco José, Ângela Micaela believed in positive values, in another life, in a vital and primitive God, perhaps influenced by the region’s indigenous beliefs. (Were the beings that appeared in the treetops spirits?) In her idealization of another kingdom, where she would be queen and immortal, there perhaps lay some distant echo of Sebastianist millennialism, syncretically blended into a body of popular religiosity.

A final example is the extremely religious stonemason Baltazar da Fonseca, thirty-five, an Old Christian who lived in Itamaracá and who was mentioned earlier because of his hatred of thieves. On December 15, 1594, he went to confess before Heitor Furtado de Mendonça’s Visitation Board. For twenty years he had refused to believe in Our Lady, St. Peter, St. Paul, or any other saint and did not believe in the cross or worship it. “He only believed in and worshipped one almighty God.” On a number of occasions he had said that “a man could very well eat meat on any prohibited day, even if it be Maundy Thursday, and that, eating salted fish on Easter, one would do for the other.” He had no doubts that Christ had died on the cross, nor that Our Lady was a virgin. He knew the saints were saints and that they dwelled in paradise and were greatly close to God. But he thought that “God Our Lord is the center and the purpose wherefrom all emanates, and he worshipped and believed only in Him.” He saw that other Catholics worshipped the cross, the Virgin, and the saints, but “for himself he believed that those who did so did not understand as well as he.” He saw they knelt down, asked forgiveness for their sins, and beat on their breasts; however, he thought that “neither the cross, nor Our Lady, nor the saints have the power to forgive sins, but rather only God Our Lord.” Therefore he “for himself believed that one need not worship anyone other than only God Our Lord.” He had often been reprimanded by the vicar of the main cathedral in Itamaracá but had never paid any attention to these reprimands. His faith seems to have been personal, autonomous, and deeply rooted. Because he did not believe “in the wee donkey and in the pack-saddle on which Our Lady had gone to Egypt, and in the chains with which St. Bartholomew had captured the demon,” the vicar publicly took him to task. Baltazar da Fonseca wanted to bet him two chickens that he would not be judged guilty by the ouvidor Diogo do Couto if a record with his peculiar beliefs were drawn up; the vicar turned down the bet.²²⁵

Before the board, they asked him from whom he had learned his beliefs. He “answered that he had heard in his youth, from whom he did not recall, that so it was said in some preaching from pulpits, and that henceforth this had remained with him till now.” He had been born in Coimbra and denied having had any contact with Lutherans, Lutheran writings, or heretics. He had realized something was wrong with his beliefs when, “from the gallows that were built that past October in Olinda in Pernambuco,” he had heard the sentence of an individual who had renounced the cross and the saints; “and that he at once became perplexed,” having gone to confess before the board and promising to “cast aside his error.” For many years, the possibility of his own religion, internal and personal, had been open to him, directed at the worship of one sole almighty God, like so many heretics in medieval Europe who absorbed ancient popular traditions. But Baltazar da Fonseca did not want a direct confrontation with the official church; nor did he want anyone to think he was a heretic or apostate. “His intent had never been nor is it to believe, nor to have, nor to go against the truth of the Holy Mother Church, and . . . never before now had he known he was going against it, but it seeming to him that he was correct, he had done and said what he had, and if he be wrong, he asks mercy for his offense.”226 The unassuming mason recognized his errors only in part, subordinating them to a conditional clause: “if he be wrong.” Even in an intimidating situation, with the Visitor before him, he left open the possibility that he was not all that wrong. He had not blasphemed and had not disrespected the saints, the Virgin, or the cross. He simply thought that, compared with God, they were not so important, and he wanted his church to allow him room for this conviction.

The Demonization of Social Relations and the Divinization of the Economic Universe

The Inquisition routed out devils in the colonial world, often seeing them where there were none. But the men of the early colonial centuries shared their daily lives intensely with devils, demons, and fiends. Even when they knew it was illicit to do so, they could not help but invoke them time and again.²²⁷ As fear of the Visitations spread—with the Inquisition seemingly ready to pounce upon the colony’s towns at any moment, particularly during the Philippine period—the demons became confined to hidden and many times unconfessed practices.²²⁸ But during the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, they inhabited everyone’s day-to-day life, as if they were private, almost inoffensive divinities. At the very least, the colonists’ understanding of these entities differed substantially from those that demonologists outlined in their treatises and that ultimately became the touchstones of inquisitorial procedures.

Within the realm of elite thought, the early Middle Ages had witnessed the steady demonization of daily existence, a process of externalization of Satan in relation to God.²²⁹ In the twelfth century, works like the Elucidarium sought to systematize and vulgarize demonological elements disseminated in Christian writings since the church’s earliest days.²³⁰ The Protestant Reformation and the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century further strengthened Satan’s presence on earth.²³¹ During the same era when “Paris saw itself dominated by a forest of belfries whose pious sound never ceased,” Jean Wier registered the existence of 72 princes and 7,405,926 devils, divided into 111 legions, with 6,666 members each.²³² They were igneous, aerial, terrestrial, aquatic, subterranean, and lucifugous.233 They dwelled on glaciers, possessed the bodies of rodents, controlled storms.²³⁴ Boniface VIII and Guichard kept their private demons inside flasks.²³⁵ Antonia Fernandes, nicknamed Nóbrega, the sorceress mentioned earlier in this chapter, had promised to give Guiomar de Oliveira a private demon inside a bottle; he spoke, answered questions, and supplied information. But he also had to be handled properly: “On certain days of the week, one had to take the care to place onion and vinegar nigh to the said glass, for that which was inside of it was fond of such food.”²³⁶

In a nonrationalized world, everything could be explained by the action of supernatural forces: either God or the devil. Neither force seemed abnormal, and the popular mentality saw the two as approximating each other.²³⁷ As Christianity advanced in its triumph over pagan survivals and folklorized religion, the devils of Christian theology lost their role as “operative forces of magic,” becoming primarily tempters and enemies of God, “those who seek to seduce souls in order to tear them away from God and drag them into hell.”²³⁸ At the close of the fifteenth century, preachers and clerics saturated their sermons with a diabolic vocabulary.²³⁹ In the catechism of the Jesuit Peter Canisius, the name of Satan is cited sixty-seven times while that of Jesus appears only sixty-three.²⁴⁰ This shows us how in elite thinking the notion of an inevitable struggle between God and the devil endured for quite some time.

The insistent presence of the Prince of Darkness in Jesuit letters shows that even before Canisius, the Ignatians were concerned about Satan’s unrestricted freedom on earth.²⁴¹ When Manuel da Nóbrega offered to venture into the sertão to build a house and chapel for the indigenous population, he saw his plans blocked by the ill-will of the governor, who initially seemed to approve of the idea. This change in Tomé de Souza’s enthusiasm is blamed on Satan, who features in Nóbrega’s text just like any other character: “This could not be hidden from Satan,” says the priest, “for, the governor having said to me that it appeared well to him that we enter, once he knew that we were taking a chapel and singers, and that we would be building a house, he hindered us by all means.”²⁴² The devil also interfered when Nóbrega sent a brother into the sertão who knew how to speak the indigenous language. “We have ascertained that the demon desires to kill him along the way,” wrote Father Pero Correia from São Vicente. This was why he had caused “two sticks thirty to forty palms long and thick as a leg” to fall on the brother’s head and had also afflicted upon him “a most great pain in the eyes.”²⁴³ In Sao Paulo de Piratininga, Pero Correia also said the priests had “many combats with the devil, and still have now.” This struggle manifested itself through the death of many members of indigenous groups. But God got the better in the end: “We held nine processions to the nine choruses of angels against all of hell, and the deaths soon ceased.”²⁴⁴ When they headed toward Laguna, among the Carijó people, the Jesuits again found themselves contending with infernal ambushes. They embarked in a small canoe, taking with them a trunk of ornaments, a cask of wine, and a gradin with relics, which belonged to Father Jerônimo Rodrigues. “As the devil so greatly felt our coming into the land, which for so many years he had possessed, he ordered, God Our Lord so permitting, that the volume be so greatly increased . . . and thus, the canoe overturning, all sank to the bottom . . . from whence with great labor everything was removed, wet and damaged.”245

On the opposite side, Luther said in his Large Catechism of 1529: “[The devil] constantly seeks our life, and wreaks his anger whenever he can afflict our bodies with misfortune and harm. Hence it comes that he often breaks men’s necks or drives them to insanity, drowns some, and incites many to commit suicide, and to many other terrible calamities.”²⁴⁶ In the Early Modern age, the ecclesiastical discourse of both Catholics and Protestants was heavily imbued with the notion that the devil was a most nefarious force working for disorder. In a kind of foreshadowing of the “scandalous affairs” of seventeenth-century France, it was predicted that the struggle between God and the devil would reach into the convents. The decree handed down by the twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent determined, among other things, that “nuns will go to confession and communion at least once a month, so that armed with this salutary safeguard they may boldly overcome all attacks by the devil.”²⁴⁷ It was thus in the early days of the Early Modern age and not during the Middles Ages that hell and its inhabitants invaded the Western imagination. Demonological science reached its apogee around 1600. At that time, the demonologist Martín del Río affirmed that the human struggle against the devil would be perennial: “perpetual war, right from the birth of the world.”²⁴⁸

In the colony, the Jesuits found autochthonous populations that also viewed the devil as an active, powerful force, in the form of multitudes of spirits wandering around about the dark forests and in sinister places. Ultimately the priests further demonized these indigenous notions and eventually—as paradoxical as it may seem—became demonizing agents of everyday life in the colonial world.²⁴⁹ The indigenous peoples were so terrified by the idea of the devil that some actually died in pure fright of hell.²⁵⁰ Or, like the indigenous people mentioned in a letter by boys at the Jesuit school in Bahia in 1552, they became terrified and alarmed at the possibility that the bad would die and go “to hell to burn with the devils.”²⁵¹ Frightened of evil spirits, they nevertheless integrated them into a corpus of beliefs where they held a specific meaning, making it possible to circumvent their negative aspects and coexist with them. The Jesuits and their greatly demonized European notions rendered the idea of evil unbearable. For these Europeans, the Otherness of indigenous culture was diabolical, as mentioned in the last chapter, and the colony was the land where hosts of Satan’s servants evolved. Consequently, the Europeans always considered indigenous and African religions to be “satanic aberrations.”²⁵²

Within the universe of popular culture and syncretic religiosity, two possibilities existed: either God came out on top or the devil did. Hence the popular Brazilian saying about lighting one candle for God and another for the devil.253 On the occasion of Heitor Furtado de Mendonça’s Visitation to Bahia, the topic of discussion was which of the two forces was more powerful. Leonor Velha complained about her husband, saying he was bad; her friend Catarina da Fonte comforted her by saying that “God is mightier than the devil, and that she should not be vexed; and [Leonor] responded that God was not mightier than the devil, that never would her said husband be good, nor would he mend his ways.” Catarina da Fonte reprimanded her: “God was mightier than the devil, she should not talk like that.” Recalcitrant, Leonor Velha retorted that “yes, she would talk like that, giving as examples other men of sinful living that never mended their ways.”²⁵⁴ The devil had the power to trouble married life, inciting discord and misunderstanding. His strength lent him credibility and, once again, placed him in opposition to God, his chief adversary. Pero de Albuquerque, fazendeiro in Pernambuco and member of one of the captaincy’s chief families, did not believe in God and the Virgin, “adding further that he ere believed in all the devils.” “I do not believe in God, nor in the Virgin Mary, if such be the truth I ere believe in all the devils,” he had the habit of saying when coming across something amazing.²⁵⁵ Tired of waiting at the door of Nossa Senhora de Ilhéus Church, where a large crowd had gathered one day for mass, André Gavião said that “if one would have to wait so long at the door of Paradise, he ere wished to go to hell.”²⁵⁶ At every moment in daily life, the possibility of choice presented itself. There were those who made such choices: suffering from a discharge all over his foot, Lázaro Aranha, mentioned earlier, said that “God is the devil.”²⁵⁷ Eager to play cards, the New Christian Pero Fernandes had asked them to let him into the game “for the love of God”; later, after he had played three or four hands, he said to the onlookers: “Let me play, for the love of the devil.”²⁵⁸

People’s attitudes toward the devil might be passive. For example, adherence by process of elimination, which was the case of the sugar master Gaspar Roiz, who suffered from constant pain: “Considering that God did not have the power to remove his pain from him, let the devils come and take him.”²⁵⁹ Adherence might also be involuntary. Residing on São Francisco Street, in Salvador, Henrique Barbas once found his wife, Antonia de Barros, “behind a door or a crate quite suffocated by the devils that were suffocating her.”²⁶⁰ Irrespective of what Salvador da Maia might really have believed, the collective imagination seemed to associate this accused New Christian with Satan. He was denounced for his Judaizing practices, which included the eating of lamb during Holy Week. His accusers did not forget to describe his physical defects: as in medieval representations of the Prince of Darkness, Salvador da Maia was “lame in one foot.”²⁶¹ Pero Fernandes, the New Christian who asked that he be allowed to play cards, was likewise stigmatized: he too was “crippled in his feet.”262 Convicted of adulterating crated sugar with sand, the merchant André Fernandes, beardless, his face marked with slash scars, wanted to lead the good life in this world: “in the next, may all the devils take me,” he acquiesced resignedly.²⁶³

But adherence could also come about intentionally. In Itaparica, it was rumored that Gaspar Pacheco had given himself to the devils.²⁶⁴ In Ceregipe o Novo, Captain Tomé da Rocha had arrested the Portuguese vagabond soldier Pedro de Mendonça by order of the Holy Inquisition; word among the soldiers was that the jailing was “because he had delivered himself to the devils.” His action must have worked, because ten days later Pedro de Mendonça had already been released.²⁶⁵ Whenever some annoyance occurred, Simão Pires Tavares—whose anticlericalism was highlighted earlier in these pages—had the habit of “offering himself to the devils, saying that he offers himself to the devils so that they will take him, and this with wrath.”²⁶⁶ Five years before the First Visitation, the seaman Manuel Faleiro despaired of his poverty: “Being at home, in anger and wrath, not having food to give his children, who asked him for something to eat, he said that he gave himself to the devils.”²⁶⁷ He perhaps hoped his fortune would improve under the new order. Remembered at moments of misfortune, the devil was also evoked at moments of leisure. A scribe in the city of Bahia, Antonio Guedes sparked envy with his sleights of hand. Asked by someone to teach him “how to perform the sleights that he did, he replied that it would be necessary to give a buttock to the devil.”²⁶⁸

Rare indeed, perhaps even a singular instance, was the attitude of superiority over the devil adopted by Lázaro Aranha, mentioned earlier. When he played, he often called on the devils to deal him a particular card. When the carpenter João Brás asked him why he did so, “he replied that he called upon them because they were his dogs.”²⁶⁹ Until the fifteenth century, the devil had served humans, with varying degrees of subjugation. In this sense, Lázaro Aranha’s prepotency in treating the devils like dogs is still medieval. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the situation changed radically, with the devil going from servant to master.²⁷⁰ Although the opposite may at first seem to be the case, attitudes of subjugation to the devil are therefore early modern. Active postures differ somewhat from passive ones, with adhesion to the pact being more transparent in the latter cases. Yet both contain the implicit idea that it is the devil who subjugates and who deals the cards. Lázaro Aranha’s arrogance toward his dogs may be more markedly popular, reminiscent of a folkloric time when demons were personal, domestic. “In the popular fantasy,” Oronzo Giordano reminds us, “there were also good, happy, meddling devils, like the hobgoblins and gnomes of Germanic mythology, always eager to jest and joke.”²⁷¹ In the instance of passive attitudes toward the devil, which is most often the case in the examples studied here, we hear the echo of demonological formulations, theorizations on pacts with demons, and the devil’s inordinate power over the earth.

It is too early to affirm that the discourse of high culture had made strong inroads into the popular universe, dictating norms; the intertwined weave of these discourses will be discussed later. For now, what should be noted is that despite their distance and isolation—and perhaps thanks to Jesuit influence—the colonial populations were not indifferent to the demon-craze that swept over Europe in the early days of the Early Modern age.

In a colony that often took on the features of hell, as seen in the last chapter, a variety of forces worked to demonize everyday life. As the process of colonization advanced, slavery perhaps became the most evident of these. Its vices were elements that dissolved the social formation and threw the people of the colony into the arms of Lucifer. In the early eighteenth century, Benci censured them vehemently. Veritable “Lucifers on earth” were the masters who closed their eyes to the errors of their slaves and, worse yet, incited them to error by forcing them to carry “illicit messages and embassies” that served their sinful needs.272 Many masters, “so as to maintain their slaves,” ignored or overlooked the sins they committed. Nuno Marques Pereira’s Pilgrim likewise reproved this attitude.²⁷³ As stated earlier, closing one’s eyes was very often a way of manipulating syncretism for ideological purposes. For the clerical culture, and for certain segments of the elites, syncretism was diabolical and as such should be combated.

Slavery thus swept masters and slaves into hell. By countenancing African heathens, indulging in lechery with black female slaves, and prostituting a good number of others, the masters turned themselves into Satan’s cohorts. The slaves, by maintaining their religious practices—so-called satanic aberrations—also collaborated with the enemy. The Christianizing efforts initiated by the Crown and by the missionaries sometimes seemed ready to crumble under the pressure of the contradictions inherent in colonization. The tendency was for syncretism to spread. “I do not know if [syncretism] passed from the slaves to freedmen, and to white men as well, for want of punishment,” the Pilgrim stated in horror.²⁷⁴ By dissimulating their slaves’ vices, the masters were in fact multiplying them. “Therefore, how may it now be permitted that they use such rites, and such indecent abuses, and with such thunderous noises, that it would seem to us that the demon desires to proclaim his triumph to the sound of these infernal instruments, with the end of demonstrating to us how he has achieved victory over the lands, wherein the true God has raised his Cross at the price of as many Laborers as have introduced to this new world the true Faith of the Holy Gospel?”²⁷⁵

Daily life in the colony at times seemed irreversibly demonized. A clear vision of hell was sketched within the popular mentality. The Compêndio narrativo do peregrino da América, which compiled countless popular traditions in vogue during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, established the image of one of these possible hells—one similar to the hell that was envisioned by Europeans in their own imagination and that high culture incorporated into demonology beginning in the early Middle Ages. What Nuno Marques Pereira describes is a “terrible place,” where “one continually sees and hears flashes of lightning and rumblings and crashes of thunder, and many other torments as well, which here are found congregated together, this being the saddest and most frightening place one can imagine.” Hell was the basest, most infamous place that could exist, located in the middle of the earth, uniting in one spot all the filth produced by putrefaction: “serpents, scorpions, snakes, lizards, toads, and all sort of poisonous creatures”—the same ones, in fact, that the detractors of America had described when they spoke of the New World.276 As if this were not enough, there was also the “most horrible and alarming sight” of countless demons and the damned, squeezed and crowded together in such a way that the “authors, and most competent mathematicians,” used their imaginations to pack so many beings into a space that was no greater than two or three leagues “in width and circuit.”²⁷⁷ In addition to painting this panorama, the Pilgrim of the book’s title is also author of the first literary description of a calundu, that is, a colonial session of Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, which he likewise portrays with diabolical features. It is as if there were the European hell, the African hell, and the hell of syncretism.

Daily life in the colony was thus permeated by demons. In contrast, the economic universe was often associated with divine elements, as if the colony were really a place of passage, a proper place for purging sins committed here or in the metropolis. Portugal was the final destination, the place of desired return after penance had been paid, as well as the destination of colonial production.

This divinization of the economic universe may at first seem a dubious notion. If, however, the analysis is taken further, it is not surprising to find that the colony’s output—with sugar at the top—at times gained superhuman features, both because of the value gained on the foreign market and also because of the tremendous efforts expended in its production. On the long road from deforestation to tilling of the soil to planting and harvesting to the milling, purging, and packing of the cane, human lives were lost. In a land of slave labor, which had consumed considerable capital investments, the prime goal was to produce much and maximize profits. For the colonists, planters, merchants, and constellation of individuals who made their living off colonial trade, both in Brazil and in the metropolis, the product of slave labor was more important than the producers’ human attributes—or even their very lives. Even clerics like Benci and Antonil theorized about how best to punish a slave without hampering the productive process.²⁷⁸

Pero de Carvalhais believed there were no friars in heaven but rather lavradores. The clerics lived like pigs while the farmers lived like angels.²⁷⁹ “He was thoroughly examined by the Board, who sought to find in the Defendant doubts about the value and validity of members of the clergy.”²⁸⁰ The tribunal had obviously stumbled down the wrong path. Pero de Carvalhais was doing no more than depicting reality as he saw it in original fashion. In the colony, not only were farmers worth much more than clerics, but if they were rich, they would live a much better life.

The New Christian Pero Nunes, a renter on an engenho real [water-powered sugar mill], revealed an extremely curious aspect of the slave-master mentality when, “seeing the sugar that had been separated to tithe to God lying on the ground, brown and raw, he said, for this is your God, in this way you treat him, calling sugar God.”281 His words are of double significance. First, they suggest that the Christians did a bad job of worshipping their God: they tithed but in point of fact lacked a more refined spirituality; their spirituality was instead rough and crude like brown sugar, dark and full of impurities. Second, these rough men’s true God was the sugar they produced: in addition to serving as currency in the religious economics of the barter system—for sugar pays tithes—it was so important in their lives that it could be compared only to God.

Lázaro Aranha, introduced earlier, scandalized those present when he said that “in this world there existed an immortal thing, which was the coal lying beneath the earth”²⁸²—the same coal that fed the furnaces and purified the sugar. Along with reflecting his disbelief in, and even ridicule of, the Catholic dogma of everlasting life, the blasphemer’s words highlighted the importance of a product of the land that, in the context of European peasant culture, could display a magical significance inherited from secular pagan traditions. Human lives would pass, and coal would continue underground, always ready to be dug up in order to generate wealth. It was immortal like a god.

Sugar master and New Christian Fernão Roiz was known for saying that “he would stick Our Lady in a sugar mold.”²⁸³ Father Brás Lourenço attributed nearly identical words to a sugar master from São Vicente: “[As] a sugar master [was] placing the sugar in molds, he said that if Our Lady were there he would likewise place her into that mold.”²⁸⁴ It is hard to know whether this was the same person and same episode or if the repetition of the story testifies to an idea common in the colony at the close of the sixteenth century. The historian Gonçalves Salvador stressed blasphemer Fernão Roiz’s Jewish roots,²⁸⁵ reading into the episode nothing more than disrespect for the mother of Jesus. As in previous cases, however, there is a second significance, one that divinizes the economic universe: the place where the precious product was molded was sacred; it could even shelter Our Lady.

The most extraordinary document attesting to this divinization of the economic universe is chapter 12 of the second book of Cultura e opulência do Brasil, entitled “Do que padece o açúcar desde o seu nascimento na cana até sair do Brasil” [Concerning what sugar suffers from its birth in the form of cane till leaving Brazil]. In this section, Antonil describes a saga that can be understood as a grand metaphor for the suffering of slaves in colonial lands. In comparing the path taken by sugar (from planting to marketing) to the Passion and Death of Jesus, Antonil realizes the divinization of the economic universe through images. The narrative seeks to capture not just the Calvary of the blacks but also the tendency of the colonial social formation to dehumanize that which is human and to dignify, through sacralization, that which lies within the realm of the productive world’s economic values.

The life led by sugar is “filled with such and so many martyrdoms that those that the tyrants invented have no advantage over them.”286 Following untold suffering and offenses that are described in minute detail—and are always endured—sugar leaves “purgatory and imprisonment, as white as it is innocent.”²⁸⁷ A new cycle of suffering then begins, from crating through marketing. As in a Holy War, there is also the danger of falling into the hands of infidels and the risk of “being taken to Algeria among Moors” (pirates or Protestant competitors who might intercept the ships carrying sugar to Portugal?).²⁸⁸ Everything is endured with courage and resignation, the sugar “always sweet and vanquisher of bitter hardships.” At last come the “great profits for the plantation owners and sugar farmers that pursued it and for the merchants that purchased it and carried it to ports, banished away, and profits even much greater for the Royal Treasury at the customhouses.”²⁸⁹ Christian-like, through its Calvary, sugar ultimately brought good to its tormentors; like Jesus, it died on the cross to save those who had tortured it.²⁹⁰

The Cuban historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals, advisor on historical matters for the movie La Santa Cena, put the following words into the mouth of a sugar master: “In this world, everything that is white had to have been black one day.” This is a superb allusion to slavery, to engenhos, and to the Catholic religion that provided the ideological framework for the early modern colonial system. The formulations of Luso-Brazilian colonists, together with the superb metaphor created by Antonil, seem to reiterate this felicitous statement, insinuating that in the colonial hell it is through production—is not sugar itself purged?—that one can achieve divine grace.

In this divinization of the economic universe, references to sugar predominate. But there is also a curious passage where the praises of manioc are sung. A tailor and domestic servant, Gaspar Coelho, went to mass and saw that there were not enough wafers for the crowd of faithful. He then suggested that tapioca cakes be distributed among them, as if they were hosts. This way of solving the problem fit such uniquely colonial molds that the Visitor needed clarification to understand it: “and asked by the visitor what thing be tapioca cakes, he replied that they are some cakes that in this land are made from bread flour, that it is a manioc root from which the flour is made, from which said tapioca cakes are made, which are like wafers, which is the common provision in this land of breads.”²⁹¹

Even if this was a mockery, the episode reveals two complementary tendencies: it assigns a holy character to a staple of the land—thereby divinizing the economic universe—and at the same time humanizes and secularizes the sacrament, imprinting a nearly lay character on religion. In making a communion wafer, why would “a little flour from Portugal”²⁹² be any better than tapioca, a local product, cheaper and better suited to the population’s habits and needs? In the end, how could that markedly elitist and formalist metropolitan religion penetrate deep into the colonists’ unpredictable, chaotic daily life, impregnated with syncretic rites?

A yawning gap separated the religious stiffness of the watchful Portuguese Inquisition and the Catholicism lived by the colonists every day, and mutual misunderstandings were a constant in their discourses. Nevertheless, when it came to talking about purgatory, tacheiros [workers who tended large sugar pots], sugar masters, sailors, slaves, merchants, carpenters, soldiers, and plantation owners were doing nothing more than discussing a question that had similarly gnawed at Luther decades earlier. This mutual incomprehension thus could not be blamed on incommunicability between different cultural levels.

In the colony’s everyday life, heaven and hell, sacred and profane, primitive and European magical practices approached each other at one moment only to pull violently apart at another. In the fluid, transitory reality of colonial life, however, the blurring of distinctions was more characteristic than dichotomy. When dichotomies did appear, they were almost always encouraged by missionary ideology and by the action of the nascent machinery of power, striving to separate the different parts with a view to seizing upon heresies. What almost always rose to the top was religious syncretism.

As we saw in the excerpt from Peregrino, syncretism was one of the faces of hell. African and indigenous beliefs were constantly demonized by elite thought, incapable of comprehending colonial religiosity in its ever more multifaceted expressions. As the colonizing process advanced, definitions would become clearer cut. The complexity of a social formation based on both slavery and Christianity pulled the colony toward infernalized images, where Satan had the role of confirming God. Hell was the social tensions; the poisoning of masters; atabaque drums beating in the slave quarters and dark alleyways of colonial towns; quilombos of runaway slaves haunting the forests, trails, and wild lands; the catimbós of northeast Brazil that called forth ancestral spirits; magical healing and divinations. On the other hand, the colony’s identification with the metropolis likewise pulled it toward the paradisiacal pole: one could reach heaven by reciting the creed of Portugal and invading European markets with sugar, tobacco, gold, diamonds.

Between one pole and the other, the colony affirmed its purging role. It was a purgatory where the penalties and evils inherent in social tensions were cleansed and where salvation was sought by divinizing the productive universe.

This divinization of the productive universe may seem less significant here than the demonization of social relations. As the former topic has never been explored, these few pages suffer the consequences of this silence. I nevertheless hope that they will serve as a point of departure for further studies and that more light will soon be shed on the fascinating being-and-not-being of the colonial world, “a land rich in diamonds and impieties.”293