PART II

Sorcery, Magical Practices, and Daily Life

The sorceress who lights her embers in a clay pot will never tell us what she knows and what we know not.

—Rimbaud

When he described eighteenth-century Brazil as a “land rich in diamonds and impieties,” the novelist José Saramago was displaying an acute understanding of history. Representing the main portion of Portugal’s colonial empire in the 1700s, Brazil fed Dom João V’s megalomaniac delirium and the inquisitorial bonfires at one and the same time. In reality, gold bars and sacks full of diamonds were more numerous than impious colonists. But the colony’s stigmatized image as a producer and perpetuator of impieties still retained enough strength to emerge in the words of the Portuguese writer two centuries later—impieties that when purged yielded brilliant diamonds. As so often stated in this book, the colony-purgatory purified itself into white gems, the currency used to purchase metropolitan imports and serve as an ephemeral palliative for Portugal’s economic and social ills.

Diamonds and impieties went together. Both were plentiful in colonial lands, nesting together like two opposite yet complementary puzzle pieces. New Christians, sodomites, Calvinist heretics, sorcerers, wise men, and diviners can only be understood within their own context—that is, within the colonial universe in all its enormous complexity and as part of the colonists’ daily lives and varied aspirations, at times noble and legitimate, at times petty and mediocre.

The Portuguese reached Brazil at a time when Satan’s presence among men was especially notable. Monsters, animals, and diabolical beings, the colonists were also sorcerers, about whom the European imagination fashioned and developed a series of notions. Indigenous peoples from America, blacks from Africa, and whites from Europe blended together to produce extremely complex and original magical practices and sorcery.

Any study of this topic—sorcery and magic—will need to cope with multiple contexts and cultural heritages, at times circumventing these issues by returning to the always comfortable Indo-European source, as Julio Caro Baroja has done.1 This author differentiates between two types of maleficia: on the one hand, encantos (charms) and sortilegios (sortilege), which entail individual practices; and, on the other, brujería (witchcraft) proper, whose collective, associative characteristics are part of a true cult.² The English historian Norman Cohn adopts the same position: witchcraft is collective; magic, individual. But he also distinguishes sorcery (a technique that induces evil) from witchcraft (where the person is the source of the evil).³ Gustav Henningsen draws a fine distinction between witchcraze and witchcraft. The first is collective; boasts a broad, systematic mythological superstructure; is defined by a pact; and does not figure in regulating or maintaining society and therefore cannot be studied by anthropology. The second is individual; has a deficient, asystematic mythological superstructure; is not defined by a pact; and plays a regulatory, preserving role in society, meaning it can be the object of anthropological approaches.⁴

Constituting a milestone in the tendency to adopt an anthropological approach, Edward Evans-Pritchard’s study of the Azande also served as a point of departure in distinguishing between witchcraft and sorcery, which he sees as the difference between an imputed act that is impossible and an imputed act that is possible.⁵ Robert Rowland believes that only British witchcraft, quite distinctive within the European context, displays similarities with African witchcraft. Throughout Europe a uniformity of beliefs could be identified in various societies; in Africa, on the other hand, types of sorcery varied from one society to the next.⁶ French has only one term for the two practices, and Robert Mandrou defines it quite simply: sorcellerie exists when there is a contract or pact with the devil.⁷ Keith Thomas, for his part, sees no great utility in the anthropological distinction between witchcraft and sorcery. According to him, it may be said that the sorcerer relies on material objects while the witch does not. However, Thomas believes that in the English case there was an interpenetration and exchange between the two, making them part of the same type of offense.⁸

In this book, I am not concerned with drawing a fine distinction between witchcraft (bruxaria) and sorcery (feitiçaria): as far as I have ascertained both terms refer to identical practices, and here I draw support from Thomas. However, like Mandrou, I do differentiate between sorcery and magic, based on the existence of a pact or not. Consequently, I use the expressions sorcery and magical practices in distinct ways.

I must also point out that what interests me more than tracing the possible kinships of magical practices in the colony is ascertaining how and as a result of what context they came to intermix. Colonial sorcery, which was almost always individual and of little significance when compared to the madness of European witch-hunts, can shed light on life in the colony over the course of its three centuries. Sorcery was one of the ways that colonists found to adjust to their surroundings; sometimes it afforded protection from conflicts, while at others it responded to the unbearable tensions troubling their day-to-day lives. It helped the colonist bind a lover, kill off a rival, get rid of the envious, fight oppressors, build a cultural identity. Very often it solved problems related to the next world; at other times, it cast the colonist into a terrible abyss. But it was almost always a bridge to the supernatural.

During their earliest moments, still in the sixteenth century, the cultural kinship between sorcery and magical practices was nearly transparent. One can easily trace their European and indigenous features and more rarely their African ones (for the slave trade was just beginning). As time went by, these features began blurring and interpenetrating, and one sole body of syncretic beliefs began to emerge. It was then that uniquely colonial forms, unlike all others, were born.