CHAPTER 3

Material Survival

And then let pleasure and distress

Disappointment and success

Succeed each other as they will;

Man cannot act if he is standing still.

—Goethe, Faust

Divination

Broadly disseminated throughout the Christian West, the practice of divination was often associated with the devil. As in so many other areas, St. Thomas Aquinas played an important role in this demonization. For him, attempting to foretell the future and going “beyond what can be foreseen by human reason or what has been revealed by God” was a grave sin, indicative of a diabolic compact: “The sinful nature of this act is deduced from the fact that it is only possible through the intervention of a demon.”¹ From this point on, even civil law would view divination as an offense incited by Satan. In Portugal, statute 3 of the Philippine Ordinances, which addresses the subject of sorcerers, also deals with the question of soothsaying: hydromancy, crystallomancy, looking into mirrors or metal images, scapulimancy using sheep, and divination using heads of animals or bodies of the dead. The punishment for these acts was severe: the condemned might be flogged with a hemp rope and paraded by a crier through the streets of the town where the offense occurred; ordered to pay three mil-réis to the accuser; and, curiously, be banished to Brazil.²

Local diviners were joined by those from the metropolis, individuals who, like the farmer Álvaro Martins—arrested by the Inquisition in 1557 at the age of eighty—responded to their communities’ very real needs through divination. The diviner Álvaro Martins used the stars to look for lost objects, money, animals, and slaves.³

Soothsayers employed countless forms of sortilege during colonial times. One of the most common involved a sieve and shears or lady’s slipper or—an apparent variation of the first—a basket. Its use is recorded as early as the sixteenth century, in Pernambuco, attributed to the mulata Felícia Tourinho, daughter of a cleric. Felícia was arrested for hitting an honorable woman in church. When Domingas Jorge lodged an accusation against the mulata before the Visitation Board, she was implicitly stigmatized: after all, she was a bastard daughter, an offender punished by law, and dishonest, unlike the woman she assaulted. As will be seen many times in this chapter, the stigmatization of women—and more rarely of men—played a major role in the collective construction of a stereotype of sorcery.

While under arrest, the mulata Felícia had once taken a pair of scissors and stuck them into a shoe. Then, “with both forefingers set beneath the rings of the shears, she raised the slipper into the air,” saying: “[D]isheveledhaired devil, big-eared devil, shaggy devil, thou shalt tell me if a certain man go down such path . . . ; if this be true, thou shalt make this thing move, if this be not true, thou shalt not make this thing move.” The scissors and slipper then turned round, tilting to one side. It was later learned that the man had indeed gone to the place in question.4

Antonia Maria, born in Beja, had left Portugal in 1713 after being convicted by the Holy Office. Accused of sorcery, she was banished to Angola for three years. For reasons known only to God, she ended up in Brazil, where she lived on Laranjeiras Street in Recife, Pernambuco. Francisco Xavier de Viveiros was her neighbor, their residences sharing a common wall. Noticing one day that Francisco seemed sad, the sorceress asked him what the matter was. We know the details from the denunciation Francisco Xavier lodged against his neighbor on July 21, 1718. Francisco replied that he was downhearted because he wanted the bishop to admit him to the clergy, but the man was taking his time processing the request. “Do not be troubled, for you shall be a cleric by this bishop,” his neighbor Antonia Maria said to ease his mind. The future priest was intrigued. Some days later, “the said Antonia Maria came to the house of him, the Witness, and said: ‘Come now, and see whether you shall be a cleric: give me four vinténs, a glazed earthen basin, some water, a paper from a notebook, a sieve, and a shears.’” Antonia poured the water into the basin then dropped in the coin (which sank) and the sheet of paper, which did not sink and remained dry on top. She took the sieve, stuck the two points of the open shears into its rim, took hold of one side, and gave the other to Francisco Xavier to hold. She then told him to repeat everything she said, negating her words. And she recited: “By St. Peter, and by St. Paul, by the door of St. Iago, Francisco Xavier shall be a cleric.” The sieve circled round, while the scissors did not move. When Francisco Xavier negated her words, the whole contraption stood still. He was ordained a priest shortly thereafter, firmly convinced the basket ritual had depended upon the existence of a pact.⁵

In Maranhão, around 1750, Margarida Borges used the basket ritual to solve crimes of thievery, as in the case of a shirt stolen by the black woman Mariquita. No reference is made to shears, but otherwise the procedure is the same: one person utters the prayer while the other negates it. The difference is that a series of names is pronounced. When the name of the pilferer is stated, the basket inexplicably turns of its own accord. The prayer is also a variation in Margarida’s case: “By St. Peter, by St. Paul, and by the hole of St. Iago and by the invested Priest and by the consecrated host, A, B, or C hath stolen the thing lost.”6

A number of cases involving divination by basket and shears were recorded in the state of Grão-Pará. The black slave Maria Francisca, who lived with her master on Formosa Street in Belém, made recourse to the basket and shears method to divine the theft of some coins. She murmured: “Come St. Pete [São Pita], come St. Paul, to the door of St. Iago,” and then she named the suspects.⁷ Manuel Pacheco Madureira used the same sortilege and same prayer to find out who had stolen one of his shirts; he had learned the technique from an indigenous woman.⁸ It was likewise from a native Brazilian—this one by the name of Quitéria—that the slave Marçal learned how to use the shears and basket ritual, accompanied by a prayer to St. Peter, St. Paul, and the doors of St. Iago, in order to discover who had committed a theft.⁹

The popularity that this practice achieved among indigenous peoples and the mestizo population in northern Brazil offers a fine illustration of the syncretization of magical practices in the colony, a process that advanced along with colonization and intensified during the eighteenth century. An unknowing reader familiar only with the cases in Pará might even think this divination with a basket, shears, and sieve had indigenous roots, but the method was also employed in eighteenth-century Lisbon. Domingas Maria used the sieve ritual, but with a slightly different prayer: “By St. Peter and by St. Paul, by the crucified Jesus, by Barabbas, Satan, and Caiaphas, and by as many as they are, by Dona Maria Padilha and all her company, tell me, sieve, if the said two people have been captured or not, collected the money, or done the business they were about, that I shall give thee one vintém of bread and another of cheese and greatly shall I esteem thee in my heart.”¹⁰ Even more curious is the fact that the sieve and shears ritual was known in sixteenth-century England, where it was often employed to solve robberies and recover stolen goods.¹¹

The case of the lady’s slipper—sortilege performed by Felícia Tourinho—and the case in Portugal have something in common: they are the only situations where divination is used in combination with a medieval-flavored conjuration of demons, accentuating its traces of ritual magic. The other episodes, such as those in England cited by Thomas, have kinship with the popular European tradition that sees magic strength in Christian prayer; they are therefore more influenced by folklorized religion than by ritual magic. In any case, the deeper meanings of the sortilege and the words pronounced have been lost in the night of time.

A divination similar to the sieve or basket and scissors was performed using a key and an Our Lady Psalter.¹² During the Second Visitation, it was ascertained that at least three women resorted to this method in the city of Bahia: Ana Coelha, a carpenter’s wife; Madalena de França, a seaman’s wife; and Maria da Penhosa, who confessed having learned the practice from the other two. As with the shears and sieve, this divination was a means of locating stolen objects. An Our Lady Psalter was opened and a padlock key placed inside, with the larger part sticking out. After closing the book, the key was grasped with one finger and the other end given to a young boy to hold. While the book hung suspended in mid-air, the suspects would be named one by one until the book turned, thereby indicating the thief. As in the case mentioned above, words were also pronounced: “I conjure thee on the part of God and the Virgin Mary by the virtue of this book to tell me who has taken the stolen object.”13 At the root of this practice perhaps lay the sortes sanctorum of the late Middle Ages, where one’s fortune was read or the future foretold by reading the Gospel. People thought this was a method of consulting God directly, since the clergy taught them that the Gospel held His words and His will. At first leery about such activities, St. Augustine ultimately tolerated them, for they were preferable to worse divinatory magical practices. He did not reprove the exercise itself; “what displeased him was that the words of the Holy Scriptures were used to orient matters and trivialities of daily life.”¹⁴ Indeed, these exercises were meant to resolve everyday troubles. This divination by book and key was well known throughout the Middles Ages, persisted into the Early Modern age, and, according to Keith Thomas, was still current in many rural areas even in the nineteenth century.¹⁵ The sixteenth-century English version differed slightly from Brazilian colonial practice. The Bible was usually used, and “the names of possible suspects [were] written on pieces of paper and inserted one after another in the hollow end of the key. When the paper bearing the name of the thief was put in, the book would ‘wag’ and fall out of the fingers of those who held it.”¹⁶

There were simpler divinations, which relied solely on prayers. The prayer of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Iago might be used alone to discover the author of a theft, as transpired with Captain-Major Gonçalo de Castro and his slave Luís in the sertão region of Caracu [sic], in Pernambuco’s hinterlands.¹⁷ Before her exile to Brazil, Antonia Maria, mentioned earlier, would pay devotion to Our Lady at the foot of the cross “to bring to knowledge and divine future contingencies.” She would kneel down before the image with her hands raised and with

the rosary in them, she would light three white waxen candles, all three being alike, the middle one in honor of Our Lady, the one to the right in honor of Our Lord, and the one to the left in honor of the Evangelist, and, they being lighted, she would beseech Mary thus: “God save thee, Virgin of Piety, thou art sanctuary of the Most Holy Trinity, as this be true, Lady, attend to my need, Thou, Virgin, know it well, right it for Thou canst. I beseech thee, Virgin, to show me: if such shall be so, stay in thy candle, and if it shall not be so, remain in that of the Evangelist.” And she, the Defendant [Antonia], believed that if the two wee candles then went out by themselves, and that of Our Lady remained lighted, she would secure that which she desired.18

As with the shears and basket, the prayers used to attain concrete objectives had more to do with folklorized religion than with ritual magic or sorcery. They bore a certain flavor of the belief in the specialization of saints, ridiculed by Luther and commented on in the previous chapter. People in the Christian West resorted to such methods quite naturally and only learned to fear them when the machinery of power identified them as offenses against the faith. Within the colonial context, the Inquisition played this role.

Many of the divinations used water as a ritual recourse. Such was the case with one anonymous diviner in Recife around 1728. He was approached by Faustino de Abreu, a pardo [person of black and white blood] who lived in the parish of Vargem and who believed that a woman by the name of Marciana had been bewitched. When consulted, the diviner revealed the authors of the sorcery in a basin full of water, where they appeared so clearly that Faustino had no problems recognizing them.¹⁹ Cota Marouta was also a diviner in Recife, where she lived on Trincheiras Street. A fellow from the sertão by the name of Manuel Machado went to her for advice because he had been robbed and hoped to recover his money. Manuel suspected a man called Cosme de Souza. Cota Marouta carried out the divination right in the suspect’s home. She called “three young maidens to bring to knowledge the evildoers inside a glass of water, and in the said glass this woman placed some straw rushes, all of them split.” She prayed and blessed the glass, but, according to her accuser, nothing happened.²⁰ The divination by egg and water on St. John’s Eve, still current in Brazil, was already known to colonists in the northern part of the country in the mid-eighteenth century. Isabel Maria da Silva learned it from another woman, of unknown name, and used it a number of times. She would fill a glass “with water from the night of the said saint” and toss the yolk and white of an egg in it, forming a cross and praying a Paternoster and an Ave to St. John. She asked the saint to show her what was going to happen to the person she named. This was how Isabel Maria foretold that a student she knew was going to be ordained a cleric.²¹

Looking for treasures or possessing the talent of divining where they were hidden was considered a serious offense. In 1403, in a law against sorcery, Dom João I banned the search for gold, silver, or any other valuables by means of rods, mirrors, or other devices. It was believed that such activities were privy only to sorcerers, aided by the devil’s agents.²² Portuguese tailors invoked devils to unearth buried treasure. One of them even stored eighteen sacks of coins given to him by Satan in his house.²³ Treasure-hunting was a very common paradiabolical practice in Europe. There was no banking system at that time, and “the possibility of coming across hidden treasure was by no means a chimera,” as Keith Thomas has pointed out.²⁴ People turned to the aid of a “specialist” in the matter. Engaged in such hunts because they claimed to possess special talents for finding valuables, these diviners argued that the treasures, which had generally been buried during times of disturbance and unrest, were guarded by demons that had to be neutralized through conjuration.25

In the colony, conjuring demons to find buried treasure does not seem to have been a common practice. Under the colonial system, wealth leaves the colony and is accumulated in the metropolis. In the popular imagination this is where treasures may thus be found. But one interesting episode did take place in Brazil. The Mina slave Domingos Álvares had lived for many years in Rio de Janeiro, where he became a famous curandeiro [healer]. He apparently was the head of a kind of terreiro [religious sanctum], of what would now be known as Candomblé. Arrested by the Inquisition, Domingos appeared in an auto-da-fé on June 24, 1744, where he was sentenced to exile in Castro Marim, a couto located in Algarve. There he resumed his illicit life. But thanks to an impressive ability to accommodate, he added another activity to his practice as a curandeiro: he began hunting for treasures that belonged to or were guarded by Moors, which appears to have been a deep-rooted tradition in Algarve.²⁶ Domingos accounted for his divinatory talents by saying he “knew what was inside the earth and within a creature’s body.” He would order excavations and declare what would be found: sludge, stones, sandy earth, and so on. As the digging progressed, he would throw some powders into the hole. The process was enveloped in a whole ritual: he wrapped himself up in a sheet, lit a candle, and murmured some unintelligible words; “sometimes he would lie down like a dead man, at other times he would stand still without moving so that he seemed of marble.” His assistants would see blue lights and hear the throwing of stones and pounding of hooves as if of small beasts. The black man said that one of the female Moors keeping guard over the hidden treasure wanted her spell removed so she could return to her native land. Another Moorish guard was half-man, half-serpent, and needed a kiss to remove his bewitchment. But Domingos was reluctant to kiss him because he found the monster revolting and was afraid of the Moor’s embrace, “for he might squeeze most hard.”²⁷

Since Domingos Álvares could see inside bodies and the earth, the Holy Office again imposed penance on him, and he appeared at another auto-da-fé, this time on October 20, 1749. The image of the bewitched Moor who longed to return to her homeland was perhaps a projection of Domingos’s own story of exile and captivity, and his magical cures were a kind of recovery of Africa. The Moor-serpent reveals Domingos’s capacity to merge and further develop traditions. It also makes it evident how monstrosity and allegedly illicit sexual desires are always found together—hence his great fear of the Moor’s tight embrace and the salvational kiss.

Certain practices of African origin remained quite unchanged throughout the colonial period. In Bahia during the First Visitation, André Boçcal, a slave from Guinea, was accused of divination using a moving pot or bowl. He would place the object on the ground, step away from it, and “move his fingers about, and with his mouth say some words in his tongue in a soft voice.” Soon “the said pot or bowl would gain a fury to move from there.” Anyone who touched it could feel that it contained a force “as if someone were throwing it.” André would ask it things—for example, the whereabouts of a slave who had escaped from Gaspar Pereira. The pot moved toward the island of Maré, and the runaway slave was found.28 Years later, in 1618, an old black man belonging to São Francisco Monastery priests performed divinations using bowls of water or wine, once more finding runaway slaves. His masters—the priests—seemed to have no complaints about his practices.²⁹ Around the same time, people in the city of Bahia would call upon a young black boy by the name of Bartolomeu. He was only twelve but had already earned fame for his ability to divine by speaking “in his chest a kind of whistling.”³⁰ In the eighteenth century, the black man José synthesized all of these techniques, in Conceição do Mato Dentro, in Minas. He performed divinations by placing a plate of water on the ground and burying a sharp knife in the earth next to it. He would ask questions, “which a small voice, like the squeaking of a bat, answered from next to the plate,” providing clarification about the maladies and chronic ailments “that each had.”³¹

Healing

Africans, native Brazilians, and mestizos were the great curandeiros of colonial Brazil. Their knowledge of herbs and ritual procedures unique to their cultural universe coupled with the legacy of European folk medicine. There were some European curandeiros, but a much smaller number. Yet, as in Europe, the number of male curandeiros was much greater—an exception, in fact, to most magical practices, performed chiefly by women.³²

Magical healing was of great importance in indigenous cultures. The successful treatment of disease stood as proof of the talents of Tupinamba sorcerers.³³ Brazil’s earliest chroniclers made allusion—often in an admonishing tone—to African skill in healing through herbal infusion. Recognizing the slaves’ special gifts in this field, Brandônio narrates an episode involving one of his female slaves. Poisoned by a black man, she survived thanks only to a serum administered by the very fellow himself—a bushy herb that the herbalist kept a careful secret.³⁴

In traditional European society, sickness was also seen as something supernatural that could be combated only by resorting to similar means. There were no satisfactory explanations for sudden deaths (nowadays attributed to heart trouble) or infectious diseases (since there was as yet no germ theory). “Lacking any natural explanation, men turned to supernatural ones.”³⁵ This is how people still thought in seventeenth-century France, where it was believed the gift of healing was hereditary. Although official medicine deemed them charlatans, empirics figured importantly as well; and even during the century of Enlightenment, practical books abounded.36 In England, a man like Francis Bacon “thought that ‘empirics and old women’ were ‘more felicitous many times in their cures than learned physicians.’”³⁷ Life expectancy in England was extremely low in the third quarter of the seventeenth century: 29.6 years. Medicine “began at home,” and “every housewife had her repertoire of private remedies.”³⁸

Using supernatural means to heal thus brought these popular therapeutics closer to the realm of sorcery.³⁹ Illnesses, sunstroke, and discomforts like toothaches were cured, but so too were spells. As evident in the episode cited by Brandônio, curandeiros had a paradoxical role to play: identified with the sorcerer, they were often requested to undo spells, and their actions could consequently appear ambivalent. In Minas, in the second half of the eighteenth century, there was a black male sorcerer who was capable of healing but also of praying some words that would leave a person disabled and unfit for work.⁴⁰ In sixteenth-century Bahia, there was talk of a woman known as Mineira and a man named Velho Quatro-Olhos [“Old Four Eyes”], who used herbs to heal through the devil’s art. The positive aspect of their work—the cure—outweighed the negative aspect—recourse to the diabolic.⁴¹ Also in Minas during the gold century, the Episcopal Visit reprimanded Captain Manuel de Oliveira da Silva for procuring the services of a curandeiro to heal one of his slaves: “he ought not again expect to obtain the health of his ill slaves through such remedies.”⁴²

In colonial Brazil, curandeiros could restore lost harmony and bring the sick back to health, but they could also unleash maleficent magic. Rarely was there a functional division like that existing in Gaul at the close of the sixteenth century, where female witches unleashed evil and sorceresses did away with it.⁴³

A few cases are suggestive of an incipient specialization. The black widower Jorge Ferreira could divine when poison had been administered and made herbal physics to discover the nature of the illness caused by the poisoning.⁴⁴ Antonio Mendes, a freed black, also employed physics to cure the bewitched.⁴⁵ Perhaps there were differences between curandeiros who healed maladies, curandeiros who cured those under spells, and spell-casters themselves (actual sorceresses), while the era’s repressive machinery led to a homogenization of these activities, accounting for the form in which they have reached us. The question remains unanswered.

Blowing out air and suction played a major role in curative magic as well as in provoking maladies and maleficia. Claude d’Abbeville points to the Tupinambá belief in the powers of both. Pajés “cause the people to believe that it suffices to blow on the ill part so as to heal it.” Sick Indians sought remedy from pajés, who would “immediately . . . begin to blow on the ill part, sucking and spitting out the evil and introducing the cure.”⁴⁶ Like the Tupinamba, sorcerers of the Apopocuva and Chipaia groups also had the habit of blowing hard on their patients with the intent of breathing magic force into them.47 Perhaps among the indigenous peoples this technique could also have the same negative potential attributed to it in Europe; in France, people believed that human breath could be deadly and could bewitch.⁴⁸ But all available records on the colony refer only to the positive effects of this technique. Suction was also a common technique among Africans and was employed in Portugal as well—here again revealing magical practices common both to tribal societies and to preindustrial European societies, which rules out the possibility of drawing a clear distinction between them. Leonor Francisca, dubbed Sarabanda, healed the sick in Lisbon by sucking on their toes and head; she cured children by “sucking on their fontanel, navel, and the soles of their feet.”⁴⁹ She did just the opposite of many witches who sucked on children to kill them, as will be seen later. Yet she was still labeled a sorceress and appeared in an auto-da-fé, where she abjured de levi (appropriate in the case of lesser offenses). Two centuries before Sarabanda, a heathen sorcerer in the Bahian sertão cured cold feet by sucking on them.⁵⁰

In the mid-eighteenth century, in Sabará, the calunduzeira Luzia Pinta ordered the sick to kneel down before her and would then breathe on them and sniff them to discover what ailed them.⁵¹ She was black and from Angola. Thirty years earlier, likewise in Minas, in the parish of Nossa Senhora de Nazaré do Inficcionado, a black male slave belonging to Bernardo Pereira Brasil paid a high price for his work with magical cures. He removed bones and drogas from his patients’ bodies by sucking them out. The Episcopal Visit believed that in so doing “he, the aforementioned, worked by virtue of the devil.” The church officials ruled that his master should give him sixty lashings in the main street of the arraial [settlement].⁵² In northern Brazil, in the state of Grão-Pará, the slave José, born on the Mina coast, had cured the fazendeiro André Fernandes of the agues from which he suffered. He took hold of one of André’s hands “and, sucking hard and vehemently with his mouth on said hand,” he gave the patient some relief on the spot; André enjoyed full recovery shortly thereafter. José had also cured the attorney José Januário da Silva of his headaches by devising a kind of herbal smokehouse and directing the smoke toward the patient’s head. He also blew on him, uttered some strange words, and sucked his neck, spewing out a white matter resembling phlegm.⁵³

Breath and suction could remove a spell from a victim’s body, causing it to be expelled orally, rectally, or vaginally. When called in to heal someone who had been bewitched, the curandeiro also undertook a kind of prospecting expedition on the grounds around the bewitched’s residence, where he or she would find various maleficia that were blamed for the patient’s ailments and maladies. Sucking, blowing, vomiting, defecating, and unearthing things were thus procedures guided by a common principle: they were meant to expel or neutralize a type of negative, destructive energy responsible for maladies and misfortune.

Around 1718 the stonemason Domingos de Almeida Lobato was a victim of Antonia Maria, the sorceress from Beja who had been banished to Pernambuco, where she had resumed her diabolic activities. Finding himself in the grips of a nonstop attack of the hiccups, the mason blamed it on the ill intent of Antonia, hired by a woman who wanted to marry Domingos despite his lack of interest. He first went to Antonia herself to have her undo the spell. She went to his house, picked some sprigs of herbs in the yard, gathered up traces of his footprint, mixed it all in a pot, and added some sugarcane rum. Antonia put the sprigs in one by one while she said: “Satan—Barabbas—Caiaphas—Lame Devil—your wife.” She lit five pieces of green twine, smoked out the little pot, and invoked the devils again, calling them her soldiers of valor and ordering them to find a remedy for the ailment in the ocean waves. Domingos was supposed to fumigate himself with the pot on the coming Tuesday and Friday and then toss its contents in front of the door of the woman whose love was unrequited. He did everything Antonia told him to, as well as using a ritual that involved a napkin and some coins. The hiccups worsened. Giving up on Antonia, he decided to try a black healer by the name of Domingos João. The latter first put some powder in the palm of the bewitched man’s hand and told him to snuff it through his mouth and nose. The healer also told him to bury at his threshold a special root given to him for this purpose. He next had the afflicted man imbibe “a drink that appeared to be the juice of chopped herbs, and right at the same moment he spewed from his mouth in vomit a creature in the form of a horse, . . . dry from the middle part down.” When the creature finished drying, the mason would die. Most extraordinary of all, just after the animal had been spit out, “a chicken suddenly flew over his [the healer’s] wife . . . , who was next to the door, and descending to the basin wherein the creature was, it carried it off in its beak, the said chicken no longer being seen, nor found, and the healer said that it had come to fetch it so that its body would not turn around backward.” The mason’s throat was very sore for some days afterward, but the hiccups went away, and “from then on he was well.”54

This remarkable account shows how ingrained syncretic magical practices were in early-eighteenth-century colonial life. Recourse was made to curandeiros and sorceresses to resolve matters of love and to cure ailments. The solutions encountered ranged from invocatory magic of a more notably European tone—where demons were still the medieval-flavored soldiers of valor—to the curandeirismo common among African peoples, also including extremely old folk traditions like the practice of lifting the footprint of the one who would benefit from the magic forces. If his health had not been restored after expelling the creature, it could be expected that the mason Domingos would have turned to church exorcisms, as so many other colonists did in such cases.

In 1615 the black man Mateus, Pedraluz Aranha’s slave, was very sick. Antonio da Costa then called upon a black man owned by Inês de Barros, said to be a sorcerer. “The Negro came, and healed the other sick Negro and on the same day made him well, with a cupping glass taking a clump of hairs from the place where it pained him, which he said was the spell that had caused the said Negro to be sick.”55 Like blood, sperm, and urine, hair had curative properties.⁵⁶ But because these things constituted vital energy (hair and nails especially, since they continue to grow after a person’s death), they could be used for either positive or negative purposes.⁵⁷ A substantial number of spells meant to cause maleficia and misfortune involved the use of hair. So nothing would be more natural than for the bewitched to expel hair when the spell was properly broken.

At the time he lived in Brazil, Domingos Álvares—the one who hunted for enchanted treasures in Algarve—was in great demand because of his skill in herbal cures. He became an herbalist thanks to his knowledge of the art brought from his homeland, the Mina coast. He spent much time in the woods in search of the right herbs and preferred those still moist with dew. He used them to make potions, ointments, and brews. When brought panicstricken before the Inquisition Tribunal, he said his healing was a result of herbal properties and not of any contribution from the devil. He had once given a patient a mixture of sugarcane rum and a powder made from ground roots and herbs, and he had blessed the brew. That night the sick person coughed and “spewed in vomit from his mouth some hair, and from his via prepóstera [rectum] some small bones that appeared to be of chickens, and hawk’s talons.” Domingos Álvares, digger of treasures, also dug up gourds to help his clients; they would prove to contain hairs, bones, and sorceries. Once when the gourds were uncovered they had caused the healer to fall on the ground as if dead—as if he were a kind of lightning rod for the maleficent forces emanating from the gourd. In Algarve, Domingos continued to detect maleficia. In the doorway to Antonio Viegas’s house, he found a doll stuck with thirty-nine pins, human and dog hair, sulfur, bones from the dead, snakeskin, shards of glass, and kernels of corn. He handed out small cloth bags he himself sewed; when a female client of his opened one, she discovered it was filled with hair.

Causing maleficia by burying spells was a common procedure in colonial Brazil. Some cases recorded in northern Brazil perhaps best illustrate the specialization mentioned earlier, whereby the sorcerer who cast a spell was distinguished from the sorcerer who counteracted it. This chapter will make frequent reference to an indigenous woman named Sabina, who was a kind of counter-sorceress often called upon to detect maleficent magic. It was said, for example, that she had unearthed from Jacinto de Carvalho’s threshold “the claw of a tapir covered with black wax, having inside it a wee piece of white stone.” The witness who narrates the episode expresses a belief similar to that held by Domingos Álvares regarding the extreme virulence of maleficent forces concentrated in buried spells; she did not even want to look at them, “for she had been told that when one Indian had touched such spells, his arm had fallen asleep and he had suffered from great headaches the entire day.”58 One of the authors of spells neutralized by Sabina was Hilário, of indigenous blood. She accused him of having buried a bundle of shellfish teeth and some fish bones beneath the hammock where Gregório Gervásio da Silva Mata usually slept, at his home in Porto Salvo (Calvo?). Sabina also blamed him for a maleficium involving a bone of unknown origin, inside of which there was “a root called tajá [a type of caladium], with which it is said that such sorcerers are accustomed to performing diabolical operations.” If these spells had not been detected in time but had remained “in the places where they were till taking effect,” Sabina said “it would inevitably happen that everyone in the place would die.” She ordered the spells thrown into the sea. With the community growing ever more suspicious of him, Hilário began moving from place to place, living with a series of small farmers. One of the witnesses who testified against him, an alferes de auxiliares [militia ensign], advised Gregório Gervásio, then sheltering Hilário at his farm, “that he not permit him in his home, nor even in his neighborhood, and that it would be better to send him to town, to the Most Illustrious and Most Excellent general, before he would perhaps bewitch everyone.”⁵⁹

At the time when Geraldo José de Abranches installed the Board of the Visitation to Grão-Pará, there were myriad cases of bewitched individuals who—like veritable wicked sisters of fairy tales—spewed countless beasts and filth from their mouths and other orifices. The black man José mentioned above, who specialized in healing through breath and suction, was once called in to see a black female slave who had taken ill. Even before he began treating her, she had been “spewing forth from her via da madre [vagina] diverse creatures and live vermin the color of bronze.” As soon as he stepped into the slave-master’s house, “seeing a creature that the said Negro woman had spewed out, he said that she still had more within her.” He began uttering unintelligible words, administered to the sick woman an herbal infusion he had prepared himself, and went into the yard to bury an ear of corn. In the end, the patient “hurled out a thing like a pouch or sack in the form of a bladder skin, wherein, after being rent, three live creatures could be seen: one resembling a small frog, another resembling a tiny alligator, and another resembling a small hairy lizard, and each of the three said creatures was of a different color.”⁶⁰

Denunciations against the Indian Sabina are filled with descriptions of strange creatures being regurgitated and of buried spells. In the 1750s the small farmer Manuel de Souza Novais sought the advice of this indigenous woman famed for discovering spells. His family was suffering from generalized maleficia; and he believed these were spells, because bundles of bizarre things would appear about the cacao trees. He sent for Sabina at the Acarã River where she lived. She had scarcely arrived at Manuel’s fazenda when she ordered them to dig on the stair landing, where they discovered “the head of a pit viper all withered, and solely of bones.”61 Her client paid with a cut of cloth.

Some time later, another small farmer, Domingos Rodrigues, asked Sabina to treat his sick wife. The curandeira said the malady had been brought on by the spells of a Tapuia who lived in the house, and Sabina called the woman to undo the harm. She ordered the accused to dig beneath the bed and in other places around the house, and from each of the holes she removed bundles containing bones, feathers, fish bones, and pierced lizards. The suspect eventually confessed that she had done it all with the help of the devil. Sabina also had the stricken woman use an herbal fumigator, which caused “diverse live creatures like small lizards and other vermin” to leave her body. Still not content, Sabina wet her hand in holy water and removed a lizard from the sick woman’s mouth. Finally, she advised the woman to seek the help of the church’s exorcists.⁶²

When the governor of Grão-Pará, João de Abreu Castelo Branco, once took ill, off went Sabina to the palace. She asked for a pointed knife and used it to jab holes in the mud wall plastered with lime, where she found a bundle containing small bones—spells against the previous governor, José da Serra, by then deceased. Sabina made a fumigator for Governor João de Abreu, rubbed his leg, and extracted from it three very soft live creatures the size of chickpeas.⁶³

To treat Raimundo José de Bitencourt, ajudante do terço dos auxiliaries [adjutant to a militia regiment], Sabina smoked a pipe and then puffed into the sick man’s eyes. She next stuck her tongue into his eyes, rolled it around, and vomited out creatures: one of them had a belly full of dead offspring and looked rather like a fish. Saying it was for hygienic purposes, Sabina repeated the operation with her tongue, and each time she would spit filth from Raimundo’s eyes: ashes, sand, dead wasps.⁶⁴ In treating other patients, Sabina vomited angleworms, snails, rattlesnakes, and shrimp eyes.⁶⁵

Narrating a contemporary catimbó session, Francisco das Chagas Batista, folk poet from Paraíba, gives evidence that magical practices are a continuous, age-old part of Brazilian folk traditions:

    He put it in his pipe, lit up

    And began to puff,

    He fumigated the ill

    With the smoke he sucked . . .

    During the fumigation

    The sorcerer said:

    “Come, Urubatan, take

    This frog from his head

    And take this mewing beast

    From his belly.”⁶⁶

In the early seventeenth century, Abbeville witnessed members of the Tupinambá group in Maranhão sucking on diseased parts of the human body. “They at times hide pieces of sticks, iron, or bones, and after sucking on the diseased part, they show these objects to the victim, pretending to have removed them. Ofttimes they are cured, but thanks to their imagination or to superstition, thanks to diabolic arts,” the Capuchin said.67

Around the same time, the auto-da-fé in Logroño was delineating various aspects of the Spanish stereotype of witchcraft. According to what was said at that time, sorceresses would concoct diabolic ointments on the akelarre, or sabbat, under the demon’s supervision. The ingredients? Vermin, toads, snakes, geckos, lizards, slugs, snails, bones, and the brains of the dead.⁶⁸ So in mixing their potions, the witches used the same creatures that the bewitched colonists—white, black, indigenous, or mestizo—expelled from their mouths, rectums, vaginas, or even skin. Is this an archetypal coincidence or the superposition of various cultural traditions? It is hard to tell. What appears undeniable is that in the earliest years of the seventeenth century members of Europe’s cultured elite—like Abbeville and the Inquisitors at Logroño—shared similar views of the devil, while this understanding differed greatly from indigenous beliefs regarding evil spirits. It was then thought that indigenous curandeiros could remove evil spirits from the bodies of the possessed by sucking, but they did not yet extract the geckos, lizards, and vermin of 150 years later. It would be wise to remember that Catholic Europeans were the great demonizers of indigenous magical practices. Even if Geraldo José de Abranches, Heitor Furtado de Mendonça, Marcos de Noronha, or any other Holy Office dignitaries had not come to Brazil, the indigenous Sabina’s devil and the spells of the black men João, José, and so many others would remind us of practices in Logroño, in Loudun, in Lancashire, and in Val de Cavalinhos: they were part of life in the colonies.

Cures also entailed hard-to-define magical procedures, often semiritual in nature. In Maranhão, the slave João blended curandeirismo, divining, and ritual proscriptions. He was summoned to heal Catarina Machada, wife of a boatman, who had taken seriously ill. The black man prepared some shallow earthen basins with water, herbs, and a stone like those found on some fish heads, saying the devil would appear in them. He dripped a bit of this mixture into the eyes of those watching so they could better see the apparition. João mixed another basin, filling it with water and covering it with a large plate; he said “it was for the sick woman to drink of and heal the sores in her throat.” He twisted some rope out of white and black strands and used them to tie up the foot and head of the cot where Catarina Machado was lying; whoever touched this rope would drop dead. João swayed around the room with a gourd in his hand, murmured incomprehensible words in his native tongue, and shouted in Portuguese: “Come, devil, come, devil.” The sick woman’s relatives and friends were gathered around to share her final moments of life, accustomed as they were to what Philippe Ariès has called “domesticated death.”69 Children ran in and out, taking little note. One of them bumped against the ropes and immediately began shouting: “Here I have touched the ropes, and even so I did not drop over, nor did I die!”⁷⁰ Catarina died shortly thereafter.

Domingos Álvares, the disenchanter of Moors, cured a variety of diseases that not even surgeons could remedy: paralysis, coughs, cankers on the face. In the latter case, he administered powders, cleansings prepared of cooked herbs, and nettles with honey. He cured the stone malady, using the stone from the head of a fish called a xaréu. It was in Brazil that he had learned this practice, which reminds us of the fish stone João mixed into the basin water. In Álgarve Álvares continued to make successful recourse to it.⁷¹ For aches and pains, he prescribed unsalted sheep tallow; in cases of various other maladies, he rubbed his patients with a baby chick and a ten réis coin! He had learned how to cure sunstroke from whites in Brazil: he had the patient stay in the sun from eleven in the morning till noon, with a folded napkin on his or her head; a glass of water was placed upon it turned upside down, which soaked the napkin until absorbed. The procedure was to be repeated several days in a row until a marked recovery was noticed.

José Januário da Silva, a 40-year-old white man who worked as an attorney, came voluntarily before the Visitation Board to confess to a number of offenses, including his remedies “to remove the sun, a malady that produces headaches.” He would first take an open napkin and make the sign of the cross over it diagonally while he recited a Credo. He would then fold the napkin, place it over the mouth of a cupping glass filled with water, and put “it all on the sick person’s head, with the napkin next to the head and the bottom of the cupping glass up in the air, with the water inside.”⁷² José Januário would make two crosses over the bottom of the cupping glass, saying: “Sun and Moon, begone with the sign of the cross.” This was followed by Paternosters and Ave Marias in the name of the passion and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ and by crossing himself in the names of the members of the Blessed Trinity.⁷³ This model, more sophisticated, accompanied by prayers, must have been the basis for Domingos Álvares’s simplified version. What is most remarkable is that exactly the same remedy for sunstroke remains in use today, practiced by blacks and mestizos in Paraíba, where it is known as sol-na-cabeça [“sun on the head”].⁷⁴ If Domingos Álvares was correct when he stated that this technique was common among white settlers, here again we have a process of transmitting and syncretizing a practice down through the centuries: in today’s Paraíba, these rezadores [healers through prayer] are always practitioners of catimbó.

In Europe, toothaches commonly were cured by using a nail and invoking the name of God, something the church deemed a mortal sin.⁷⁵ But records of this practice in colonial times have more to do with a variation that combines the sacred and the occult. Flemish by birth but a resident of Bahia, João Poré had learned the procedure from some Italians in Madrid around 1610. The method consisted of “taking a new nail and touching the aching tooth with it, and also writing on the wall with it the name of Maccabeus, and if the said tooth is in the right part, by nailing the said nail to the first A of the said name, and if the said aching tooth is in the left part, by nailing it to the last A.”76

Common all around Europe, these magical cures through words reflected a longtime belief in the curative power of the medieval church. The procedure that Margaret Hunt confessed to before the Commissary of London in 1528 bears great resemblance to many of the methods we have seen so far: she would first pronounce the names of the afflicted persons; then she would kneel down and pray to the Most Holy Trinity and ask for protection from their enemies. The ill were to say five Paternosters, five Aves, and a Credo for nine consecutive nights, all in the name of the Holy Spirit.⁷⁷

In Brazil, this kind of remedy was used especially for quebranto, a weakness or illness caused by the evil eye; for evil eye per se; and for erysipelas. Cures for quebranto were in use all over the colony in the eighteenth century. In Minas, in the arraial of Tejuco, a parda by the name of Aldonça was famed for “curing quebrantos by means of words.”⁷⁸ In the north, José Januário, mentioned earlier, and the Indian Domingas Gomes da Ressurreição healed quebranto. José Januário defined the ailment as encompassing headaches, fever, and bodily weakness.⁷⁹ To combat it, he blessed the patient’s whole body with his index finger and thumb or with the cross on his rosary. While he made the sign of the cross, he would say: “So and so, with two it hath been given to thee, with three it shall be taken from thee. In the name of God and of the Virgin Mary.” He then said one Paternoster, one Ave, and a Gloria Patri in the name of the sacred passion and death of Jesus.⁸⁰ Domingas Gomes had learned the cure from her mistress, who could no longer practice it since she had received the sash of St. Francis (which did not keep her from teaching it to the slave!). Domingas would say: “Two evil eyes have given it to thee, with three thou shalt be cured.” The three eyes were an allusion to the members of the Most Holy Trinity. The prayers were the same, except for the Credo; honor was paid to souls in purgatory as well.⁸¹

José Januário and Domingas also remedied evil eye, but by recourse to different prayers. The native woman made signs of the cross over the sick person’s face, saying: “Jesus Christ hath marked thee, Jesus Christ hath created thee. Jesus Christ sayeth to thee, behold who hath looked at thee in evil.”⁸² Januário, who made signs of the cross as well, prayed: “St. Anne begot Mary. Mary begot Jesus Christ. St. Isabel begot St. John the Baptist. As certain as these words are, so shalt ye, so and so, be free of this evil or of this eye, by St. Peter, and by St. Paul, and by the crucified Jesus.”⁸³ Domingas also had a prayer against erysipelas: she would take a knife and touch it against the affected place, making the sign of the cross and saying: “White rose, I cut thee. Black rose, I cut thee. Scarlet rose, I cut thee.” At each utterance, she would touch the person twice with the knife. And she would end: “I command thee for the sake of God and of the Virgin Mary, if thou be wildfire or erysipelas, do not afflict God’s creature.”84

In the Brazilian northeast, magic formulas for combating quebranto and evil eye still survive, many of them in verse form. As in colonial days, when the praying is done, oblation is made to the holy passion and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, concluding:

    Just as he was made free

    Safe and sound from his afflictions

    Thus ye believe, so and so,

    Ye shalt be made free of evil eye

    And of all hidden evils.⁸⁵

An amazing mixture of religiosity, occultism, magical cures, and, in a way, Satanism is found in the charges brought in the 1740s against Friar Luís de Nazaré, a Carmelite from Bahia. The friar was an exorcist in great demand for his ability to cure the sick, and he would often administer a physic. Once he ordered a pig bought in order to make this household remedy. He said the animal should be slaughtered and the quarters and the side pork sent to him so he could prepare a salve to rub into the invalid’s belly. The animal’s entrails should be cooked and placed at a crossroads late at night. The patient in question, who was a female slave, died. The priest told her masters to give away or sell the dead woman’s clothes and that no one should wear them. He probably believed they were impregnated with evil forces.⁸⁶

In the cities and countryside of Europe, priests had practically no choice but to double as doctors. One of their most sacred duties was to offer spiritual comfort to the sick, “helping them to profit of the illness and, in some cases, to have a good death.”⁸⁷ In fulfilling the role of curative priest and exorcist, Friar Luís found himself struggling with repressed desires—with a sexuality that exploded violently and destructively because it was illegitimate and guilt-ridden. Yet he was no poor soul brutalized by the rigid, hypocritical morals of his time; when it came to women—particularly those of lower social status—he took full advantage of his prerogatives as an exorcising priest, as a man of the cloth, someone relatively well educated in a colony of illiterates.

Hundreds of denunciations document his favorite habit. When summoned to see someone who had taken ill, Friar Luís would state that the only road back to good health was through the administration of certain cleansings and fumigations. One of these episodes was witnessed by Feliciana Pereira da Cruz, a black crioula who would later denounce the priest before the Holy Office’s commissary. Tomásia, a female slave who worked in the same house, fell sick around 1736. Her malady was “extraordinary and unknown” and failed to respond to medical treatment. Her masters then sent for Friar Luís de Nazaré and asked him to exorcise their slave. Arriving at their house, the priest took his stole, “read some books that contained the exorcisms,” and caused Tomásia to experience “some tremors and convulsive writhings twice.” He then ordered that the sickly woman be moved to another room, taking with him as assistants the subsequent denouncer, Felícia, and a parda named Tereza. He ordered them to “remove all of the ailing woman’s clothing, and rub her belly, having placed a charcoal in the mouth of each.” He then told them “each to cut the hair of their privy parts, and that they cut the hair on the invalid’s head.” Together they should make some fumigators for the stricken woman. Friar Luís returned the following day, repeated the exorcisms with his stole, and “placed himself over the same ill woman, telling the assistants to turn their faces the other way, and he engaged in an act of carnal copulation with the woman, and then another with the denouncer, and another with the aforesaid Tereza; both reviled him but were vanquished, and he aided by saying that the book with which he performed exorcisms so ordered, wheretofore they submitted to the said Priest, who told them they need have no scruples, for it was to cure the sick woman.”

If the slaves who were asked to lend their assistance rebelled against the priest’s efforts to force them into sexual relations, he would send them away and ask the mistress of the house to find him new assistants. Intimidated by the exorcist’s prestige, the slaves kept a pact of silence for a long time. The exorcist told all of them to “clean the seminal matter from said copulations with a piece of cloth and spread it on the sick woman’s belly, and that they ought, on every occasion, to wash their privy parts with water, and keep [the water] in a pot so they could continue to wash the said sick woman with it.” All this paraphernalia notwithstanding, the patient died.

In some cases Friar Luís actually forced the women to have sex with him. He confessed to having done this with a slave owned by one João Francisco, who lived in the sertão. The priest would make certain demands: in order to cure Father Francisco Quaresma, resident of the Recôncavo region, he required “a clean, tidy woman” who could help him do some cooking with ervas de São Caetano [a local herb]. His intentions were in fact otherwise.

Friar Luís perhaps believed in the curative power of sperm, like so many Europeans of his time.88 His skullduggery is undeniable, but it reveals a mysterious, syncretic world where magic and popular religiosity intersect, regardless of his status as a man of the cloth. In this sense he reminds us of the superstitious, “ignorant” priests mentioned in the previous chapter. Many years before charges were brought against him, Friar Luís was asked to exorcise a sick woman by the name of Dona Antonia de Lacerda, who had supposedly been hexed. One day when he was arriving at the patient’s home, the priest was approached by her unmarried sister, Dona Rosa, who said she suffered from great stomach pains during each monthly cycle. The priest called her to an inner room, told her to lie down, and, “ordering her to raise up her shirt, placed the scapular of his habit over her stomach, and prayed the Magnificat, whilst at the same time he had his hand holding the said scapular over her belly, and he was standing; once finished praying, putting aside the scapular, he ran his hand downward till touching her privy parts with the intent of having carnal copulation with her, which she resisted, and he then left her, but some time later he was unchaste with her several times through consummate voluptuousness, approaching his privy parts to those of the said Dona Rosa de Lacerda, although he never consummated carnal copulation with her, for she was reputed to be a maiden.”

Not all of the infirm took unkindly to the exorcist’s curative procedures. Married and seriously ill, Tereza, a slave of Colonel Custódio da Silva and resident in Bahia, copulated with Friar Luís. According to what he later confessed, it seemed she felt “the same way she could if she were well.”

On occasion, Friar Luís lent a bit more sophistication to his cleansings, adding to the water such local herbs as erva espinheira and erva de São Caetano; a mordant known as bolo-armênio; or charcoal. He was arrested by the Inquisition and sent to Lisbon in 1740. Terrified before the inquisitors, he made a total confession, lamenting and regretting his acts. He admitted to having greatly offended God, blinded by his lust, “in which he admitted having been more than excessive.” Like an ungrateful son, he blamed his sins on his condition as a resident of the colony: “in those parts of Brazil where he found himself,” lust enjoyed “great strength and dominion.” He disdained and humiliated the women with whom he had copulated: they had been credulous “because they were ignorant and simple women, and . . . in those lands of Brazil, they are easily misled by anything told to them, especially when these are people whom they hold in some regard.”89 The Inquisition read the verdict before the board, banished him to the most remote monastery of his province for five years, prohibited him from returning to the city of Bahia, and banned him forever from practicing exorcism—but allowed him to remain a priest.

Superstitious Blessings

Blessing animals had been a common practice in European societies since the late Middle Ages. Gregorius of Tours left a remarkable account of this custom: bulls, sheep, and pigs would be taken for ritual blessings, turning the basilica into something like a modern Texas ranch.⁹⁰ This widely employed practice was an effort to save animals essential to a subsistence economy.⁹¹ For a long time, these blessings were better tolerated by the church than were other types of ritual used for the same purpose. In 650 the Synod of Rouen banned charms that used breads and herbs hidden at crossroads for the purpose of protecting herds and flocks from epidemics.⁹² At the end of the Middle Ages and dawn of the Early Modern age, a greater intolerance began to appear. In 1499 Dom Manuel ordered that blessers, along with sorcerers, have the letter “F” (for feiticeiro) branded on both cheeks.93 The defamatory punishment of the iron was later suspended, as the Philippine Ordinances dealt less harshly with the offense of superstitious blessing. “We uphold that no one shall bless dogs, or beasts, nor other dumb animals, nor shall do it, but that he shall first obtain our permission, or that of the prelates, to so be allowed.”⁹⁴ Offenders were to receive the customary punishment: a flogging, a fine of one mil-réis paid to the accuser (or two mil-réis if the accuser was a squire or of higher rank), and banishment to Africa for men and to Castro Marim for women.

Colonial documents have little to say about these blessers. It is hard to tell whether there were indeed so few of them or whether the Inquisition, episcopal Inquiries, and other powers were so unconcerned about them. Since superstitious blessings are still practiced in Brazil today, the second hypothesis seems the more likely.⁹⁵

The First Visitation to Bahia investigated charges against João Roiz Palha, a 62-year-old farmer. In his confession, the man says that fifty-two years earlier, while still in Portugal, he had charmed cattle to make bugs fall off them. “He picked nine stones from the ground and uttered the following: I charm by the greater devil and by the smaller, and by all the others.” He repeated these words nine times, “and each time he finished saying them, he threw one of the said stones toward the place where the cattle were walking.” Three days later, all the bugs fell off. Asked his reasons for engaging in this practice, João Roiz Palha replied that “he did it because in those days he saw almost all shepherds of that land generally doing it.”⁹⁶ A long-standing tradition thus justified his action and lessened his guilt.

In the eighteenth century, in Nossa Senhora da Conceição dos Carijós, Minas, the overseer Francisco Martins spoke blessings on animals afflicted with maggots, and they became “rid of them and healthy.”⁹⁷ He therefore played a very useful role in the community, but the long arm of inquisitorial power did not have the habit of delving into the merits of social harmony. When the visitor Friar Domingos Luís da Silva traveled to the gold-mining region at the order of the bishop of Rio de Janeiro, Dom Friar Antonio de Guadalupe, he lodged a denunciation against Francisco Martins for his activities as a blesser.

The Overseas Universe

Divinations, magical cures, and superstitious blessings were an attempt to respond to the needs and events of daily life, making things a little easier at a time of frequent hardships. They were often used in combination, as part of an effort to ameliorate the impacts of one of the most important components of daily life, directly tied to the colonists’ subsistence-level living conditions: the overseas venture.

One-fifth and at times even one-fourth of Portugal’s population was engaged in the overseas effort. This meant an average of one or two people per family.98 At a time when little was known of technology, the sea easily incited fear. It was “the privileged dominion of Satan and of infernal forces.”⁹⁹ So despite their long tradition as a seafaring people, the Portuguese feared for their relatives far away, who were battling waves, whirlpools, typhoons, and giant Adamastors.

In Brittany, where sailors were also numerous, their wives resorted to sortilege to get them back: they cleaned the chapels near their towns and threw the dust into the air, hoping favorable winds would bring their husbands home as a result.¹⁰⁰

Many have argued that the Basque maritime endeavor accounts for the great upsurge in Basque sorcery in the early seventeenth century. Pierre De Lancre, the terrifying judge of Labourd, was perhaps one of the first to draw this link; for him, the beautiful Basque women who were left home alone by their fishermen husbands summer after summer insinuated “dangers of love and sortilege” with their eyes.¹⁰¹ But it was Dr. Martínez de Isasti who went further. In Relación que hizo el Doctor don lope de ysasti presbytero y beneficiado de leço . . . , Isasti constructs a brilliant explanation: “Women witches, because of the pact they have made with the Devil, can give news of what is happening at sea or at the ends of the earth; sometimes they are right and sometimes wrong in what they say, but there have been people who have known about events that occurred a hundred or five hundred leagues away the day after they happened, and who have been right. . . . And this is their chief motive for becoming witches, to get news of their husbands and sons who are on their way to the Indies, Newfoundland, or Norway.”¹⁰² If so many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people in fact believed the sea to be the dominion of Satan, nothing could be more natural than sorceresses’ knowing its secrets better than anyone else.¹⁰³ They learned these from the devils, which often dwelled on ships or in the ocean depths. The devil that helped the cafuza Maria Joana with spells and conjurations sometimes failed to appear because he was not on land but “on a ship that he could not leave.”¹⁰⁴ Maria Barbosa, parda, would summon an ocean demon in her prayers: “Great demon maritime, unto thee I deliver this pine.”¹⁰⁵

Trobriand Islanders believed that shipwrecked men fall helplessly into the hands of flying witches who go about at night with the intention of drowning sailors at sea.¹⁰⁶ In the Middle Ages, certain demons were specialized in sinking ships.¹⁰⁷ Colonial witches did not sink ships, but they could interfere with and change their courses. The infamous Butt-That-Burns [Arde-lhe-o-rabo], “for two cruzados that were given her, caused a ship going from Bahia to Portugal to make port, by the power of the Devil.”¹⁰⁸ Also in the sixteenth century, it was rumored in Bahia that the mulata Beatriz Correia, on her way to the Kingdom, “carried three snakes inside a jug on board ship and caused it to make port.”¹⁰⁹ Antonia Fernandes, known as Nóbrega, was the only woman accused of sorcery by the First Visitation to Bahia who actually came before the board to confess. She had been banished from Portugal for acting as procuress for her own daughter and was the widow of one João da Nóbrega, “a man who traveled as a provisions clerk on Lisbon armadas.” Because she was a single, middle-aged woman (she was fifty) suspected of being a procuress, the community began to view her much as a stereotyped witch. Among the numerous charges of sorcery lodged against her, one was that she had caused “a ship from India to make port.”110 Like the women De Lancre and Isasti spoke about and like those in Brittany who threw dust to control the direction of the winds, Nóbrega was married to a man who earned his livelihood in the struggle with the sea. In the eighteenth century, the overseas horizon still occupied the colonists’ imagination. At the calundu sessions held by Domingos Álvares when he resided in Rio de Janeiro, one of the possessed “responded by furnishing news about what had happened at sea with vessels, and in other lands most far away,” after which she fell dead on the ground.¹¹¹

Curiously enough, there is at least one case of two men who also altered ships’ courses. Around 1668 the Holy Office charged the young barber Manuel João with sorcery, and the episode appears to have caused quite a stir in Belém. One of the witnesses who testified against Manuel João was the merchant Salvador de Oliveira. He told the board that he had inquired as to whether the sorcerer had news about the caravel due in from Lisbon and that the accused “had replied that he had ascertained that the caravel was not lost and that within three days it would arrive in Maranhão.”¹¹² The slave Manuel da Piedade had been born in Bahia but later moved to Portugal, where he resided in a number of cities. While still living in the colony, a fisherman passed to him the prayer of the Just Judge, said to work well for escaping blows and dangers at sea. He was accused before the board of having performed a ceremony to keep a ship from making port, unleashing unfavorable winds by blowing and spitting.¹¹³

Daily life in the colony depended greatly on the fleets that arrived from Portugal bearing news, goods, loved ones, and on occasion unpleasant orders from the Holy Office and even mandates for arrest. It was important to know when a ship would arrive, when an awaited voyage to Lisbon would finally be made, whether the husband who sent no news had died in the struggles in India or had been swept away in the Atlantic waves.

The colonists missed Portugal, longed to go back, and sometimes had a vague feeling of inferiority because they lived in the colony, an inferior region of the planet. Projecting deep-seated desires, Dona Lianor claimed she could go from Bahia to the Kingdom in one night, which placed her under suspicion of sorcery.¹¹⁴ Put in jail and stigmatized as a diabolical sorceress, Boca Torta [“Twisted Mouth”] “said that she saw what was said and done in Lisbon.”¹¹⁵ More magnanimous, Isabel Maria de Oliveira boasted she could take people from Belém to Lisbon by means of some glass rings she had bought in the Terreiro do Paço, in Lisbon. On other occasions—perhaps to provoke the envy of acquaintances—Isabel Maria claimed she went to the Kingdom just to buy ribbons.116 She could supposedly transport people wherever they wished to go as well; all they had to do was embark in a canoe in the company of a black rooster, not utter the names of Jesus or Mary, and not carry any gold or silver coins. In her confession, she admitted to claiming she could make these secret trips as a joke.

The licentiate André Magro d’Oliveira was held at the Recife jail because people accused him of betraying the Spanish king and of serving Dom Antonio, prior of Crato. One day the mulata vendor Brígida Lopes—“considered and called a sorceress”—had gone up to the jail bars and muttered in his ear that he would be embarking for Portugal “and that at sea he would do battle with a thieves’ ship, and that he would not be captured but would reach the Kingdom, and there he would be released and would return to this Brazil, released and free.” The vendor knew this because she had performed “some spells and rituals with water and lead.” Everything turned out just as she predicted: the licentiate embarked, did battle at sea with an English ship, reached Lisbon, was released, and returned to Brazil. As a result, he had a “bad conceit of her” and denounced her to the Visitor in 1593.¹¹⁷

Maria Barbosa, a mulata with a dubious past, lived in Bahia in the early seventeenth century. It seems she had previously been banished to Angola for sorcery. Once in Brazil she became a repeat offender. Among the many denunciations against her, an old episode was brought to light. In a basin of water she had shown Manuel de Silveira, governor of Angola, the image of his wife, who lived in Portugal. She had also predicted how long his administration would last in Angola, “and so as she spoke, so did it happen.”¹¹⁸

The baker Maria de Escobar lived in Recife and was married to a ship’s pilot who was off in the area of India. She thought her husband had died and wanted to confirm this fact so she could remarry. She sought out Domingas Brandoa, known as a sorceress, “and requested that she do something to discover whether she was to marry the said man.” The witch asked her to maintain total secrecy. She took “a twig broom and dressed it in a shift and placed a towel on it like a woman, and with it thus decorated stood it against the wall, and in a loud voice, standing in the middle of the house, she began to speak, summoning Barabbas and naming other names and things.” Once the ceremony was over, she told the woman to go home, “for it was certain that she was to marry the man that she intended to marry.”¹¹⁹

Isabel Maria da Silva’s spells also served romantic purposes. She performed the St. John divination mentioned earlier, breaking the white and yolk of an egg in the shape of a cross inside a glass of water. Appearing before the board of the Visitor to Grão-Pará, she recounted the sortilege. A young maiden had sought her help to discover whether she “was to marry a mazombo [person born in Brazil of Portuguese parents] or a man who would come from the Kingdom.” When the sorceress employed her technique, “there appeared before her a ship that she clearly saw.” The girl married the man from Portugal. Another woman who asked for the same divination had different luck: no ship was spied in the glass, and she married a man from Brazil.120

In Lisbon, a terrified woman sought out the sorceress Domingas Maria. She was crying and said her husband had arrived in the fleet just in, and rumor had it he intended to kill her. She wanted to know if this was true. Moved by the woman’s tears, Domingas Maria performed the egg ritual using a urinal and also taught the woman countless prayers to be said at certain times and in certain places.¹²¹ The Portuguese sorceress Sister Maria do Rosário, who had gone by the secular name Maria Tereza Inácia, also intervened in favor of a suffering woman whose husband was far away. The woman complained about her spouse’s lengthy absence. After hearing out her complaints, the sorceress decided to help her. Together with some women friends and the demon, they went to India in the form of ravens, where they found the man lying sick in a bed. They placed him in a vessel and carried him home through the air, depositing him at the door of his house.¹²²

In one of her prayers, the aforementioned witch Dona Paula spoke of “faithful saints of the God of distant seas, of near seas.”¹²³ Tried by the Portuguese Inquisition in 1582, Ana Gómez confessed she had been initiated into the secrets of sorcery during the twelve years she spent living with a famous sorceress in a town in Portugal. She had later married, and her husband had gone to fight in Africa. Because she wanted news of her spouse, she invoked the devil using words in a book. Satan said her husband and his friends as well had perished in the African venture.¹²⁴

If God was worshipped in the near seas and overseas, Satan was too, reigning over ocean swells and whirlpools. At a time when the colonial system encompassed a large part of the globe, it is natural that dreams, longings, desires, and imaginary projections would reflect its importance, evincing the system’s impact on everyone’s daily life, personal relationships, and very survival. Furthermore, sorcerers circulated within the heart of the colonial system. Lists of autos-da-fé include a substantial number of sorceresses whose close relatives (husbands, fathers, or brothers) were sailors. When convicted of sorcery, a good share of these women were banished to Brazil, especially in the seventeenth century. Those accused of false beliefs were likewise exiled to the colony: beatas and visionaries. So documentation again demonstrates the curious role the colony played in the early modern European imagination: the place where sins were purged and where paradisiacal visions alternated with infernal ones.

The three lists below serve to illustrate the relationship between sorcery and the overseas world. The first enumerates sorceresses related to men engaged in the overseas endeavor; the second is a list of Portuguese sorcerers banished to Brazil; and the third is a roster of Portuguese beatas banished to Brazil.

Witchcraft and the Overseas Universe125

1. Maria da Conceição, widow of Manuel Fernandes, seaman: Auto-da-fé (AF) May 16, 1594.

2. Maria Vicente, married to Pedro Mendes, or Martins, sailor: AF October 11, 1637.

3. Maria Gorjoa, married to Pedro Roiz, seaman: AF December 15, 1647.

4. Joana da Silveira, daughter of Manuel Rodrigues, seaman: AF August 18, 1661.

5. Maria Jacome, married to Domingos Romeiro, seaman: AF September 17, 1662.

6. Monica Gomes, married to Antonio Delgado, pilot: AF September 17, 1662.

7. Francísca de Sá, widow of Manuel Galego de Oliveira: AF August 17, 1664.

8. Maria da Silva, married to João Esteves, sailor: AF August 17, 1664.

9. Luisa Pereira da Silva, married to Gaspar da Costa, pilot: AF March 31, 1669.

10. Luiza da Silva, widow of Marcos Lucas, sailor: AF August 8, 1683.

11. Maria da Conceição, widow of Manuel Fernandes, seaman: AF May 16, 1694.

12. Josefa Hilária, a.k.a. Hilária Correia, married to Manuel da Costa Palma, seaman: AF October 14, 1714.

13. Tereza Maria, known as Valente, married to Matias dos Santos, seaman: AF November 8, 1750.

14. Maria Tereza, known as Rata, married to Crispim dos Santos, sailor: AF September 24, 1752.

Portuguese Sorcerers Banished to Brazil¹²⁶

1. Catarina Barretta: AF December 10, 1573.

2. Suzana Jorge: AF April 5, 1620.

3. Jerônimo de Souza: AF January 10, 1621.

4. Ana Antonia: AF May 5, 1624.

5. Simão Ribeiro: AF May 5, 1624.

6. Maria Ortega: AF October 11, 1634.

7. Marta Nogueira: AF February 25, 1645.

8. Francisca Cota: AF December 15, 1647.

9. José de Jesus Maria: AF October 29, 1656.

10. Tomé João: AF December 15, 1658.

11. Amaro Fernandes: AF October 17, 1660.

12. Manuela de Jesus: AF September 17, 1662.

13. Francisca de Sá: AF August 17, 1664.

14. Luzia Maria: AF August 17, 1664.

15. Maria da Silva: AF August 17, 1664.

16. Caterina Crasbech: AF June 24, 1671.

17. Domingas da Silva: AF June 24, 1671.

18. Maria de Seixas: AF December 10, 1673.

19. Paula de Moura: AF December 10, 1673.

20. Úrsula Maria: AF December 10, 1673.

21. Maria Pinheira: AF May 10, 1682.

22. Maria de Souza: AF August 8, 1683.

23. Maria Simões: AF August 21, 1689.

24. Paulo Lourenço: AF September 21, 1689.

25. Domingas Fernandes: AF July 1, 1691.

26. Simão Luís, known as Castelhano: AF July 1, 1691.

27. Maria Manoel Beleza: AF June 14, 1699.

28. Manuel Pereira: AF September 12, 1706.

29. Manoel Rodrigues: AF November 18, 1708.

30. Isabel da Silva: AF June 21, 1711.

31. Antonio Nunes da Costa: AF May 17, 1716.

Portuguese Beatas Banished to Brazil127

1. Luiza de Jesus: AF December 15, 1647.

2. Maria Antunes: AF December 15, 1658.

3. Joana da Cruz: AF October 17, 1660.

4. Maria da Cruz: AF October 17, 1660.

5. Luíza or Luzia do Santo Antonio: AF October 19, 1704.

6. Felipa Lopes: AF June 30, 1709.