CHAPTER 6

Communicating with the Supernatural

Come, come, sir, this excited flood

Of rhetoric’s quite out of place.

The merest scrap of paper meets the case.

And—for your signature, a drop of blood.

—Goethe, Faust

Dreams

In their dreams, the colonists would see heaven and sometimes purgatory. One morning when she was just twelve and still living in Angola, Luzia Pinta collapsed in the middle of her master’s yard as if dead, “remaining wholly immobile and out of her senses.” Knowing not how, she saw herself transported to the bank of a wide river, where an old woman asked where she intended to go. Luzia had no idea; she was just wandering aimlessly. She decided to take the old lady’s advice, namely, that she should “go very far away, because she would soon return.” Continuing along her path, Luzia met a rather young man who asked her the same questions as the old woman and received the same answers. Farther along she ran into another old woman, who once again repeated the question. Luzia expressed her desire to travel to the other side of the river. The old lady instructed her to take hold of one end of a very fine thread she was holding in her hand. As if by enchantment, the river dried up, and Luzia “was able to cross over, her feet dry and without any trouble.” She then found herself at a crossroads where there were two other old women. Two pathways opened before her, one filthy and the other very clean. Luzia’s first impulse was to choose the clean one, but the old women ordered her to take the other. Acquiescing, the slave girl arrived at a big house, “wherein she found an ancient old man with a long beard seated on a chair, and around him a number of young boys holding lighted candles.” Luzia instinctively went up to the old man and asked for his blessing; he ordered her to return. When she reached the stairs of this great house, she woke up, “by virtue of medicines and fumigations that her said master had ordered made.” Luzia went to speak to a cleric and narrated the events to him; he told her that the old man was God Our Lord, “which she thus came to understand.”¹

Luzia’s dream contains a number of archetypal elements found in countless fairy tales and mythical narratives: the river that must be crossed, the old women who give advice, the crossroads—where the most alluring path is not the one to be taken—and the long-bearded old man. First the river and then the soiled pathway (perhaps symbolizing how hard grace is and how attractive sin is) draw a clear separation between the world of the living and the world beyond.2 For the slave girl, the big house where she found Our Lord evoked the world of white men who owned both slaves and land. Luzia asked God for His blessing as she asked it of her omnipotent master, who wielded decision-making power over her life and her fate.³

Maria Joana, who knew so many prayers for procuring women for men and who held conjuration ceremonies at crossroads, felt remorse for engaging in these practices. One day, lying in a hammock, she fell asleep and dreamt about the open heavens, “the size of a great room.” Inside it, countless people dressed in colorful clothing were all joining “in a great party, to the sound of many and well-tuned instruments.” In the space where heaven was, all was blue and filled with lights. From the door, someone garbed in purple stared wordlessly at Maria Joana. When she awoke, the young woman decided to change her way of life. She traveled with her children into the countryside, where her daughter died. In despair, she wanted to see in dreams where her daughter had gone. “At one moment she would be convinced [her daughter] was in purgatory; at another, that she was wandering the earth, purging her sins.” Then one night Maria Joana dreamt she saw “the open heavens, very far off, and a great procession of persons dressed in white.” An intense brightness enveloped everything; at the doorway stood “someone dressed in theatrical style, who appeared to be an angel, with a burning torch in hand.” The angel ascended back up into the heavens, followed by the entire procession. The heavens closed, and Maria Joana woke up, convinced her daughter was among those in white. Four times in her dreams she saw an angel “with a burning torch in her hand walking about heaven, and among clouds, till hiding in a most thick one.”

Maria Joana always asked to see Christ or the Virgin in her dreams. Once “she had seen something like a staircase with steps, which began in the middle of the air and ascended up into heaven.” Near it stood a huge multitude of people dressed in white. A cleric appeared from inside heaven. Covered with many lights, he descended the steps, “and with such resplendence, that it almost prevented her from . . . being able to see him as she would like.” He always had his back to her; and when he reached the end of the stairs, everything disappeared. Maria Joana “believed that the cleric was Christ Our Lord.”⁴

Maria Joana was white and of Portuguese ancestry. Despite her penchant for syncretic prayers, she saw heaven through the eyes of Catholic Europe’s iconography. The stairs leading to heaven suggested an ascendant perspective; the theatrical clothing, overwhelming clarity, and thick clouds recall baroque representations of saints and miracles, vulgarized by painters typical of the Counter-Reformation, led by the Carraccis.5

But such celestial visions of a bearded God the Father, of dramatic torch-bearing seraphim, of intense blues and blinding lights notwithstanding, the colonists were also inclined to infernalized visions. The Inquisition censured both but left greater records of diabolical delusions and obsessions with witches.

Everyday life and the imagination often intermingled, their boundaries growing hazy. But even when there is a clear-cut distinction between the two, understanding these so-called delusions and fantasies is indispensable to understanding the Luso-Brazilian colony’s social formation.

Metamorphoses

In colonial days it was believed—as is true in many parts of rural Brazil even today—that certain people had the power to transform themselves into animals. This belief traced its roots both to European folk tradition, lost in time—when animals talked, when Beauties married Beasts—and to indigenous and African legends as well, when turtles, tortoises, monkeys, and oxen behaved like people.⁶ Two stock characters were constructed in antiquity: the striga and the ass-man. Apuleius wrote of ass-men, while strigae can be found in Ovid, sucking babies’ blood and shrieking harshly, a sort of combination of the owl and the vampire.⁷ St. Augustine said that men dreamtthat the devil transformed them into animals.⁸ In the Early Modern age, European demonology borrowed elements of metamorphosis from centuries-old folklore tradition. As early as 1428, sorcery trials in Sion, in the canton of Valais, and in Todi, Italy, made mention of metamorphosis, associating it with witches’ night-flights.⁹ Witches were thus able to transform themselves into animals: those who were burned at the stake during the 1559 Lisbon auto-da-fé attended sabbats transformed into dogs or cats by diabolic art.¹⁰ As further evidence that man and animals are archetypally linked in the realm of the divine, the Tupinambá of Brazil also believed that sorcerers could undergo metamorphoses and take on zoomorphic features.¹¹

At the time of the First Visitation to Bahia, two respectable ladies from Salvador had been found “in the form of ducks,” in Caminho de São Sebastião or Água dos Meninos. One of the women was Dona Mécia, wife of Francisco de Araújo. The episode became public knowledge. Isabel de Sandales was at her window talking with the priest of Vila Velha one day when Dona Mécia passed by on the street. “There goes Goody Duckling,” said the cleric.¹²

Around the same time it was rumored that André Gavião’s wife was a witch. Father Baltasar de Miranda, a member of the Society of Jesus, spied her trying to cross the threshold of a door whose latch was raised—but she failed, as often happened with witches. That same night a large cat came through the door, leaping over the candlestick and putting out the flame. Suddenly those in the house realized that a 6-day-old baby, brother to the Jesuit, had been “hexed, with his chin sucked.” The child died shortly thereafter. Transformed into a cat, the woman had been the perpetrator of the evil deed.13

Around 1550 Dona Lúcia de Mello had sheltered in her home in Bahia a poor woman married to a city jailer by the name of Godinho. Knowing her hostess was easily frightened, the woman said she would someday give her a real scare. One Saturday night, Dona Lúcia and her sister were busy sewing by candlelight when “a very big butterfly with very big eyes came along and flew round the candle so much that it went out, and the butterfly appeared no more.” Dona Lúcia was afraid and told Godinho’s wife of the incident, “[w]hereupon she answered that she herself had been the butterfly.” Dona Lúcia thought the woman was teasing her but shortly thereafter learned that the woman had been banished from the Kingdom for practicing sorcery. She took to hiding her children so the odd woman would not hex them.¹⁴

In the mid-eighteenth century, Luzia da Silva Soares was accused of metamorphosing into a butterfly and passing through a hole in a window to suck a child’s blood. She achieved this feat “as the witch that she was.”¹⁵

Like the bat in the Azande world, the butterfly seems to have served as a vehicle for the witch’s soul in the Brazilian colony.¹⁶ This particular insect was seen as a psychopomp in Europe as well. In writing of the horrible agonies that plague mystical life, St. Teresa said that “Satan tries to unhinge the person who, like a moth round a lamp, . . . approaches too close to the divine sun.”¹⁷ In the Auto de Guerreiros, still current in mid-twentieth-century Alagoas, the butterfly symbolized a sorceress, in the broadest sense of the word:

    I am a butterfly

    I’m lovely, a sorceress

    I move about the room

    Seeking whoever wants me.¹⁸

Even more than witches, the devil himself enjoyed metamorphosing. He did not always take an animal form. Sailing to Lisbon to face incarceration under the Inquisition, José Martins saw the devil in the guise of a large-headed, hairy mestizo with a big mouth, fat from the waist up, thin from the waist down, poking fun and laughing at him.¹⁹ The devil appeared to Manuel João, the young barber from Grão-Pará, in the form of a large talking beetle, which complained that the fellow had set fire to some haunted houses.²⁰ Antonia Maria spied the devil walking about her house in the form of a small black pig; in a menacing voice, it asked her for some kind of a sign. Antonia gave it a bit of blood, and the beast disappeared.²¹ For Luzia da Silva Soares, it appeared as a foul-smelling he-goat.²² In the fields of Massarelos, in Portugal, Manuel da Piedade saw the devil in the forms of a cat or dark-gray she-goat, a kid goat, and also a mulatto-like figure.²³ But the most diverse diabolic metamorphoses appear in the trial records of José Francisco Pereira. The demon appeared to him either as a white man or as a black man with the feet of a duck or hare; as a woman with her feet pointing backward; “in no wise seeming a person, in the figure of a black he-goat, a donkey, a lizard, a toad, a tortoise, a spotted cat,” and a hen with chicks.24 It was in the devil’s slippery nature to fool people and surprise them with the unexpected. When coming upon an animal, no one could be certain it was not the demon.

At times an animal, at times human, the devil almost always exhibited some feature that betrayed his infernal nature. The butterfly had big eyes uncommon to its kind; the woman’s feet were on backward; the man’s feet resembled a duck’s or a hare’s; Manuel da Piedade’s demon was mulatto-like, stigmatized by mestizo skin in a society of whites.²⁵ And what José Martins ran into at sea was an expression of discord in its strong upper limbs and scrawny lower ones. What appears in all these cases is a “fantastical accumulation of monstrous metamorphoses” that always produce a partial totality, a “sum of fragments that cannot be resolved into a whole.” In the most diverse cultures, the diabolic form has always been distinguished by deformity, plurality, and chaos. Satan—God’s monkey—fashioned monsters from the shreds of mutilated creatures.²⁶

“If no devils, no God,” it was stated in an English witchcraft trial in the last year of the sixteenth century.²⁷ The existence of the devil was the ultimate proof of the existence of God, as many seventeenth-century English thinkers rightfully asserted.²⁸ Historically, the devil has been linked to monotheism. The early Hebrews felt no need to personify the principle of evil, attributing it instead to the influence of rival deities. With the triumph of monotheism, however, it became “necessary to explain why there should be evil in the world if God was good. . . . The Devil thus helped to sustain the notion of an all-perfect divinity.”²⁹

The demon’s physical imperfection not only mirrored his inner, spiritual imperfection but also stood as a counterpoint to divine perfection. Out of collective dreams, his image was crystallized in the discourse of high culture. De Lancre envisioned him as large as a tree, sitting limbless in a huge chair, a kind of goat with many horns, one of which shone to light the sabbat.³⁰ Reginald Scot—author of the first book on sorcery written in England and also the inspiration for Macbeth’s witches—described the Fiend as “an ugly devil having horns on his head, fire in his mouth, and a tail in his breech, eyes like a basin, fangs like a dog, claws like a bear, a skin like a Niger and a voice roaring like a lion.”³¹

Animal Familiars

The devil’s repugnant, sometimes terrifying appearance did not keep people from frequently invoking and conjuring him up. Recourse to diabolical forces seems to have been quite common during the colonial period. Numerous women bragged that they talked with demons, invoked them, went about with them despite grave danger, and tamed tumultuous passions with their help: Arde-lhe-o-rabo [“Butt-That-Burns”] and Boca Torta [“Twisted Mouth”] in sixteenth-century Bahia; Domingas Brandoa and Felícia Tourinho in Pernambuco; and Apolinária Dias in Minas Gerais.32 Some commanded the devil, following the medieval tradition of conjuration. Timótea Nogueira “would make the demon come unto her presence whenever she desired.”³³ Isabel Maria, from Grão-Pará, has already been mentioned earlier; she summoned the devil by knocking thrice on a tree.³⁴ Rosa, a crioula from Congonhas do Campo, was more playful and had the habit of going to “dance with the devil at the foot of a cross at midnight.”³⁵

Satan could send demon familiars to assist sorceresses. Many took the form of an animal and sucked the sorceresses’ blood at certain spots, leaving indelible marks on their bodies.³⁶ They suckled at the witch’s breast, which she offered them in delight. In Logroño, Beltrana Fargue nursed her toad familiar, who sometimes “would stretch up and jump off the ground” to satisfy its voracious appetite.³⁷ In the portal of the Moissac cathedral, under Satan’s serene eye, a flaccid-breasted woman suckles two serpents, possibly familiars. Such representations persisted throughout the Middle Ages and can be found in Hieronymus Bosch as well.³⁸ Animal familiars were very common in England. In the days of Matthew Hopkins, a great many took the form of insects. “It thus became a common procedure in witch-detection to isolate the suspect and wait for some animal or insect to appear as proof of her guilt,” according to Thomas.³⁹ In colonial Brazil, in the cases listed above, many of the peculiar animals generally thought to be sorceresses in metamorphosed form may perhaps have been animal familiars. The cat that snuffed out the candlestick and hexed the baby, the butterfly that frightened Dona Lúcia with its big eyes, and the one that sucked the blood of the master’s little boy may have been familiars in the service of André Gavião’s wife, Godinho’s wife, or Luzia da Silva Soares.

At the time of the First Visitation, Nóbrega boasted she had a familiar called Antonim, while her daughter had another one in Portugal, named Baul.⁴⁰ Baul lived in a ring, and Antonim “was her private servant, and did all that she commanded him, and . . . Lucifer had given her for her protection.”⁴¹ It is not clear whether Antonim lived in a bottle, where Nóbrega kept “a thing that spoke and answered all that they desired to know, and on certain days of the week, care had to be taken to place onion and vinegar near the said glass, for that which was inside it was fond of such fare.”⁴² Perhaps the one who enjoyed well-seasoned food was a second familiar, heir to a long tradition. Guichard, the influential bishop of Troyes under Philip the Fair, had a familiar he held in great esteem; he kept him inside a flask and relied on him for valuable advice.⁴³ In 1326 or 1327 Pope John XXII issued the bull Super illius specula, directed against this practice, so common to ritual magic of the Middle Ages.⁴⁴ In 1612, some twenty years after Antonia had boasted of the advantages she and her daughter enjoyed thanks to the services of familiars, Evzen Gueguen’s Confessional reiterated the position taken by the pope three centuries earlier: “keeping the enemy in bottles or rings is a mortal sin.”45 Baul, who belonged to Nóbrega’s daughter, appears to be a corruption of Baal, the Canaanites’ sun-god, who in the Old Testament is portrayed as the most fearsome of all heathen gods. In ritual magic, he ruled over all other demons, who, like the angels, often had names derived from the Bible.⁴⁶

One curious case involved Leonor Martins, a single woman banished from the Kingdom for practicing sorcery. She lived on João Eanes Street, in Recife. One day Leonor summoned Madalena de Calvos, who resided in the home of Leonor’s sister, Isabel Martins; she told Madalena that out of friendship she wanted to share a secret. “She raised up her skirts and on her left flank and next to the bottom of her back she showed her, in her own flesh, a concavity pushing inward, a rounded hollow as large as a coin, and inside the hollow, on her very flesh, there was fixed in the middle, and sticking out, a figure with a face like a human, and this was her very flesh, and when she showed this, she said to her that she was carrying a familiar there.”⁴⁷ Like English sorceresses, Leonor bore on her body the unnatural mark that announced her ties to Satan, though it was more like a protuberance or cavity than the classic spot insensitive to pain.⁴⁸ Inside it dwelled the familiar, in symbiosis with the sorceress. Interestingly, the Azande believed witchcraft was an organic substance, and autopsies of witches showed it to be located in the intestines, precisely near the ilium.⁴⁹

In her home in Pernambuco, Antonia Maria had a doll that talked to her, possibly a familiar.⁵⁰ Isabel Maria and Dona Isabel, both living in Grão-Pará, projected the inner demons of slavery on their familiars. Isabel Maria had some little black boys who did everything she ordered. Dona Isabel would summon her little black devils with song; she called them xerimbabos [wild animals raised as pets], and they would eagerly come running from a corner of her house, speaking an incomprehensible language.⁵¹ The indigenous peoples wanted spirits that would serve them and help with daily chores as well. In Maranhão, a sorcerer claimed he had at his service “a most fine spirit, friend of God, not a bit cruel, which, to the contrary, seeks to do good: he eats with me, sleeps and walks ahead of me, very often flying in front of me; and when the time comes to take care of the planting, I do no more than mark the boundaries of my field with a stick, and the next day find everything done.”⁵²

Pacts

Familiars were a part of medieval magical tradition, of the days when—as seen in chapter 2—men ruled over demons, availing themselves of the services they could provide. Although pacts with the devil were a kind of semifeudal contract, they reflected a new, more early modern reality: under the aegis of Satanism and the emergence of an elite current in demonology, men who had previously subdued demons now became their servants. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there are growing numbers of references to such pacts, both written and verbal, often accompanied by sexual subjugation. As noted earlier, Mandrou contends that it is almost always a diabolic compact that defines a sorcerer as such. For Cohn as well, the conjurer of demons who wields power over them is not the Early Modern age sorcerer but rather the medieval magician.53

Compacts with the devil served to secure advantages, achieve success, guarantee political prestige—Oliver Cromwell is said to have made one on the eve of the battle of Worcester. Paradoxically, some English sorceresses justified these covenants based on their fear of hell.⁵⁴ In a context of tension and extreme inequality, like that of the colonial slave society, resorting to a pact with the devil was a way of resolving—at least in one’s imagination—the hardships inherent in daily life. Giving oneself carnally to the devil was in turn a way of realizing sexual fantasies and often of compensating for loneliness and the absence of concrete emotional relationships.

At the time of the First Visitation, a woman known as Borges was arranging diabolic contracts for clients, taking their blood for the devil. In 1593 she took a carpenter to the bridge in Vila de Olinda, tied up his hands and feet, and poked him in the legs with a needle “to take his blood to give to the devils, and she called for them.”⁵⁵ Nóbrega used blood from her finger to write a statement to the devils “in which she delivered herself unto them.” In exchange, they taught her “many things of sorcery.”⁵⁶ She tried to lure her acquaintances and bring new followers into the demonic sect. She said the devil always talked to her, in the guise of a man accompanied by many horsemen; he chose to appear as a human being precisely so he would not frighten his servants.⁵⁷ The famous Maria Gonçalves Cajada habitually spoke with devils and had dealings and slept with them as well. They helped her perform different types of spells, and in exchange she gave them her blood to drink. For this purpose she always had an open sore on her foot. “On certain days of the week, the devils would take a piece of flesh from that wound.”⁵⁸

In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, in Pernambuco, Antonia Maria accused her fellow witch Joana de Andrade of having persuaded her to make a compact with the devil, putting her blood on a scrap of paper. Antonia claimed she had succumbed to her friend’s pressure, because she argued that they were both poor and had nothing to their names.⁵⁹ Around the same time, a black man by the name of Luís paid the devil back for his covenant by murdering at the evil one’s orders.⁶⁰

In lieu of payment for the blood due upon signing a diabolic pact, off-spring could be given to the devil. In 1734, in the arraial of Tejuco, word had it that the prostitute Arcângela Pereira had given the devil a writing “so that he would help in her wantonness.” They called her “the devil’s wife,” and it was said “she had made a pact with the demon, to give him the children such as she bore, in this way to come by good fortune.” She had suffered certain health problems, and her own doctor, Henrique de Lemos, thought something supernatural might be happening to her. Time proved it was some sort of uterine trouble [folhetos uterinos]. A poor woman with nothing of her own, she still could never rid herself of the nickname, a constant reminder of her alleged supernatural consortium.61

Minas was also the setting of one of the most interesting cases of diabolic compact in colonial times. The key protagonist, Paulo Gil, was a pardo freedman who lived in the vicinity of Vila do Príncipe. Reputed to be a sorcerer, he was blamed for a number of deaths and suspected of having made a covenant with the devil. He had once taken a liking to a certain slave. When the young woman’s displeased mistress reproached him for it, he responded with threats. Both the slave and the mistress then fell seriously ill and only recovered thanks to church exorcisms. João Batista, a 20-year-old pardo freedman, has left us a detailed account of Paulo Gil’s witchcraft. The sorcerer asked João “if he wanted to have a mandinga pouch so that no one could bring him harm,” and then he offered him some ground-up altar stone in a brew. João Batista turned him down, but Paulo Gil kept insisting for another eight days. João finally gave in and accompanied the sorcerer on a nighttime excursion to a crossroads, where he stayed by himself while Paulo Gil disappeared for a bit. Paulo returned a few moments later, together with seven or eight black figures, all human in form. The sorcerer said: “Here are our friends.” Terrified, João Batista told Paulo he was going to leave for a moment but would be right back. He disappeared, seeking refuge at his house. The next time they ran into each other, Paulo Gil reprimanded him harshly and said it had been a big mistake for him to disappear. Paulo Gil again insisted on the mandinga pouch, but João Batista would not make up his mind. Some days later, João awoke feeling a great pain in his hips. Paulo Gil had wounded him in order to take his blood and give it to his “friends,” who in exchange would guarantee him immeasurable strength. João Batista disavowed these friends, saying he wanted nothing to do with them. Immediately a terrible whirlwind came up, and the terrified young man began calling out for St. Anne. From that day on, he never again spoke to Paulo Gil.⁶²

A classic sorcerer, Paulo Gil brought on disease and held diabolic meetings at crossroads—a sinister, dark place where good and evil meet that in ancient times had been held sacred by Hecate.⁶³ Having a compact with Satan, Paulo also served as middleman, insistently seeking new covenants and even stealing human blood in the still of the night. Here again, the blood was taken from the hip region, which became sore and irritated, as was always the case wherever blood was drawn to offer to the devil. In response to João Batista’s desertion, the devil had shown his fury by unleashing a whirlwind.⁶⁴ The episode combines a number of elements common to European and African sorcery: the belief that disease is the work of witches; the role of the flank as a receptacle for witchcraft-substance; and the popularity of devil worship among slaves in Brazil.⁶⁵ Also present are certain features typical of popular colonial religiosity. St. Anne—who had begun to be venerated more intensely in Europe in the Renaissance—was a symbol of the master’s house in Brazil, identified with the slave-owners’ paternalism, within whose shade João Batista had sought shelter in his moment of panic.66 Highly syncretic, the tale of Paulo Gil thus has a universal flavor precisely because it combines singular solutions with elements so general that they are archetypal. In the final analysis, the case of this pardo from Minas fits into a long tradition dating back to the Eastern legend of Theophilus and other diabolic pacts, a tradition that has had important repercussions even in literature—Gonzalo de Berceo’s poem on Theophilus and Goethe’s Faust, to cite only two.⁶⁷

Born in Rio de Janeiro and a resident of Lisbon, Marcelina Maria, mentioned earlier, was driven to make a pact with the demon because her boss had mistreated her so badly. He demanded that all household chores be done on a tight schedule, and the slave felt incapable of getting things finished on time. So “it came to her thoughts to make recourse to the demon to help her with that work.” Angry and “with the intent of becoming a sorceress,” she began summoning up the devil while kneading two alqueires [roughly 80 pounds] of wheat bread. She was unable to do her job properly, for she was “greatly enfeebled and shortly before [had been] bled.” And so it was that suddenly she saw the bread kneading and rising by itself, and in an instant she was able to roll it out and place it in the oven to bake. Dubious, she “did not wish to partake of it, and she well knew that only by the work of the devil could bread be kneaded and rise in so little time.” Marcelina did not see the person who kneaded the bread, “but she saw very well that . . . it was making a great din, as it was being well kneaded.” When she started asking how she would get all her work done by the hour appointed by her master, she heard a voice say: “If thou so desirest, seek in Campo Grande, for there they shall teach thee what thou must do so that thy labor shall all be done swiftly.” Scared out of her wits, her hair on end, her body shaking, Marcelina kept staring fixedly at holy images, not knowing what else to do. Finally, at midnight, she decided to go meet the devil. She found the door of the house open, despite the lateness of the hour and the fact that all were asleep.

And she understood that the demon had left the door open and ready for her, so that she might seek him, and for this purpose she removed the beads from round her neck and went out in only her shift and flannel cloak, and heading for Campo Grande by way of São José Street, she encountered no person nor carriage nor animal; and, before reaching the Church of São José, near some fine houses that stand on the right side, she spied a very tall shadow, and it seemed that it was taller than she, in the figure of a he-goat, she knows not of what color, for upon the sight of it, her body trembled, and the light was gone from her eyes, and she heard the said shadow utter these words: “Whither goest thou?” and then there arose a gust of wind so great that she thought it would knock her to the ground.

In terror, Marcelina Maria replied that she “was going to fetch some good things,” and she decided to run back to her master’s house. In her rush to get home, she felt someone following her but saw no one. She found the door open, just as she had left it. She had barely come in the door when it slammed shut behind her. The slave spent many sleepless nights, until she eventually decided to take an image of Christ on the cross to bed with her and hug it tightly. From then on she slept peacefully.

Besides the elements that were standard fare in diabolic pacts and activities, this case illustrates an interesting replacement of diabolic possession by divine possession. When the slave, exhausted by insomnia, carries a crucifix to bed with her, Jesus replaces Satan as her lover. Marcelina’s experience brings to mind the antagonistic yet complementary conceptions of mystical nuptials and diabolic weddings that took form around the sixteenth century. While female witches submitted to painful diabolic coitus on the sabbat, mystics as illustrious as St. Teresa of Ávila fell into ecstasy pierced by flaming arrows. Both were cases of sexual possession.68 The beauty of the slave’s testimony lies precisely in the ellipses, in what went unsaid but can be read between the lines. Farther along in the trial records, in the excerpt referring to the Examination [Exame]—when the inquisitor starts closing in on the defendant—Marcelina makes it apparent how she has sexualized the whole experience: “Knowing that the vile demon copulates with some women, and that he takes on the figure of known men, upon all occasions when she consummated the sin of carnal knowledge, with whomever it might be, she always blessed herself first, so that it should not happen that this copulation be with the demon.”⁶⁹ In exposing her sex life, Marcelina became entangled in the Inquisition’s net; for in the minds of demonologists, a sorceress would never be a virgin.⁷⁰

Sabbats

As seen so far, despite metamorphoses, familiars, oral or written diabolic compacts, and allusions to sexual relations with the devil—couched in such terms as “dealings with the devils,” “giving oneself to the devils,” “receiving many blows from the devil”—Brazilian colonial sorcery makes no mention of the famous sabbats, so common in Europe. In Lisbon, however, three slaves—one a Brazilian and the other two having spent time in the colony—stated they had attended a meeting that could in a way be considered a sabbat. If so many practices of European origin found their way to Brazil, as seen throughout this chapter, why not the sabbat?

It is perhaps still a bit early to formulate an answer. Contrary to what certain historians have contended, however, it appears that the sabbat never truly existed as the powers-that-be construed it.⁷¹ Here in the colony, far removed from the ongoing interference of these powers and of the interrogations that disseminated the inquisitorial creed and rekindled demonological fantasies in the popular imagination, the sabbat did not hold up. Elite sectors and popular sectors professed distinct ideas about the devil, and the colony seems to have nourished popular thought while dismissing elite thought.

Under brutal torture, Manuel da Piedade confessed that he had gone with some friends of his, all black, to speak with the devil in the fields surrounding the city of Porto. Appearing in animal form, the devil would ask for blood, guide the preparation of mandinga pouches, demand to be worshipped, and take pieces of shirts and pants from those in attendance. Ultimately, he would ask for their souls.72 José Francisco Pedroso and José Francisco Pereira, the slave friends who served two brothers, constructed interwoven narratives in which they are both protagonists of the same episodes, along with other black men, all of whom met to worship the devil and run through the fields near Lisbon with him. The meetings took place primarily in Cotovia and Val de Cavalinhos—precisely where the Portuguese witches that went to the stake in 1559 used to meet.⁷³ Perhaps in an evocation of bacchanals and Dionysius, the demon would offer the participants wine and grapes. His assistants, almost all of whom were black, would square off against each other, run brawling through the fields, and sing black songs, some in the Mina coast tongue. Recalling the sabbats of England, France, and other non-Iberian countries of Europe, they would skin a goat and eat its meat, later carrying its hide beneath their hats to protect them from knife slashes.

At last came the part that the inquisitor so anxiously awaited: sexual relations with the devil. José Francisco Pedroso limited himself to saying only that the devil appeared before him thrice “in the figure of a woman, well dressed and well adorned. She gave him embraces and kisses” and “had vile dealings with him diverse times, repeating lascivious acts.”⁷⁴ José Francisco Pereira, in contrast, generously shared the details of his matings with the devil and also narrated particulars of the other black men’s relations, hence painting a portrait of the orgiastic features of the Val de Cavalinhos and Cotovia “conventicles.”

It is symptomatic that the only account of sexual excesses under the command of Satan came from the mouth of an African slave and involved other slaves as well, native Africans like himself or born in colonial lands or in the metropolis. In the realm of the imagination, sexual pleasure appeared as both liberating and integrating, reestablishing the identity between nature and culture that was more intense in African lands, an identity that, like so many other cultural traits, had been destroyed by slavery. Scholars of witchcraft today often contend that “orgiastic practices evince a religious nostalgia, a powerful desire to return to a culture’s archaic stage—the oneiric time of fabulous ‘beginnings.’”⁷⁵

In other words, for those who prefer a more anthropological approach, the Early Modern age sabbat violated what were then newly devised rules, that is, sexual and social conventions underpinning the construction of the idea of home, family, and social organization. Hence the attention focused on heterodox sexual practices like sodomy, incest, promiscuity, and homosexuality.76 Finally, as a projection of the imagination, the sabbat exposed hidden recesses of the collective subconscious, where unrestrained sexual activity constituted both the culture’s great taboo and the ultimate, unattainable desire. It is well known how much Christian tradition demonized sexuality, deeming satanic any practice that in other cultural contexts might have an important ritual meaning.⁷⁷ It is exactly this meaning that perhaps felt more familiar to a newly arrived slave from Africa; painfully, it would be resuscitated by inquisitorial pressure. Under the influence of the demonological perspective, present in each of the inquisitor’s questions, sexual practices that were constituent elements of the African cultural universe and were crystallized in its imagination would attain a degree of demonization unthinkable in the original African context. Through a complex mechanism that worked much like a set of trick mirrors, the African slave would hand back to the inquisitor a discursive formulation wherein the latter would recognize the sabbat. Rather than integrating the slave into his or her new universe, this process shattered it even further.

José Francisco Pereira said:

. . . the truth is, in the olive grove that lies in the valley, near the Convent of Jesus, he and his said companions Antonio Borges, Tomás, José Francisco, Pedro de Azevedo, Mateus, all of them together had vile dealings with the demon, and it was at night, it would be six o’clock, and at the time of the winter last past, he does not remember the month, and this happened on many occasions, he does not remember how many times it was, and in the same place and spot, all of them had copulation with the demon in the figure of a woman, in the figure of a man, for at each instant it would change from one to another figure, and when it took that of a man, it was by way of the vaso traseiro [rectum] that he had coition with him and with each of his companions.

All then worshipped the devil: they knelt down before him with their hands raised, “the demon in the figure of a man, and at each instant he would change colors, both in face as well as in dress, and before and after indulging themselves in venery, all did worship him and recognize him as their God.”⁷⁸ In the devil’s series of transformations, the slaves projected their longing for the fullest possible sexual satisfaction, which transcended the differentiation of the sexes and pointed toward the realization of desires often repressed within the limits dictated by anatomy, male or female.

The sabbat was thus present in the inquisitor’s mental universe rather than in the colonists’. The confessions of the three slaves cited above are the sole references to participation in sabbats during the colonial period. In their relationship to the supernatural and in their invocations of the devil, the mestizo colonists expressed themselves primarily through ritual possession of indigenous or African influence. Because these activities were collective in nature and included the presence of the devil or of spirits that were often wicked—or at least ambiguous and ambivalent—the inquisitors were led to see sabbats in them. But they actually were something quite different, found at the root of today’s Umbanda and Candomblé: calundus and catimbós. If a differentiation between sorcery and witchcraft based on the individualistic character of the first and collective character of the second were in fact valid, it could be said that colonial witchcraft resided primarily in the calundus and catimbós.

Possession

Just as there were no sabbats, there is nothing to suggest that the colony witnessed cases of collective possession like those that brought renown to the French convents of Loudun, Louviers, and Aix in the seventeenth century. The only episode in which several people were stricken by demonic visions is narrated in the trial of Manuel João, the young barber from Grão-Pará arrested by the Holy Office in the late seventeenth century. Largely at Manuel’s insistence, his female cousins, aunts, and some slaves in the house of Manuel Soródio (his grandfather) began having visions of angels and strange figures. They witnessed extraordinary happenings, heard voices, and lost their senses for up to forty-eight hours. Those who had been bewitched were eventually taken to Belém, where they could receive the aid of the church, including exorcism by Mercedarian friars.79

The custom of exorcism dates back to the early days of Christendom. In the third century, Tertullian and Cyprian viewed the Christian ability to exorcise demons as the surest proof of Christian truth, representing Christ’s victory over pagan deities.⁸⁰ Exorcism was given a high profile by the Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation, which published a number of practical manuals on procedures for casting out devils.⁸¹ Friar Luís de Nazaré, who copulated with young girls and then used the washings from their pudenda to make physics, employed the books Mestre da vida and Opus de maleficiis, written by Friar Candido Brognolo. At the time of Friar Luís’s trial, the inquisitors alleged that these works had been banned—something the cleric did not know, or so he said. He had achieved prominence in Salvador as an exorcist, and when evidence of his improper behavior began piling up against him—a “wooing” priest who deflowered maidens—the ecclesiastical authorities were incredulous.

It is well worth registering here one particular case of possession where Friar Luís was called in. The vicar of Cotegipe had sent Leonor da Silva, bewitched, to see the friar. After exorcising her, Friar Luís was approached by a young boatman, named José Romeu, who had escorted the girl to the priest. José asked the priest to give him confession, and among other sins he stated that “all that said maiden was suffering was pure deceit, for in truth she was neither possessed nor did she suffer from anything, and that she pretended in that fashion solely for the end of wedding him, which her mother and relatives forbade her, and she, to convince them and persuade them, showed herself to suffer from such complaints.” The friar volunteered to remedy the situation. He called the young woman’s parents and relatives and advised them to take her to a country house where she often went. He arranged things so that he was alone with the girl “and had carnal copulation with her, availing himself for this purpose of that which he had heard in the said mulato’s confession.” Finally, he took some alms and joined the couple in wedlock, and the story ended there.82 Such was the conduct of Friar Luís de Nazaré, who in the words of José Roiz de Oliveira, Commissary of the Holy Office, was “known and held” in Salvador “to be a serious cleric, and reputed to be virtuous.” He was a Commissary of the members of the Order of Carmo and was charged by “his office publicly to exorcise the possessed and others that turn to him in their illnesses.”

Calundus

Whenever he saw that his exorcisms were doing no good, Friar Luís recommended consultations with black calundureiros. Tomásia, slave to the businessman José da Costa, was exorcised by Friar Luís several times. He eventually ascertained that she “had spells such as those called calundus among the negros, and they consist of saying that the souls of deceased relatives come to speak through the mouth of the bewitched, which is very common in [Brazil].” The priest told the patient’s master and husband that they should “send her to the healers called calundureiros, inasmuch as . . . exorcism does not remove that kind of spells, for they are a diabolical thing.” This sentence sounds contradictory, since the goal of exorcism is to expel demons from the bodies of the possessed or rid them of spells cast by devils and their henchmen. But Friar Luís was actually displaying an astute sensitivity: the calundu demons were not the same ones the church dealt with, and so it was necessary to call upon specialists who would know how to handle them. Furthermore, Friar Luís demonstrated that he was attuned to his patients’ spiritual needs. For the slave Tomásia, calundureiros were closer to her than Christian clerics and could therefore be more efficacious in helping with her troubles. So whenever he deemed it necessary, the priest would direct the possessed or the bewitched to black calundureiros. Such was the case with the parda Apolônia Góis and the pardo Inácio Tinoco. Friar Luís was quite familiar with calundus and most likely had attended some, although he did not openly admit this; he claimed he had become versed in the subject merely out of curiosity, by asking questions of the black people who participated in these events. He knew such festivals were very common in the city of Bahia and its surroundings. The blacks in attendance would leap about, oddly contorting their bodies and screaming till they fell down upon the ground as if dead. “There they remained for some time, and when they would later rise up, they would say the souls of their deceased relatives had come to talk to them” during the time they had been passed out.83

These observations by Friar Luís are dated 1740. In Bahia, ritual African practices were already known as calundus. Around the same time, in Rio de Janeiro, Domingos Álvares—the one who unearthed buried treasure—practiced what was apparently calundu as well. He led a ceremony in which a basin of water was placed on the ground with a sharp knife stabbed into it, with a number of people standing around. In the middle of the circle, next to the basin, was “a woman possessed by a demon called Capitão, who danced and jumped about.” Domingos threw some black powder at her, “whilst placing his finger on the fontanel of her head.” He asked the possessed woman about the maleficia and cures to be done and also inquired: “Capitão, are we friends?” The woman replied affirmatively. “Am I in hell?” The woman said no, adding: “For thou art more able than I, and whither thou goest, we cannot go.” Domingos fumigated the possessed woman, “wherewith she became furious and grew more incensed,” saying she was blind.⁸⁴ About thirty years later, in 1772, Rita Sebastiana referred to her enemy Ana Maria da Conceição as a rabicha [big butt] and calundureira. In the trial records, calundu is defined as the act of “jumping diverse dances” and performing deeds offensive to God and His creatures.⁸⁵

But it was in Minas that the calundu seems to have gained wide-ranging ground earliest, confirming Bastide’s thesis that it was Brazil’s cities that best preserved archaic African traditions.⁸⁶ Minas was the colony’s most heavily urbanized captaincy and likewise the captaincy with the most robust slave system in the eighteenth century. The region’s sizable contingent of slaves made more intense social fellowship possible, including the organization of quilombos and confrarias, the former outside and the latter inside the system. If whites enjoyed all the rights, the black was left to find refuge in mystical values, “the only ones they could not take away from him.”⁸⁷ So resistance to the white man was expressed on both the social and religious planes.⁸⁸

Some references to the calundu in Minas are vague and imprecise, just as the rite itself must often have been vague and imprecise. In Curral del Rei, around 1756, one of Inácio Xavier’s slaves revered the god of his native land by hanging a pot from the ceiling of his home and worshipping it. He would put stews and old household utensils on the table, ask its permission to eat, “and round the same pot, hold his festivals and calundures. . . . It is said that this man is a sorcerer.”⁸⁹ A few years later, in Congonhas do Campo, a black man wrought cures through sorceries, holding gatherings of black men who danced and engaged in batuques [ritual dances of African origin, using atabaque drums] in his house. He had even been arrested for these offenses, which was reflected in his name: everyone called him Domingos Calandureiro.⁹⁰ The black woman Antonia Luzia, together with two other companions, summoned “Negro women and pardas to worship dances” and used dead persons “to tame the masters’ wills.”91

In none of these cases is the ritual clearly defined. Violante Coutinho, who lived in the arraial of São Gonçalo, in Paraúna do Andrequicê, “danced and did calundures,” and in her house black men would beat atabaques.⁹² In Sabará, a black woman of Angolan origin was suspected of summoning up demons through recourse to the “abominable merriment” of the calundu dance.⁹³ Some masters allowed their slaves to practice these rites, in an astute attitude that was—as far as we know—inaugurated in Brazil by Fernão Cabral de Taíde (see chapter 2). Gaspar Pimentel Velho was one of these. He knew his slaves held “superstitious calundu dances,” and for this the Pastoral Visitation obliged him to pay a heavy fine. He was also instructed to prohibit such dances, “not only because they were heathen, but because it can be presumed that demons participate in said dances.”⁹⁴ Yet again, an African practice was demonized by the ecclesiastical authorities. In 1753 the slave Maria Canga earned a bit of gold for performing ritual divination. “She would invent a batuque dance, in the middle of which something began to leave her head, which was called wind, and she began to divine that which she desired.”⁹⁵

In 1728 Nuno Marques Pereira left us one of the first literary descriptions of a calundu. While staying at a planter’s home, he could not sleep at night because of the infernal “din of the atabaques, tambourines, canzás [recorecos], botijas [musical jugs], and castanets” played by the black slaves, which made “such a terrible clamor” that the Pilgrim thought it the mayhem of hell.⁹⁶ His host seemed quite tolerant of the slaves’ noise, and explained to the Pilgrim: “These are festivals or divinations that the Negroes say they were accustomed to perform in their own lands. When they get together, they perform them here too in order to bring to knowledge all manner of things, such as what is causing illnesses, or to find lost objects, also to have success in hunting or in their fields, and for many other purposes.”⁹⁷ Always virtuous, the Pilgrim had a word with his host, demonizing the calundu and declaring it a most horrible offense against God. For Bastide, the Brazilian slave endeavored not to let “vital values inherited from his ancestors perish but to reestablish them, either in the secrecy of the calundus or in the armed isolation of the quilombos.” The white colonists even referred to these calundus as mocambos or quilombos,⁹⁸ revealing both the terror the African slaves’ cultural expressions instilled in them and their own awareness that such expressions represented a danger to the established order. Another recognition of this danger was evinced in the employment of so-called capitães-do-mato [slave hunters], hired to repress these manifestations of African religiosity.⁹⁹

The slave-owner’s tolerant, understanding paternalism and the Pilgrim’s dogmatic, orthodox intransigence are thus two sides of the master stratum’s ideology. The first—much like Antonil, and perhaps even more advanced—viewed African practices (already somewhat syncretic) as a necessary evil if slave labor was to be sustained. The second, whose viewpoint was perhaps more heavily bound to the metropolis, associated the Africans’ unique cultural identity with a serious crime against the faith and against the king: “It is the rite these heathens are accustomed to practicing and bringing from their lands.” Once in the colony, they had to be converted since it was catechization that justified slavery.100 What lay beneath the Pilgrim’s arguments was the bothersome certainty that preserving the blacks’ cultural identity would lead to class consciousness and thereby jeopardize the colonial system.

The letter that accompanied Luzia Pinta to the Inquisition at Lisbon said she was publicly reputed to be a sorceress, “making diabolical apparitions by means of dances, which are commonly called calundus.” In order to divine the whereabouts of lost objects or money, she would don “certain clothing not used in that land” and commence dancing to the sound of drums or cymbals played by black people encircling her. She would sniff some bentinhos [scapulars] that she kept in a box; in apparent anguish, she would tremble violently, as if out of her senses. She would even divine secrets: Domingos Pinto had sought her assistance because he had been robbed of some oitavas-de-ouro, and she told him the author of the theft was his Coura slave, with whom he had slept without giving her anything in return. The letter states that “it was correct that Domingos Pinto had slept with one of his Negro women, and had not given her anything, and had the said Negro women in his house.”

One of the descriptions of Luzia’s ritual bears great resemblance to what we know of Candomble today. She would perform calundures

on a little altar with a canopy, a scimitar in her hand, a wide ribbon tied round her head, with the ends of the ribbon toward the back, garbed in the manner of an angel, and two Negro women, Angolans as well, would sing while a Negro man would play an atabaque, which is a small drum, and they say that the Negro women and Negro man are slaves of the aforesaid, and they play and sing for a length of one to two hours, [and] she would appear to be out of her mind, saying things that no one understood, and the people she cured would lie down on the ground; she would move over them diverse times, and it was on these occasions that she said she received winds of divination.¹⁰¹

The myths symbolized in rituals like calundu may have been lost or altered substantially over time; as seen in chapter 2, the selection process that occurred in the heart of African religions in Brazil ultimately placed greater esteem on bellicose warrior gods. But the rite itself as established during the colonial period has remained remarkably the same until today. As Bastide wrote: “Those who perform the rite are not always completely cognizant of the underlying myth.” Indeed, the rite cannot vary much, as it “is encaged in the matrix of muscular capacity. . . . The scope of myth, on the other hand, is the almost infinite one of the creative imagination.”102 Practically stowed away in hiding places or “niches,” the African cultural traits that were successfully preserved would help in the effort to reconstruct African society, in a movement that, for Bastide, “was accomplished in a downward process”—from the superstructure to the infrastructure.¹⁰³

Traits unique to each group ultimately formed one culture, as ethnicity and culture became dissociated. Distinct legacies and additions to them very often merged in a single cultural expression, like calundu.¹⁰⁴ As described by Luiz Mott, an interesting dance called the tunda or acotundá took place in Paracatu around 1747; it illustrates this Afro-Brazilian religious syncretism and points to nuances within African rites themselves. When this dance took place, the Mina woman Caetana

said that she was God, that she had made heaven and earth, the waters and rocks. To join in this dance, they first set in place a doll they had made with the figure of a head and nose imitating the Devil, pierced upon an iron tip and with a cape of white cloth that covered its head, and the end of his snout and his blood-shot eyes appeared. And they placed him in the middle of the house, on a small carpet on top of some crosses with nine crossbars on each point and some pots in a circle, and inside them a few cooked herbs and in others some raw herbs, and in another a piece of foul-smelling dirt. And after placing this platform for the doll, they all went in to dance and say their words, that this was the Saint of their land and thus they showed favor to the doll.¹⁰⁵

According to the testimonies, the blacks sang in the Coura tongue, and some of them proclaimed words of the Holy Catholic Faith. Near the altar were a number of gourds, water-filled clay pans, a pot painted with blood, fish bones, and seashells. They said their black man came from the land of Coura, “and that he came baptized by Our Lady of the Rosary and St. Anthony, and that he came to work miracles in this land of Paracatu.”¹⁰⁶

Divinations were performed during the ceremony. Devotees of the acotundá dance were arrested in 1747 by capitães-do-mato, confirming once more Bastide’s thesis that quilombos and calundus resembled each other as forms of protest against slavery. Known as courá, courano, curá, curano, and by some other terms, primarily in eighteenth-century Minas, the Coura people were Sudanese, neighbors to the Minas, and from all indications belonged to the Yoruba language group.¹⁰⁷

There is a kind of uniformity in all these practices: ritual possession (the winds of divination); the evocation of spirits (usually of the deceased) and offerings to them; clothing of African inspiration; divination and at times curandeirismo; music sung to the rhythm of percussion instruments; and their collective nature. But there was heterogeneity as well, with the variations eventually converging in the calundu. They flourished in Minas more than anywhere else in the colony during the eighteenth century; at least available references to Minas calundus are more numerous—even more so than references to calundus in Bahia, now the land of Candomblé. Here again it must be remembered that Afro-Brazilian religious syncretism, religious persecution, and slavery were traveling companions in colonial territories, so Minas stands out; after all, in 1733 Simão Ferreira Machado called Vila Rica, “for the circumstances of its nature, the head of all America; for the abundance of its wealth, the precious pearl of Brazil.”108

Catimbós

Displaying characteristics quite similar to those of calundus, indigenous rituals of possession also drew the Inquisition’s rage. These rites occurred almost solely in northern Brazil, and all references I have located refer to Grão-Pará. The descriptions that have reached us must already display a certain degree of syncretism, not always easy to detect.

In 1767, on the Tajurá River, a number of people—the majority indigenous—engaged in “activities of sorcery invoking the demon, pretending they called down spirits, foreseeing the future, and discovering hidden things, with the intent of thus healing and curing the ill.”¹⁰⁹ All the cases involve a very similar practice. Ludovina Ferreira, a white woman, had learned curative magic from indigenous peoples. Around 1735 she performed cures together with the native Brazilian Antonio. She had once gone to a sick friend’s home, where she and the Indian sat down on the woman’s bed. With the room in darkness, her maraca in hand, Ludovina chanted incomprehensible songs and smoked a taquari or cigarette made of tree bark. Outside the bedroom, members of the sick woman’s family heard thunderous noises on the rooftop—the sound of people jumping about, whistling, hoarse and sharp voices that asked questions and then answered. Ludovina suddenly appeared with the head of a snake bearing a pepper in its mouth. She told those in attendance that these things were spells buried at the front door and that the pajés had come to get them.¹¹⁰ Back in the bedroom, she balanced the maraca over a water-filled gourd and placed them both under the sick woman’s bed. After the session was over and Ludovina had left, the indigenous man remained prostrate on the ground, as if dead. The residents of the house went looking for Ludovina the next day since they had no idea what to do with him. Ludovina returned and blew smoke over her friend, whereupon he got up as if nothing had happened.¹¹¹

Three years earlier, Dona Antonia Jerônima had been involved in rituals similar to those employed by Ludovina. She had been suffering from fevers, headaches, and strange movements affecting her whole body. Some indigenous people told her that the Indian Antonio could heal her. Summoned by the afflicted woman, Antonio gave her scrapings of tree bark and roots to drink. He also said that the lights would have to be put out in the house so he could better consult with his pajés and discover what was wrong with her. Antonio began chanting in his native language. When he finished his songs, “a most violent gust of wind was heard on the housetops” and the roof shook. “Soon there was a loud din as if someone were jumping up and down.” After wishing her good evening, a voice asked Dona Antonia Jeronima how she was, to which she replied that she felt most ill. The voice said that God would reestablish her good health by means of physics made by the native Brazilian; furthermore, her sickness was the product of maleficia. When Dona Antonia asked who was responsible for the maleficia, “the said voice responded that it had not come to lay blame on others.”112

Another practitioner of such divination ceremonies was Maria, a black slave; a commotion would likewise be heard on the rooftop, along with unfamiliar voices and a loud rumbling like an earthquake.¹¹³ Other practitioners included the native Brazilian Domingos de Souza, his wife Bernardina (also indigenous), the mulata Lourença, and the cafuza Teresa. They covered themselves with bird feathers, played maracas, and sang unknown words next to the sick person who had bid them come. When the lights went out, the uproar would be heard on the roof: the stomping, the unfamiliar voice replying to questions asked of it. At the end of the ceremony came a new clamor: the figure (which no one ever managed to see) was leaving, after having cured the illness.¹¹⁴

The Indian Marçal Agostinho’s confession, which commenced on May 9, 1765, offers an interesting demystification of these healing and divination rituals involving the invocation of spirits, which appear to be a kind of catimbó. About forty years old, Marçal was a small farmer in the town of Bulim, in Grão-Pará. He often attended the gatherings of Indian men and women sponsored at night by an indigenous carpenter named Pedro Açu. At these events, Pedro would speak with souls, foretell events, and heal diseases. There would also be singing, dancing to the sound of maracas, whistling, and “unfamiliar voices, some more melodious, others sharper, in accordance with the age of the one who was singing, and people who had passed away.” Ceremony participants put questions to the deceased, many about the final destination of their loved ones. Marçal Agostinho admired Pedro Açu’s talent, even though he was a little suspicious that his practices involved diabolic art and familiarity with the devil. He envied the Indian’s prestige among his followers and decided to ask Pedro Açu to instruct him in these techniques. Agreeing to Marçal’s proposal, Pedro first taught him a song that should be chanted at the gatherings.¹¹⁵ Later, after he had gotten to know his disciple better and felt certain he would be able to keep a secret, Pedro Açu told Marçal that “all that he had seen him do was trickery, with which he fooled the observers so that they would respect him, because no souls came from the other world to be at the gatherings; nor did he go up on the rooftops to call them: and all the voices that were heard were his, which he caused to be higher or deeper as circumstances required, and that it was he himself who supplied the answers that were heard to all that was asked; however, he, the Confessor, should not reveal this secret to any person, if he wished to be respected by the Indians.”

Mançal Agostinho then began the second stage of his specialized training. Though he now knew it was all fakery, he continued to engage in these practices to earn the respect of the other Indians. He called a meeting at his farm and followed Pedro Açu’s instructions to the letter. He led the dancing and singing to the sound of maracas. It was in the darkness of night, and he could pretend that he went up on the rooftop, that it made much noise, that the souls descended one by one, at his command:

and after pretending that the souls with which those of the assembly desired to speak had come, he himself, the Confessor, began to greet the onlookers with voices of diverse qualities, one by one, feigning to some that he was his father’s soul, or mother’s soul, to others that he was their son’s or daughter’s soul, to others that he was the soul of a relative or certain friend, all remaining in silence while this feigning went on, and he, the Confessor, responded only to that person who asked about the place to which a soul had gone, saying to some that the soul was in heaven and to others, that it was in hell.

When he came down from the roof, Marçal Agostinho made a show of being very tired and said he had come from a secret place about which nothing could be revealed. He became famous and was highly sought after for his sessions. Considered a disciple of Pedro Açu, he was called pajé and prophet, “in addition to enjoying the advantage of drinking as much as he desired at such assemblies, till he became drunk, as very often was the case.” He pretended that the souls drank so he would have a reason for drinking more himself. When brought before the Visitation Board presided over by Geraldo José de Abranches, the indigenous man said he deeply regretted his behavior and asked that his sins be forgiven.

Charges were brought, and the trial opened with a series of depositions, all incriminating Marçal Agostinho. He was accused of cheating his fellow man, supporting abortions, and taking advantage of women who trusted him. On August 28, 1766, Father Inácio José Pestana, presbyter of the Order of St. Peter, certified that “on the first octave of Easter . . . the Indian Marçal Agostinho had been found dead in the morn, in one of his houses located on the banks of the Piri in this town, and he had been buried in the plaza of the Church of São João.” Nothing in the written document indicates the cause of death. Perhaps he was murdered for having divulged the secret of the ritual so dear to the indigenous peoples. In disobeying Pedro Açu’s instructions, he did not maintain silence and therefore probably was not respected by them.116

These varied ways of foretelling the future, discovering the whereabouts of lost objects, healing disease and undoing spells, recovering animals essential to a subsistence economy, and achieving some kind of control in the maritime endeavor meant that magical practices and sorcery figured very importantly in the daily life of the colony, alleviating the hardships and threats posed by the material world. While guaranteeing daily sustenance, they also addressed situations of conflict, sometimes exacerbating them, sometimes ameliorating them. They kept watch over the colonists’ affective lives, sealing and breaking unions, stemming the flow of blood from romantic wounds, and opening up new perspectives. In short, they were the primary means by which the colony communicated with the supernatural, from whence peered the figure of Pero Botelho, the sometimes friendly image of the devil from popular lore. The devil, magical practices, and sorcery were very often regarded quite naturally, as part of everyday life. They had traveled to the colony together with the Portuguese, and their roots had been lost in the darkness of time, in European folk tradition. Grafted together with other cultures here in the colony, they took on new shades. A synthesis of African, Amerindian, and European beliefs, the mandinga pouches or patuás worn round the neck and the equally amalgamated calundus were the two great creations of colonial magic and sorcery. Both date to the eighteenth century, as if the process of magical syncretism required time to mature and, moreover, moved parallel with development of the colonial consciousness.

Brazil’s most harshly repressed attempts at political emancipation were the Inconfidencia Mineira in 1792 and the Revolta dos Alfaiates [Tailors’ Rebellion] in 1798. There is no record of any sizable colonial rebellions in the sixteenth century. In 1591, however, the Inquisition was already treading on American soil, on the trail of heresies, sexual deviance, magical practices, and sorcery. Brazil had just become a colony, and the legal trials of its residents were already being sent to Portugal. So from the very outset the colonists and the Inquisition disagreed about religion, magical practices, and their role in daily life.