CHAPTER 7

Interwined Discourses

Whilst we live in the fear of Hell we have it.

—Richard Coppin

The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

—Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

The onset of the witch-hunt, the creation of the centralized state, and the inauguration of the Early Modern Inquisition were tightly linked contemporary phenomena. Sorcery and inquisitorial persecution played out their momentous roles on stage against a gruesome backdrop of fear—the age of fear that Delumeau has addressed in so many of his works, particularly his most recent,¹ and that accounted for the occurrence of the West’s two religious reformations: the Catholic and the Protestant. Born in the surge of the fourteenth-century crisis, the early modern state was both an integral part of and possible solution to the era’s dilemmas. Along with its birth came expansion of commercial capitalism and colonization of the New World—in the final analysis, creation of the mercantilist colonial system or of early modern world economics, as some authors would have it.²

Looking at the Inquisition, sorcery, and the absolutist state as early modern phenomena, it can be noted that it was the witch-hunt’s “immense fiery cross” that enveloped Europe most evenly, from “Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, from the British Isles to Poland,” its flames singeing the Americas as well, though not uniformly. In Brazil its presence was felt more intensely in the north, more tenuously in the south.³ In Europe witches were persecuted even in regions where there was no centralization of monarchical power, such as the severely punished Swiss cantons and especially German principalities. Sorceresses were also burned or hanged in parts of Europe where the Inquisition did not venture, confined in the Early Modern age to the Iberian peninsula, the Mediterranean islands under Spanish rule (Sardinia and Sicily), plus certain areas of Italy, primarily in the north. Curiously enough, given the scope of the regions involved, early modern sorcery resembled another phenomenon that similarly connected diverse and geographically distant areas: the construction and operation of the old colonial system. Of course there is no necessary relationship between one phenomenon and the other, notwithstanding a few interesting isolated observations, as mentioned in earlier chapters—those of De Lancre and Isasti. Yet in the case of the present study, sorcery and the colonial system are interwoven insofar as the former derives singularity from the latter. Numerous authors have aspired to comprehend European sorcery through the prism of the absolutist state and the wars of religion. Among others, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Franco Cardini contended that persecutory fury was greater in Protestant regions, while Delumeau tried to demonstrate the inimitable ferocity unleashed against sorcery in Catholic countries, where a process of political centralization was under way.4

None of these authors turned their attention to the colonial system, because they were focused on the European witch-hunt. But this book cannot explore sorcery as a phenomenon without establishing just such a relationship. My object of study is sorcery in colonial Brazil, and I endeavor to portray it by exploring the tangle of its interwoven threads, which lent it a historically constructed form, at once universal, archetypal, and unique.

Witch-Hunt and Inquisition: Early Modern Nightmares

The Inquisition was established in the thirteenth century as a religious tribunal charged with judging and punishing crimes of heresy, in the hopes of halting the Cathar advance.⁵ Appointed by the pope and accountable directly to Rome, medieval inquisitors devised the procedures that would later be adopted by Early Modern age tribunals, namely, by the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. Their guidelines were laid out in the manuals Practica Inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis, written in the first quarter of the fourteenth century by Bernard Gui, and Directorum inquisitorum, authored by the Catalan Nicolas Eymeric some fifty years later. While addressing the question of heresy, both the inquisitors and their manuals nevertheless contributed to the construction of a symbolic model of sorcery. In blaming heretics for offenses long ascribed to minorities or marginalized groups, they allowed such offenses, organized into a model, to become associated with sorcery.⁶

From the late Middle Ages on, all of folkloric culture had been rejected by ecclesiastical culture, as Jacques Le Goff has brilliantly shown.⁷ Interpenetrations notwithstanding, the educated clerical stratum managed to equip its cultural system to preserve its cohesion and enable itself to perpetuate one given form of thought—that is, “rationalism” of Greco-Roman roots—to the detriment of another, much more ambiguous and equivocal, that is, the folkloric system. The Carolingian period saw a strong revival of folkloric traditions, expressed later in such “concessions” by the ecclesiastical elite as establishment of the Day of the Dead, which occurred in Cluny, or the upsurge in devotion to saints and in hagiography. At times it was thus necessary to respond to popular concerns, and again it is Le Goff who has demonstrated how this can help us understand the “creation” of purgatory, a true need felt by Europe’s Christian masses in the twelfth century.⁸

The installation of the medieval Inquisition was a watershed marking a new trend that would be inexorable and dominant into the Early Modern age: the intolerance of the Western Church, a deadly tempest that would spawn two Reformations and fell thousands of victims on European soil. In Cardini’s eloquent words, “the twelfth-century Church—the Church of the University and of the canonistic and theological Summae, master of all science and lord of all power, on its way to realizing the hierocratic dream owed largely to Innocent III—could no longer view with the same tolerance the survival, even on the fringes of Christianity, of ancient, nonintegrated traditions.”9 During the following century, not even sacred forms predating the advent of the church “and therefore not necessarily opposed to its message” would be countenanced any longer.¹⁰ Menacing, alarming, the shadow of heresy began creeping over formerly tolerated magical practices and postpagan superstitions that were constituent elements of Europeans’ daily lives. The ruling culture gradually demonized both heresy and sorcery, within an already early modern context where the devil would be forever horrendous and never again a buffoon.¹¹ In the Early Modern age, sorcery would ultimately become a form of heresy.¹²

Responsible in Europe for the burning of some 20,000 individuals over a period of 250 years, the witch-hunt reached its apex between 1560 and 1630.¹³ Some of these mass murders left their imprint on an entire era: the 900 executions so proudly ordered by Nicholas Rémy in Lorena between 1576 and 1591; the executions in the Jura region of France that took nearly 1,500 people to their deaths between 1537 and 1685; the slaughter in Catalonia, which wiped out 300 lives between 1616 and 1619; and the sentencings in Finland that sent 152 unfortunate souls to their graves between 1665 and 1684.¹⁴ There were other famous tribunals that caused much ado even though large numbers of sorceresses were not always sentenced to death. Such was the case of the 1610 trials in Logroño, Spain, against the witches of Zugarramurdi;¹⁵ the Lancashire trial, the most famous in the history of English persecution;¹⁶ the notorious, scandalous trials of seventeenth-century France—in Aix (1611), Loudun (1634), and Louviers (1647)—explored in Robert Mandrou’s model study;¹⁷ and the Salem witch trials in the United States, which in 1692 terrorized New England.¹⁸ In all these trials, sorcery was punished as the gravest of human crimes and a horrendous sin against God, a crime of lèse majesté both divine and human: “Divine because it aggrieved God Himself, putting Satan before Him. Human because, like all offenses of whatever degree, it aggrieved the interests of the prince and of Justice.”¹⁹

Church and state, justice and religion, thus bore down on sorcery in the Early Modern age. As Muchembled affirmed, the witch helped promote a new model of humankind, meeting the absolutist need to augment authority and control. By exorcising demons, Europeans could better impose a model of political and ideological domination. In the process of investigating, imprisoning, and torturing sorceresses, the new judicial structure—intended to keep a controlling eye on people and to unify penalties—served the interests of the recent organization of the state while strengthening its own hand.20 In other words, emerging from new political structures—those of the absolutist state—criminal law created the conditions for persecution while solidifying and legitimizing itself in the process.

Just as Europe legislated against the marginalized masses whose numbers multiplied as the crisis of feudalism reached its crest, so did Europe write laws against witches. Repression of sorcery and repression of vagrancy, beggary, and pauperism thus emerged as correlated phenomena.²¹ In 1484 the church’s overt struggle against sorcery became irreversible with the papal bull Summus desiderantis affectibus, a veritable “war cry from hell.”²² But even before this, civil powers were already enacting laws against sorcery. To cite only the Portuguese case, the famed Carta Régia of 1385 was, in the words of Oliveira Marques, meant to “cast out idolatry to please God in the grave situation then prevailing.”²³ This was when the magistratura citadina [urban magistracy] of the “justice of the wedded, paramours, and sorceresses” was created, with Gonçalo Lourenço as its first head. The aim was to expunge idolatry and standardize customs, that is, render them moral.²⁴ On March 19, 1403, in Santarém, Dom João I returned to the attack, publishing a law against sorcerers.²⁵ Across much of Europe, civil tribunals sent hapless victims to the stake and to the gallows—in France, in England, in Switzerland. At the dawn of the seventeenth century, when the Portuguese Inquisition was already more than fifty years old, the Philippine Ordinances still legislated on sorcerers, as seen in earlier chapters. At least in theory, crimes of sorcery were on the roster of offenses falling under more than one jurisdiction—a topic that greatly merits a study of the attributions of each power: civil, ecclesiastical, and inquisitorial.

Even when judgment fell specifically to one or another of these three powers, crimes of sorcery contained a complex intertwining of different discourses: learned, popular, lay, religious, metropolitan, colonial. Bernard Gui and Eymeric, who played such important roles in designing the procedure later adopted against witches, even by lay judges, were members of the clergy. Some of the most renowned demonologists—such as Heinrich Sprenger and James Kramer (authors of Malleus maleficarum, 1486) and Martín del Río (who in 1599 wrote Disquisitiorum magicarum libro sex)—were likewise members of the cloth. Combining the attributions of judge and theologian, these authors were read and adopted by secular courts all over Europe.

A subject matter as complex as sorcery could not have produced judges of a unified voice. Even before the aforementioned skepticism about sorcerers had become more generalized, criticisms of unbridled persecution were often insinuated or implied. Among judges, Salazar Frias is famed for his dissenting stance in Logroño. Among demonologists and theologians, at the height of what Mandrou has called the crisis of Satanism, the Jesuit Friederich von Spee cried out against torture in his Cautio criminalis (1631). Reginald Scot studied sorcery with a skeptical eye, earning the enmity of Scotland’s James IV, who, once seated on the throne of England, ordered copies of Scot’s 1584 Discovery of Witchcraft burned.26 In the fifteenth century—when the papal bull Summus desiderantis and Malleus were both introduced—men like Ulrich Molitor (De Lamiis et Phitonicis Mulieribus, 1489) and Johannes Tinctoris (Tractatus de secta vaudensium, circa 1460) espoused much more flexible positions than Cologne’s two inquisitors.

This is not to say that any of them doubted the existence of witches. In the opinion of Trevor-Roper, witch-belief was an inseparable part of the era’s philosophy (and here Jean Bodin, economist and jurist, must once more be remembered). Men like Scot and Spee believed in witches but questioned early modern methods of detecting them.²⁷ Contrasting Molitor with Sprenger and Kramer, Cardini calls our attention to the early modern singularity of the witch-hunt. He argues that Molitor’s Tractatus is an anti-Malleus, written in dialog form and representing “an eloquent product of court literature”; Molitor dedicated the book to Austria’s Archduke Sigismund.²⁸

So, curiously enough, it was reactionary forces—those with the strongest ties to feudal and knightly values—that proved the most moderate, tolerant, and skeptical about the power of witches. The official culture’s most progressive camp had blindly embraced the Thomist thesis of the reality of magical facts, “a cause that would triumph in the following century, the century of the modern Absolutist States.” The reality of sorcerous powers made it necessary to repress them once more, “which is revealing,” Cardini claims.²⁹ In a century of upheaval, the same author goes on to say, “reason and tolerance found themselves on the side of reactionary forces, while intolerance, dogmatism, and persecution were on the side of progressive forces”—a paradox comprehensible only within the context of the traumatic shift from feudal to early modern values, to the values of the absolutist state.³⁰ What triumphed at the close of the century was the position represented by Sprenger and Kramer, the position that would be defended again one hundred years later by Bodin, Rémy, del Río, Jean Boguet, De Lancre, and so many others: “the line of intolerance and of the stake.”³¹ Satan’s prime realm was therefore the realm of early modern times and not of the Middle Ages.³² Until the eighteenth century, European states would deal ever more brutally with sorcery, once more exposing the relation between absolutism and demonic obsession.³³ Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, the great theoretician of absolutism by divine right, lamented that all the sorcerers in the world did not share a single body, so that they could be burned together in one bonfire.³⁴

On the Iberian peninsula, the Inquisition was an essential element in the consolidation of the state apparatus. It was the “leviathan’s best helper,” a tool of the monarchy, and a device for managing relations between royal power and inquisitorial power.³⁵ In Portugal, where the social body displayed more archaic cultural features—perhaps too “gelatinous,” to use a term outside the historical context of the Early Modern age—the society’s more traditional sectors also waged a more intense battle against the historical process that would destroy them. The Inquisition was a prime arena for this conflict. Owing to the specific characteristics of the Portuguese case, the opposing forces at times turned the Holy Office more into a state above the state than a state inside the state or alongside it.36 The “helper” consequently became more powerful than the main protagonist. Providing evidence of these clashes and conflicts between social strata, the long arm of the Inquisition overrode the interests of slave-owners in the colony, arresting captives and detaining them in prison for years on end.³⁷

If the major onslaught against Judaizers in Spain occurred during the earliest days of the tribunal, with the hunt growing more diversified in the seventeenth century, the New Christians and conversos were the main targets of the Portuguese Holy Office.³⁸ Perhaps it is this quasi-specialization in persecutory activities that accounts for assertions that the Portuguese Inquisition used a gentler hand in dealing with magical practices.³⁹ I do not agree. Overall, it appears to me that the Portuguese Inquisition was more rigorous than the Spanish. A case in point: there is nothing to indicate that individuals in Portugal who had been accused of offenses eligible for judgment in a mixed forum either desired or petitioned to be judged by the Holy Office.⁴⁰ On the contrary, as I will try to show, Portugal’s inquisitorial procedures sowed terror and panic on both sides of the Atlantic, fraying the social fabric even when directed at offenses that were less profitable and incited less greed, like sorcery and magical practices.⁴¹

Paradoxically, the Portuguese Inquisition had only one colonial tribunal, that of Goa (1560), while Spain had three: Lima (1570), Mexico (1571), and Cartagena (1610). Furthermore, all indications are that it was under the union of the two Crowns—or, better put, during the time of dual monarchy—that efforts to establish a tribunal in Brazil were most intense. Rumors to that effect circulated in the colony, and Pyrard de Laval witnessed the New Christian terror at the possibility that the Inquisition would be introduced in the early seventeenth century.⁴² The New Christians supported the Bragança dynasty, while the Portuguese Inquisition supported Spain, tightening the noose on the New Christians.⁴³ Spain’s colonial tribunals likewise dealt harshly with the Portuguese New Christians residing in lands under Spanish control.⁴⁴

Throughout the colonial period, Brazil thus answered to the tribunal at Lisbon, which, from Portugal, was responsible for cases in the colony. The Holy Office’s already sluggish proceedings became even more so given the distance separating metropolis and colony.⁴⁵ Outside the periods of Visitation—of which there were three for certain—the Holy Office’s Commissaries and Familiars snooped among the colonial population to uncover offenses that could be brought before the Lisbon Tribunal.⁴⁶ Cases could also be raised by some of the colonial bishops. It is known, for example, that in 1579 the bishop of Bahia was vested with the duties of an apostolic inquisitor.⁴⁷ Ecclesiastical or civil inquiries (Devassas) were brought before the Council General of the Inquisition at Lisbon, which issued an official opinion concerning the listed offenses. Should these merit further attention, witnesses would be cross-examined pursuant to the terms of the Inquisition’s Instructions [Regimento].48 It was only then that the Holy Office would consider bringing a case to trial. If things got this far, the accused would be taken to Lisbon, held in custody, and submitted to questioning. Once his or her guilt had been established, the interrogations would continue in the Inquisition’s so-called secret prisons, where the detainee would often be tortured. As far as I am aware, trials were always held in the metropolis, except during periods of Visitation.⁴⁹ On these occasions specific charges would be drawn up, separate from the Visitation Books, that is, from the records of interrogations presided over by the Visitor.

The colonists dreaded the arrival of the ships, which often carried inquisitorial paperwork ordering arrests or further interrogations. Antonia Maria, the “relapsed” witch who performed sorcery services in Pernambuco, asked that all witnesses who testified against her be cross-examined. She was already in Lisbon then, detained in the Inquisition’s secret jails, where she remained for quite some time.⁵⁰ Isabel Maria’s trial provides us with an example of a written record entrusting the defendant to a ship captain:

I, João de Freitas Monteiro, hereby state, as captain of the ship Nossa Senhora da Madre de Deus, São José e Almas, being at anchor in the port of Pará, bound for the city of Lisbon, that it be true that I received from Manuel Pedro Nunes and José Gonçalves Chaves, on board the said ship, Isabel Maria, arrested at the order of the Illustrious Apostolic Inquisitors, at the Imposition of the Court and the city of Lisbon, from the hand of said Familiars. I likewise received a paper bundle, which contains a filigree cross and a chain bracelet with a vernicle carved with the image of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception and St. Benedict, and a gold ring with a counterfeit stone, which is said to weigh six oitavas [total of nearly 40 grams] less fifteen grãos [total of 0.75 grams], to be delivered on the account and at the risk of the said Isabel Maria to the Treasurer General of the Holy Office. As I have also received the bundle of papers drawn up to be delivered to said Holy Tribunal, having received all listed herein from the aforesaid Familiars, I wholly do oblige myself, God granting me the good safety of this ship, to deliver said prisoner to the Keeper of the Jails of the Holy Office; and the gold to the Treasurer General of the same.⁵¹

The letter is dated November 25, 1756. Two years later Isabel Maria appeared in an auto-da-fé suspected of minor heresy. Her trial, as well as that of Adrião Pereira de Faria—who was convicted in the same auto-da-fé and who, in addition to being flogged, abjured in forma—must have related to the Visitation that had reached Grão-Pará five years earlier, headed by Geraldo José de Abranches. Both of the accused were from this region and were prosecuted for sorcery.⁵² Isabel Maria’s auto de entrega [record of delivery] exemplifies what must have been usual procedure and reveals the network of Inquisition bailiffs active in the colony. But it also evinces the complexity of the colonists’ living religion and the gulf between the elite notion of sorcery and popular experience: the defendant, a sorceress, was carrying images of saints on her. Finally, the document points up the inordinate greed of the Holy Tribunal, which did not overlook even the most humble contributions—everything was worthy of confiscation.

The three Visitations to Brazil focused on the colony’s economically significant regions: Bahia, Pernambuco, and Grão-Pará (to which Pombal directed special attention, appointing his brother governor of the state).53 The inquisitors apparently exercised heightened zeal in dealing with colonists from Brazil’s most affluent areas throughout the colonial period: “The Holy Office of the Inquisition always sought and kept a vigilant eye on the most prosperous regions of Brazil,” states Anita Novinsky.⁵⁴ A breakdown of offenses by region and period (see tables 1–3 in the appendix) shows us, for example, that Minas led in the eighteenth century—and this during a period when no Visitations took place, that is, the second quarter of the century. It is northern Brazil that stands out at the end of the century, when Geraldo José de Abranches established his Visitation there. The predominance of sorcery in the colony’s richest regions indicates that syncretism and magical practices were intensifying and gaining in complexity in tandem both with the process of colonization and the production of wealth and with the increased number of African slaves. In the case of New Christians, it is of course logical that the wealthiest would be found residing in areas of greater prosperity.⁵⁵

In overall terms, it seems clear that in these areas of Brazil both the Inquisition and the Crown strove to render the population more “well-ordered” and homogenized, since heresies, spells, dissidence, adultery, incest, and bigamy were a greater menace and therefore less tolerable at these nerve centers. The very existence of episcopal Devassas is evidence of this nor-matizing concern. Ordained by the Constituições primeiras do Arcebispado da Bahia, these Inquiries were part of the post-Tridentine effort to gather the faithful to the bosom of the church, stamp out idolatry, and divest popular religiosity of any folkloric traces.⁵⁶ In this case, inquiries should have occurred throughout the colony, from north to south. Yet to date they are known to have occurred in only three regions: Minas Gerais, where they were more periodic and broader in scope and in range, held from the early 1720s through the dawn of the following century; Mato Grosso, where an episcopal Inquiry took place in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, at a time when the region had already entered a sharp decline;⁵⁷ and Ilhéus, Bahia, which still played an important role in the colonial economy in the early nineteenth century, when the inquiries occurred.

As far as the inquiries in Minas and Bahia, the economic importance of these regions justified such efforts to “normatize” the colonists’ lives. In Cuiabá, in Mato Grosso, in contrast, the initiative was inspired by this border zone’s strategic role.

From all that has been stated so far, it seems clear that the powers of state in the colony were helped by the Inquisition, acting autonomously at given moments. In the colony, the power structures likewise flexed their muscles and endeavored to attain legitimacy by persecuting and punishing heterodox and deviant behavior. Like the monotheistic God who can only exist in opposition to the devil, the Inquisition and the state looked for the elements of their lifeblood in the midst of the colony’s mestizo population, syncretically religious and indisputably different from European models.58 Visitors were not exactly “moved by love” to come to the colony, contrary to what one historian has argued.⁵⁹

While the Inquisition spread its network of Familiars, Commissaries, and Visitors throughout Brazil, availing itself as well of offenses detected by episcopal inquiries, civil authorities created legislation for a populace that fit ever more poorly into the metropolitan mold as the eighteenth century advanced. During those hundred years, Municipal Councils were ordered to verify whether sorcery was practiced in their communities and if there were any witches curing animals by blessing them, making recourse to diabolical relics, or entering into compacts with the devil.⁶⁰ In 1780 the count of Povolide informed Martinho de Mello e Castro that open-air ceremonies were being sponsored by blacks from the Mina coast, where a centerpiece of the rite was an altar bearing idols, live goats, cock’s blood, and corn cake, offered to the participants—in short, precursors to sessions of Candomblé. In tune with the European trend of demonizing expressions of popular culture, Povolide saw this event as a sabbat and tried to place it within the same framework as sorcery in Portugal.⁶¹

As noted in these pages, it appears evident that the witch-hunt could only have come to pass during the Early Modern age. Employed since time immemorial by a broad gamut of peoples, sorcery and magical practices altered their semblances in response to the new ways of organizing institutions and power structures that began emerging in the late fourteenth century. Intolerance of witches, procuresses, and diviners grew in tandem with the irreversible changes under way: the feudal system came undone, power was organized into monarchical states, and the church recognized its limitations in defending and propagating Christianity as the hegemonic religion. Sorcery was therefore not the “daughter of misfortune” depicted by Jules Michelet in the nineteenth century. Rather, it was a by-product of the birth of a new era, one symptom of a painful delivery that was to produce the precapitalist legions of dispossessed people, the mentally ill, and so many other excluded categories.

Among these categories, sorcery stirred the most hatred because it epitomized the clash of two worlds: the world of popular culture and oral, unlettered tradition—shared by the bulk of Europe’s population—and the world of high culture, educated, written, and limited to a restricted number of intellectuals, who were about to be struck by the advent of the printing press. A multifaceted, polyphonic phenomenon, this clash of two worlds was connected with a series of contemporaneous transformations. Hence the numerous explanations for its emergence: the wars of religion;62 the disenchantment of the world prompted by the dawning of Protestantism; the intensification of tensions between neighbors within an impoverished society;⁶³ the church’s realization that it was becoming an isolated citadel;⁶⁴ the acculturation of the Flemish and French countryside;⁶⁵ and many others. Nearly all recent studies raise the issue of this conflict between two distinct worlds but offer different interpretations and inferences about what has otherwise become a near consensus.

French historians ascribe great import to the existence of these two levels—the popular and the learned. While recognizing the interrelation between them, they tend to place more weight on the side of the elites.⁶⁶ In examining the devil’s presence in daily life during the Early Modern age, Mandrou assigns it dual ancestry: judicial and theological literature, on the one hand, and oral tradition, on the other.⁶⁷ But when he delves deeper into his analysis, he links the witch-hunt to the judges’ persecutory attitude and argues that the French magistrates’ early acceptance of enlightened ideas accounts for the disappearance of the hunts. Muchembled, so concerned with the question of popular culture, ultimately finds himself not far from Mandrou, affirming that when the demonological doctrine fashioned at the top found its way down into the hands of civil servants zealous in its application, the persecution intensified.⁶⁸ Viewing sorcery from the point of view of persecution, Delumeau and other French historians, including Muchembled, characterize it as “the ruling ethics’ self-defense” against an “invading” popular culture. From this perspective, Bodin, James I, Rémy, Boguet, De Lancre, and del Río constituted a “frightened elite” engaged in a veritable “enterprise of expropriation” directed against popular culture and tradition.⁶⁹ Although the demonological construct is seen here as a mixture of elitist obsessions and fragments of social reality and popular culture, the former and not the latter would constitute its main ingredients.⁷⁰ Emphasizing persecution thus has the effect of accentuating the elite’s “terrorizing theology” and fails to draw a sufficiently clear picture of the twisted route by which the stereotype itself was constructed.⁷¹

Albeit at times caught up in a fascination with sorcery as a mental construct imposed from the top down, English historians have nevertheless made greater inroads in deciphering the various forces at play in the formulation of the early modern idea of sorcery. Keith Thomas has endeavored to show how the elites reworked the age-old notion of maleficium (according to which certain people are capable of causing injuries), eventually engendering the notion of the witches’ sabbat, which was originally of a different nature and grounded in theological writings.⁷² Thomas also detects a popular hatred of witches, which demonological literature and the advent of the witch-trials adroitly took advantage of.⁷³ Drawn to the idea of a stereotype constructed by the elites, Cohn at the same time offers an interpretation analogous to Thomas’s, wherein he highlights the fact that inquisitorial procedures were brought to bear on maleficium in the Early Middle Ages.⁷⁴ Rowland, whose analysis is of a more anthropological bent, has shown that the relation between sabbat and maleficium depended on formulations with distinct formal structures. Rowland feels that the lives of saints, magical popular tales, and confessions of sorcery offenses display a diachronic structure, based on the sequence of events and essential in translating relations between the natural and supernatural worlds. By contrast, scholasticism’s demonological concept is abstract, atemporal, synchronic.75 At the height of the witch-hunt, these two concepts merged to produce a new myth.⁷⁶ In the words of Rowland, witch-beliefs derived from the process of institutional mediation between cultural levels within a complex society.⁷⁷

Gustav Henningsen makes what appear to be some contradictory assertions. He states that the “demonic mythology of witchcraft was a product of the cultured elite and not of the popular mind.” Nonetheless, he regards witchcraze as the “fruit of a mating” between popular culture and high culture and believes that “in areas where there were no popular witch-beliefs, there was likewise no persecution of witches.”⁷⁸ With Carlo Ginzburg’s analyses in mind, I believe it is valuable to stress that witchcraft raises the issue of the circularity of cultural levels, which often hampers our ability to tell when the elite sectors predominate over the popular sectors and vice versa. The cultural elites reworked expressions of popular culture from the perspective of demonology, and demonology in turn could not have been constructed without recourse to long-standing folk traditions. In other words, demonology as a field of knowledge belonged to the educated elites; but it was still never devoid of the silent, steady presence of popular elements.

Ginzburg did a model job of demonstrating how Menocchio, the Friulian miller, constructed a heretical cosmogony that intertwined popular and elite themes, often taken from readings like The Decameron and A Thousand and One Nights.⁷⁹ Based on Ginzburg, it should also be said that much as this mating occurred, a rift could still be perceived between one level and the other. The early modern church and state were amazed by the myriad religious concepts and social realities that had to be administered and, in their eye, homogenized. Their awareness of the immense gulf lying between these two clashing universes generated and legitimized repression. Yet this was often a suicide mission, insofar as one world was intertwined with the other.

Finally, it should be stated that witch-beliefs were a generalized phenomenon in Portugal, as indicated by the laws cited earlier and by various types of documents. Still, sorceresses were persecuted less in this country than in other parts of Europe. The mere existence of a belief thus does not suffice to account for a greater or lesser degree of repression.

The polemic surrounding sorcery will remain alive for a long time to come. In this regard, lying at the intersection of distinct cultural levels, colonial sorcery is an object of study with exceptional explanatory potential, as the clash between the popular and elite worlds becomes exacerbated within the colonial system and within a social formation so complex from myriad angles. I believe colonial sorcery acts as a kind of magnifying glass in the study of these intertwined discourses. In the crossfire between them, the inquisitor’s metropolitan condition also intersects with the defendant’s colonial condition, undeniably another source of intimidation.

The Inquisition’s Task: Spreading Persecution and Awakening Memories

Witchcraft is by definition an impossible crime, says Gustav Henningsen. This author tells us that “what is characteristic of the witch’s role is that it is a fictitious one, imputed and vacuous: a witch can neither fly nor destroy anything with her look (evil eye).”80 From the perspective of reason, Henningsen is right. In a famous essay on sorcery, contemporaneous with the immense fiery cross upon which humans were roasted, Montaigne had long before manifested his perplexity that people charged with these impossible crimes would be burned.⁸¹ And as Mandrou has demonstrated, it was necessary for the entire belief system supporting the intertwined discourses on sorcery to fall apart before the rationalist, enlightened position could triumph.⁸² Montaigne’s concerns found practically no echo, unlike Nicolas de Malebranche, who wrote in the late seventeenth century; only then did Montaigne’s assertion prevail: that cooking men and women alive was too high a price for such conjectures.⁸³

As it captured and promoted the intermingling of elite and popular formulations, the inquisitorial procedure was exemplary in creating and perpetuating the stereotype of sorcery, driving the accused to confess.⁸⁴ For the most part, it acted on two fronts: the individual, by awakening memories and scrutinizing lives, fears, and desires; and the collective, where it aggravated social conflicts and interpersonal tension and created a channel where accusations, hatred, and sinister procedures could multiply. In short, spreading inquisitorial activities would allow the tribunal a much broader reach than it could achieve alone as an institution.

Colonial Brazil did not have its own tribunals, unlike Spanish America. But like Spanish America it experienced the dread of inquisitorial investigations. So it was familiar with the “microphysics of power” that emanated from the Inquisition, even at a distance; as Gonçalves Salvador observed, its tentacles reached Brazil.⁸⁵ Every year on the first Sunday of Lent, an edict that established the offenses falling within inquisitorial jurisdiction was read out and posted in the churches of the Kingdom and the Empire’s overseas dominions.⁸⁶ Thus was the door opened to denunciations and accusations. The fear of Visitations in Brazil even prompted denunciations of dead people.⁸⁷

Through arbitrary mechanisms—but nonetheless perfectly in keeping with the early modern notion of justice—the defendants were entangled in a web from which they could not extricate themselves. The Portuguese Inquisition permitted testemunhas de ouvida; in other words, hearsay was deemed admissible evidence. Furthermore, witnesses were not required to prove their own character, and any testimony counted, even that of children.⁸⁸ Famous judges and demonologists like Boguet and De Lancre placed great store in depositions of this kind, even when they were extracted under torture.89 By virtue of the very fact that guilt was assigned a priori, “everything was done to facilitate the lodging of denunciations, while everything was done to hamper their elimination or exclusion.”⁹⁰ In Portugal the Inquisition even resorted to what Saraiva has called the “curious device of multiplication”: if witnesses were few, the Instructions determined that a different question would be asked at each repeated act or ceremony. Denunciations were thus augmented to give the defendant the impression that they were greater in number than they really were.⁹¹ Finally, an informant could hide behind a cloak of secrecy, which by the same token meant that the defendants could be kept in the dark regarding their true situation or regarding any means by which they might dodge the inquisitorial trap set up at each interrogation. In the complacent words of Caro Baroja, the Holy Office was an “enigmatic tribunal” grounded in secrecy.⁹²

For Bartolomé Bennassar, by contrast, the secret procedures that the Iberian Inquisition developed “to perfection” are consonant with “that era’s trend, which we can identify with the development of the Modern State and its desire for power and control over its subjects.” In Spain, men like Ferdinand of Aragon, Cardinal Cisneros, and Charles V devoted immense energy to preserving these procedures, despite the initial scandal this raised.⁹³ In Portugal, the Instructions themselves were secret, although printed; access was reserved to judges of the Inquisition and perhaps the prosecutor, while it was closed to the public and to the defendant, attorneys, and most civil servants. This meant that those accused had no knowledge of trial documents, the organization of the trials, the norms governing them, the law that would judge their crimes, the judges’ decisions, or the individuals accusing them.⁹⁴ In the case of documents whose contents were to be read to the accused—such as the Statement of Charges (Prova da Justiça) and the Verdict (Sentença), announced during the auto-da-fé—the language was vague and elliptical when people and places were mentioned, with the intent of protecting informants, all in accordance with the Instructions. For instance: “A witness of the Court, sworn in, ratified, . . . states that he knows, for the reason given, that the Defendant, José Francisco, was found in a certain place and in certain company, whom he asked to go to a Church to place some papers beneath an altar stone so that some masses might be said above them.” A second example: “Another witness of the court . . . states knowing, for the reason given, that the Accused, José Francisco, was found in a certain place, where he read to a certain person for the purpose of transcription. . . .”⁹⁵

This blurring of people and places in the Statement of Charges as well as the Verdict seems to have the intent of highlighting the accused’s crimes, which were described in minute detail even when repeated by a number of witnesses. The verdicts in the two trials of the relapsed heretic Antonia Maria, for instance, form a veritable compendium of magical prayers and spells, reconstructed from depositions by people who remained anonymous to the public. Names are omitted even in the Inquisition’s transcriptions of the defendant’s confessions: “She said, and confessed, that on a certain occasion, because she found herself in prison, a person she knew consulted with another that she might teach her some remedy to free said person; and indeed, both prepared a brew.” Then follows the description of the ritual, while farther on it is stated: “And another person had asked her to make some remedy, so that someone, with whom she had maintained an illicit friendship, should desire to continue the wicked dealings as hitherto, making her a certain promise, if the results were achieved. And moved by these interests, she, the Defendant, went to the home of said person, and after she asked for a piece of goat cheese, they both went to a window.”96 The fact that these data are omitted even when the defendant tells her story and names the supporting actors lends credence to the notion that the intent was not only to preserve an informant’s identity but also to magnify the suspect’s guilt by means of this formal expedient. In the realm of crime and punishment, he or she alone gains an identity; he or she is the only actor.

Making recourse to Familiars and to means of persuasion—like sermons, processions, autos da fé—the Inquisition crept into all corners of daily life and, according to the liberal historiography of the nineteenth century, transformed “humankind into a band of informants and Christian society into a horde of spies.”⁹⁷ This persecutory furor took advantage of personal or social antagonisms and indeed reproduced and perpetuated them.⁹⁸

As in Spain, most denunciations in colonial Brazil came from neighbors, relatives, and friends.⁹⁹ In the late sixteenth century, Madalena de Calvos was friend and confidante to Leonor Martins, who went by the nickname of Salteadeira [“Leaper”], a single woman found guilty of sorcery and banished from the Kingdom. Leonor had confided to Madalena about the sorceries she knew and had even shown Madalena the familiar branded in the flesh of her flank, mentioned in earlier chapters. When Heitor Furtado de Mendonça’s Visitation reached Pernambuco, Leonor was panic-stricken. “She begged [Madalena] to keep secret all the said things she had disclosed to her and that she do her no harm and not denounce these things, nor state them before this Board [of the Visitation], and she, the Accuser, promised her that she would not disclose them.”¹⁰⁰ But Madalena betrayed her friend and appeared before the board to recount what had happened, revealing the sorceress’s frailty before the menaces of this world and the violence of the power structures. Mutual denunciations also spread widely among the Bahian group arrested in the mid-eighteenth century for carrying mandinga pouches. The circumstances, however, were different: the friends began pointing fingers at one another after they had been arrested, and the incriminatory testimonies fell mainly upon Mateus Pereira Machado, accused by both José Martins and Luís Pereira de Almeida.¹⁰¹ The same thing occurred in two other trials, where the defendants were involved in the same offense: José Francisco Pereira and José Francisco Pedroso, charged in Lisbon with taking part in the sabbat in Val de Cavalinhos and in Campos da Cotovia.¹⁰²

Yet there were shows of solidarity between prisoners as well, chiefly when they were not prior acquaintances or involved in the same offense (for in the latter instance they all fended for themselves as best they could). When the pardo carpenter José Fernandes was locked up in the dungeon in Bahia, his cellmates frightened him by saying that “if he would make the same confession before the Holy Office as he had made there, they would certainly order his life taken.”103 Confessing bit by bit, as the inquisitorial noose tightened—a standard procedure among prisoners of the Holy Office—the black woman Joana was called to task by the inquisitors. They wanted to know why she had not confessed at once to the episodes she eventually disclosed. “She said that her reason for not confessing to everything immediately was because the other prisoners had advised her to deny everything that she could deny, and not to admit to her offenses.”¹⁰⁴

Informants often found themselves caught in the Inquisition’s net too, as illustrated by the trials of Violante Carneira and “Butt-That-Burns.” On August 22, 1591, Violante had voluntarily testified against Maria Gonçalves Cajada (Arde-lhe-o-rabo i.e., Butt-That-Burns), accusing her of being a sorceress. She reported the episode examined earlier, namely, that the famous witch of the time of the First Visitation allegedly had the habit of nourishing the devil with flesh from a sore on her foot. What Violante Carneira could not know was that by then she herself had been denounced by a former lover; two days earlier, on August 20, 1591, Bernardo Pimentel had of his own volition come forward to accuse her of uttering words from the mass during carnal relations.¹⁰⁵ Impassively, without tipping their hand, the inquisitors took first one and then the other denunciation. Hanging over every witness’s head was the risk of being transformed into a defendant, by the same process through which he or she had voluntarily accused someone else. In other words, the Inquisition turned every witness into a potential suspect. But instead of discouraging denunciations, this menace spurred even greater numbers to testify, all trying to save themselves from possible denunciations and earn the inquisitor’s confidence by appearing before him as an informant. Hence so many voluntary appearances and denunciations—aided further by the fact that church confessors prodded their lambs to appear before the Visitation Board whenever the priest deemed that a sin fell within the Inquisition’s scope.¹⁰⁶ Thus diffused, the power of the Holy Office created chains of accusations, impregnated by a pervasive, omnipresent dread.

This generalized persecution fed on various types of animosities. Antonio Carvalho Serra, who along with his brother Salvador was accused of stealing sacred hosts and using them in a mandinga pouch, spent fifteen months imprisoned in the colony; he was later sent to Lisbon, where he eventually died. At one point in the proceedings, the vicar of Conceição do Mato Dentro Church certified that the case all boiled down to the false witness of an enemy of the defendant, who wanted to sleep with his sister-in-law.¹⁰⁷

Antonia Maria, trapped a second time in the Inquisition’s net, alleged that the accusations against her had been lodged by “mortal enemies”; Bárbara de Mello supposedly despised Antonia because she suspected the woman of having an affair with her husband. Bárbara wanted Antonia as far away from Pernambuco as possible and had threatened her, saying that “she would see that she would be cast out of that land.” Antonia Maria’s landlord allegedly had been induced by the woman to kick her out, which he did. The jealous wife said that even if she had to sell the veil on her head, she “would seek out false witnesses so that she, the Defendant, would be arrested again for the same crime for which she had been banished to that town.” The stonemason Domingos Gonçalves had gone to Antonia Maria seeking relief from the attack of hiccups tormenting him. Antonia’s remedy did no good, and the man “went to the home of her, the Defendant, most wrathful and furious, saying that he would hit her, the Defendant, with a stick and that he would whip her and accuse her before the Holy Office, making many insulting remarks in all the places he would go, slandering her, the Defendant, with very offensive names.”

Listed among Antonia’s many alleged enemies was Joana de Andrade, with whom she had a professional conflict, as mentioned earlier. Antonia Maria ended her contestation by stating that she “was a foreign woman who went to said town without having any kin there who would believe and defend her from so many defamations as her enemies raised . . . , and as these enemies were native to said town where they had kin and friends, it was easy for them all to unite to do this harm to her, the Defendant, and cast her out of the town in revenge, for the hatred they harbored against her, and in this manner not only would the witnesses that she had contested swear falsely but also the others whom she does not remember now, who would be kin and friends of the said enemies of the Defendant.”108

Permeating the fabric of social relations, the persecution instigated by the Holy Office intensified existing tensions and sparked new ones, winning adherents who became veritable heralds of the ideology it embodied. On many pages of the Compêndio narrativo do peregrino da América are traces of the procedures devised by the Inquisition. When Nuno Marques Pereira criticizes the African slaves’ quigila, he does so following the line of the inquisitors’ demonological thinking:

It is an explicit pact, which these heathens enter into with the devil, upon which is based some bodily convenience desired by the party who made it: such as having good success in war, fortune in the hunt, in planting, etc. These pacts, and quigilas, derive from the fact that the devil is greatly envious of the rational creature, and wants by diverse means to lead him to sin, making him lay aside his rules, and commandments, to the end of casting him into Hell. This quigila, or pact, is passed on by tradition to children, grandchildren, and other descendants; however, as these were not the instigators of the pact, it is tacit in them: and as they are ignorant of the cause, their offense does not have such gravity as that of their parents and ancestors, who did it expressly.¹⁰⁹

When Nuno Marques Pereira adopts the idea that sorcery is hereditarily transmissible, when he differentiates between a tacit and explicit pact, and when he opposes magic to rationalism (that of the scholastics), he signals his adherence to the entire arsenal of ideas shaping the ideological framework of the early modern witch-hunt. The object of his repudiation is one of the constituent elements of the Afro-Brazilian religion that was then gradually being constructed in the colony; his discourse consequently illustrates the intersecting levels of the popular universe and elite universe. Perhaps the Pilgrim was a Familiar of the Holy Office as well. Or perhaps his adherence to the tribunal’s ideas is merely proof of its efficacy as an apparatus of power that intruded into daily life and molded mentalities.

The microphysics of inquisitorial power thus constituted a complex process whereby both the collective and the individual universe were simultaneously undermined by a powerful institutional network, which in turn was bolstered by its collaborators’ efforts and the concoction of arbitrary trials. In Spain the Inquisition already had been in force for fifty years, and there its devastating effects had become irreversible, engraving the traces of terror on people’s memories.110 Even today, the population of Galicia identifies the Inquisition with all it deems repressive and arbitrary. Recapturing that distant era, the region’s inhabitants say the men of the Holy Office would appear like a vision, silently, evoking surprise and fear. “The ironically entitled Holy Inquisition has consequently become a symbol of disorder, of insecurity, of the violation of a person’s innermost sanctum,” Carmelo Lisón-Tolosana concludes.¹¹¹

To enhance its results at the individual level, the Holy Office relied on confessions. These had been the key to the ancien régime’s penal system, and in the case of the tribunal were taken as a sign that a trial had proceeded efficaciously, the grand finale of a successful interrogation.¹¹² The inquisitor should be “fanatical about detail,” faithful to the spirit of the Manual governing him: “Even when the denunciation lodged shows no glimmer of truth, nevertheless the inquisitor shall not discard the trial that has begun, which he shall always move ahead with, for that which is not discovered today may be achieved tomorrow.”¹¹³

Michel Foucault is the author of one of the finest analyses of the significance of confession in Western societies. According to Foucault, from the time of the Middle Ages, confession has been an important ritual for arriving at the truth, while corresponding interrogation methods have been gradually devised. We have become a “singularly confessant” society, building knowledge upon these foundations: hence scientia sexualis:

The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated.114

Friar Luís de Nazaré, the debauched priest, and Maria Joana, the walking compendium of syncretic prayers, were both overcome by a veritable frenzy of loquacity during their interrogations. Furnishing much detail, the priest narrated episodes that were extremely similar to each other, even recalling events from long before, as if entranced with recapturing them. He was humble and plaintive and exaggerated his regret, blaming the error of his ways on his “wretchedness” and “weakness.”¹¹⁵ Maria Joana likewise did service to detail with great ardor, listing an impressive number of magical-religious prayers and dredging up from memory the places, people, and circumstances involved, as if she too, through her confession, were pursuing an identity lost in the course of the trial.¹¹⁶ It was as if the impact of the interrogations had unleashed an identity crisis within the accused, traumatically dissociating the elite and popular levels intertwined in their everyday practice. Acting against their own best interests, the defendants succumbed to an “eagerness to confess and to expiate” in their desire to forge an alliance with the inquisitor.¹¹⁷ The epitome was adherence to all the inquisitor said and the belief that what had been confessed had in fact taken place.¹¹⁸

The realization of guilt often was triggered by the forces of repression. At the time Heitor Furtado de Mendonça was making his way around Pernambuco, for example, Beatriz Martins and Gaspar Francisco became aware of their violations when they heard that the Inquisition regarded them as such. Beatriz had heard the announcement “of the documents of the Holy Office,” which condemned affirmations that the state of matrimony was better than that of religious vows. Pressured by her fears, Beatriz recalled the time when she had first started thinking that way: “It seemed to her that she, being a young girl, had heard [these ideas] from a woman, her mistress, who had taught her to cook and to wash in her homeland [Mérida].”¹¹⁹

Gaspar Francisco gave a most interesting testimony that exemplifies this introjection of the inquisitorial mechanisms of repression. While still living in Lisbon, he had declared that the state of matrimony was better than that of the clergy. Shortly thereafter, he discovered that he “had spoken badly,” according to the general monitory and edict of faith announced in the See, in São Domingos and São Roque, and “he immediately cast aside the error.” He went to confession and received absolution, along with a warning that he should go before one of the inquisitorial boards in Lisbon to report his offense—which Gaspar failed to do, “out of carelessness.” After moving to Pernambuco, he heard the announcement of the edict of faith ordered by Heitor Furtado de Mendonça, which again indicated that Gaspar’s earlier assertion, made in Lisbon, was a heresy. Once more he felt pangs of guilt and sought out a Jesuit to make confession. Curiously enough, the priest “told him that there was no danger here that witnesses would come forward to accuse him, that he could be exempted from going before the Board; and for such reason he had not come.” But his fears once again got the better of him when, “during the public act held at the main cathedral, some were given penance for this very reason.” He went to another confessor, “who wanted not to absolve him, and ordered him to come before this Board, for which reason he now comes and asks forgiveness.”120

As soon as he discovered that he had acted against the precepts of the church, Gaspar grew uneasy and tortured by fear and guilt. Through one confession and then the other, he sought assurance that his sin would be forgiven. But not even his confessors managed to give him a straight answer. One of them said that in the colony—land of sin—no one would denounce him; the Inquisition was a whole ocean away. The other, within the context of the Visitation, encouraged him to report his offense—for the threat was now at hand.¹²¹

The foreman Baltazar da Fonseca—whose peculiar religious views were seen in chapter 2—was made aware of his error thanks to the auto-da-fé held in Olinda, where he heard a penance given to someone “who had renounced the cross and the saints, and hence he was perplexed and for this reason he has now come before this Board to denounce himself, and henceforth he shall believe and hold to that which this Board teaches and orders him, and he has come forward with this intention, so that if he be wrong, he may cast aside his error, being herewith declared and enlightened.”¹²² His testimony is a sincere example of how the colony’s living religion differed subconsciously from that postulated by the Inquisition.

The news going round about the all-powerful Holy Office and the announcement of monitories, sermons, autos-da-fé, and banishment all induced people to denounce themselves and others. Meanwhile, the inquisitors stirred the frightened memories of the suspects and defendants caught in their net, unearthing corpses. When the memory of a possible violation had been lost somewhere in the passage of time, the interrogation endeavored to revive it—for example, in the instance of Brásia Monteiro, in Pernambuco: “Asked if she knows or suspects for what reason she has been summoned, she responded nay; . . . if she knows something that someone has done against our holy Catholic faith, she responded that she knows no more than that which she has already said before this Board. . . . Further asked specifically what person is it that she knows to have lashed a crucifix she said that now she remembers that many years ago, she knows not how many, Branca Dias being alive. . . .” And she began her denunciation.¹²³

The net of denunciations entrapped people who might not have come forward spontaneously to testify before the Inquisitorial Board. The Holy Office’s terrifying eye, ever-watchful and probing, discerned crimes where ordinary people would often not so much as glimpse them. João Antonio, a 27-year-old carpenter, took part in a conversation with Pero Gonçalves, likewise a carpenter, and with the stonemason Antonio Martins. At the time, João thought there was nothing unusual about their topic.¹²⁴ The Inquisition rekindled his memory during interrogation; it shifted his recollection out of the context in which it had been recorded and dressed it in new clothing, the tone being set by the offense: “Asked from whom he had heard it said that no one goes to hell for women or like matter, he responded that he does not remember having heard such a thing, and was thereupon admonished to tell the truth, if he had heard this from one Pero Gonçalves, carpenter, because this Board has information that he was present, and that if he does not speak the truth, he shall be punished. He responded that now, after the specific case had been stated to him and the circumstances surrounding it, he recalls and remembers that it is true that. . . .” And he went on to denounce his friend.125

Francisco Cortes asked forgiveness for the blasphemy he had uttered fifteen years earlier, in Barcelona.¹²⁶ Salvador Carvalho Serra, arrested and tried for stealing hosts, remembered an old incident of a pact during his interrogation.¹²⁷ At the time of the Visitation to Grão-Pará, Crescêncio Escobar came before the board of his own volition to confess to a compact dating nine years earlier; he had reasons to be terrified, since his cohort, Adrião Pereira de Faria, had been arrested and prosecuted by the Holy Office and had fled to the interior.¹²⁸ Ana Seixas’s testimony before the board in Pernambuco is moving. In 1594 she had been married fourteen years, and she confessed to having had anal relations with her husband twice, although he had ejaculated in her “vaso natural [vagina].” She asked forgiveness and said that “she had agreed to said relations to do the will of her husband.” She added that she was “happily married in love and friendship with the said husband.” Divulging the smallest details of his intimate life and contributing to the construction of what Foucault called scientia sexualis, the husband went to unburden his conscience too. The first time anal relations had occurred, he had been drunk, and “the said sins he had done against the will of his wife, who, out of fear of him, had consented.”¹²⁹

Particularly when it came to sexual matters, confessing was not enough—the violation had to be dissected and the acts described and disclosed before the inquisitor’s sick curiosity. João Batista, a lad of fifteen, worked as page for one Lopo Soares, a bigwig in Pernambuco’s colonial administration. Before the board, he naively told that he had gone to fetch a pair of his master’s slippers from the shoemaker, who had raped him. Pressed by the Holy Office, he was compelled to recount the event in minutiae: “He was warned that he should state if the said shoemaker had penetrated with his member in his breech, and that he should speak the truth about all that had happened, for if he should tell a lie or silence the truth before this Board, he shall for this reason be punished; and he responded that the said shoemaker had not entered nor penetrated his vaso traseiro [rectum], for the reason that he, the Accuser, had not consented nor given opportunity for this, and everything that he has said is true.”¹³⁰

The Inquisition thus engendered the perception of guilt, pried it from memory through its interrogations, and then, reversing direction, introjected this guilt into the defendants, prompting adherence to the inquisitorial discourse, as stated earlier. José Januário da Silva cured quebranto with magical words and prayers, as seen in chapter 3. When questioned by the inquisitor, he replied that he had faith in the words he pronounced. The inquisitor then warned that the devil was quite fond of mixing good words (those of prayer) with empty words (those of superstition), to which the poor prisoner responded that if the words he had said entailed diabolic concert, he had used them without realizing it, naively. The dreadful inquisitorial logic eventually defeated him:

Asked if he, the Deponent, knows that the words “St. Anne begot Mary, Mary begot Jesus Christ, and St. Isabel [begot] St. John the Baptist” may contain a blasphemy and slander against the Most Holy Virgin and her Most Holy Son; for it being certain that Our Lady the Virgin begot, remaining always a virgin, and that Jesus Christ Our Lord was born without it being the deed of a man, none of these attributes are found either in St. Anne or in St. Isabel, or in St. John the Baptist; and that for this reason, there being no difference in the said words, and considering Our Lady the Virgin like St. Anne and St. Isabel, and Jesus Christ like John the Baptist, then they are denied those unique qualities that are due them: to Our Lady as ever virgin, and as mother of God, and to Jesus Christ as conceived by the Holy Spirit, without concert of any man.¹³¹

The cure for quebranto had been transformed into an attack on Mary’s virginity. The defendant had not thought of this but ended up recognizing that he had blasphemed; he regretted it and asked forgiveness.

The Indian Domingas Gomes da Ressurreição, who likewise cured quebranto, saw her knowledge of folk medicine ridiculed by the inquisitor, who strove to confuse her and make her doubt her therapeutic powers. As explained in an earlier chapter, the formula Domingas used was a syncretic prayer that made mention of white, black, and scarlet roses. The inquisitor drew on the same argumentation applied to José Januário: that it was a sin to mix good words with vain ones. The indigenous woman revealed the doubt this stirred within her: “She said that only now, after she made her confession, did she become dubious of the words by which she performed cures, and for this reason she also suspected that there may be in them something of the superstitious.” As soon as the Holy Office’s visit was announced, Domingas had begun to have pangs of guilt and wished to confess. The inquisitor took advantage of her hesitations to introject more and more guilt feelings, resorting to wild argumentation: “If she, the Deponent, knows that the three colors, white, black, and scarlet, are opposite to each other, and could not be placed together on one ill part”—to which the accused acceded. Well, the inquisitor rejoined, if she knows that, she should also know that the words she used were vain and superstitious, grounded on a “clear and evident lie” and lacking any virtue save that communicated by the devil, “who is father of the lie, and always making use of them.” When Domingas said she was curing the illness without curing it, she was clearly lying and in so doing “showed that she had dealings, friendship, commerce, and communication with the demon.” The accused capitulated: “She has said that she now knows the error in which she has lived, using lying and vain words and actions, which may contain superstition; however, she has said and done all by material means because she was thus taught.” Cautious, she denied any compact, stating that she wanted nothing to do with the devil, that “instead, she hates and loathes him, and flees from him as a common enemy that thinks only of taking souls to their damnation.” Finally, she promised never again to practice such cures, which she finally realized were “questionable” and composed of vain words.132

The mechanisms that the Inquisition deployed against individuals, leaving them at its mercy and reshaping them according to its creed, also made any chance of escaping this subjugation seem very remote. Mateus Pereira Machado had been arrested in Bahia in 1750 for carrying mandinga pouches. He reached Lisbon in 1753 and was taken to the inquisitorial prisons. One year later, when the testimonies of other deponents arrived from Bahia, the defendant was transferred to the Inquisition’s secret jails, which is where he was the day the 1755 earthquake struck. Interrogations were resumed on May 19, 1756, at which time the inquisitor asked him what he had been doing during his period of freedom, since the tragedy had destroyed the Inquisition palace.¹³³ Mateus then told how on the day of the earthquake, after Aves (i.e., late afternoon), he had managed to break down the door with the help of two companions, one of whom was his Bahian friend Luís Pereira de Almeida. They had left by the hallway, with the fire at their heels, consuming everything. They had then joined some other blacks. The next day they had gone to Rocio at the jailer’s summons and had signed an agreement promising not to run away. “And so long as he had been in freedom, he had occupied himself with the work of clearing away rubble in the streets to earn a few vinténs for his sustenance, appearing many times at the door of the pavilion where matters of the Inquisition were processed to see if anything was desired of him.”¹³⁴ One week earlier, on May 12, 1756, he had been taken anew to the Inquisition’s jails, by then rebuilt.

During the six months he had been free, he had not attempted to run away or escape trial or slip out of the clutches of the Holy Office but had instead passively accepted his fate. One month later he was convicted at an auto-da-fé and in August began his banishment in Castro Marim, a sentence he served out conscientiously until 1760. He had given ten years of his life to the Portuguese Inquisition, which he was unable to evade even when by chance he had gained his freedom.¹³⁵

The Inquisition’s Task: Hunting Down Pacts with the Devil, Degrading the Colonial Condition, Shattering Human Lives

As we have seen, confession was the key to the legal system organized during the Early Modern age. For the judges who dealt with sorcery offenses, what mattered most was extracting confessions of diabolic compacts from the defendants. Again borrowing a formulation by Franco Cardini, this covenant was the “fundamental theme around which the theological and juridical image of truly heretical sorcery could be constructed.”136 It was debated whether or not such pacts were actually a fabrication, and each author held his or her own opinion about their true nature, illusory or concrete.¹³⁷ In general terms, however, from the fifteenth century on, the idea that it was heretical to invoke the demon with supplications predominated; in other words, the viewpoint was no longer that applicable to ritual magic in the Middle Ages, which aspired to master or command demons.¹³⁸

In capturing and reconstructing the imagination of Europe’s elites at the close of the Middle Ages, it can be said that demonologists and theologians established one of the currents of thought that supported the construction of the sabbat—in its essence, a myth foreign to the popular mentality.¹³⁹ But this elite current was not the only one at work; it was an integral part of a cultural complex further composed of dispersed elements of popular culture that had been fused in the crucible of the Inquisition.¹⁴⁰ The sabbat was therefore one of the main mental constructs introduced thanks to the confluence and interpenetration of elite and popular concepts that occurred in the early days of the Early Modern age, often in traumatic fashion. Diabolic pacts and the sabbat went hand in hand, almost always impossible to disassociate. Once an inquisitor had extracted a confession of a compact, he started on the trail of the sabbat.

As Carmelo Lisón-Tolosana has observed, in inquisitorial mythology it is the defendant who is portrayed as powerful. He or she is the author of the pact, the person who must be exterminated or cleansed.¹⁴¹ The inquisitor hunts about in search of this diabolic covenant, probing among practices buttressed by popular tradition. Some of the condemned bravely denied the accusation; others, intimidated even if not tortured, confessed whatever their opponent wanted to hear.

Antonia Maria, tried twice, confessed to reciting a number of magical prayers and to practicing romantic sorceries but firmly denied any covenant with the devil. At most, she pointed her finger at her enemy Joana, with the clear goal of freeing herself from inquisitorial insistence on this topic. But even in the absence of proof, it was acceptable to make allegations: “the Defendant being a baptized Christian, and as such obliged to hold and believe that which the Holy Mother Church of Rome holds, believes, and teaches; and with her life and habit to set examples, not using spells, superstitions, and brews, and other things, by means of these to achieve diverse ends, she has done the opposite, and from some time thenceforth, forgetting her obligation, has used the said things, desiring through them to achieve the purposes intended, which could not be without the Defendant having a pact with the demon.”142

It was the first quarter of the eighteenth century, but the Holy Office’s stance still resembled that of late-sixteenth-century judges and demonologists, when “Butt-That-Burns” [Arde-lhe-o-rabo] had been accused simultaneously of sorcery and of being a “dishonorable woman,” a double stigma that fit like a glove in the case of single, penniless women. Like Antonia Maria, the sorceress of the colony’s early days negated the reality of the magical practices so skillfully insinuated by the inquisitor: “She, within her inner self and her soul, never had erred in our Holy Faith, and never had she spoken with the devils nor had dealings with them, nor possessed bones of the hanged, and never had gone to the abyss of the ocean, and never had buried jugs with sorceries . . . but all the things she had said and feigned doing, all being false, to fool the said people who asked her for spells, to take from them money and things to eat.”¹⁴³ Antonia Maria’s trial records show the intersection of two concepts under debate since the Middle Ages: the actuality of sorcery and its fictitiousness. The former concept was embraced by the elites, while the fictional interpretation was invoked by the sorceress to justify her social role as the community witch; since the community saw her as an intermediary between themselves and the supernatural, she responded to this popular need as a way of making her living.

Arrested in 1756 and sent to Lisbon, where she arrived early the next year, Isabel Maria was insistently questioned by the inquisitor about the pact she had supposedly entered into with Satan: “. . . if by maleficium and diabolic compact, she had done or intended to do harm to any person’s life, honor, or property, and if for this purpose she had contracted or sought to contract in any way friendship with the devil.” The defendant had boasted she could transport people, go shopping in Lisbon, and subdue wills, but she denied any pact. The inquisitor insisted: had she made recourse to words for lascivious purposes or relied on the demon’s concourse?—for God did not act in such a manner. Isabel Maria dodged first one way and then another, claiming ignorance as justification for her actions.

But the Holy Office pressed on, steadfast in its effort to hunt down a pact and extract a confession consonant with demonological theory, asking “if she had found herself with the demon at some gatherings of people where she had seen and known other persons with whom he had friendship, and who worshipped him?” In response, the defendant’s despair: “She said that, for the mercy of God, never had such a thing come to pass with her.” She perceived she would pay dearly for her cavalier proclamation of inconsequential words, when her sole objective had been to earn the admiration and envy of those who knew her. Then came the merciless verdict, grounded in her claims about nocturnal flights: “. . . boasting that she was one of the demon’s favored so that she be feared and could hold subjugated to her those with whom she had dealings, all of which leads to the presumption that she, the Defendant, straying from the common practice of Catholic believers, does believe in the demon and with him has dealings and friendship.” In addition to being convicted of minor heresy in an auto-da-fé, she was forced to serve out three years of exile in Leiria, Portugal, a great distance from Belém, where she had gone voluntarily years before at the encouragement of El-Rei [the king], who wanted “people to populate that conquered land.”144

Nothing has been found to indicate the use of physical torture during Visitations to Brazil. The Inquisition did, however, resort to means of persuasion that terrified the defendant and had a powerful psychological effect. Joana Preta was suspected of having poisoned a fellow slave over a matter of jealousy involving their masters, as seen in chapter 5. As soon as Geraldo José de Abranches began his interrogation, he threw in the question of a pact, purportedly made with the intention of realizing certain desires. He pushed the defendant to confess. When she denied the accusations, he stated that superstitions were invariably “inventions of the demon . . . for it is certain that God Our Lord does not involve Himself in vain, worthless, and superstitious things.” In the light of such evidence, to deny the pact was insolence. Intimidated, Joana began to give in: “She said that even though she had used the said things for the reasons stated, and even though she had been warned that they were superstitious and invented by the devil, she had never made an express pact with him; however, that if in said things there be a hidden, tacit pact, in this case she must have made one, for using the said things.” She was not aware that this sortilege involved the devil’s concert and only learned of it when warned by her confessors: “And she knows it now with greater clarity by the questions that have been put to her.” The avid inquisitor wanted to know about promises made to the devil, about his appearances before her, about the body parts Joana had given him “as a sign of subjugation and that she was his slave, disciple, and friend,” about the reverence she paid him, worshipping him as a god. After four years in jail, her verdict was announced at the Visitation Board. She abjured de levi and was exempted from banishment.¹⁴⁵

The inquisitor interpreted the magical-religious prayers described in great detail by Maria Joana before the Visitation Board as presumptive evidence of a pact. She agreed that she trusted in the devil and admitted there may have been a tacit pact, but she firmly denied having entered into a pact per se.¹⁴⁶ The prayer to St. Mark pronounced by Manuel Nunes da Silva was also likened to a pact during his inquisitorial interrogations. At first he successfully dodged accusations, but two months later he ended up charged with a tacit pact.¹⁴⁷ The inquisitorial logic shook the convictions of the accused, who eventually caved in to the charges. Manuel Pacheco Madureira used prayers to achieve success in romance and was in addition a practitioner of the basket divination. Always on the prowl, the inquisitor asked if Manuel knew that Jesus and his saints were not in the habit of granting favors for vile ends. The defendant concurred: “All thus did he know, but his wretchedness and weakness had led him to this great precipice.” The groundwork was laid for introducing the question of a pact: “If, as he says, he did thus know and understand, it was certain that he, the Deponent, could not expect, nor indeed did he truly expect, to attract the desire of the said woman for his libidinous purposes, save solely through the concert and intervention of the devil, entering into a pact with him and contracting his friendship by means of the aforesaid words, which he calls prayers.” Cowering, Manuel Pacheco said that “he did not know how to answer the question, and he only knew that he had never made a pact with the devil.” Under this pressure, he eventually affirmed—with no conviction at all—that he had invoked the devil twice and had promised him obedience only between the hours of eleven and twelve o’clock on the same day, regretting it immediately and confessing the next day. Triumphant, the inquisitor rejoined that this meant that on these two occasions he had entered into an explicit compact with the devil and that he should make a full confession. Vacillating at each new round of questions, Manuel responded that if he had made a pact, he had done so unawares, without deliberate intent.148

The inquisitorial logic did not always prove intimidating enough. The next step was then torture. By all accounts, Manuel da Piedade had fallen into the Inquisition’s clutches because other prisoners had accused him. There were indications that he attended sabbats, and the inquisitors pressured him to confess something to this effect. In response to his denials, they tortured him. This triggered a deposition that is remarkable for its fluctuations: he confessed that “he gave the demon his blood, and then said that this was a lie, and again said that it was true that he had given him his blood, and his arm hurt, and he was wounded by a knife belonging to a Negro named João, he does not know to whom he is a slave, and then he said that what he had now stated was a lie, and then he again affirmed that he gave him his blood, and at Campo de Santa Clara . . . , but there was no sign of a wound, but never did he give him his soul or adoration.” Dissatisfied with the tenor of his confessions, the inquisitors ordered further torture, which lasted about an hour. The next day, as was standard practice, they summoned him and asked if he remembered what had happened and if he confirmed what had been said following torture. “He said that he remembered the session that had occurred on the said days of the present year in the house of torture, where he was taken, and the confession he had made there, and the people of whom he had spoken, which he did falsely, and he had said such things under the pressure of the torment whereto he found himself subjected, and that he retracted it all, and the lies he had told in the same confession for the said reason.” The records of his testimony were taken and then read back to him. The accused listened and agreed, though he was incapable of signing “due to the suffering he had experienced during said torment.” Ten days later, they summoned him yet again and questioned him about his testimony: did he recall having said, on the torture table, that he had gone to Campo de Santa Clara to speak with the devil? The defendant did remember, “but . . . had said so falsely.” The inquisitor refreshed his memory: he had said he had seen the devil in the figure of a dark-gray she-goat and of a cat and had given him his blood. Manuel remembered the confession, “but . . . it too was false.” Faced with the Inquisition’s insistence, Manuel said that “nothing had happened between him and the devil, and that which he had said had happened with him was false; . . . that he had never gone with anyone to the field, nor had he even left his house.”

Seeing the chances for confession of a pact evaporating, the inquisitor closed in: “How could it be that he had not gone to the field in Massarelos with the Negroes, if he had named some in whose company he had gone to make a mandinga, and had said of them that he had seen them talking with the devil?” Manuel replied that it had been a lie, that he had never set about to prepare a mandinga, “and that he had always wanted and endeavored to be a good Christian. . . . If he had heard of mandingas, he had paid no attention and what he had said had happened with the devil had been out of fear and under the pain of torture.” Because he was cruelly tortured, “that is why he spoke against himself and against everyone, and all falsely.”

Impervious and obsessed with his hunt for the pact, the inquisitor judged Manuel “blind and obstinate in his guilt” and accused him of endeavoring to “conceal the devil and his cruelties, . . . moving from precipice to precipice” and aggravating and augmenting his guilt, “retracting his statements and contradicting all that he had said in that place, attributing everything to falseness and to the pain of torture.” It had been fifteen days since his first session, and Manuel da Piedade was sent to the house of torture for the third time. The fruit of this further violence was of course his confession to a pact and to attendance at sabbat gatherings held in Campo de Santa Clara. Finally, this inconsistent finale shows the poor defendant’s desperation: he affirmed that the devil had asked him not to attend mass but then added that

what he had said about the mass was too much, and also that the devil had told him to talk to him every day, and had asked him for his soul, and he had said that he could not give him his soul, and [the devil] had asked for the blood of his body, and he likewise had not wanted to give it; and he said that he had given him his soul and his blood; he had not said prayers to him even though the devil had asked for them, nor did he take him as God even though the devil told him to take him as such, and then he said that he was confessing to everything that was not true, and he said no more.

Deeming his confession unaltered, the inquisitors subjected Manuel to a fourth torture session.

Five days later, the unfortunate man confessed to everything the inquisitors wanted to hear: a pact had been made; he had given the devil his blood, his soul, his worship; he had taken part in sabbats and the crafting of mandingas; he had abandoned the Catholic faith. His penalties were harsh: abjuration in forma; perpetual prison and penitential habit; and floggings citra sanguinis effusionem [until he began to bleed] through the streets of Lisbon. The Holy Office had shattered his pride and fashioned him into an obdurate sorcerer, exactly according to the book of European demonology. Manuel da Piedade was black, a slave, born in the city of Bahia.149

The trial records of another slave, José Francisco Pereira (mentioned earlier), offer one of the finest examples of the Holy Office’s mechanisms for making the defendant introject the elite’s concept of sorcery. As stated in chapter 4, which addresses tensions within the colonial slave system, José Francisco had been arrested in Lisbon in 1730 and charged with making and bearing mandinga pouches. Born on the Mina coast, he had lived for some years in Brazil and there had picked up the custom. He was known as a mandingueiro among blacks in the capital of the Kingdom, and it would appear that he had a small business going in amulets. Other than that, nothing concrete could be ascribed to him, and his first testimonies were centered on these facts.

José Francisco was, however, quite talkative, and he named many slaves who had asked him for pouches. The Inquisition construed these group connections as sabbat gatherings. By the time his Bill of Indictment (Libelo Acusatório) was read, the court had clearly solidified its presumption of a pact and had arrived at a negative judgment of him, “. . . from which it can be gathered that the Defendant’s confession is fraudulent and deceitful, made solely for the purpose of escaping the great punishment he deserves, and not of healing his soul; and as such it is not admissible, nor is the Defendant deserving that any mercy be granted to him but all the rigor of justice, . . . that he be punished with the greatest and gravest penalties of the Law, which for his offenses he deserves, all in complete fulfillment of Justice.”

The Statement of Charges published by the courts explains that José Francisco was accused of using blood from his left arm or from a chicken to write the letters that went with the pouches. Furthermore, he dedicated prayers to “Luçafé” in order to seal his body and avoid injury in disputes. Intimidated by constant threats of torture, he began raving; he described metamorphoses by the devil, who would appear in different guises, asking for his soul and for blood, traveling with him in ships, invading his home, demanding parts of his body, and urging him to attend diabolic assemblies in Val de Cavalinhos. José Francisco’s frightened discourse is rife with confused notions derived from heterodox popular traditions: the devil would say that “everything was nothing like what the Ministers of the Church taught and advised him, that those matters of the Church were false, and when he went into a Church he should soon exit it, and when he entered it, he should cast the holy water behind him, for only Jews sought the Church and had the habit of staying there for very long.”

The intimidating interrogations, detention in secret prisons, and the steady threat of torture awoke in José Francisco the need to talk more and more about his friendship with the devil and his option of an antichurch and of demystification; finally—in a conclusion rich in significances—it aroused in him an obsession with painting in minute detail “the point of weakness where evil portents reach through to us; the fragment of darkness that we each carry within us”—in other words, sexuality.150 The inquisitorial methods stimulated him to wild imaginings about the numerous possibilities of coitus, which coincidentally were part of demonological knowledge: anal relations—painful, ice-cold, devoid of pleasure, and rife with guilt feelings.¹⁵¹

“He stated further that he was so intimate and familiar with the devil that for a long time his dealings with him were vile and lascivious . . . , the demon serving him in the figure of a woman to satisfy his venery, having carnal copulation with him for many years, with the demon always being a succubus, and sometimes the demon had sodomy with him, the same demon acting in the figure of a man, and penetrating his via prepóstera [rectum].” In the guise of a woman, the demon varied from ugly to beautiful; however, she was “always white in color,” which held a special meaning for the black man José Francisco. The coitions he had consummated with the real women he had known were “more enjoyable” than diabolic coition “because he found more heat in these women, while in his coition with the devil, when the latter served him as a woman, he found roughness and ice-coldness.” Even when the acts were heterosexual, they held within them the potentiality of homosexuality: “During this same act of coition he always saw the devil with both tools that differentiate the two sexes and by which they are known.” It was easier to penetrate regular women and have ejaculations with them than with the devil; since dark and sinister desires flowed together in the demon—all was arduous and slow, spawning guilt and punishment. “He stayed on him much longer, and when this copulation was finished, he felt greatly enfeebled, with pain in his hips, his arms, and throughout much of his body. . . . His member was always left aching, showing some sign that a thin layer of skin had come off, always left battered and weak.”

“He stated further that also with the devil he had vile and lascivious dealings, both in the form of men, putting their members between one another’s legs and spilling between them; and that which the demon spilled was something cold, and when the demon sought his vaso traseiro [rectum], he always felt . . . great pain and roughness, his belly began to ache and he felt some swelling in it, and from his vaso traseiro blood would flow.” Del Río always warned judges to keep a constant, watchful eye on accused sorcerers because even in jail they would copulate with the devil.¹⁵² So it was with José Francisco: “After he came forward before this Inquisition, he still copulated with the devil, serving him in the figure of a woman, and the devil had him by means of sodomy . . . ; and the devil always warned him not to confess before the Holy Office to anything that had happened with him, telling him that if he confessed, he would punish him most severely, but he did not say what punishments these would be.”

There was no preference for one form of sexuality or another, which was regarded instead as something unified and integral. Engaging in homosexual sex did not erase a desire for women, and the devil himself was an accomplice in this regard, giving José Francisco touch-letters he could use to seduce women.

As far as can be deduced from trial records, José Francisco revealed the world of his imagination to the inquisitor more because he felt intimidated psychologically than because of torture. This once more challenges the idea that the Inquisition tortured less than lay tribunals and therefore was more benevolent and less cruel. This slave’s amazing case opens up countless analytical possibilities. Caught in the terrifying position of being charged by the Holy Office, the defendant not only revealed the frightened, guilt-ridden psychological universe that was also shared by the era’s educated men but also confessed what they expected him to confess. His belief in amulets was transformed into adherence to the demon of the theologians, while it simultaneously caused an unearthing of all the dark, frustrated desires that Christian tradition endeavored to camouflage and disguise.153 The inquisitor, dazzled by the world of the imagination that unfolded before his questionings, always wanted to know more and demanded further details, for in the black man’s raving discourse he recognized the source of demonological theory. The inquisitor asked: “Which of the vile couplings that he had with the devil was most odious to him, whether it was the sodomy he consummated with him, or the coition, the devil playing the role of woman?” In addition, he asked whether José Francisco usually told his male friends about his sexual adventures with the devil, if they had sex together, if Satan brought other devils along to these diabolic assemblies “in the figure of women, so that together all could engage in the depravities that he declared”; if he usually assigned names to these succubi, if he spoke out loud with them or in whispers, if their meetings took place during the day or at night. At various moments the Inquisition sought to frame the universe of the imagination inside a logical discourse, running anew into the clash between symbolic and rational. The inquisitor grew elated when he detected in the poor defendant’s speech echoes of Guibert of Nogent, who believed the devil unleashed his debauchery upon women;¹⁵⁴ of Caesarius, the monk from Heisterbach who attributed the origin of the Huns to intercourse between ugly Hun women and demonic incubi;¹⁵⁵ of St. Thomas Aquinas, the theoretician of explicit and tacit pacts and of the differentiation between succubi and incubi;¹⁵⁶ of De Lancre, advocate of the idea that diabolic coitus was cold and painful;¹⁵⁷ and of so many others.

José Francisco’s trial records raise another question: the sincerity of belief in the pact. The moment the accused chooses to adopt a discourse that is the inquisitor’s but that shares points in common with the popular imagination, he or she believes that everything actually happened as stated.158 In this sense, José Francisco’s story reminds us of the “Benandanti” of northern Italy, followers of a centuries-old fertility cult that eventually became transformed into a diabolic cult after more than a century of inquisitorial pressure.¹⁵⁹ It further brings to mind testimonies such as that of the Spanish sorceress La Solina, who, intimidated and tortured, produced a crazed account that likewise speaks of sodomy with the devil.¹⁶⁰

Finally, the Calvary of José Francisco provides us with elements for rethinking the question of sorcery as a mythology exclusive to the European elite or as a cultural system where popular and elite elements interpenetrated. It once more raises doubts about whether it is possible to reconstruct the popular universe based on institutionalized repression and interrogations led by inquisitors, almost always skillful in manipulating the answers to their questions.¹⁶¹ It leads to one certainty, perhaps the only one among so many questions that remain unanswered: that sorcery trials were a unique place where distinct discourses intersected and overlapped, weaving, perpetuating, and affirming a stereotype.

By the same token, these trials allow us to perceive moments when the gap between the popular and elite worlds is wider. This rift becomes apparent primarily when the inquisitor brings up the defendant’s inferior condition, not always quite explicitly. During Manuel da Piedade’s interrogation, the Holy Office wanted to know how he went about invoking the devil: if he had “whistled as is the habit among Negroes.”¹⁶² Upon recording the black woman Caetana’s accusations against Friar Luís de Nazaré, the assistant priests read her testimony back and then asked if what was written was the truth. She “responded in her coarse and awkward way of speaking Portuguese that all that she had thus stated was the truth.”¹⁶³ José Francisco Pedroso declared before the Inquisition’s board that he used mandingas because he believed them to be “a thing of God.” “How could he believe that the mandinga was a thing of God if he saw that only Negroes used it?” asked the inquisitor.¹⁶⁴

The defendant’s inferior condition served to justify his or her repression. In a letter to the Inquisition in Lisbon, a member of the clergy—probably a Jesuit and Commissary of the Holy Office—stated that imposters pretending to be witches abounded in colonial lands. “And as they are commonly Negroes and Indians, it is necessary to have power here, so that those who use such impostures can be ordered flogged; and if not, they shall continue their whole lives with this behavior, with no one to reprimand them promptly.”¹⁶⁵

Added to the contempt felt for poor populations in Europe was the repudiation of popular culture itself.¹⁶⁶ And when it came to the New World’s inhabitants, the European elites supported their stance by a new prejudice, directed at the colonial condition. As stated repeatedly in this book, the colonists were members of a singular, menacing humanity that often took on demonic hues.¹⁶⁷ Twentieth-century authors have interpreted expressions of popular religiosity like the calundu of colonial days as “coordinators of passions,” possessing the ability to alleviate social tensions. Yet what bothered authorities in the Luso-Brazilian colony most of all—and what bothered the inquisitors themselves—was the colonial nature of these expressions, a threat to metropolitan power.168 Measures like Vasco Fernandes César de Menezes’s provisions against the calundus of blacks are part of this picture, their zeal justified by the need to defend the “republic’s” interests and to “protect the peoples and service of God.”¹⁶⁹

Scholars who have studied the Iberian Inquisition contend that its activities were particularly intense through the seventeenth century, after which they declined. As far as Brazil is concerned, however, no such turning point can be observed. On the contrary, trials were especially numerous in the eighteenth century and, as can be seen in tables 1 to 3 in the appendix, there was an increase in the number of trials involving the most prosperous regions. Aimed at popular culture and tradition, the elites’ “enterprise of expropriation” intensified in Brazil during the eighteenth century.¹⁷⁰ But it did cleverly undertake to don new attire.

According to Amaral Lapa, the Visitation to Grão-Pará occurred at a time when the Holy Office was in decline and when the Marquês de Pombal was battling to see torture abolished.¹⁷¹ Taking a close look at how inquisitors dealt with defendants, some variations can be observed and, as of 1768, a sharp change in course: the arrogance and intransigence of Geraldo José de Abranches gave way to a more “reasonable” and tolerant position. As had happened before with the Bahian group in the 1750s and with the Carvalho Serra brothers from Minas Gerais in the 1760s,¹⁷² Anselmo da Costa and Joaquim Pedro were arrested for carrying mandinga pouches.

But while their cohorts were shipped off to Lisbon, where they were tried and then appeared in autos-da-fé, these two indigenous men from northern Brazil received completely different treatment. It is true that they had endured four long, bitter years of incarceration—from 1764 to 1768—but when the Visitor sent a list of their offenses to the Council General in Lisbon, the latter ruled that the charges did not warrant a trial. It was stated about Anselmo that

rather, the Defendant can be seen to desire the same sacred things with the decency and respect befitting his capacities, bearing them round his neck and hoping by means of them to free himself from greater dangers that he might come to encounter in his life, which he naturally seeks to preserve, and for this purpose all means that assist in this end are valuable, and even if these be, and are, improper, all must be attributed to the lack of education found in the Defendant, and not in any intent that he may have had to insult the aforesaid things. Likewise, the condition of the Defendant does not call for greater punishment, for, to offend religion, it is necessary to be instructed in religion and have an intent to transgress, all of which is lacking in the Defendant.¹⁷³

Incapable of discerning the error of his ways, the accused could not possess the malice needed to commit the offense, “and without [this intent], maleficia cannot exist.” Of Joaquim Pedro it was said that he knew “only those things indispensably necessary to Salvation, and this only in material terms and lacking that knowledge that enlightens the spirit, to preserve holy and sacred things pure and free of superstition, which is transcendent throughout that country.” Finally, the inquisitors from Lisbon advised that the defendants should be released but nevertheless harshly rebuked before the board and educated in the mysteries of the faith, their “lengthy imprisonment” in the city of Pará for more than four years “having been overly sufficient punishment.” It was further stated that in the case of Anselmo “heed should likewise be taken of his being a minor at the time of the wrongdoing, being only fourteen years old.” It was October of 1768, and the days when sorcery trials were built around the testimony of children seemed to be fading into the distance.174

A number of witnesses denounced the black slave Maria Francisca for divining with a basket. The recording of her offenses began in 1753, and five years later the Lisbon Inquisition’s official opinion reached Belém: “heeding her coarseness and want of education,” and also because “in this Kingdom knowledge of the things of religion is different than in that State,” the defendant should be harshly admonished but not receive any greater punishment.¹⁷⁵ After two centuries of intransigence, the Inquisition finally seemed to begin perceiving the singularity of the colonial populations’ living religion, which could not be reduced to the dogmatic faith guiding the Holy Office’s actions. Making constant reference to the defendants’ coarseness and lack of education, the Inquisition also allowed itself to recognize the pertinence of the colonists’ medical knowledge in northern Brazil. The Bill of Indictment for José, a black slave curandeiro, was likewise only seen by the Lisbon authorities four years after it had been written up; and as in the previous cases, the Council General dealt leniently with the accused. It was declared that the tribunal only punished “those who committed deeds that, exceeding the force of nature, must, by the circumstances of the Subject, be ascribed to the power of the Demon; and as it is befitting in the order of Nature to heal the ill by virtue of herbs and fumigators, there is no reason for why the aforesaid cures should be construed as offenses.”¹⁷⁶

With a delay of almost one century, the “supernatural omnipresence” (of God or the devil) in daily life was replaced in Portugal by a more rational understanding of existence; Satan’s retreat “gave back to man and to nature an autonomy rendered impossible by the previously permitted mixture of natural and supernatural.”¹⁷⁷

What is noted in a first reading of these documents is that the Inquisition became aware of the gap separating elite religion from popular religion and that it began to demonstrate greater complaisance—and even take paternalistic stances—toward the coarse and ignorant colonists. This makes sense if the Holy Office is thought of as an autonomous, sovereign tribunal. During Pombal’s reign as prime minister, however, efforts were made to restrain this powerful institution, culminating in enactment of the Instructions of 1774.178 At the same time, Portugal’s educated elite was growing steadily more convinced of the pressing need to solidify an economic policy that would guarantee preservation of the colonial condition and, in the final analysis, of its overseas possessions.¹⁷⁹ All the above-mentioned opinions issued by the Council General date from October 1768. It is curious that this shift in the inquisitors’ attitude toward the colonists occurred between enactment of the Lei do Diretório dos Indios in 1758 and imposition of the new Instructions in 1774. This further coincided with the apogee of Pombal’s reformist concerns and with the realization that—at that juncture of external dangers (foreign threats against political and economic control of the colony) and internal dangers (the possibility that the colonists might become conscious of their colonial condition)—the Portuguese colonial empire was facing the threat of ruin.

If the Inquisition truly lost autonomy under the pressure of the state, another look must be taken at this benevolence toward the colonists and what it may have meant. When Portugal adhered to a more rational form of thinking, one that called into question the reality of magical facts and sorcery, it was following the European trend that Mandrou has investigated so well in the French case. Together with this rising complaisance and even a certain paternalism, however, there was always a disdain for the colonists themselves: an ignorant people—black, Indian, or mixed-blood descendants of Portuguese—incapable of understanding the complexity of faith, of displaying reason, or of reaching a more refined spiritual plane. In the trial of Joaquim Pedro, the Inquisition took as its own the words of one witness, in whose opinion the young men involved in stealing altar stones possessed “that intelligence befitting the condition of Indians.”¹⁸⁰ So even long before the colonists had constructed the perception that they were all “poor children of America, forever hungry and with nothing of their own”¹⁸¹—be they black, indigenous, or mestizo—the Inquisition took advantage of the prejudice and mistrust that pitted them against one another.

To some extent, this adherence to one of the facets of enlightened rationalism also explains the disdain for the colonists expressed by the Inquisition’s “benevolent” and “complaisant” judges in northern Brazil in 1768. Once again, it is Mandrou who sets us to thinking: the thesis of witches’ non-responsibility brought the culmination of the crisis of Satanism in France. The realization finally hit: the best way to eliminate witches was to make them look ridiculous.¹⁸²

At the dawn of the Early Modern age, a rift had opened between popular culture, where beliefs in magical acts and maleficia were wholly integrated, and elite knowledge, which persecuted these practices yet did not fully relinquish belief in them—both the ordinary people and Bodin believed in witches. A new rupture, distinct from the previous one, began to take shape at the close of the seventeenth century. This time the enlightened elite parted company with popular beliefs, and in this new context a position like Bodin’s became untenable. When the first rupture had taken place, the possibility of belief had been preserved. But now the division was governed by skepticism; and whereas persecution ceased, prejudice did not.183 I would like to suggest that from this viewpoint, the Inquisition and the Portuguese state were collaborators in sustaining the rift between popular and elite, readjusting it in accordance with their concerns about preserving the colonial world. The colonial condition was thus eviscerated with a view to ridiculing it and, yet again, conserving dominion of the overseas world. Behind the inquisitors’ apparent “benevolence” lay the true, hidden intent: to bring home the impossibility and incapacity of the colonist to decide his or her own fate. In the eighteenth century, the Holy Office no longer banished those accused of sorcery to Brazil.¹⁸⁴ The entire colonial system was then being reshaped and rethought, and the metropolis dedicated special attention to homogenizing and conforming the people in the colony. So what sense would there be in adding new numbers to the already menacing army of mestizos, coarse and ignorant, fated to a universe of dissidence and rebellion?¹⁸⁵

Throughout the colonial period, the Inquisition was an organism that wrought terrible destruction on the social fabric and was responsible for collective panic and personal tragedies. Even when it did not murder, it incarcerated for years on end, isolating defendants in prisons far from their families and from any form of human contact; it tortured them and, not infrequently, drove them to madness. After condemning them to traumatic and often deadly stays in the Inquisition’s dungeons, the Holy Office subjected the accused to public scorn, to ridicule, to the humiliation of grandiose autos-da-fé organized for the purpose of intimidating, impressing, and terrifying the spectators. Before returning the offender (now transformed into human refuse) back to society, the Inquisition sentenced her or him to banishment or to the galleys. Some heroes, like Adrião Pereira de Faria, managed to make their way back to family and friends after this Calvary.¹⁸⁶ But his case was certainly atypical. The devastating effects of the Inquisition sundered the social fabric and the collective memory. In the indignant words of two nineteenth-century Portuguese historians, what was taking place within the Holy Office was a “composite evil, fashioned from unprecedented monstrosities crafted for the perdition of humanity.”¹⁸⁷

For Henry Kamen, the prisons of the Spanish Inquisition were not dens of terror.¹⁸⁸ Perhaps here they differed from the Portuguese prisons, which Father Antonio Vieira described in these horrifying terms:

In these jails there are usually four and five men and sometimes more, according to the number of prisoners that there are, and to each one is given his water jug for eight days (and if it runs out before that, one must simply bide his time) and another for urine, with a chamber pot for one’s needs, which is also emptied every eight days, and there being so many who are kept in this filth, it is unbelievable what these wretched people must endure, and in the summer so many are the bugs that the jails are filled with them, and the stench so excessive that it is a blessing of God if a man leave there alive. And well can we see on the faces of all who appear in the autos the treatment they have received therein, for they come out in such a state that no one recognizes them.189

It must have been common for prisoners to go mad in the jails, since the Instructions of 1640 address this topic in book 2, chapter 17.¹⁹⁰ Isabel Mendes, arrested in the late 1620s and charged with Judaizing and sorcery, went insane in prison “following seven years of grievous suffering.”¹⁹¹ Mateus Pereira Machado was afraid he would go crazy during his imprisonment prior to the earthquake of 1755: “He, the Defendant, was constantly distressed by his imprisonment, but nevertheless he did not swear falsely; however, he believes that this incarceration disturbed his thinking, for he remembers that at that time he suffered some forgetfulness, of which he is now wholly free, and for so being he gives much thanks to God.”¹⁹² Had the disaster not destroyed the inquisitorial jails and thus set Mateus free, it is likely he would have gone mad.

The saddest story I know is that of the pardo shoemaker Antonio Carvalho Serra, Requibimba by nickname, born in Mariana, Minas Gerais. He was arrested for stealing hosts in early 1757 and reached Lisbon in August of the same year. He must have taken ill in prison, because when he was brought before the court for examination two years later, he said he had known how to read and write a bit but could not do so after the sickness that had befallen him. It is impossible to say exactly when he lost his mind, but after two years in jail he was clearly mad. Before he was sent to Todos os Santos Hospital, in 1761, a number of depositions about his behavior were recorded. The prosecutor José Mendes da Costa stated that, “whilst at the start of this accusation, the Defendant had no defects in his thinking, although one could always perceive in him frenzy, and a greater resoluteness than is common, today he shows himself frenzied and visibly crazed, both by his actions and by the words he pronounces.” He then advised that the defendant not be judged until he had recovered and shown signs of being in a perfect state of mind and “able to defend himself in the prescribed form”—which, given the way inquisitorial trials went, sounds like a joke.

The Holy Office’s jailer underscored Antonio’s rough and fearful temperament, recalcitrant even when medicine was administered; he testified that the defendant displayed “total impairment of his thinking, which is steadily worsening, because he undresses before all and no longer will tolerate clothing, being naked in his cell; he wants to eat nothing made in the fire, eating everything raw, even codfish.” He would ask for food that was not part of his ration, would not tolerate cellmates, had lost his initial slyness, and could no longer be punished. The guards confirmed that Antonio was mad. One of them said that when Antonio had first come to the prison, he spoke without problems; but shortly thereafter he suffered a stupor and became partially impaired. Another guard, apparently a faithful follower of the inquisitorial ideology, said he had noticed a disorder of some kind in the accused and had attributed it to the “desperation born of his temperament.” He added that the madness was partial, for the hapless man could still eat and sleep. Other witnesses described his gauntness, his body being nothing but skin and bones; his loud cries; his nightly singing; the filthy clothes he wore, “wandering about the place even while bleeding, talking as if he was speaking with his wife or some young boys”; refusing food for fear they would poison him; and “feigning like a rich and honored man.” In 1761 it was decided that Antonio should be transferred to the hospital. The following year, when he died, Dr. Manuel José Monteiro, who nursed the deranged, signed his death certificate: “ACS madman; state, country, fatherland, and occupation unknown.”193

There was physical torture too, of which the rack and the pulley were the most common in Portugal. The procedures took place in the house of tortures, “a kind of underground cave, all vaulted,” with benches for the inquisitors, physicians, and surgeons and tables for the notaries.¹⁹⁴

Cruelly tortured, Manuel da Piedade underwent torment nonstop for an hour during one session, “in which he called out for Jesus and [said] he wanted to die by Faith in Christ.”¹⁹⁵ His verdict omitted the torture, stating only that the defendant had wanted to confess. In the case of the rack [potro], the defendant was placed on a board, and his or her four limbs were bound at two points each: thighs and calves, arms and forearms. When he was tortured on May 31, 1756, Mateus Pereira Machado was tied “at six points only, for he had a wound on one arm.” He cried out greatly, beseeching the wounds of Christ to succor him, “together with the crown of our lord King Dom José.” Three times he begged for mercy, saying he was going to finish confessing. But when he added nothing new, his torture was resumed until those examining him on the board were satisfied and sent him back to prison.¹⁹⁶ After three torture sessions, the Bahian shoemaker José Fernandes—who had stolen consecrated wafers around 1760—was saved by the doctor, who stated that “the said Defendant was not fit for more torment, from which he was promptly removed, where he had spent twelve minutes and had called out repeatedly for Our Lord Jesus Christ, and Most Holy Mary, to succor him.”¹⁹⁷

All indications are that about ten autos-da-fé were held in Bahia and Pernambuco between 1592 and 1595.¹⁹⁸ They must have been modest and meager compared to those in the metropolis. Maria Gonçalves Cajada, or Arde-lhe-o-rabo, was one of the Brazilian sorceresses who appeared in an auto-da-fé in the colony, which took place in Pernambuco in 1593; it was recommended that Maria not be publicly flogged since she was ill.¹⁹⁹ Starting in 1595, all those convicted in Brazil appeared in autos held in the metropolis. Although some Portuguese witches were sent to the stake, there is no indication that any Brazilian sorcerers were “relaxed.”²⁰⁰ But the Brazilian offenders were scourged, some until blood gushed from their wounds, and in their disgrace and humiliation were paraded about the streets of Lisbon before the eyes of the king, the princes, the inquisitor general, the jailers who had interrogated them for months, and all the people. Their offenses and secrets were exposed and read in public. In the case of José Francisco Pereira, for instance, his verdict was read in its entirety, including the descriptions of diabolic intercourse and the sabbats in Val de Cavalinhos. He was encarochado [made to wear a conical witch’s hat], abjured in forma, and was obliged to serve out a sentence of five years in the galleys.201 Manuel da Piedade, José Fernandes, and José Martins were among others flogged citra sanguinis effusionem, and Manuel was condemned to wear a sanbenito or penitential habit for the rest of his life.²⁰² Next came banishment: five years in Angola for José Fernandes; five years in Castro Marim for Mateus Pereira; the same in Miranda for José Martins; five years in the galleys for Manuel da Piedade; and six years in Miranda as punishment for the relapsed heretic Antonia Maria.²⁰³

After this, they were free to return to “normal” life. Until their deaths, they would carry with them the stigma of having been accused by the Holy Office, many wearing sanbenitos. What may have been the destinies of the Brazilian colonists who, after years of captivity and terror, found themselves free in a strange land? Very little is known about the sorcerers. One illustrious defendant, Bento Teixeira, appeared in an auto-da-fé in 1599. He was sentenced to life but received permission to live in freedom. He lasted just one year, struck down by a lung disease that took him to his death, spitting blood.²⁰⁴ Antonio Serrão de Castro, apothecary and poet, was absolved in 1682 following two years in the cells. Nearly blind, “he found it necessary to beg, although of an advanced age, so as to support himself, two children, who had been born demented, and a second sister, a widow.”²⁰⁵ His other elderly sister had died in prison as a result of punishments.

Considering the cold reality of numbers alone, many past and present scholars have asserted that when all is said and done the Inquisition killed very few and that the lay tribunals that judged sorcery were more cruel and destructive.²⁰⁶ Fortunato de Almeida justified the Inquisition’s actions with a formulation that stands as a true pearl of reactionary thinking: “The number of victims would have been much greater if the Inquisition had not rid the country of the horror of holy wars, which caused the spilling of tides of blood in the countries where the Protestant Reformation penetrated.”²⁰⁷ Sônia Siqueira adopted an analogous stance, underscoring what she deems a “meritorious achievement” on the part of the Holy Office: “The minute percentage of deaths, in relation to the number of reconciled, reaffirms the Holy Office’s good intentions of cleansing the faith and bringing back into the fold believers who had strayed.”²⁰⁸

Any believers who may have been brought back into the fold by the Inquisition—annihilator of lives and of wills—would have been frightened, broken people, hypocritically convinced of the truth proclaimed by the tribunal. Contemporaries of the horrors of the Inquisition protested against its operation and its existence.209 In the early twentieth century, Antonio Sérgio assessed the destruction wrought within Portuguese society by the Inquisition and concluded that it hindered the flowering of critical thought within the realm of culture.²¹⁰ The Inquisition’s deadly consequences cannot be measured or translated into figures.

Looking specifically at the repression of sorcery, it can be said that the Tribunal of the Holy Office reflected the clash between two different cultural universes, in which the one personified by the court held the upper hand and was momentarily embodied by the defendant. In the course of an inquisitorial trial, the figure of the witch depicted in the inquisitor’s symbolic universe was momentarily absorbed by the accused or superimposed on her or his beliefs. Popular tradition in Portugal was unfamiliar with the sabbat, and yet people confessed to having attended diabolic assemblies.²¹¹ Always ready and eager to transform individual practices into collective ones (i.e., sabbats), the Inquisition thus endeavored to justify its discourse and its repression. After undergoing the trauma of incarceration, torture, and an auto-da-fé, the accused might return to their previous beliefs sometime later; hence the backsliding of individuals like Antonia Maria and Domingos Álvares, who eventually resumed the practices that had originally incriminated them.²¹²

This is not to say that the Inquisition “created” the stereotype of the witch—as asserted by so many of the historians analyzed in this chapter. The tribunal tampered with the inner workings of the popular cultural universe, altering and expunging the significance it assigned to magical practices. Cases where previous practices were resumed illustrate how the Inquisition’s devastating impact could be overcome and the popular cultural universe reorganized.

Reverence for the supernatural and belief in magical acts were constituent elements of both universes, but with different meanings assigned to them by each. The witch-hunt in early modern Europe was an attempt to standardize these differing concepts. In Portugal, the intertwined discourses that echoed through the trials of the Holy Office provided a fertile arena where the stereotype of the witch could be constructed, affirmed, absorbed, and, in the end, demoralized.

On the theoretical level, it should be said that this was the confluence, struggle, adoption, renunciation, or dismantling of two distinct cultural universes. What is appalling is that during this clash, in the complex weave of these discourses, the Inquisition consumed, shattered, and degraded so many human lives.