CONCLUSION

Sabbats and Calundus

Indeed, the little soul that remained disconsolate and aimless after having been obliged, still so callow and helpless, to leave Warrant Officer Brandão Galvão’s body was not a Brazilian soul originally, because it is very unlikely that souls are destined to be born to only one nationality, whatever it may be, nor are they likely to become attached to one.

—João Ubaldo Ribeiro, An Invincible Memory

An agonizing, turbulent world began falling apart in the fourteenth century. In its struggle to find ways to restructure economic, political, and social life, this world sent discoverers in search of new markets—an endeavor that found its protagonists caught between attraction to and panic before the unknown. The new universe unfolding before the Old World’s eyes was at times portrayed as positive (edenic), at times as negative (diabolic). Understanding these negative images within the imagination of the discoverers—soon to become the colonizers of these new territories—is of utmost importance if we are to gain a better understanding of how they reacted to diabolic magical practices or how they yielded to them.

The European of the late Middle Ages and Early Modern age believed monstrous humanities inhabited the ends of the known world. When the New World took its place on Europe’s maps, a shift occurred in the universe of the imagination, and these monstrous humanities became associated with the inhabitants of American lands; but contrary to what happened in Europe, they became demonized. Sixteenth-century accounts like those of Jean de Léry and André Thevet searched for a common thread linking the sabbat to indigenous ceremonies. As Michel de Certeau observed, the explorer/missionary was thought to serve as an exorcist of the American demons.

Sorcery in colonial Brazil was superimposed on an inviable humanity, further demonizing its members, who were already viewed with disdain. The relationship between sorcery and this inviable humanity was characteristic of the colonial dimension of the phenomenon, lending it singularity. Ever since the Middle Ages, Europe had the habit of animalizing its subaltern classes. “Masterless men” were often seen as beasts, with this resemblance between men and animals limited to one social sector, excluding society’s ruling strata. In Brazil this view applied initially to indigenous peoples but was soon extended to blacks as well, eventually encompassing all the colonists. It is true that “good men” were labeled as such in opposition to “wicked men,” who were members of the less privileged social sectors; however, eighteenth-century discourses such as the Count of Assumar’s suggest that animal-like, diabolical traits were meant first and foremost to qualify the colonial condition of the colonist rather than any one social stratum. When this official referred to the colonists as a “race of demons,” he was not thinking just of the “wicked men” (slaves and the dispossessed) but also of the great potentates who risked standing up to metropolitan taxation, perpetually inciting infernal rebellion.

At the same time that the colony underwent this process of “infernalization,” it was shaped to fit the Europeans’ edenic myths. In the colonizer’s view, heaven alternated with hell—an outlook that gradually became shared by the colonists as well and that left space where purgatory could intrude. The process of colonization thus saw the forging of an ideological justification, anchored in faith and its negation, using and reworking images of heaven, hell, and purgatory. In a chronicler like Jaboatão, the alternation of Good and Evil is transparent; this history of the settler’s attachment to the land and confrontation with indigenous peoples relies heavily on the images of heaven and hell. Antonil, on the other hand, poses the idea of the colony as a purgatory of penances and of sugar, Brazil’s main export, refined and whitened through human effort.

Heaven, hell, and purgatory thus continually traded places with each other during the shaping of the colonial system. In the relationship between metropolis and colony, it oftentimes fell to the colony to purge the metropolis of its social ills. It was the dungeon of its delinquents and the place where slavery was reinvented, standing in sharp contrast to the incipient wage labor system then taking root in metropolitan centers. So while slavery flourished in Brazil—and colonial exploitation itself was based on it—in the metropolis the general trend was to pay the labor force in wages. At this historical turning point, the ruling strata transformed the paradisiacal vision, an integral part of the culture of so many peoples, into a tool for enticing settlers and into a constituent element of colonizing ideology. Populating the colony also meant purging the metropolis, not only of its “sick” human elements but also of forced forms of labor exploitation. Europe gradually abandoned the gradations of servile labor—foundation of the feudal system—adopting instead wage labor—cornerstone of factory and industry. In return, colonial lands became crowded with slaves. After long imaginary pilgrimages, the European imagination had relocated the Promised Land, the Eldorado of legend, the Earthly Paradise, to America, which also began to harbor the hell of slavery.

It was thus that the reinvention of slavery—or, more precisely put, the birth of early modern slavery—fostered the exploration and exploitation of the paradisiacal American land and in its wake, and as its prerequisite, brought hell for the wretched slaves. Exploiting to its very limits the forced labor of these damned beings, the white settlers saw themselves destined to dwell in purgatory, enjoying the riches they did not create themselves and for this very reason having to pay the penalty, living out the horrible being-and-not-being of white people in the land of blacks, free in a land of captives, Christians in a land of heathens. As it emerges in Antonil’s writings, the white people’s purgatory would appear to be this need constantly to take stock of oneself in the face of the awful contradiction of the colony’s everyday life.

There were times when one theme or the other predominated: infernalization or edenic invention. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda pointed out that the polemic surrounding the New World in fact heightened in the eighteenth century, when the initial rose-colored view was fading and the colonies’ “damned” aspect began to emerge: marshy, inhospitable lands inhabited by degenerate men and animals, carriers of the germs of revolt. Between the paradisiacal vision and its antithesis, two centuries had passed, centuries that had seen establishment of the slave trade and the unbridled exploitation of black Africans as slave labor. Slavery would contribute decisively to endowing the New World with its negative character, damned and hellish. This was not only because the Europeans who lived off overseas exploitation suffered the pangs of guilt and were constantly compelled to justify the act of enslaving their fellow humans—hence the negative side of the polemic, the inferiority of the American lands, so often visible in the authors used by Gerbi. It was also because the multitudes of black slaves posed an imminent danger to the established order and to perpetuation of colonial domination. From the eighteenth century come Assumar’s heated texts, denying the humanity of the mestizo colonist and the black slave. From the eighteenth century comes the Inconfidência Mineira, when the colonists’ newfound consciousness of their colonial condition skirted the issue of slavery and in a way “saved” the status quo of the slave system. For the rebels, the heart of the question was their dependence on the metropolis and not the exploitation of slave labor. As of the eighteenth century, no more Portuguese sorceresses were banished to Brazil. Perhaps Portugal was rethinking the purging role of the colony, which more than ever before had begun to resemble a giant Inferno.

In the early modern imagination, heaven and hell were binary elements. Within the colony’s popular religiosity, the sacred and the profane would become conflated and then move apart, like the popular dragon analyzed by Le Goff. It was the kingdom of ambiguity, of the blurred, of the multifaceted, with syncretism suffusing religious life and seeping into the gaps left open by the Jesuits’ catechizing efforts. Within this context, the Inquisitorial Visitations and Inquiries constituted dire moments when a deep fissure exposed the disparity between two irreconcilable worlds: that of the Inquisition and that of popular religiosity. How could the metropolitan religion, prisoner of the Catholic Reformation’s formalism, find an echo within the colonial population’s unpredictable, chaotic daily life, pervaded by indigenous and African rites? How could conflict be avoided between the Portuguese Inquisition’s prevailing religious rigor and the reality of colonial Catholicism?

As so clearly manifested in the documentation of the Visitations to Brazil, the colony’s popular beliefs and singular religiosity were characterized by a greater familiarity with the sphere of the divine, by a more natural relation to the world of sex, and—already under the sign of the Reformed Church—by an identification between sex and evil, which may have been an indication of the rupture prompted by Christian morals. There was a great need to blaspheme, to theorize freely about matters of religion, as Menocchio did, in an effort to keep the Catholic God from becoming cold, absent, distant, and unreachable. Understanding each one’s attitudes and reactions from the perspective of the singular, multifaceted, syncretic religiosity of the colony is more important than knowing whether a certain colonist lashed a crucifix because he was a Jew, or whether another doubted the existence of purgatory because she was a Calvinist. In the eyes of this popular religiosity, punishing St. Anthony by hanging him upside down and behind a door was a normal thing to do, and bringing purgatory into this world—“next to that tree and along that path”—simply foreshadowed the discourse a soldier of Christ would create two centuries later: the Jesuit Antonil, for whom the colony was hell for blacks, paradise for mulatos, and purgatory for whites like him.

Here was a world that desacralized religion; that reinvented slave labor; that dwelled each day with the Otherness of the black, of the indigenous, and—from their perspective—with the Otherness of the colonizing white; and that sporadically fell under the sharp eye of the metropolitan Inquisition, eager to bring its opposites together and homogenize their differences. This was the world of colonial sorcery.

Like the European discoverer’s imagination and like the popular religiosity of which it was part, colonial sorcery was diverse and heterogeneous, comprising essentially two parts that made up one whole: a backdrop of magical practices characteristic of so-called primitive cultures (African and indigenous) and a backdrop of magical practices characteristic of European populations, heavily imbued with a secular paganism still pulsating beneath a recent, “imperfect” Christianization. From one moment to the next, this binary nature of colonial sorcery shifts the focus of analysis from an emphasis on what is common to magical practices and sorcery to an emphasis on the singularities of colonial reality.

Melding a gamut of conceptions and beliefs, sorcery and popular religiosity were thus extremely heterogeneous. This complexity developed during the process of colonization, ultimately forging a specifically colonial character. There were times when both were tolerated: Fernão Cabral and the Santidade, Antonil and his complaisance toward the slaves’ syncretic Catholicism. But the overriding tone was one of intolerance and repudiation of singularly colonial magical and religious practices. The heights of this repudiation and intolerance were the Visitations, the Inquiries, and the persecution unleashed by the Holy Office’s Commissaries and Familiars on Brazilian land.

Colonial sorcery dovetailed with the population’s everyday life, especially among the poorest. It could be seen in neighbors who would denounce each other, peering over their clotheslines or through a fence into the yard next door, pressing their ears against a wall, gleaning information from the day’s conversations at a shop, in the church, down at the corner, through a window. People went to sorceresses for love potions, to learn magic words that would bind a lover forever, to uncover secrets, to foresee the future, to bring ships lost in the seas of India or of Africa back on course, to heal wounds, to close sores, to bless animals afflicted by maggots. The community poured out its inner demons, its anxieties, doubts, and uncertainties, upon these women and men. Their testimonies unveil an important part of the collective unconsciousness and of each person’s dreams. In the erotic ravings that the tortured black slave José Francisco Pereira bared before his inquisitors, the devil who possesses him and is possessed by him always appears in the form of a white man or woman. Since he found himself compelled to confess to ghastly sins, at least his partner would be someone from the dominant race, thereby avenging his misfortune. Ugly, a midget, a slave, Catarina Maria said she was the devil’s lover; he had deflowered her and always came to her in the form of a black man, redeeming her from the contempt probably shown by men of her own status. When the caboclo and indigenous populations in the state of Grão-Pará participated in secret ceremonies, it was through these autochthonous magical practices that they endeavored to achieve affirmation in their communities, rather than crumbling beneath the impact of Portuguese culture.

On a concrete level, sorcery became an integral part of daily life. The repression and repudiation of these practices, however, are signs of the great rupture that occurred at the close of the Middle Ages, which helps clarify the elites’ reaction to what had been common practice until that point. As a result, the elite sectors began rejecting the popular universe, and it was within this context that the witch-hunt gained great impetus. Europe’s religious reformations and the consolidation of early modern power apparatuses helped deepen the fissure; they were, at one and the same time, indicators and triggers of the rift that occurred between the hegemonic culture and the subaltern culture, to use Gramsci’s terms. The Middle Ages had seen popular currents that were highly favorable to religious tolerance; in the Early Modern age, these were buried by the Wars of Religion and by the bonfires that burned witches, Jews, and heretics. A violent rift had occurred, and the town sorceress to whom everyone had turned and with whom everyone had fearlessly coexisted on a daily basis became an enemy to be wiped out.

Focusing on this rupture, one can ponder how the repressive discourse began detaching the figure of the demon from the heart of magical practices and folklore (in short, from the culture of the popular sectors), isolating him and modifying his significance. Under these new circumstances, it was as if the only thing seen of the devil was his venom, the only thing stressed was the negative. Early modern sorcery was to emerge as a product of this imbalance—of the way in which elite thought began placing emphasis on the figure of the devil, to the detriment of his relationship with magical practices as a whole. This statement does not constitute an unrestricted endorsement of Mandrou’s thesis, according to which sorcery is defined by the elite stratum that represses it, theorizes on its repression, or omits such theorizing. This statement goes further: it raises the possibility that the profound changes under way at the dawn of the Early Modern age undermined both elite and popular thought and that this set off simultaneous, complex interactions at the different levels.

Taking place within this context, the Portuguese Inquisition and the catechizing effort to discipline European and colonial populations constituted the upper strata’s responses to these upheavals, where the subaltern classes were protagonists as well. To better homogenize these strata, it was necessary to haunt them with the threat of the catechism’s negation and of the dangerous power that worked stealthily and steadily against it. Perhaps this is why the definition of witchcraft rested on the existence of a diabolic pact.

Even if one believes that the rift in magical practices was first opened by the ruling class’s attitudes, there are nuances to be accounted for. If it is first affirmed that the sixteenth century was the moment of rupture between elite culture and popular culture, it can be stated that as part of this break elite thought removed the demon from his previous context and distorted his significance, discarding the former connections. It must then be taken into account that if elite thought “demonized” magic in the Early Modern age and distorted the inner dynamics formerly inherent in the universe of magic, this very demonization eventually determined how magical practices were exercised and caused its practitioners to begin endorsing the ideology espoused by the repressors.

The colonists’ everyday demon wore a number of different faces. At times he displayed archaic traits, which the colonial condition perhaps helped perpetuate, while in Europe these began giving way to other, more dramatic traits. In the Brazilian colony, the devil still bore the familiar marks of folkloric tradition, the ambiguity peculiar to popular culture. Devils could be invoked at any moment, to help out in a card game or to offer their friendly collusion when someone needed to let off steam verbally. Still linked to the magic of conjuration, these archaic traits joined the new reality—colonial reality—and acquired a new shape: they ceased to be medieval and in their new context were reconfigured and became colonial. They coexisted with other traits, like early modern passiveness toward the devil, which reflected echoes of demonological formulations and theorizations about compacts—and so the elite level ended up permeating the popular level. The zeniths of demonic virulence are found precisely within the realm of intertwined discourses: that is, in the trials, when colonists abandoned their long-standing familiarity with the demon and revealed themselves to be subjugated to him.

The colonists’ fear of repressive apparatuses and their awareness of the Holy Office’s edicts, which were read in the towns at the time of the Visitations, contributed decisively to the modernization of these archaic traits and to turning the devil into the horrendous creature of the papal bulls, of Sprenger and Kramer’s Malleus, and of Bodin’s De la démonomanie. Just as the Jesuits had played a demonizing role during the sixteenth century, reading sabbats into indigenous ceremonies, it was the culture of the elites that helped the devil acquire his virulent dimension within colonists’ daily lives. In the eighteenth century, Nuno Marques Pereira—dreadful moralist that he was—would see sabbats in the colonial calundus.

By the eighteenth century, learned knowledge already had a conceived notion about magical-religious expressions in the colony. By that time, the colonial population had established singular forms of magic and sorcery: mandingas, calundus, catimbós. Of the twenty cases of mandinga pouches identified in the colonial period, nineteen occurred during that century. All trials or denunciations involving calundus or catimbós also took place during the eighteenth century.

Thus it was in the interweaving of different concepts and discourses that a colonial sorcery took shape. It was both the object of a complex collage and the genesis of new syntheses: today the Maria Padilha of eighteenth-century conjuration prayers is Umbanda’s pomba-gira [female entity of ambiguous morality, tending toward prostitution and evil]. In the realm of magic and religion, syncretism would ultimately prove itself uncontainable and ineradicable; it would forever bear the ambiguous mark of popular culture, which mixed the sacred and the profane. Leaving behind it a trail of death and horrific suffering, the long process of acculturation eventually merged sabbats, masses, and calundus. In Salvador, in 1983, I listened as a young woman working for the Bahia state tourist agency gave the following answer to a French visitor curious as to whether the ritual washing of the steps of the Church of Bonfim was a religious festival: “It’s religious, and it’s also profane.” I never saw the tourist again, but I can imagine his expression, caught between bewilderment and awe, as he gazed upon the deafening carnival unfolding on the steps of the most venerated church in Bahia.