| Original Full Text | Copyright by Michael Benjamin Amoruso 2016 The Dissertation Committee for Michael Benjamin Amoruso Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Walking with the Dead: Transit, Transfer, and Transformation in São Paulo’s Devotion to Souls Committee: Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Supervisor Thomas A. Tweed Jennifer Graber Matthew Butler John S. Burdick Walking with the Dead: Transit, Transfer, and Transformation in São Paulo’s Devotion to Souls by Michael Benjamin Amoruso, B.A.; M.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2016 iv Acknowledgements I’ve heard some scholars say they enjoyed writing their dissertations. One even told me it was “fun.” Maybe I don’t know what fun is, or maybe this particular colleague was pulling my chain. Whatever the case, this dissertation was a struggle. Anthropologists like to speak about the trials of fieldwork—the disorientation, the embarrassing miscommunications, the inevitable food poisoning. I experienced all those things, but none compared to the terror of writing. In the face of the blank page, one’s inadequacies and insecurities come to the surface. I couldn’t have gotten through it alone, and I’d like to thank all those who offered support. Early in my research, I wrote a note titled, “Fieldwork: Or, Wandering Around and Wondering What I’m Supposed to Be Doing.” As with writing, fieldwork only takes direction once you’ve found the right people—those who help you get your bearings and tolerate incessant questioning. Two people were particularly important in this respect: the employees of the Liberdade churches I pseudonymously call Rodrigo and Dona Renata. Each answered my questions with patience and good humor, as well as help in facilitating my interviews with devotees. I’d also like to thank the devotees who took the time to chat with me. That so many entertained my questions speaks to their kindness and warmth. This project is really about them—and the souls to whom they pray, and who also deserve agradecimentos. I’d also like to thank my colleagues in Brazil. Marcio Goldman at the Museu Nacional at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and José Guillerme Cantor Magnani at v Universidade de São Paulo both agreed to be institutional affiliates for the Fulbright IIE Fellowship and provided helpful guidance. The members of the Grupo de Estudos da Religião na Metrópole at the University of São Paulo introduced me to new literature on urban anthropology and religion, and exposed me to the complexity of Brazilian religion. Many of my fellow Fulbrighters—Melissa Teixeira, Rosanna Dent, Mari Rodrigues, Alex Scarlett, and Brendan Doshi—were friends and conversation partners. Nate Millington, in particular, was a good friend, attentive listener, and always willing to call me out on my B.S. And I think both of us owe a debt of gratitude to the many garrafas of Original we shared over the course of 2014. I was lucky to receive funding for research and writing. The bulk of my fieldwork was supported by a Fulbright IIE Fellowship, which was supplemented by a Tinker Summer Travel Fellowship and a Billy Bob Draeger Summer Research Fellowship in the Humanities through the University of Texas at Austin. A Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship supported my dissertation writing and freed me from some of the usual burdens of graduate study. This project would never have happened were it not for a Summer Foreign Language Area Studies grant to study in São Paulo in the summer of 2012. My thanks to the FLAS program in general, and to Tulane University for administering funding and running the São Paulo program. Christopher Dunn and Jeffrey Lesser deserve heaps of praise for building such a special program, mentoring junior scholars, and creating an atmosphere of collegiality. They introduced the FLAS students to São Paulo’s chaotic beauty. I owe special thanks to vi Dr. Lesser, who first introduced me to the Church of the Hanged on his tour of Liberdade. His deep knowledge of the city and of the history of immigration in Brazil continues to inform my work. There are many people to thank at the University of Texas at Austin. My dissertation advisor, Virginia Garrard-Burnett, provided extensive feedback and guidance on this project. I always looked forward to her office hours, where she provided personal and professional advice with grace and wit. Tom Tweed, who was part of the department at UT during my first two years, remains a mentor. Tom gave detailed feedback on nearly every draft of every chapter and has continued to give invaluable guidance during this transitory period. Jennifer Graber also read chapter drafts and offered helpful feedback during and after the dissertation defense. Matthew Butler was a close and careful reader, and is also to thank for my early interest in Kardecist Spiritism. Chad Seales provided years of advice and encouragement, and has lent a compassionate ear when I complained of the vicissitudes of graduate student life. The members of the Religion in the Americas colloquium helped me refine my arguments. Justin Doran and Katharine Batlan, in particular, have helped me think through my material, and have been good friends and colleagues over the past half-decade. Other scholars and colleagues deserve mention. I continue to be inspired by John Burdick’s work on religion in Brazil, and his comments during my dissertation defense will inform my manuscript revisions. At the University of Chicago, Bruce Lincoln and Richard Fox taught me to think carefully and critically. Under Richard’s early guidance, I first flirted with studying religion in Indonesia. He left Chicago, but before he did, encouraged my vii nascent interest in Brazil. The Religion Studies Department at Lehigh University, my undergraduate alma mater, Lehigh University, first sparked my interest in religion. I thank Norman Girardot for encouraging me to pursue a graduate career. I’ve learned a lot from Norman over the years. But his most important lessons, I think, are to trust in one’s weirder instincts, and to keep a sense of humor. I can’t thank my family enough. My parents were committed to providing me and my siblings with a college education even when times were hard. There were periods in my undergraduate career where both each worked multiple jobs so we could stay in school. They were not always happy with my decisions—particularly that to switch from a major in computer engineering to religious studies—but they always supported and trusted in me. Most of all, I thank my wife, Giovana. A talented journalist and astute writer, Giovana’s editing greatly improved the dissertation’s ethnographic vignettes. But more than that, she shepherded me through the darker periods of writing with love, wisdom, and patience. She helped me find confidence when I was lost in self-doubt. I dedicate this dissertation to her. Obrigado por tudo, meu amoré. viii Walking with the Dead: Transit, Transfer, and Transformation in São Paulo’s Devotion to Souls Michael Benjamin Amoruso, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2016 Supervisor: Virginia Garrard-Burnett On Mondays—widely known as “the day of the souls” in Brazil—devotees across São Paulo visit cemeteries and Catholic churches to pray to the souls of the dead. But not all practitioners are Catholic, and some are Catholic and something else too. For this reason, observers call the devotion to souls syncretic. While some scholars have criticized the term for positing essential religious forms degraded through mixture, in Brazil, it is part of the vernacular. There it is wedded to a national racial ideology that characterizes Brazilians as a mixture of Portuguese, African, and indigenous peoples. According to this logic, Brazilians mix religions because they themselves are racially mixed. This dissertation considers this devotion to souls as a vector for religious movement. Turning syncretism on its head, it attends to how souls, living and departed, move and mingle. It argues that the devotion to souls is a point of transit and transfer between realms—that is, it connects devotees to departed kin and other souls in the spiritual world—and between religious theologies, identities, and institutions. Put more plainly, it suggests that devotees move across religious boundaries, and that movement changes religious spaces. ix Table of Contents List of Figures ....................................................................................................................... x Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Part I: Orientations ............................................................................................................ 22 1. Time: Monday is the Day of the Souls ....................................................................... 23 2. Space: Sites of Memory and Affliction ........................................................................ 57 Part II: Trajectories ............................................................................................................ 93 3. Transit: Religious Movement in São Paulo ................................................................. 94 4. Transfer: Traces of the Dead .................................................................................... 125 5. Transformation: Death and Rebirth ......................................................................... 157 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 192 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 203 x List of Figures Figure 1: The Church of the Holy Cross of the Souls of the Hanged .................................. 5 Figure 2: Votive Candles at the Church of the Hanged ...................................................... 11 Figure 3. The Chapel of Our Lady of the Afflicted ............................................................ 65 Figure 4. Wooden Door in the Chapel of the Afflicted ..................................................... 66 Figure 5. Types of Souls Mentioned in Written Requests .................................................. 78 Figure 6. Ticket for Spiritual Assistance ........................................................................... 107 Figure 7. Tomb at Cemitério Consolação ........................................................................ 114 Figure 8. Novena to the Afflicted Souls ........................................................................... 145 Figure 9. Cross at the Shrine of the Thirteen Souls .......................................................... 169 Figure 10. Tomb of a Thirteen Soul ................................................................................ 171 Figure 11. The Shrine to the Thirteen Souls .................................................................... 172 Figure 12. Prayer to the Thirteen Souls ............................................................................ 174 Figure 13. Santinho of the Thirteen Souls ........................................................................ 181 Figure 14. Excerpt the Journey of the Thirteen Blessed Souls .......................................... 186 1 Introduction Just before noon on a cool, overcast Monday in July, I had a conversation with a middle-aged evangelical Protestant woman inside a Catholic church in São Paulo, Brazil. Beatriz had just ascended from the church’s candle room where, every Monday—widely known as the “day of the souls” in Brazil—hundreds of devotees light candles for the souls of the dead. Beatriz said she practiced the devotion out of respect for her parents, particularly her “disincarnated” mother who had been a committed devotee. “I bring candles for her. I go to mass for her. I pray for her. Our Father, Hail Mary, all these things for her. But I’m evangelical, the World Church of the Power of God.” As we spoke, I overheard two older men reciting prayers in the corner of the candle room, where they were lighting red, blue, and white candles in a surreptitious Umbanda ritual. Beatriz, too, moved between religious spaces. Pressing her on her use of language like “disincarnated”—a term typically used by Kardecist Spiritists to refer to the dead—Beatriz revealed that she practiced Kardecism before converting to evangelicalism thirty years earlier. She explained that while she agrees with her church’s doctrine that Christ is the only savior, she thought the souls of the dead—especially those who suffered in life—could help the living.1 1 Interview, July 7, 2014. Many scholars have noted that this understanding of the dead is widespread in Brazil. Carlos Brandão, for example, writes the dead “are especially empowered to help the living… but are at the same time especially dependent upon the living for their own salvation”; Os deuses do povo: um estudo sobre a religião popular, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1980), 187. A group of Catholic clerics likewise wrote, regarding the religiosity of “simple people,” that “death, the souls, and the other world… assumed great importance in the eyes of the people, because popular religiosity is characterized by a profound respect for the souls of the other world”; João Fagundes Huack et al., História da igreja no Brasil: Ensaio de interpretação a partir do povo: segunda época, a igreja no Brasil no século XIX (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1980), 148. Diana Brown notes that Umbanda “refers to an extremely varied and eclectic range of beliefs and practices, and it remains a deceptively simple term in current usage as well… Umbanda’s defining features are 2 This study asks why Brazilians with different religious commitments go to Catholic churches on Mondays to light candles and pray to the dead. When I first came across the practice, I was puzzled. On the one hand, I was familiar enough with Brazil’s mediumship religions that I was not surprised to see people seeking help from the dead. On the other hand, this practice did not look like mediumship. Practitioners were not incorporating or channeling the dead, nor were they conjuring them. Rather, they treated the souls like saints, using candles, prayers, and novenas to make pedidos (or requests) to them. Still, despite having been raised Catholic in the northeastern United States, I had never seen a practice like this. Why were so many people praying to suffering souls? What power did these pitiable dead have to help the living? Why was the “day of the souls” on Monday, which is typically thought of as profane? And, given Brazil’s constitutional guarantee of free religious exercise, why were non-Catholics like Beatriz praying to the dead in Catholic churches? I hope to answer all these questions, but this study began as my attempt to answer the last. Two years before I interviewed Beatriz, I first encountered the church where I met her while on a walking tour of central São Paulo with a historian friend. Called the Church of the Holy Cross of the Souls of the Hanged, I was struck by its peculiar name and the lore surrounding it, both of which spoke to its place near the former site of the city gallows (Figure 1). Its contemporary setting was also strange: located in Liberdade, São Paulo’s “Japanese neighborhood,” the church contrasted with the area’s stereotypically “Oriental” an eclectic blend of Catholic belief and practice, Kardecism, Afro-Brazilian practices, and aspects of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other currents of mysticism”; Umbanda: Religion and Politics in Urban Brazil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 1. 3 façades. On that July evening, two mãe-de-santo (Candomblé priestesses), were sitting outside its front gates, casting cowry shell divinations for paying clients.2 Adjacent to the church, a large religious supply store sold Catholic images from one half and Afro-Brazilian and esoteric ritual goods from the other. Inside, signs prohibiting colored candles were meant to dissuade ritual practices associated with Afro-Brazilian traditions. Elizabeth McAlister’s “The Madonna of 115th Street Revisited” came to mind. Like the Church of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel in East Harlem, it seemed that the Church of the Hanged was a sort of “religious borderland” where visitors practiced a religiosity that scholars have alternately called syncretic, creole, and hybrid.3 In Brazil, syncretism (sincretismo) is part of the vernacular. Early in my fieldwork at the Church of the Hanged, I asked an employee named Rodrigo about the prohibition on colored candles. “We recycle the wax,” he answered, “and we can’t recycle colored wax. It’s only this.” So I asked about the mãe-de-santo casting cowries out front, asking why they set up shop there rather than, say, the more spacious and highly trafficked square across the street. Rodrigo gave an embarrassed smile. “Look, Mike,” he laughed, “In Brazil, everything 2 Paul C. Johnson defines Candomblé as a “Brazilian redaction of West African traditions recreated in the radically new context of a nineteenth-century Catholic slave colony,” i.e., Brazil; Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 3 Elizabeth McAlister, “The Madonna of 115th Street Revisited: Vodou and Haitian Catholicism in the Age of Transnationalism,” in Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration, ed. R. Stephen Warner and Judith G. Wittner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 135-136. 4 is mixed.” He then described Brazil as a mixture of three races—the Portuguese, Africans, and indigenous tribes—whose religions mixed accordingly.4 4 Rodrigo would repeat this formulation, often explicitly talking about syncretism in terms of racial mixture. Fieldnotes, February 17, March 6, April 14, and August 4, 2014. 5 Figure 1. The Church of the Holy Cross of the Souls of the Hanged. (Igreja or Capela da Santa Cruz das Almas dos Enforcados.) 6 “In Brazil, everything is mixed.” It was an interpretation I would come to hear often, particularly with respect to religion. In later conversations, Rodrigo explicitly spoke of sincretismo, usually in tandem with the “myth of the three races” that has come to characterize Brazilian national racial identity. This account holds that Brazil’s essence is racial mixture, and that as people mixed, so did Catholic saints and African orixás. Crystallized and propagated via early and influential sociological studies like Gilberto Freyre’s Casa Grande e Senzala and Roger Bastide’s The African Religions of Brazil, the Durkheimian equation of religion and race continues to hold sway. Even today, many scholars and non-scholars alike describe Brazil as essentially syncretic.5 5 Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, 2nd English-language edition (New York: Knopf, 1956). As Stephen Selka writes, “Perhaps more than any other country in the Americas, Brazil is known for its cultural eclecticism and religious syncretism. The mixture of European, indigenous, and African cultures has long been central to how both Brazilians and foreigners imagine Brazil, and syncretism and hybridity are master tropes in narratives of Brazilian identity”; “New Religious Movements in Brazil,” Nova Religio 15, no. 4 (2004): 3. Similarly, the sociologist André Droogers calls Brazil a “syncretistic laboratory”; see Play and Power in Religion: Collected Essays (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 11. Though the academic interest in miscegenation has waned, scholars continue to invoke miscegenation as an explanation for religious syncretism. For example, Laura Mello e Souza writes, “Mixing white, indigenous, and black blood, it is as if Brazilians had been ‘condemned’ to syncretism”; The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 46. More often, race is not explicitly identified as causal factor, though the constitutive components of Brazil’s characteristic religious mixture are curiously delimitated along racial lines. In a recent essay assessing the current state of the Brazilian Religious field, Marcelo Camurça proposes the idea of a Brazilian “common religious language… that was forged by the combination of the beliefs of traditional religions: the dominant, Catholicism, with the subaltern, indigenous and African.”; “Entre sincretismos e ‘guerras santas’: dinâmicas e linhas da força do campo religioso brasileiro,” Revista USP 81(2009): 175. In O que faz o brasil, Brasil? (What Makes Brazil, Brazil?) anthropologist Roberto DaMatta sees a tendency towards mixture as essential to the Brazilian character—Brazilians are racially mixed, they mix food (for example, rice with beans on the plate, “forming an undifferentiated mass”), profane and sacred, business and affect, and, of course, Catholicism with Afro-Brazilian religions. O que faz o brasil, Brasil? (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rocco, 1984). For a discussion of the social scientific search for Brazilian identity, and the tendency to see mixture as elemental to that identity, see Maria das Dores Campos Machado and Cecília Mariz, “Sincretismo e trânsito religoso: Comparando carismáticos e pentecostais,” Comunicações Do ISER 45 (1994): 27. 7 In 1967, the historian Robert. D. Baird wrote, “Although seldom defined, the term is usually assumed to be abundantly clear, even though examination of its usage reveals that it is used in various and conflicting ways.” A half century later, the term is still unclear. Similar to what Lévi Strauss called floating signifiers—words like “mana,” which, void of meaning, are apt to take on any meaning—syncretism’s ambiguity lends it considerable explanatory purchase. Often, the term elides description and explanation, referring to both the product of past mixture and the process of that mixture. In Brazil, the concept explains a variety of contemporary boundary violations—colored candles in a Catholic church, the identification of African orixás with Catholic saints, the expansive cosmology of Umbanda—by invoking a historical narrative of racial miscegenation.6 More generally, scholars have criticized syncretism for implying the prior existence of pure, authentic religious forms. As Paul C. Johnson writes, “syncretism essentializes too much, implying that there were once well-behaved pure breeds before the new religious mutts gnawed through their leashes.” This criticism stems in part from syncretism’s historically pejorative usage, particularly by seventeenth-century Protestants, to lament indigenized churches, which they saw as novel corruptions of an implicitly authentic European Christianity. For these and other reasons, many social scientists have abandoned 6 Robert D Baird, “Syncretism and the History of Religions,” The Journal of Religious Thought 24, no. 2 (1967): 42. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 63-4. Stephan Palmié echoes Baird’s objection, writing, “I would argue that [syncretism's] relation to its purported empirical referents—certain processes and/or results of religious change—remains notoriously obscure”; “Against Syncretism,” in Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, ed. Richard Fardon (London: Routledge, 1995), 74. 8 the term in favor of others like “hybridity” or “creolization.” But as some critics have noted, these synonyms are similarly flawed: both are only intelligible in contrast with purity, and each conjures problematic associations with biological speciation and racial identity.7 In his introduction to The African Religions of Brazil, Roger Bastide suggested, “it is not civilizations that are in contact but human beings.”8 While in the end, Bastide put social theory before his observations of individuals, I began my research by taking his assertion to heart. Asking how a religion syncretizes, I submit, is the wrong question. It assumes religions 7 Paul Christopher Johnson, “Migrating Bodies, Circulating Signs: Brazilian Candomblé, the Garifuna of the Caribbean, and the Category of Indigenous Religions,” History of Religions 41, no. 4 (May 1, 2002): 302. On the historically pejorative usage of the term, as well as a good overview, see Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw, “Introduction: Problematizing Syncretism,” in Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis, eds. Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1-26. While hybridity is often cause for celebration in contemporary academic usage, it is unavoidably biological in linguistic origin, and in the already fraught discussion of religious (and particularly Afro-) syncretism, conjures up racial the sort of racial connotations I am trying to avoid. Creolization, a term largely attributable to Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, was an attempt to move away from the problems of syncretism and survivals by emphasizing African-American creativity; see J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 281. But this term also has problems. As Stephan Palmié notes, the term was originally used to reference things of Old World origin born and raised in the New World, and “has served as an immediately significant predicate of selfhood and social practice for close to half a millennium” and is thus inevitably entangled ideas about with racial identity and purity; “Creolization and Its Discontents,” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (January 1, 2006): 433–56. More concisely, as Charles Stewart writes, “without creole people there would be no creole linguistics”; Charles Stewart, “Creolization, Hybridity, Syncretism, Mixture,” Portuguese Studies 27, no. 1, (January 1, 2011): 48-55. See also Charles Stewart, “Syncretism and Its Synonyms: Reflections on Cultural Mixture,” Diacritics 29, no. 3 (October 1, 1999): 40–62. For a helpful critique of syncretism and application of hybridity to Umbanda, see Stephen Engler, “Umbanda and Hybridity,” Numen 56, no. 5 (January 1, 2009): 545–77. 8 Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 15. An extended quote helps reveal the rationale for prioritizing social theory: “It is not civilizations that are in contact but human beings. Consequently, when two civilizations meet, it is psychic mechanisms that account for what happens. In the final analysis, then, the causal factor must be sought in the desires of individuals… But psychology cannot, in my opinion, be separated from the sociological conditioning within which it operates. This is a psychology not of isolated individuals but individuals who belong to social groups, castes, or clans, where status differs with sex, age, or rank. Whether we like it or not, the psychological factor thus sends us back to the sociological one.” Bastide continually emphasizes the importance of ethnographic observation, but as Marcio Goldman argues, struggled to reconcile these two perspectives. See Marcio Goldman, “O dom e a iniciação revisitados: o dado e o feito em religiões de matriz africana no Brasil,” Mana: Estudos de Antropologia Social 18, no. 2 (2012): 269-288. 9 are discrete, autonomous things and requires measuring religious change against an implicitly stable benchmark. The problem of essentialism is an artefact of scale. At a place like the Church of the Hanged, Catholicism and neo-Pentecostalism and Kardecism were not “syncretizing.” Rather, people with different and sometimes multiple religious commitments and identities were traveling to this particular Catholic church. But why there? What was special about this place? At the start of my fieldwork in January 2014, I visited the Church of the Hanged on different days and at different times, waiting for something to happen. It seemed like nothing ever would. The church was almost always empty. Sitting in the pews in the sweltering February heat, I took notes on the few congregants. Thursday, January 16, 10:42 a.m.: six visitors, one of whom was almost aggressively praying before a statute of Our Lady of Aparecida. Wednesday, January 29, 6:00 p.m. mass: twelve congregants. Sunday, February 2, 11:47 a.m.: twenty-three congregants, with a steady flow of two to three people in the lower candle room. Nothing remarkable. The church seemed like it might be a dead end, and I began spending more time at other potential field sites. But then, on a Monday morning, I found the church transformed. Five mãe-de-santo had set up tables on the sidewalk in front of the church, with large umbrellas shielding them and their clients from the 10:00 a.m. sun. Inside, the church’s pews were full and there was standing room only. While some congregants sat still and participated in mass, others circulated the nave, praying at each of the icons that lined its walls. Down in the larger of the church’s two candle rooms, hundreds of candles were burning, many in clusters of seven, 10 eight, or thirteen. Eighteen devotees were quietly speaking their prayers, patiently bearing the immense heat of the flame in summer. Spotting a black and a purple candle burning, the church’s caretaker shook his head and grabbed it, extinguishing it in water before throwing it into a bag of collected wax. Wedged in a corner, another candle—half black and half white, lit for the pretos velhos (literally “old blacks,” a kind of spirit popular among Umbandistas)—had escaped his notice. A white and yellow candle was floating in the shallow water that surrounded the candles. In the space designated for “seven-day” votive candles, someone had left several cups of water and a bag full of pão francês, or small loaves of bread (Figure 2).9 9 Fieldnotes, February 3, 2014. 11 Figure 2. Votive candles, cups of water, and loaves of pão francês at the Church of the Hanged. 12 Back in the nave, congregants’ agony was palpable. Two middle-aged women and a young girl were sitting in one of the back pews, hunched over and crying. One of the older women put her hand on the young girl’s back, rubbing it to console her as they both sobbed. I began to feel a welling of emotions from all this, thinking about love and loved ones lost. What was happening here? I asked an employee. “It’s the day of the souls,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It’s always busy on Mondays.” He pointed to a large mass schedule hanging high on the wall. There were three masses daily except for Mondays, when there were nine. Why Mondays? I asked a few people, but no one knew. “It’s a tradition of the people,” one congregant suggested.10 This tradition, which following vernacular and academic usage I call the devotion to souls (devoção às almas) or cult of the souls (culto das almas), is widespread in Brazil. In São Paulo, thousands of devotees visit cemeteries and Catholic churches on Mondays to pray, light candles for, and ask things of the souls of the dead. Like the Church of the Hanged, the most popular devotional sites in the city have a special association with suffering or death. The Chapel of Our Lady of the Afflicted, just around the corner from Liberdade’s Church of the Hanged, is the two-hundred-forty-year-old remnant of what was once the city’s pauper cemetery. The Sanctuary of the Souls in Ponte Pequena was built by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart to accommodate a flourishing devotion in the middle of the twentieth century, and to commemorate the dead. Municipal cemeteries like Cemitério Consolação, in the 10 Fieldnotes, February 17, 2014. 13 center of São Paulo, not only commemorate the dead, but have cruzes das almas, dedicated crosses where practitioners can light candles for departed souls. This dissertation is an ethnography of the devotion to souls in São Paulo. Though I began the project intending to write an “ethnography of syncretism,” it became something quite different. By changing the scale of analysis, a new set of themes and questions emerged. After speaking with practitioners who described themselves as “eclectic”—or, like Beatriz, who identified as something other than Catholic but prayed to the dead in Catholic churches—the thought of attributing their actions to a vague process of syncretism felt lazy and wrong. Why was Beatriz visiting the Church of the Hanged? Why were others? While some, like Rodrigo, would say it was because “everything is mixed,” racial miscegenation does little to explain Beatriz (who, incidentally, descended from Dutch immigrants). The reasons she gave made more sense: her mother had been a devotee, and Beatriz was honoring her memory. And she was doing it at the Church of the Hanged because she, like others, knew it as “the Church of the Souls.” This is not an ethnography of syncretism but a study of space and movement. It explores why places like the Church of the Hanged are preferred devotional sites even for non-Catholic practitioners. It asks why few devotees light candles for the dead at home, even though they light candles to saints and guardian angles. It considers how devotees traverse the urban space of São Paulo and transform sites of death and suffering into places of devotion. It is also a study of feeling and memory. Devotees pray because remembering the dead makes them “feel good,” as so many told me. They remember those who risk being 14 forgotten, the loved ones long departed and the nameless multitudes known known only by the nature of their suffering—the souls of the hanged, the souls of the drowned, the souls of the afflicted, the souls of the burned. And in turn, the dead come to the aid of the living, helping them with worldly travails—nagging health problems, lovers’ quarrels, legal matters, and financial woes. Mutual suffering underpins a relationship of mutual aid, affectively binding the living and the dead. Argument and Organization This study considers the devotion to souls as a vector for religious movement. Turning syncretism on its head, it attends to how souls, living and departed, move and mingle. I argue that the devotion to souls is a point of transit and transfer between realms—that is, it connects devotees to departed kin and other souls in the spiritual world—and between religious theologies, identities, and institutions. Put more plainly, it suggests that devotees move across religious boundaries, and that movement changes religious spaces. In Part I, “Orientations,” I situate the devotion to souls in time and space. While this study is principally concerned with describing the devotion in contemporary São Paulo, the practice is not unique to that city, or even to Brazil. It is widespread, if varied, throughout the Catholic world, especially before the turn of the twentieth century. Chapter 1 traces the contemporary devotion’s antecedents, focusing especially on the purgatorial devotionalism of colonial Brazil. Defining features of today’s devotion—like the emphasis on suffering, souls’ capacity to help the living, and the custom of praying to the dead on Mondays—were set in 15 this period. While the Catholic lay brotherhoods and other institutions that sustained the devotion weakened during the nineteenth-century “Romanization” of the Church, the devotion survived and even flourished, becoming useful to Catholic authorities in the late nineteenth century as a way of combating the new threat from mediumship religions like Kardecist Spiritism. Chapter 2 considers the Church of the Hanged and Chapel of the Afflicted as sites of memory—places where, in the words of Pierre Nora, “memory crystallizes and secretes itself.”11 Like other popular devotional sites, these churches are thought of as haunted, inhabited by the restless dead. Histories of death and suffering cling to them, demanding a response from the living. The devotion to souls is a way of confronting that suffering. Devotees go there to pray to afflicted and forgotten souls, hoping to alleviate the souls’ suffering with offerings of prayer, candles, and food and drink. They say the souls go to the flame of the candle, “taking a bit of the flame” to illumine the darkness in which they dwell. And in gratitude, devotees say the souls help alleviate the earthly anguish of the living. The second part of this study, “Trajectories,” examines devotees’ movement and its effects. Here I make two major claims. As I detail in Chapter 3, in São Paulo, moving between religions means moving across the city. In other words, what scholars of religion in Brazil have called “religious transit” (trânsito religioso) is not just about broad patterns of switching affiliation. Practitioners do not just move between Catholicism and Umbanda. 11 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7. 16 Rather, they move between specific places—like the Church of the Hanged and the Spiritist Federation of the State of São Paulo—for particular reasons. My second claim in this section is that practitioners’ movements are motivated by affect. Devotional sites make them feel good. So does praying for the souls. Practitioners are not impulsive shoppers of São Paulo’s religious marketplace, haphazard eclectics in search of easy salvation. Their itineraries are marked not so much by the places they go but by those to which they return. And like Beatriz, devotees keep coming back to devotional sites to pray for the souls because they do not want to abandon the dead. After all, they told me, the dead never abandoned them. Like all objects of devotion, the souls of the dead had become part of them. In Chapters 4 and 5 I suggest how spiritual transit precipitates transfer and transformation. When practitioners move, they bring things with them. By traveling to different religious places practitioners form and reinforce relationships with various supernatural beings. Bound to these beings by devotion, they sometimes carry these forces with them as they move into or build new places. And building something requires raw material, tools, and labor. All these things have to come from somewhere. In Chapter 5, I suggest how the faithful transform people, pasts, and places into objects of devotion. Through a close study of São Paulo’s “thirteen souls,” I suggest that the devotion to souls allows for vernacular creativity, by which the victims of local tragedy may be consecrated as objects of devotion. 17 Sources and Methods This study is an ethnography of a single devotional practice in São Paulo. While I sometimes speak of religion in Brazil, this is, above all, a dissertation about religion in the city of São Paulo—a sprawling metropolis with over eleven million inhabitants within city limits. I conducted most of my fieldwork between January-December 2014, with two months of additional fieldwork in June-July 2015. Almost all of this fieldwork was in the city of São Paulo, except occasional trips to Rio de Janeiro. In São Paulo, my primary field sites were the Church of the Holy Cross of the Souls of the Hanged (Igreja das Almas da Santa Cruz dos Enforcados) and the Chapel of Our Lady of the Afflicted (Capela Nossa Senhora dos Aflitos) in Liberdade, for reasons of interest and accessibility. Unlike the Sanctuary of the Souls (Santuário do Sagrado Coração de Jesus em Sufrágio das Almas) in Ponte Pequena, the clergy and employees at the Liberdade sites were welcoming, and the layout of each church made it easier to solicit interviews without offending or disturbing visitors. I did, however, conduct fieldwork and nine interviews at the Sanctuary of the Souls, and another eight at Cemitério São Pedro, which houses the Shrine to the Thirteen Souls. Of my many secondary field sites, I most frequently visited the Spiritist Federation of the State of São Paulo (FEESP)—the largest and one of the most important Kardecist centers in Brazil. As I discuss in Chapter 3, a substantial portion of the devotees I interviewed visited this center, and some volunteered regularly as mediums. This massive, nine-story structure offered no shortage of activities, but my most regular participation included a weekly course on Allan Kardec’s The Spirits’ Book and a months-long course, required for all volunteer 18 mediums, called “What is Spiritism?” Given Kardecism’s influence in Brazil and its assertion of the possibility of communication with the dead, I attended FEESP to get a sense of institutional Kardecism’s similarities with and differences from the devotion to souls. I also attended regular public ceremonies and weekly courses on “mediumship development” at the Exu Tranca Ruas Cultural Institute, an Umbanda center in Zona Norte. As with FEESP, I began visiting the Cultural Institute after speaking with a number of devotees who identified as Umbandistas. These devotees affirmed the importance of the souls of the dead within Umbanda. As one put it, “the cult of the souls is practically a thing of the terreiro (or center).” My choice of the Cultural Institute was largely a matter of access: in addition to its location near a Metrô stop, it held twice-weekly public ceremonies and offered courses several nights per week.12 In what follows, I try to foreground what practitioners said and did. To that end, one of my most important source bases are the recorded, transcribed, semi-structured interviews I conducted with ninety-three practitioners, which I conducted with the approval of the Institutional Review Board at University of Texas at Austin. Seventy-one interviewees were female and twenty-two were male. This sample slightly over-represents female participation in the devotion—while most devotees are female, the proportion of female is probably closer to two-thirds. The reason for this overrepresentation is that I found women easier to approach. Men often seemed to be in a greater rush, and some gave curt responses. Still, 12 Interview, September 8, 2014. 19 most devotees, both male and female, welcomed the opportunity to talk. I did not have much difficulty soliciting interviews, especially once I figured out where best to solicit them at each church. At the Church of the Hanged, I had the most success waiting in an antechamber near the candle room, or near one of the room’s outside exits. Soliciting interviews at the Church of the Afflicted was even easier. While sometimes I would wait near the candle room, I had more success sitting near Dona Renata, the chapel’s administrator, as she sold candles to devotees. She would often introduce me to devotees and allow me to interview them in a small, quiet room off the chapel’s nave. At these and other sites, I found it helpful to identify as a foreign researcher. Having talked to Brazilian anthropologists afterwards, many agreed that my foreignness probably helped me, as Brazilians might be more untrustworthy of their compatriots. The fact that I am a tall, white male also likely helped. Despite the myth of Brazilian racial democracy, racism remains a problem in Brazil, and white privilege is real. Devotees were not predominantly of any race. Judging by stated employment and level of schooling—I did not ask about income—most seemed to fall between lower- and upper-middle class. The interviews ranged from as short as a minute and a half to as long as one hour and forty-seven minutes, with a median duration of just over ten minutes. I interviewed most of these devotees just once, though I saw many again and chatted with them more informally, sometimes asking follow-up questions. I had continued correspondence with six of them, and conducted additional recorded, unstructured interviews with two. I opted for conducting semi-structured interviews to get a sense of 20 general trends in belief and practice, though I want to emphasize that my purposive sampling does not allow me to make statistically sound claims. I also make limited use of archival materials to shed light on the historical devotion in São Paulo. Most of this material pertains to the Church of the Hanged and Chapel of the Afflicted, and consists of correspondence and lay brotherhood records housed in the Arquivo Metropolitano do Arquidiocese de São Paulo (AMASP). Unfortunately, the documentary record is somewhat thin, allowing only for a historical sketch of each church. Neither site is a parish church and both belong to Sé parish, the seat of the archdiocese, and were thus eclipsed by greater institutional concerns. However, newspaper records housed in the Arquivo Histórico de São Paulo, the Arquivo do Estado de São Paulo, and the newspaper Folha de São Paulo’s proprietary online archives help provide a fuller understanding of devotional life at these sites. These archives, as well as the newspapers digitized by the Biblioteca Nacional, were indispensable for tracing the history of the thirteen souls, which I relate in Chapter 5. Though largely ethnographic, this study begins and ends with the past. This is because it is about the dead. While gone, the dead are sustained in our memory. The pain of their absence gives them a second life. In English, we call this feeling of loss nostalgia or longing. In Portuguese, it is known as saudade. Saudade is a cherished emotion in Brazil, one many see as essential to the Brazilian national character. It is also the emotion most closely associated with the dead; as the popular saying goes, “saudade is the presence of those who are absent.” While similar to nostalgia, it is not seen as naïve or quaint, but profound and 21 poetic. To call attention to this difference is to highlight that memory is socially conditioned. It relies on vocabularies and ways of thinking and being that are historically specific. To understand the devotion to souls, then, we have to understand something about the devotional culture from which it emerged. With that, I turn to the baroque religiosity of the colonial period, in which Monday became known as the day of the souls. 22 Part I: Orientations 23 1 Time: Monday is the Day of the Souls On Monday mornings, Praça Liberdade bustles. Morning commuters emerge from the neighborhood’s Metrô stop and pour into the square. Car horns blare on the adjacent Avenida Liberdade, clashing with the off-key warble of the Peruvian pan pipes. The scent of car exhaust mingles with the odor of burning paraffin from the Church of the Holy Cross of the Souls of the Hanged, where every Monday, hundreds of devotees come to burn candles and pray to the souls of the dead. The day of the souls transforms the Church of the Hanged and the space around it. Its dark wooden pews, all but empty most days of the week, fill with congregants. Members of the church’s lay brotherhood sit in the front pews, decorated in green sashes. There they linger for most of the day, sometimes taking the sanctuary floor to lead the faithful in prayer between masses. When not participating in mass, visitors pray before saints and write mass intentions or requests to saints and souls on small pieces of grey recycled paper. Some never even enter the nave, instead heading straight for the church’s two candle rooms, whose exterior gates open to the street on Mondays. Outside the church, a flower and an herb vendor sell their flora to visitors. Fortune tellers capitalize on the traffic, casting cowries or reading Tarot cards for thirty reais. Casa de Velas Santa Rita, a religious supply store adjacent to the church, opens early and closes late to sell candles to devotees. “I started coming because I have a son with mental difficulties,” a devotee named Luiza told me. “He disappeared for a year. He suddenly called me, and he was in Bolivia.” 24 She had moved to a new apartment and gotten a new phone number, but somehow her son managed to find her. “Isn’t it quite a coincidence?” she asked. Like many visitors at the Church of the Hanged, Luiza had been praying to the souls for decades. Even though she did not typically go to mass, she said, “You can find me here every Monday, the day of the souls. I come every Monday, and I light two candles: one to ask the souls, one to thank them.”13 Luiza did not know why Monday was the day of the souls, and neither did most others I spoke with. It was a tradition whose invention was so distant it seemed timeless. For many, it was something obvious, something anyone raised Catholic knew. How did you learn the devotion? I would ask. “Well, I’m Catholic,” one devotee said, as if that were explanation enough. Another told me, “I was baptized in the Catholic Church, catechized in the Catholic Church, christened in the Catholic church, and I came to know God via this path.” For them, the Monday devotion was as familiar as Good Friday mass is to Catholics in the United States.14 This study hopes to shed light on why practitioners with different religious commitments pray to the souls of the dead in Catholic churches on Mondays. This chapter focuses on part of that question, asking why Monday—a day not conventionally thought of as having sacred significance—is dedicated to the souls of the dead. In a way, the answer is simple, if obscure: between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, prominent liturgists like Jean Beleth and Sicard of Cremona affirmed the suffering souls in purgatory received respite 13 Interview, July 14, 2014. 14 Interview, July 14, 2014. 25 from Saturday to Sunday evening. They recommended the faithful pray on Mondays to ease the souls’ suffering as they returned to the purgatorial fire. The custom took hold as confessors and preachers spread purgatorial devotions and designated Monday as a day for celebrating masses for the dead, cemetery processions, and the benediction of graves.15 Being that the Monday devotion to souls is not common throughout the Catholic world, why is it so well known in contemporary Brazil? In this chapter, I offer two historical reasons. First, I suggest the devotion was an important part of the baroque Catholicism of the Portuguese colonial period, having become particularly popular during the eighteenth century. It was propagated within lay Catholic brotherhoods and promoted by ecclesiastical authorities and the Portuguese crown, principally Dom João V. Though brotherhoods faced reforms in late nineteenth century, the devotion to souls remained an important practice. This brings us to the second reason for the devotion to souls’ popularity: the rise of mediumship religions, particularly Kardecist Spiritism, near the turn of the twentieth century. In Brazil and other Catholic countries, it was a way to combat the growing mediumship religions by offering an alternative means of engaging the dead. This history helps account for some of the devotion’s defining features, such as practitioners’ emphasis on souls’ suffering, their belief in souls’ capacity to help the living, and their preference for practicing the devotion in Catholic churches and on Mondays. 15 Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 177. See also Jacques LeGoff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 37, 299; Adalgisa Arantes Campos, As irmandades de São Miguel e as almas do purgatório: culto e iconografia no setecentos mineiro (Belo Horizonte: C/ Arte, 2013), 98. 26 These practitioners may not always be Catholic, but they do not have to be. Like saints, who some identify with orixás or as Kardeicst “beings of light,” the souls are not under the Church’s control. Purgatorial language offers a way of talking about the dead—and, like all language, it is fluid. It changes and escapes easy control. The Catholic Church has no monopoly on the dead. Purgatorial Antecedents The devotion to souls was once widespread throughout the Catholic world. It thrived in France in the nineteenth-century, a period Michel Vovelle describes as a “great century for purgatory.” In Lombardy, Italy, a vibrant seventeenth-century devotion to souls centered on the excavated bones of plague victims alarmed church authorities. Church authorities were alarmed not because the faithful were praying for the dead, but to the dead. The living asked the dead for favors, as if they were saints or Marian images.16 Shocked though church authorities in Lombardy may have been, the notion that the dead could help the living was not unique to the faithful in seventeenth-century Italy. Early Christians, too, petitioned the deceased for help. “Let me suggest that there was something in the nature of Christian representations of the other world that seemed always to draw the living and the dead together,” writes Peter Brown. “Each side—the living and the dead—was believed somehow to need each other. The dead, in particular, needed the living.” It could 16 Michel Vovelle in Guillaume Cuchet, “The Revival of the Cult of Purgatory in France (1850–1914),” French History 18 no. 1 (2004), 85. On the Italy devotion, see Michael Carroll, Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 117. 27 also work the other way around. In the catacombs of San Sebatiano outside of Rome, third-century graffiti reveal that the living not only prayed for the dead, but asked the dead to pray for them. “Januaria, take your rest well, and ask for us,” one family scrawled into the plaster around the marble nameplate on the tomb of the departed.17 Remembering the dead was a way of asserting their place in the world of the living. But by the end of the fourth century, “the dead and the living… drifted apart.” Bishops were suspicious of “views of the afterlife that seemed to present the dead as hovering in too comfortable a manner around the living.” They railed against customs like picnicking at the grave, which “assumed too cozy a relationship between the living and the dead.” Augustine, who one historian calls the “true founder of the Christian theory of ghosts,” was especially important in keeping the dead at bay. In a time where the nature of the postmortem soul was far from settled, Augustine forcefully argued against the possibility that the body or soul of the dead could appear to the living. At best, the living could see a “spiritual image” of the dead, but even then these images might be introduced by demons.18 The dead and living may have drifted apart, but the bond between them was never totally severed. In fourth and fifth century Rome, it was the rich who customarily buried their loved ones near martyrs’ graves. The holiness of these saints was such that their proximity would help ensure the dead’s entry into heaven. By the seventh century, the social elite would spend great sums to build monasteries and convents, what Brown calls 17 Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Christianity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 17, 38. 18 Schmitt, Ghosts, 17. 28 “powerhouses of prayer on behalf of the souls of the departed.” Knowing their tombs would be bathed in the “perpetual light of perfumed candles,” thought to symbolize the glory of heaven, the rich could rest easy knowing prayer would spare them too lengthy a stay in the cleansing fires of purgatory.19 In the seventh century, liturgy for the dead—masses in the dead’s name on the third, seventh, and thirtieth day after death—became common practice. The institutionalized commemoration of the dead was further developed four centuries later with the establishment of All Souls’ Day on November 2. Tradition attributes it to St. Odilo, the fifth abbot of Cluny, who initiated the tradition sometime around 1030. Hagiographies of Odilo say a Sicilian hermit heard demons complain that the suffrages of Cluniac monks were delivering too many suffering souls from their torments. When he learned of the hermit’s visions, Odilo instituted the holiday, and soon after, “an apparition of the dead pope Benedict, freed from the punishment of the hereafter through the suffrages of the Cluniacs, confirmed the validity of that initiative.” Cluny was influential, and the holiday quickly spread throughout France, Germany, and England, and was adopted as official doctrine in 1274.20 In Brazil today, All Souls’ Day (Dia de Finados) is one of fourteen national holidays. In 2014, an estimated two million Paulistanos—that is, almost one in five—visited the city’s 19 Brown, Ransom of the Soul, 21. 20 Schmitt, Ghosts, 33, 68. “All Souls’ Day” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed.,vol. 7 (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 290-291. This paragraph draws from my encyclopedia article, “All Souls’ Day,” in Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions, ed. Henri Gooren (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016). 29 twenty-two municipal cemeteries. To accommodate the traffic, the city’s transportation authorities increased service for over two hundred bus routes and redirected existing ones. Churches known for the devotion to souls were also full. At the Chapel of the Hanged, a line of visitors waiting to buy candles stretched onto the sidewalk. As with the regular Monday devotion, visitors were praying for their deceased loved ones and to other, general kinds of souls. At the tombs of the thirteen souls in Cemitério São Pedro, I counted sixty visitors. Another fifteen were crammed into the tiny chapel next to the tombs. An older woman heaved as she prayed, and put the back of her hand to her forehead, sighing, “Aí!” over and over. Turning to the man next to me, I asked if he visited the thirteen souls often. “When I can,” he said. “Because souls need light.” Like others, he asked the thirteen souls for help and affirmed they could help the living.21 The notion there are needy souls was not new to purgatorial theology, but the birth of purgatory helped firmly establish it. The birth of purgatory—which historian Jacques LeGoff dates to between 1150 and 1200—reformed the relationship between the living and the dead. LeGoff describes purgatory as “an intermediary other world in which some of the dead were subjected to a trial that could be shortened by prayers, by the spiritual aid, of the living.” The doctrine crystallized a set of preexisting ideas about souls and the afterlife, such as a belief in the soul’s immortality and resurrection, its separation from the body at death, 21 Fieldnotes, November 2, 2014. On the flux of Paulistanos to the cemeteries, see “Cemitérios de SP devem receber 2 milhões de pessoas neste domingo,” accessed August 22, 2014, http://www.ebc.com.br/noticias/brasil/2014/11/cemiterios-de-sp-devem-receber-2-milhoes-de-pessoas-neste-domingo. “Ônibus de SP terão operação especial no Dia de Finados,” accessed August 22, 2014, http://g1.globo.com/sao-paulo/noticia/2014/10/onibus-de-sp-terao-operacao-especial-no-dia-de-finados.html. 30 its punishment and purification via fire, and the possibility of its eventual entry into heaven. And it did so in a way that put the Church in a position to mediate the relationship between the living and the dead.22 Lay Brotherhoods and Colonial Catholicism According to LeGoff, the triumph of purgatory coincided on a reorganization of the social order. “Before the idea of suffrage of prayer in behalf of the dead could be evolved, solidarity had to be established between the living and the dead,” writes LeGoff. This solidarity required certain institutions. Masses were not free, and prayer could be costly. While families could pray for their departed loved ones, the more prayer, the better. One way to ensure that one’s soul would receive sufficient holy intervention was to pay for it by setting aside money in one’s will. Another was to belong to a Catholic brotherhood. These brotherhoods were mutual aid societies, and were fundamentally concerned with death and the dead and the swift passage of brothers’ souls through purgatory. Purgatory became increasingly important within these brotherhoods between the thirteenth and sixteenth century. In the wake of the Counter Reformation, brotherhoods specifically dedicated to the souls multiplied.23 22 LeGoff, Purgatory, 4-6. 23 Ibid., 5, 12, 293-4. Campos, As irmandades de São Miguel, 75. The Catholic Encyclopedia dates the first purgatorial society, or confraternity dedicated to saving purgatorial souls, to 1547. Joseph Hilgers, “Purgatorial Societies,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909). Accessed August 11, 2016 from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12572a.htm. In Italy, confraternities focused on the release of souls from purgatory became increasingly common in the late sixteenth century. See Rebecca Lisabeth Ehlert, “S. Maria Del Pianto: Loss, Remembrance and Legacy in Seventeenth Century Naples” (M.A., Queen’s University, 2008), 64. 31 Catholic lay brotherhoods (irmandades or confrarias in Portuguese) existed in Portugal since at least the thirteenth century, and were mainstays of social life in Brazil through the turn of the twentieth century. These guild-like groups were primarily organized along class and ethnic or racial lines, and less frequently, occupational ones. Membership in the prestigious Santa Casa de Misericórdia (Holy House of Mercy), for example, was only open to landed nobles who were “free of any Moorish or Jewish stock.” The black Brotherhood of Santo Elesbão and Santa Efigênia in Rio de Janeiro, which was organized by Africans from the Gold Coast, Cape Verde, São Tomé, and Mozambique, explicitly excluded “blacks from Angola.” Membership in brotherhoods, then, was one way of navigating the social hierarchy in colonial Brazil. And for slaves and freed people with limited means, it was a way of ensuring a good burial. Without brotherhood membership, slaves risked their corpses’ being dumped in remote locations by slave masters or, only slightly better, the group trenches of Santa Casa de Misericórdia. The social support offered by a brotherhood could be crucial for those who wanted to avoid that undignified end.24 24 On the Santa Casa de Misericórdia, see João José Reis, Death is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 41-44. On the Brotherhood of Santo Elesbão and Santa Efigênia, established 1740, see Mariza de Carvalho Soares, People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 4, 126-27, 138-39. The literature on Catholic lay brotherhoods is extensive, and scholars have long noted their having been essential to colonial social life. Gilberto Freyre, for example, writes, “these brotherhoods of colonial Brazil... were among the most important institutions in Portuguese America”; see “Some Aspects of the Social Development of Portuguese America," in Charles C. Griffin ed., Concerning Latin American Culture (New York, 1940). While the brotherhoods were subject to approval by the Church and crown, they were not simply a means for institutional indoctrination. As Cardozo notes, they were not funded by the Church, but rather a primary means by which the Church raised funds from the populace (as most tithing income was kept by the crown); see Manoel S. Cardozo, “The Lay Brotherhoods of Colonial Bahia,” The Catholic Historical Review 33 no. 1 (1947), 12-30. Likewise, as the extensive scholarship on black brotherhoods has illustrated, they could serve as a space of black sociability in which slaves’ customs could thrive and mingle. On black brotherhoods, see especially Elizabeth W. Kiddy, Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and 32 Brotherhoods helped ensure the salvation of their members’ souls. Members not only expended considerable effort and money organizing deceased brothers’ funerals, but also praying for and requesting masses in intention of the dead.25 Their statutes and guidelines often explicitly mandated prayer for departed brothers, typically on a chosen day of the week, Sundays, and/or specific holy days (such on Fridays of Lent and the holy day of the Church). Brotherhoods with a special interest in purgatorial souls, like the Brotherhoods of São Miguel and Almas (St. Michael and the Souls) that were popular in Minas Gerais, often reserved Monday for mass and prayer for the anonymous souls in purgatory.26 During this period, purgatorial devotions were also encouraged by ecclesiastical authorities and the king, Dom João V (1689-1750; reigned 1706-1750). A contemporary of the king noted that “since the first years of his government, an ardent devotion to liberate the souls from Purgatory shone in his spirit.” João V opened a running account to pay for masses for the souls in purgatory, and some sources suggest he ordered between 10,000 and 18,000 such masses annually—a number that increased to 700,000 in the final years of his reign. The expense prompted the common complaint that the king “sends the living to hell History in Minas Gerais, Brazil (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005); Antonia Aparecida Quintão, Irmandades negras: Outro espaço de luta e resistência (São Paulo: 1870-1890) (São Paulo: FAPESP, 2002); Reis, Death is a Festival, pp. 39-65; and Mariza de Carvalho Soares, People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 25 Elizabeth Kiddy writes, “Another important ritual obligation, and an important part of the reconstruction of communities, was the necessity to take care of the dead and the souls of the dead. The proper care of the dead, and the rituals for their souls after death, were one of the main preoccupations of the brother- hood members, and in the compromissos often several chapters were taken up by explanations of how and where burials were to take place and how many masses would be celebrated for the dead” (Blacks of the Rosary, 98). 26 Campos, As irmandades de São Miguel, 96. According to Caio Boschi, there were thirty-five brotherhoods dedicated to the souls or St. Michael and the souls in colonial Minas Gerais; Os Leigos e o poder: Irmandades leigas e política colonizadora em Minas Gerais (São Paulo: Editora Atica, 1986), 191. 33 to take the dead out of purgatory.” His zeal for the souls merely amplified a trend that had begun a century earlier—in Portugal, alminhas (roadside altars to the souls) and brotherhoods dedicated to the souls began proliferating in the seventeenth century. “The devotion to souls was so familiar and rooted in the religious practices of the Portuguese,” writes one historian, that there was “a veritable pious dialogue between the world of the living and that of the dead.”27 This “pious dialogue” between the living and the dead extended to Brazil. While the tradition of the alminhas was never imported from Portugal, purgatorial imagery flourished. Altarpieces and alms boxes were adorned with iconography of purgatorial souls, who are typically depicted as naked (and often white, young) bodies bathed in flame. Concern for the dead was also codified in ecclesiastical dictates. The Constituições primeiras do arcebispado da Bahia (First Constitutions of the Archbishopric of Bahia, 1707), which served as the principal ecclesiastical legislation in the country for nearly two hundred years, states: “conforming with the general custom approved by the Church, in our Sé Cathedral and parish churches of our archbishopric, will be made processions on the Mondays of [every] year for the dead.” The document also encouraged the establishment of brotherhoods, “principally those of the Holy Sacrament, and of the Name of JESUS, to Our Lady, and of the Souls in Purgatory, when possible, and the capacity of parishes allows it, because it is good 27 The quote from Dom João V’s contemporary is found in Ana Cristina Bartolomeu D’Araújo, “Morte, memória e piedade barroca,” Revista de História de Ideais 2 (1989): 152-153. For more on Dom João V’s devotion see, Adalgisa Arantes Campos, “São Miguel, as Almas do Purgatório e as balanças: iconografia e veneração na Época Moderna,” Memorandum 7 (2004): 151. On alminhas, see Campos, As irmandades de São Miguel, 67, 73. 34 to have these Confraternities in every church,” (emphasis added). The souls in purgatory were an essential part of religious life in Brazil.28 Anonymous Souls “In Brazil, religion, or that which is so called, meets you everywhere you can do nothing, observe nothing, without being confronted by it in one shape or another,” wrote Thomas Ewbank. An English inventor of means, Ewbank chronicled his 1845-46 stay in Rio de Janeiro in his travel diary, Life in Brazil. The work offers a rare account in the lived religion of nineteenth-century Brazil. Ewbank was a Protestant who saw Catholicism as a “barrier to progress,” but it fascinated him. “It is a leading feature in public and private life,” he wrote, and something that no careful observer could ignore.29 Religion pervaded life in Rio de Janeiro, and the souls in purgatory pervaded religion. Having lodged in Catete, a neighborhood in Rio’s Zona Sul, Ewbank was near the famous Our Lady of Gloria church, built over a century earlier in 1739. “Four or five feet in front of the chapel door, a post is fixed in the pavement, and against it an alms-box, bound with iron and secured by a padlock. On the raised back a cup is painted, and under it heads 28 Sebastião Monteiro da Vide, Constituições primeiras do Arcebispado da Bahia feitas, e ordenadas pelo Illustrissimo, e Reverendissimo Senhor D. Sebastião Monteiro da Vide: propostas, e aceitas em o Synodo Diocesano, que o dito Senhor celebrou em 12 de junho do anno de 1707 (São Paulo: Typographia Antonio Louzada Antunes, 1853), 303 (Titulo LIX, no. 864), 305 (Titulo LX, no. 869). 29 Thomas Ewbank, Life in Brazil: Or, a Journal of a Visit to the Land of the Cocoa and the Palm (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856), vi-viii. 35 rolling in flames. On the box is written, ‘Esmolas para as almas’ — alms for drawing souls out of Purgatory.”30 The dead were part of everyday life. “Numerous days on the calendar are marked with the word ‘Alma,’” which indicated days advantageous for freeing souls from purgatory. Ewbank wrote that on every day but Sunday, alms collectors would go door to door and solicit funds for that day’s masses. “Thus, in Cattete, every Monday a man knocks at our door for a donation to release the imprisoned souls.” This man was likely collecting alms on behalf of the Church of Our Lady of Gloria.31 Ewbank was especially struck by an alms-box outside a store that “presented the best piece of picture-writing I have met with.” It depicted two infants, one black and one white, screaming in pain while burning in the fires of purgatory. “Passing travelers can hardly refuse a trifle to innocents thus beseeching them with screeches, tears, and uplifted hands,” he wrote. Though he thought Catholicism a barrier to progress, Ewbank never dismissed purgatory as a means of spiritual extortion. He seems to have intuitively understood the affective hold of purgatorial devotionalism. “Indeed, who of the faith can withstand invitations to shorten the purgation of departed friends,” he asked.32 30 Ibid., 66. Augusto Mauricio, Templos históricos do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Gráfica Laemmert, 1946), 191. 31 Ewbank, Life in Brazil, 273. 32 Ibid., viii, 285-286. Ewbank also relates an advertisement for a play called The Brother of Souls, a comedy meant to excoriate alms collectors that pocket money for themselves. He says the plays proceeds would help fund a church, though he does not name which one (349). 36 Ewbank was probably mistaken—the coins that clinked in the coffers most likely funded masses for anonymous souls. The faithful were careful to distinguish between these souls and those of their friends and family. Brotherhoods prioritized prayer to shorten their own members’ purgatorial stays. Similarly, historians’ analyses of last wills and testaments show that testators consistently requested more masses for themselves and loved ones than for the anonymous dead. This makes sense. One of the main reasons for drafting these documents was to minimize one’s own purgatorial suffering. Even though funding masses for anonymous souls was a way of earning merit, having masses said for oneself was still the best way of ensuring one’s own salvation.33 Testators may have requested fewer masses for anonymous souls than for themselves, but that they spent any money at all on purgatorial souls suggests how important they were in religious life. Outside of last wills and testaments, these masses were typically funded by alms boxes, like those Ewbank described, or by special collections. In the Brotherhoods of São Miguel and Almas in Minas Gerais, for example, members passed around a bacia das almas (“basin for the souls”) dedicated exclusively to the anonymous souls in purgatory. 33 Campos’s analysis of mass requests in eighteenth-century last wills and testaments reveals that in both Brazil and Portugal, most requests were for the dead themselves (83% in the first half of the century and about 51% in the second half, though there are gaps in the data). For the most part, it seems the faithful requested more masses for loved ones than the souls of purgatory, though in the first half of the eighteenth century in Minas, Campos tallied 190 mass requests for loved ones, and 217 for the purgatorial souls. As irmnadades de São Miguel, 109-110. João Reis writes that in nineteenth-century Salvador, “‘souls in purgatory’ received more masses than only the souls of slaves and those of business partners. Most masses said in Salvador’s churches for souls in purgatory were probably paid for by anonymous donations deposited in the churches in alms boxes decorated with little souls engulfed in flames.” He further notes that former slaves seem to have been more inclined to remember the anonymous souls in purgatory. “People who had once lived in bondage may have associated the experience of purgatory with that of slavery.” The testament of one freedman even remembered “the souls of the slaves who find themselves in Purgatory.” Death is a Festival, 204. 37 They also reserved Mondays for prayer to these souls, praying to those of members on other days, like Sundays or at other designated times.34 Requesting mass was not the only way of coming to purgatorial souls’ aid. The faithful also prayed for the souls—and to them—privately. Historians disagree about when the souls came to be seen as intercessors, but in Brazil, it seems devotees were petitioning the souls for help at least as far back as the eighteenth century, as evidenced by oblique references to the souls’ intercessory powers in some brotherhoods’ compromissos. The 1713 compromisso of the Brotherhood of São Miguel and Almas of Caeté, for example, relates the “wonders that God has wrought in this world through the Souls in Purgatory.” The compromisso of the Brotherhood of São Miguel and Almas of Pitangui (1727) similarly mentions souls’ “wonders.” Rote language can indicate routine practice, and these compromissos suggest widespread acceptance of souls’ intercessory powers.35 34 Campos, As irmandades de São Miguel, 97. 35 Ibid., 36-37. Historians debate how far back we can date purgatorial devotions. LeGoff argues that the idea of purgatory took hold in the twelfth century and that it was as much a part of folk practice and belief as it was elite discourse. He suggests it became common practice for the faithful to petition souls for intercession as early as the fourteenth century, while noting instances of the practice as much as a millennium earlier; Purgatory, 49, 249, 357. Michel Vovelle, similarly, suggests purgatorial devotions were first confined to the clergy and religious orders, and “only began to be diffused among the mass of the people from the fourteenth or, more notably, fifteenth century, reaching its culmination in the period of the post-Tridentine reconquest”; Ideologies and Mentalites (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 23. With respect to Portugal, Campos suggests it became part of popular practice in the fifteenth century, citing the altar of the souls in the Church of the Convent of Santa Clara in Porto. Campos, As irmandades de São Miguel, 63, 68. On the other hand, scholars like Michael Carroll and Philipe Ariès date widespread purgatorial devotion to the seventeenth century. Carroll, Veiled Threats, 119-123; Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 462. Guillaume Cuchet argues that the cult of the souls had a large revival in late nineteenth-century France following two innovations: prayers for abandoned souls and the new possibility of petitioning souls for intercession; “The Revival of the Cult of Purgatory,” 76; Guillaume Cuchet, “Les morts utiles du purgatoire,” Terrain: Revue d’ethnologie de l’Europe, no. 62 (March 4, 2014): 90. While this may have been the case in France, it certainly was not in Portugal or Brazil—though there seems to have been a resurgence of the devotion throughout much of the Catholic world in the late nineteenth century. I would be surprised if the faithful in France were not frequently petitioning abandoned souls sometime before this period, however. At the very 38 The historical record does not offer much insight into what devotees were asking of the souls. Agaldisa Arantes Campos suggests a theological explanation, noting that devotees usually offered suffrages rather than ex votos to thank souls for favors received. I suspect that there were also material impediments to leaving ex votos. Unlike saints, anonymous purgatorial souls typically lack statues and tombs, and thus there is nowhere to leave an ex voto. Today, in cases where they do have images and spaces—as with the thirteen souls, who have physical tombs in São Paulo’s Cemitério São Pedro—ex votos seem more common. Still, devotees did occasionally leave written testimonies of the souls’ power. For example, Campos relates a rare ex voto from 1743 in which a devotee thanks the souls for help in saving his life after a violent attack. This is not so different from what devotees say today. Many told me the souls protected them from the violence of the streets. As one said, “I ask the souls to carry the souls to heaven, that the souls be there, to open my pathway, to protect me, me and my family, my friends, the people I like, my animals.”36 The devotees I spoke with prayed to souls like the afflicted souls (almas aflitas), the holy souls (almas santas), and the blessed souls (almas benditas), all of which are phrases historically used as shorthand for the purgatorial souls in Iberian Catholicism. Blessedness and affliction might seem mutually exclusive, but in purgatorial logic, the two go hand in hand. As Campos explains, the further the souls are on the purgatorial path, “the more holy, least, I doubt that prayers to abandoned souls were much of an innovation—after all, the altarpieces that depicted purgatorial souls were not showing particular people, but rather generic multitudes, bathed in flame. 36 Campos, As irmandades de São Miguel, 36-37. Interview, May 26, 2014. 39 more lucid, ‘wiser and more understanding,’ and, necessarily, more ‘afflicted.’ It is exactly these souls, those that suffer most, that are most in need of suffrages.”37 Devotees today do not always believe in purgatory, as I note later, and even those that do may not think the souls reside there. And for some, afflicted souls and blessed souls were not synonymous terms, but referred instead to different kinds of dead. Some anthropological work on religious language helps us to note that religious recitations “often retain some marked linguistic or performance features, which testifies to their persistent connection to and difference from the prior—and distant—context.” While ways of referencing souls suggest a once-pervasive concern with purgatory, they have become something different. Rather than being synonyms for the purgatorial souls, these different phrasings have become kinds of souls in themselves. Whatever devotees think about souls today, the language for talking about the dead has endured.38 We can trace the form and content of the contemporary devotion to its colonial roots: unlike the devotion to saints, devotees today see their relationship with the souls as one of mutual aid. It reflects the sociality engendered within the Catholic brotherhoods that thrived before the twentieth century. Devotees refer to the souls as “friends” and characterize their relationship with the dead as one of reciprocal altruism. This is an important point. Even though scholars have characterized the devotion as “magical” or “instrumental,” these labels miss its affective qualities. They focus only on what devotees ask for and pay too little 37 Campos, As irmandades de São Miguel, 39. 38 Webb Keane, “Religious Language,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 63. 40 attention to devotees’ relationship with the dead. Friendship and instrumentality are at odds. As one philosopher has argued, “we love all our friends… ‘for themselves’ and not just what they do for us. ‘Instrumental friendship’… is a contradiction in terms.”39 To say the contemporary devotion to souls took shape within the baroque Catholicism of the colonial period is not to make any normative claims about its orthodoxy, then or now. One of this study’s arguments is that the devotion to souls is a vector for religious movement. That is, while it is practiced in Catholic spaces and makes use of the language and practice characteristic of the Brazilian Church, today’s devotees are not only observant Catholics. The ones I spoke with had varied religious identities, and even those who affirmed Catholicism visited other religious sites in São Paulo. Some spoke about the dead in distinctly non-Catholic terms and called them “spirits of light,” borrowing phrasing common in Kardecist and Umbandist discourse. The devotion to souls has accommodated people of different faiths, and for this reason, clergy and lay elite have used it to catechize and indoctrinate. It offers a means of communing with the dead, but one markedly different from the medium religions that, from the late nineteenth century onward, the Church sought to combat. Other Notions of the Dead The purgatorial imaginary may have gripped the minds of Brazil’s faithful, but it was not because the Church had an overwhelming presence in Brazil. Until the twentieth 39 Alexander Nehamas, On Friendship (New York: Basic Books), 113. 41 century, the Church was institutionally weak. In the preface to the second English-language edition of The Masters and the Slaves, Gilberto Freyre describes Brazilian religion as a “family Catholicism, with the chaplain supported to the paterfamilias, with a cult of the dead, etc.” The Church’s position as the established faith, funded through the crown’s ten percent tithe on everything produced in Brazil, did little to incentivize its independent organization (though the Jesuits had a strong presence until their expulsion in 1759). From 1551 until 1676, there was only one bishopric (in Salvador), and until the establishment of the Republic in 1889, there was only one archbishopric (also in Salvador). Furthermore, the Portuguese crown held the right to name bishops and censor the Vatican’s acts and decrees under the arrangement of patronage (the padroado), established via a series of papal bulls between 1415 and 1515. In urban areas, brotherhoods were the dominant religious institutions. And though they were subject to ecclesiastical approval, they operated with little clerical oversight until the “Romanizing” reforms of the late nineteenth century.40 So while purgatory was influential in Brazil, the laity was never known for ultramontane piety, or devotion that emphasized the authority of Rome. Purgatorial doctrine was not the only way of thinking about the dead, and while ecclesiastical authorities and the crown encouraged purgatorial devotions, they did not demand or control them. Likewise, 40 Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, xxxiii. On the history of church state relations, see Thomas Bruneau, The Church in Brazil (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1982), 14 and The Brazilian Catholic Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 14-15; John Frederick Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: From Conquest to Revolution and Beyond (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 35, 99-100; Kiddy, Blacks of the Rosary, 28. If I do not mention any great shift in Church-state relations at the advent of Brazil’s independence (1822), it is because the independence had no real effect on this relationship until the so-called Religious Question of 1874. The Church remained the established faith under the 1824 Constitution, and the padroado continued to apply; see Bruneau, The Church in Brazil, 22. 42 popular healers and independent religious specialists regularly appropriated the Church’s ritual, language, and material culture in ways that roused the inquisition’s ire. For instance, inquisition records tell of Domingas Gomes da Resurreicão, a native healer, known for healing quebranto, or weakness caused by evil eye. “To combat it, he blessed the patient’s whole body with his index finger and thumb or with the cross on his rosary.” Domingas would say, “Two evil eyes have given it to thee, with three thou shalt be cured,” before honoring to the souls in purgatory.41 Ecclesiastical authorities have long been anxious about attempts at direct contact or communication with the dead, fearing the persistence of Roman and other pagan practice. But if inquisition records offer an accurate account, these practices were not unusual during the colonial period. A Portuguese woman (who was banished to Angola after being convicted by the Holy Office of sorcery in 1713 and 1720) and one of her clients sought her help winning over the heart of his beloved. She instructed him to pray: “Souls, souls, of the sea, of the land, three hanged, three dragged, three shot to death for love, all nine shall gather into the heart of so and so shall enter, and such tremor shall cause her for the love of so and so, that she shall not rest, nor be still, save she say yes to his wish to wed.”42 41 Laura Mello e Souza, The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 108. 42 Schmitt, Ghosts, 11. Souza, The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross, 145. Remarkably, this language remains popular in contemporary simpatias and Umbandista prayers. Take the following prayer, published in 1987: Souls, souls, souls, three that died of drowning, three that died of burning, three that died for love, gather all three, all six, and all nine to jolt the heart of so-and-so, so that he/she cannot eat, not drink, not sleep, not stop and not rest anywhere without speaking with me and being in my company. When he/she sleeps, he/she will awake thinking of me, with the power 43 Fear of wandering souls—that is, ghosts—was common in Brazil and Portugal. From at least the nineteenth century onward, these souls were typically called almas penadas, a phrase alternately translated as “lost,” “pining,” or “wandering souls” (though it might be translated more literally as “suffering souls”). Some scholars have pointed to belief in almas penadas as evidence of a “folk Catholicism” that was “not in harmony with salvationist Christianity, much less Tridentine Catholicism.”43 But the Church is not a monolith. Augustine may have proposed a Catholic theory of ghosts that limited their appearances, but many theologians have argued that purgatorial souls could not just appear to the living in dreams, but affect earthly matter. For example, in 1894, Victor Jouet, a Missionary of the Sacred Heart, collected relics of purgatorial souls’ impressions upon earthly matter, such as a handkerchief on which he asserted a soul left an imprint of its finger. He collected these relics in a small museum inside the Sacro Cuore del Suffragio, a church dedicated to the purgatorial souls, near the Vatican.44 of this knife (take a virgin knife, secure it and act as if you will stab the ground), the power of this ground, it does not penetrate the floor, but penetrates the heart of so-and-so, so they cannot eat, cannot drink, cannot sleep, and cannot rest anywhere without speaking with me and being in my company and at my side. Caboclo Cobra Coral (espírito), Orações Umbandistas de todos os tempos (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas Editora, 1987), 47. See also the “Oração das nove almas soffredoras” in Mario de Andrade, Música de feitiçaria no Brasil (São Paulo, Livraria Martins Editora, 1963), 122. 43 Bruneau, The Church in Brazil, 24. John Burdick notes a contrast between these bitter souls and blessed souls: “As is still true today, a person who died with bitterness in her heart was believed to wander and require purification, while whoever had faced worldly suffering with resignation was thought to become an alma bendita, a blessed soul, whose proximity to the saints would allow her to intercede on behalf of the living”; Blessed Anastácia: Women, Race, and Popular Christianity in Brazil (New York: Routledge, 1998), 65. 44 Bruneau, The Church in Brazil, 24. On Victor Jouet, see Diana Walsh Pasulka, Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 128-29; William A. Christian, Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 340-41. 44 The phrase almas penadas—like almas aflitas and almas santas—probably has origins in Iberian purgatorial discourse. In that context it referred to souls’ purgatorial peregrinations, not their earthly ones. In time, however, it became largely divorced from this original context and came to refer to souls that wander the earth. It remains common today, even part of popular culture via Penadinho, a comic strip and cartoon about a young, friendly ghost.45 Other traditions suggest how Brazilians understood the dead’s place in the world. In Life in Brazil, Thomas Ewbank wrote, for example: “Soon as a person dies, the doors and windows are closed—the only occasion, it is said, when the front entrance of a Brazilian dwelling is shut.” Similarly, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, the Portuguese folklorist José Leite de Vasconcellos reported, “When someone dies, one must get rid of all the water in the house, because the soul can return there to bathe.” These ideas were common, but not always met with clerical approval. For example, in 1530, the Bishop of Verona lamented “the practice of uncovering the roof so that the soul [of the dead] can get out, something that suggests that the soul could be held back by a roof.”46 45 For seventeenth and eighteenth century references to almas penadas, in which penar typically is a way of describing the souls’ suffering in purgatory, see José de Barcia y Zambrana, Despertador Christiano Santoral: De varios sermons de santos, de anniversaries de animas, y honras, en orden à exciter en los fieles la devocion de los santos, y la imitacion de sus virtudes (Barcelona: Rafael Figverò, 1699), 480; Leonardo de Porto Mauricio, Via Crucis: explanado y ilustrado con los breves y declaraciones de los sumos pontifices Clemente XII y Benedicto XIV y de la sagrada congregacion de indulgencies, y con la resolucion de todos las dudas suscitadas para impeder tan santa e devota devocion (Madrid: Imprensa de la Viuda de Manuel Fernandez, 1758), 180; Sermones de las almas del purgatorio: sacados de diversos y graves autores por un sacerdote devoto de las mismas almas (Gerona: Joseph Brò, 1767), 47, 189-93. 46 Ewbank, Life in Brazil, 67. José Leite de Vasconcellos, Tradições Populares de Portugal (Porto: Livraria Portuense de Clavel, 1882), 79. Carrol, Veiled Threats, 146-147. Vasconcellos noted other precautions related to the souls, such as not spitting on a flame, “because they are souls that go to purgatory; who spits is a 45 Purgatory offers a sanctioned way of communing with the dead. It is also a means of keeping them at bay. Theologians debated whether and when purgatorial souls could return to earth, but that there were debates at all suggests that, generally speaking, the dead were cordoned off in the Catholic afterlife. Some scholars argue that in periods where purgatory flourished, hauntings decreased. It has also been argued that Spiritualism was successful in Protestant countries that lacked a purgatorial ritual for engaging the dead. But I am not fully convinced that purgatory ever really succeeded at eradicating ghosts and spirits or that the correlation between Spiritualism and Protestantism is clear. After all, Kardecist Spiritism came from France and was popular throughout much of Latin America at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly in Brazil, where the Church had little success in using the devotion to souls to combat spiritism. The devotion was popular enough, but Kardecism quickly gained a large following.47 Combating Spiritism The Church maintained its position as the established faith for the duration of the Brazilian Empire (1822-1889), but Church-state relations soured by the end of it. Liberalism had threatened the Church’s state support throughout the Catholic world, and in places like Jew” (35). Regarding almas penadas, he wrote “it is believed the souls of great sinners are transformed into animals, wandering late at night through fields, as well as churches and cemeteries” (303) and that “the souls of those who die without returning paying back what they must return to this world, by God’s favor, and implore a friend or relative to pay back the stolen thing” (301). 47 Jacques LeGoff, writes, “Ghosts made a comeback in the Renaissance, however, for although purgatory continued to play its role of forging a link between the dead and the living… it apparently ceased to fulfill the function of a prison for the suffering souls”; Purgatory, 293. For the possible connection between Spiritualism and Protestantism, see Ariès 462-63. 46 Mexico, reformers were successful in separating church and state, nationalizing the Church’s land holdings, and restricting the authority of Church courts. The Church reacted in kind. The reign of Pope Pius IX, in particular, marked a shift in the Vatican’s attitude towards the place of the Church in Catholic countries. Perhaps most famous for his 1864 Syllabus of Errors—which condemned heresies like liberalism, modernism, socialism, Protestantism, and secret societies—Pius IX instituted ultramontane reforms that aimed to centralize the Vatican’s power in matters of ecclesiastical government and unify doctrine and practice. Even though Dom Pedro II banned the Syllabus’s publication in Brazil, the country was not immune from the Vatican’s reforms.48 New religious trends like spiritualism and spiritism also threatened the Church. Soon after Kate and Margaret Fox’s highly publicized spirit communications in New York in 1848, droves of curious people tried their hand at communicating with the dead. For some, the séance was just an amusing parlor game, but for others it was a scientific means of investigating the spirit world. Séance practices quickly spread to France, where Allan Kardec (née Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail) “codified” them via five books that elaborated the core of “Spiritist” belief and practice. Kardecist Spiritism (as opposed to American and European Spiritualism) spread throughout Latin America, where its French provenance lent the doctrine a prestigious air.49 48 Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America, 161, 189-90; Bruneau, The Brazilian Church, 28. 49 On the early history of Kardecism, see David Hess, Spirits and Scientists: Ideology, Spiritism, and Brazilian Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 59-80. 47 While initially slow to respond, the Catholic Church became increasingly concerned with mediumship religions and issued progressively strict prohibitions on Catholics’ engagement with them. In 1856, eight years after the Fox sisters’ first reports of spirit communications, the Holy Office decried the “abuses of magnetism,” clairvoyance, necromancy, and “other analogous superstitions” as “heretical, scandalous, and contrary to the honesty of customs,” which “condemned spiritualism without explicitly naming it,” as historian Guillaume Cuchet points out. In 1864—the same year of Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors—the Vatican put several of Kardec’s works and his periodical, the Revue Spirite, on the Index of Prohibited Books, where it joined other works on Mesmerism, hypnotism, and Swedenborgianism. It took another thirty-four years, however, for the Church to officially ban spirit communications in 1898 because even communications in good faith were not with the dead, but with evil spirits, and it was not until 1917 that the Church banned Catholics’ attendance at any mediumship session, even as spectators.50 In Brazil, the bishops’ concerns with mediumship religions dovetailed with a broader process of ultramontane reform (also called “Romanization”). These generally synonymous terms refer to the Vatican’s efforts to centralize its power and unify doctrine and practice. At this time, the emperor Dom Pedro II was still exercising his right to appoint bishops and priests under Royal Patronage, which the Church vehemently resisted. Seven of Brazil’s 50 Guillaume Cuchet, “The Revival of the Cult of Purgatory,” 82-3; Hess, Spirits and Scientists, 67. For a contemporary Catholic discussion of the ban on attendance, see Herbert Thurston, “Communicating with the Dead,” The Month: An Illustrated Magazine of Literature, Science and Art, vol. CXXIX January-June (1917): 134-144. The text of the ban is printed in the Analecta Ecclesiastica, vol. VI, 187. 48 eleven bishops attended the First Vatican Council (1869-70) and returned to Brazil with an ultramontanist agenda, hoping to free the church of all state control. The number of dioceses expanded, from twelve in 1891 to fifty-eight in 1920. At a local level, clergy exercised increasing involvement in the lay brotherhoods, as many compromissos that were drafted during this period—and thus subject to ecclesiastical approval—required parish priests attend meetings, and sometimes even be appointed to leadership posts in brotherhoods.51 This impulse to enforce orthodoxy and orthopraxis resulted in a condemnation of spiritism, which was often lumped together with other heresies like liberalism and Protestantism, by observant laypeople and worried clerics. Séance practices had arrived in Brazil as early as 1853, five years after the Fox sisters’ first spirit communications. In 1865, Luís Olímpio Teles de Menezes founded the country’s first Kardecist center, the Grupo Fimilar do Espiritismo, in Salvador da Bahia. Two years later, the archbishop of Bahia issued a pastoral letter condemning the “pernicious errors of spiritism.” Observant lay Catholics also condemned the doctrine. In an 1868 article titled, “The Present” in the Rio de Janeiro 51 Kiddy, Blacks of the Rosary, 142; Bruneau, The Church in Brazil, 17-18. The issue of ultramontism came to a head in the Religious Question of 1874, which was a high-profile altercation between the Church and state over the issue of freemasonry. At the time, the lay brotherhoods were a venue for freemasonry, and many priests were unabashed masons. Two ultramontane bishops—Dom Vital Maria Gonçalves de Oliveira and Dom Macedo Costa—insisted clergy and lay brotherhood members abjure their masonic ties. They also pressured clergy to expel members who refused to abjure. This was a sensitive issue, because brotherhoods were both ecclesiastical and legal entities, and the crown perceived the bishops interdiction as the church imposing on state sovereignty. Eventually, the bishops were sentenced to four years’ hard labor, though Pedro II eventually commuted their sentence to simple imprisonment, and then, in 1975, amnesty. According to Bruneau, the event demonstrated the “liabilities of the Church’s close relationship with the state,’ and indicated to the government “the extent of the diffusion of ultramontane ideas among sectors of the Church.” In short, it convinced various parties that something about the church-state relationship needed to change, and “the opportunity [for change] presented itself in the founding of the Republic”; Bruneau, The Brazilian Catholic Church, 27-29. 49 edition of O Apostolo, an ultramontane Catholic weekly, the author laments that Salvador, a pious stronghold, the “false doctrine of spiritism… [the] science of Satan” had taken hold.52 The term spiritism (espiritismo) can be cause for confusion, as its colloquial and academic usage can be ambiguous. It is derived from the French espiritisme, coined by Allan Kardec to differentiate “a doctrine that has its foundation in the relationship between the material world and spirits” from a more general “spiritualism,” that is, the belief “in something more than matter.” In Brazil, espiritismo has referred specifically to Kardecism, but it also has been used for any of the mediumship religions. Sometimes, other mediumship religions—particularly those raced as black—were referred to as “low spiritism,” though this obviously pejorative term is rare today. In this study, I use the terms Kardecism or Kardecist Spiritism to refer to those institutions that proclaim a rigorous adherence to the Codification, and the term mediumship religions to refer to the diverse institutions and traditions that engage in practices of spirit mediumship. I use the term spiritism, in the lowercase, only to reflect other historical actors’ discourse, such as that of Catholics at the turn of the twentieth century.53 Catholic denunciations of spiritism became more frequent and forceful near the end of the century, though they were still slow coming. As Bruneau notes, the Church seemed more preoccupied with modernism and freemasonry than religious competitors that 52 On the Grupo Familiar, see Boaventura Kloppenburg, O espiritismo no Brasil: orientação para os católicos (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1960), 12, 15; O Apostolo (Rio de Janeiro), April 12, 1868, 122; see also November 22, 1868, 373. On O Apostolo’s ultramontism, see David Gueiros Vieira, O protestantismo, a maçonaria e a questão religiosa no Brasil (Editora Universidade de Brasília, 1980), 53. 53 Allan Kardec, The Spirits’ Book (Philadelphia: The Allen Kardec Educational Society, 2003), 1. 50 demanded conversion. Still, greater ecclesiastical organization following the establishment of the First Republic resulted in more coordinated condemnations of spiritism. In 1890, Brazilian bishops began regular meetings to coordinate the church’s administration, after which they published their findings in collective pastoral letters (pastorais coletivas). In the Pastoral Coletiva of 1904, the episcopacy issued its first collective statement condemning spiritism, mandating that “all Catholics abstain from the superstition and evils of spiritism” and that “in all seminaries is developed, in theology or apologetics, teaching against spiritism and other errors.” This language was reproduced in later pastoral letters, including the influential Pastoral Coletiva of 1915.54 The Pastoral Coletiva of 1915 condemned spiritism as “one of the most pernicious, if not the most pernicious of all” threats to the faith. This document functioned as the Brazilian Church’s legal code and a “veritable reference manual for parish clergy” for the next quarter century, and thus set the tone of Catholic orthodoxy in Brazil. “Arm yourselves, priests, against this fatal enemy, guard your flock, so that they are not caught in the devil’s web those who pontificate on spiritism.” The letter forbade Catholics from attending spiritist centers and prohibited spiritist literature: “Spiritism is the collection of all the superstitions 54 Bruneau, The Brazilian Catholic Church, 34. Pastoral collectiva dos bispos da provincia ecclesiastica meridional do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Typografia Leuzinger, 1904), Capitulo VII, no. 91; Pastoral collectiva dos senhores arcebispos e bispos das provincias ecclesiasticas de S. Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro, Mariana, S. Paulo, Cuyabá, e Porto Alegre (Rio de Janeiro: Typografia Leuzinger, 1911), Capitulo VII, no. 277; Nova edic ̧ão da pastoral colectiva de 1915 (Canoas: Editora La Salle, 1950), Capitulo XII, no. 1194. 51 and gimmicks of modern unbelief, that, denying the eternal punishment of hell, the Catholic priesthood, and the rights of the church, destroy all Christianity.”55 In addition to condemning spiritism, the episcopacy recommended the devotion to souls as a way of strengthening the faith. “We encourage all parish priests interested in the conservation and augmentation of Religion in their parishes to introduce and foment the devotion in suffrage to the souls of purgatory.” They promoted November as the “month of the souls” and encouraged clergy to inspire the faithful to commune with the souls “not only in November, but also other times over the course of the year, and remember frequently the souls of the faithful departed in their prayers.”56 It is no coincidence that the Church promoted the devotion to souls at the same time it condemned mediumship religion. Throughout much of the Catholic world, historian Guillaume Cuchet argues, “the revival of purgatory formed the positive side of this anti-spiritualist policy.” Treatises on purgatory published in France and Rome after 1855 announce the “dangers of spiritualism and contrast it with the ‘healthy doctrine of purgatory.’” Similarly, the English Catholic Times suggested that praying for the purgatorial dead was a sort of “spiritualism sanctioned by the Church.” Brazil was no exception, and the Pastoral Coletiva of 1915 instructed priests to direct people away from spiritism and toward “a special prayer to St. Michael”—long associated with purgatorial devotionalism in Brazil, 55 Maurílio César de Lima, Breve história da igreja no brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Restauro, 2001), 157; Pastoral colectiva de 1915, Capitulo I, no. 65. 56 Pastoral colectiva de 1915, Capitulo XVI, nos. 884, 885, 88; see also 834, 889 for general recommendations that priests promote suffrages for the dead. 52 as the angel who swifts souls from purgatory to heaven—“to permit them to speak with a spirit of a specific person.”57 Catholics’ concern with the mediumship religions persisted well into the mid-twentieth century, and they continued to promote the cult of the souls as a way of combating it. In the 1930s, for instance—a period of Catholic revitalization following Getulio Vargas’s rise to power—an Association for the Souls in Purgatory was formed, with the following objectives: 1. To help and console the souls in Purgatory. 2. To ensure help and consolation for members of the Association after their death if they are captive in Purgatory. 3. To work for the veneration of souls, to combat spiritism and to contribute to the splendor of the holy Church. (Emphasis added.)58 Though the Association for the Souls was a lay association, it may have reflected an institutional preoccupation rather than a ground-level concern. Unfortunately, the only archived documentary evidence on the association is a three-page list of statutes. These statutes show it was strictly controlled, even for lay associations of the time. The parish priest was the only person eligible to serve as its director. He had to be present at all meetings, was the only one capable of admitting new members, and could dismiss members at will. 57 Catholic Times, November 6, 1897, in Cuchet, “The Revival of the Cult of Purgatory,” 83. Pastoral colectiva de 1915, Capitulo I, no. 63; this recommendation is also in Pastoral colectiva de 1911, Capitulo I, no. 41. Also note that Ann Taves’s analysis of Catholic devotions in the United States nineteenth-century suggests that devotions to the souls in purgatory became more frequent in the second half of that century; Ann Taves, The Household of Fatih: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Notre Dame: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 40, 149. 58 Associação pelas almas do Purgatorio, Paroquia de Nossa Senhora de Boa Parte, Archidiocese de São Paulo; AMASP, Associações. 53 At the first National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB) in 1953, spiritism was a major agenda item, alongside issues of land reform and Catholic Action. During the conference, the episcopacy initiated a national campaign against the “spiritist heresy” and declared that “spiritism is, at the moment, the most dangerous doctrinal deviation for the natural religiosity of the Brazilian people. The bishops also decreed that spiritist propaganda had left Catholics under the “highly erroneous impression that it is possible to continue to be Catholic and adhere to spiritism.” They likewise founded the Anti-Spiritist Division of the National Secretary for the Defense of Faith and Morals. Boaventura Kloppenburg, Bishop of Novo Hamburgo, was appointed its head. Kloppenburg led the vocal charge against the mediumship religions for decades, publishing a series of books and pamphlets like Why the Church Condemns Spiritism, The Black Book of Spiritism, and What is Spiritism? Orientation for Catholics.59 Kloppenburg not only saw suffrages as the proper means of engaging the dead, but also prescribed the devotion to souls in purgatory as one of several means of combating the influence of mediumship religions. In a pastoral guidebook that republished the recommendations of the 1953 CNBB, Desidério Kalverkamp and Boaventura Kloppenburg recommended that priests work to “increase devotion to the Holy Spirit, to the Good Lord Jesus, to Our Lady, to the angels and to the souls of Purgatory, as an antidote to the fluorescence 59 Solange Ramos Andrade, “Frei Boaventura Kloppenburg e a história da Igreja Católica no Brasil: aspectos de uma biografia,” História Unisinos, 16 no. 1 (January-April 2012): 140. Desidério Kalverkamp and Boaventura Kloppenburg, Ação Pastoral Perante o Espiritismo: Orientação para Sacerdotes (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Vozes, 1961), 17-18. 54 of spiritist superstitions” (emphasis added). The authors suggested them because these are “very Catholic devotions and already very popular in Brazil,” and ones in which convicted spiritists, who ostensibly negated purgatory, would be unwilling to participate.60 Conclusion The devotion to souls was an ineffective antidote to the spiritist poison. Writing in 1955, the Jesuit scholar Thales de Azevedo commented, “Throughout the country, no small number of people think their profession of adhesion to Catholicism reconcilable with the spiritist beliefs of Alan Kardec, which have become extraordinarily widespread.”61 The various mediumship religions only became more popular as the twentieth century progressed. Kardecists faced some resistance from the medical establishment, who took umbrage with Kardecists’ embrace of scientific discourse and healing practices. And the state, at times, suppressed Afro-Brazilian religion, of which mediumship was a prominent feature. The devotion to souls, it seems, was no more effective an alternative to spiritism than the saints were to orixá devotion. 60 Kalverkamp and Kloppenburg, Ação Pastoral Perante o Espiritismo, 24, 94. See also Boaventura Kloppenburg, “A Comunhão Eclesial depois da Morte,” Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira, 31 no. 122 (June 1971): 334-335. 61 Thales de Azevedo, O catolicismo no Brasil: um campo para a pesquisa social (Salvador: EDUFBA, 2002), 38. Dain Borges argues the Penal Code of 1890, which outlawed charlatanism, was more motivated by the medical establishment’s desire to suppress Kardecism than Afro-Brazilian religions. See Dain Borges, “Healing and Mischief: Witchcraft in Brazilian Law and Practice, 1890 – 1922,” in Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society Since Late Colonial Times, eds. Ricardo D. Salvatore, Carlos Aguirre, Gilbert M. Joseph (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 186-187. For an argument that this legislation was meant to suppress Afro-Brazilian practice, see Paul Christopher Johnson, “Law, Religion, and ‘Public Health’ in the Republic of Brazil,” Law & Social Inquiry 26, no. 1 (2001): 9–33; Yvonne Maggie, Medo do feitiço: Relações entre magia e poder no Brasil, (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1992). 55 The cult of the souls may not have effectively combatted spiritism, but it remained popular. Old churches were expanded and new ones built to accommodate it. The original Church of the Hanged, for instance, was demolished and rebuilt in 1829 to accommodate the throngs of faithful. Writing four decades later, curious journalists noted that on Mondays, the church’s candle room was often too crowded to enter. More devotional sites were built, and in 1955, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart consecrated the large Sanctuary of the Souls in the Ponte Pequena to accommodate the “grand devotion to the souls in purgatory” in the parish. A large building since its inception, the Sanctuary was expanded in the 1980s with a new “Chapel of the Resurrection,” a massive candle room that can accommodate hundreds of devotees.62 Today, the devotion lives on outside of Catholic lay brotherhoods. While some brotherhoods, like the Brotherhood of the Holy Cross of the Souls of the Hanged, still pray to the dead on Mondays, they are not the prominent social institutions they once were. Today, neither the brotherhoods nor purgatory are central to the devotion. It is largely solitary, and devotees’ practice and their understanding of it can be idiosyncratic and heterodox. But even those that reject purgatory have inherited this element of its devotional culture. While the cult of the souls has changed, taking on new kinds of souls and objects of devotion, its style of spiritual reciprocity is not so different—and cannot be understood apart from—the purgatorial devotionalism of pre-republic Brazil. Today as then, devotees pray to 62 “Nossa História,” accessed August 22, 2016, http://www.santuariodasalmas.com.br/historia/. Fieldnotes, September 8, 2014. 56 the dead on Mondays, hoping to ease the souls’ suffering, and in so doing, alleviate their own. And in São Paulo, that means going to devotional sites remembered as places and trauma and death.63 63 On the devotion as a solitary practice, see Monique Augras, A segunda-feira é das almas (Pallas: Rio de Janeiro, 2012), 34-35; Maria Angela Vilenha, Salvação Solidária: O culto das almas à luz da teologia das religiões (São Paulo: Paulinas Editora, 2013), 29. 57 2 Space: Sites of Memory and Affliction After Monday evening mass at the Church of the Holy Cross of the Souls of the Hanged, I was casually chatting with Edson, a devotee and member of the church’s brotherhood, about the chapel’s past. As we stood beside the confessional in the nave, I told Edson I had recently visited the archdiocesan archives and found little information about the church, which the archivist said was due to it not being a parish church. Edson suggested more nefarious motives. “Most churches here were built in town squares and don’t have any special history. But this church has a history, understand?” he said, gesturing downward with both hands to emphasize history. Edson suggested the priests suppressed the chapel’s history because of its association with popular devotion and miracles. “They didn’t want Chaguinhas to become a martyr.”64 Devotees remember the Church of the Holy Cross of the Souls of the Hanged as a site of death. It is named for the souls that perished at the former gallows where, as many told me, “the slaves were hanged.” Of the countless people whose lives that ended there, Chaguinhas (née Francisco José das Chagas) is the most well-known. A soldier in the light infantry and a beloved native of the city, Chaguinhas was sentenced to death for inciting a rebellion among his fellow soldiers over poor working conditions and unpaid wages. But according to legend, Chaguinhas’s hanging went awry. On the first attempt, the rope broke. 64 Fieldnotes, March 10, 2014. 58 The sympathetic crowd cheered, declaring it a miracle and begging Chaguinhas be pardoned. The authorities, callous to the crowd’s cries, refused to commute Chaguinhas’s sentence. But on the second attempt, the cord broke again. The crowd pleaded for his release, screaming, “Liberdade!” and, “He’s innocent!” Some say he was finally hanged on the third attempt, when the executioner swapped the fiber rope for one of leather. Others say it took four tries to end Chaguinhas’s life.65 65 There substantial disagreement and little reliable source data regarding the details of Chaguinhas’s hanging. The version I recount here is largely adapted from Raimundo de Menezes, Histórias de História de São Paulo (São Paulo: Edições Melhoramentos, 1954), 163-159. Menezes’s account is paraphrased in “Santa Cruz das Enforcados,” a short, unpublished history of the chapel composed by Wanderley dos Santos, the former archivist at the Arquivo Metropolitano de São Paulo (AMASP, folder “Santa Cruz dos Enforcados”). Sometimes, the chapel keeps copies on hand for curious guests, but this was relatively rare during my visits in 2014-2015. Menezes, unfortunately, does not cite the sources from which he reproduces verbatim quotations. It seems relatively certain, however, that Chaguinhas was a historical person involved in a rebellion in Santos, a port city about forty-five miles south of São Paulo, where he was stationed. However, the details of his involvement in the rebellion and subsequent execution are unclear and have been the subject of bitter debate. Between 1899 and 1902, we find protracted discussion of the event in São Paulo newspapers and the Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo, as Antonio de Toledo Piza and Estavão Rezende battle over the details of the event. Toledo Piza argues that contrary to popular belief, Chaguinhas was hanged in May 1822, not in September 1821. More controversially, he argues that Chaguinhas was secretly allowed to flee, with the help of Martim Francisco, an important political figure in São Paulo and the Brazilian independence movement. Toleda Piza asserts that the first two cords were deliberately weak, meant to cause delay so that Chaguinhas could be spirited away to Porto Feliz and a dummy hanged in his place after the early May nightfall. Estavão Rezende argues that Toledo Piza’s argument is “a farce so ridiculous” and relies on dubious oral accounts and the author’s political sympathies. Rezende argues that Martim Francisco had no sympathy for Chaguinhas and that the latter was actually hanged between September 10 and 26, 1821. Much of the debate revolves around the nature of one of the principal sources of the legend, the testimony of Padre Diogo Antônio Feijó—who eventually served as Regent of the Brazilian Empire —before the Chamber of Deupties on May 22, 1832. Feijó claimed to have seen the event firsthand, which Toleda Piza doubts. Much of the debate revolves around what the respective authors make of Martim Francisco, who was an important if controversial figure, and to whom Feijó was greatly opposed. See Antonio de Toledo Piza, “O Supplicio de Chaguinhas,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo, 5 (1899-1900): 3-47; “Martim Francisco e A Bernarda,” 48-78; “A Bernarda de Francisco Ignacio,” 95-125; “A Bernarda de Francisco Ignacio,” 131-144. Estavão Rezende, see “A Bernarda de Francisco Ignacio,” 79-94; and “A Bernarda de Francisco Ignacio,” 126-30 in the same volume. For a summary of this exchange, see Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, ed., História de São Paulo Colonial (São Paulo: Editora: Unesp, 2008). 59 Sometime following Chaguinhas’s death, two laymen, Olegário Pedro Gonçalves and Chico Gago, erected a simple wooden cross adjacent to the hill on which the gallows stood to commemorate the dead. It became known as the Holy Cross of the Hanged. At its side was a “rustic table on which wax candles were burned every night, that, according to tradition, were not extinguished by wind or rain,” says the historian Antonio Toledo de Piza. After about twenty years, neighborhood residents built a small structure to house the offerings of candles and flowers from the elements, and to accommodate the “pious souls that come there to celebrate religious services.” In 1891—seventy years after Chaguinhas’s death—the archdiocese built a small chapel to accommodate the devotion, which they reformed and expanded just four years later. Placing the humble wooden cross behind the altar, the chapel was consecrated the Chapel of the Holy Cross of the Souls of the Hanged (though devotees usually call it the Church of the Souls or Church of the Hanged). Soon, according to historian Raimundo de Menezes writes, “this simple temple was attracting an incalculable multitude of faithful, [who were] captive to a caring, popular veneration, burning votive candles, and celebrating annual festivals.” This devotion continued, and today, the Church of the Hanged is one of the city’s most popular sites for the devotion to souls.66 66 Piza, “O Supplicio de Chaguinhas,” 46. On the reconstructions of the chapel, see dos Santos, “Santa Cruz dos Enforcados,” 10, 13. It is unclear when the devotion started. Some suggest the faithful erected a cross within months of the hanging; see Nuto Sant’Anna, Santa Cruz dos Enforcados, (São Paulo: Tipografia Rossolillo, 1937), though note this is a historical fiction. Others suggest the cross was erected only after the gallows was dismantled, which different sources say happened in the early 1850s or 1870s, primarily promoted by Olegário Pedro Gonçalves and Chico Gago. See Menezes, Histórias de História, 168 and dos Santos, “Santa Cruz dos Enforcados,” 9. The earliest source to definitively date the devotion is an illustration by Pedro Alexandrino from 1874, which depicts the Holy Cross of the Hanged and table for candles at the side of the 60 Like the Church of the Hanged, other popular São Paulo sites for the devotion to souls have histories of suffering and death. The nearby Chapel of the Afflicted was once part of the Cemetery of Our Lady of the Afflicted, which many devotees remember as the “cemetery of the slaves” and the resting place of Chaguinhas. More recently, in the far north of the city, devotees built a new Chapel of the Afflicted at a street intersection where several people are thought to have died in car accidents. Cemeteries, too, are devotional sites. Many municipal cemeteries have a cruz or cruziero das almas (cross of the souls) where visitors can light candles. These crosses are popular places for ritual offerings associated with Afro-Brazilian traditions, and one often finds deposits of things like cigars, cachaça (distilled sugarcane liquor), and red and black candles for exu spirits at them. Popular saints’ tombs are also destinations of local pilgrimage, identifiable by flowers and ex votos left for graces received. Some, like those of the thirteen souls in Cemitério São Pedro, can receive hundreds of devotees every Monday.67 Here I consider suffering and the movement of souls, both living and departed. Devotees move across the urban landscape, confronting souls’ suffering at sites of trauma. hill where the gallows once stood; in Nicolau Sevcenko, “A cidade metástasis e o urbanismo inflacionário: incursões na entropia paulista,” Revista USP 63(2004): 20. These men, and particularly Olegário Pedro Gonçalves, were important in the church’s early lay brotherhood. 67 The history of the new Chapel of the Afflicted is poorly documented. As I discovered it late in my fieldwork, I only managed to ask a few people about its history, and none were quite certain. One suggested there were frequent car accidents at the intersection due to visibility issues (the intersection falls near the top of a small hill where it could be hard to see turning traffic). Another suggested there was a series of homicides at the site. None were certain, however, nor knew exactly when the chapel was built. It does not appear to have been constructed by the church, though a priest from the Paróquia Nossa Senhora das Neves administers mass twice daily on Mondays. I have not attended mass at the chapel or spoken with any priests there. The administrator I spoke with at Paróquia Nossa Senhora das Neves did not have any detail about the chapel or its history. 61 Residents of Liberdade report hearing screams coming from the Church of the Hanged and Chapel of the Afflicted late at night. Workers at Edíficio Joelma, the office building where the thirteen souls burned to death, claim to have seen cars drive themselves. Ghost hunters post YouTube videos of their visits to the Chapel of the Afflicted, where they measure the dead’s movements with EMF meters and frequency scanners. For devotees and ghost hunters alike, these vestiges of a bygone era are privileged conduits between the present and past, between this world and the next. In confronting suffering, the devotion to souls is a way of establishing and maintaining a relationship between the living and the dead.68 It is also a struggle against 68 Confronting suffering is not unique to the devotion to souls. Thomas Tweed argues that it is a fundamental quality of religions, which he defines as “confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and superhuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries”; Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 54. Influenced by Tweed’s theory of religion, this study attends to suffering, space, and movement at length. However, I try to resist talking about religions as such, instead treading close to what devotees and other religious practitioners do and say. This effort stems from practical and theoretical concerns. Critics of syncretism have continually lambasted the concept as positing essential and prior religions that are corrupted by religion. I think there is something to this objection, but I would also ask: if we cannot talk about, say, Umbanda as a syncretic mix of Candomblé and Catholicism, why is it any more acceptable to use concepts like Candomblé or Catholicism as if they were not just as implicitly normative? This question is not just a theoretical indulgence. In trying to talk about the immense variety of Brazilian religions, one quickly confronts conceptual hurdles. While Catholicism has a relatively advanced degree of institutional and dogmatic coherence, the beliefs and practices called “Catholic” in Brazil—including the devotion to souls—looks remarkably different than those in, say, suburban New Jersey. The innumerable religious centers glossed as “Candomblé,” “Umbanda,” “Spiritist,” or “Afro-Brazilian” can be even more difficult to characterize. In Chapter 4, for example, I introduce a center called the Spiritualist Brotherhood of Faith, whose director described it as having “roots in Candomblé and Umbanda” but not strictly either. They also have a temple to the souls and incorporate Catholic prayers “in a more energetic sense.” On the one hand, the center’s director distinguished it from these traditions. On the other, the center is not entirely unique unto itself, and conforms to a vernacular style of worship common in São Paulo. Some observers would be inclined to identify the center as “Umbanda,” but its director seemed reluctant to take on this label. Others might call it “Spiritism” in the broad sense, but this term is contentious, sometimes referring only to a current of Kardecist orthodoxy embraced by institutions like the Brazilian Spiritist Federation. The rub, then, is to find language that allows us to identify patterns resorting to implicitly essentializing categories. This may be impossible. But in this study, I tend toward linguistic metaphors—and particularly Primiano’s notion of “vernacular religion”—as a way of indicating a coherent and intelligible set of beliefs, practices, attitudes, and feelings generally recognized as 62 forgetting.69 By remembering subaltern pasts, both personal and collective, the devotion gives the dead new life. Memory, as J. Z. Smith observes, “appears to be preeminently a matter of time, yet it is much an affair of space.” This is why devotional spaces matter. In traveling to a cemetery or the Church of the Hanged, devotees move closer to the souls. And according to devotees, the souls also move, traveling toward candles to “come get a bit of the flame.”70 Feeling and memory shape the spatial trajectories of the living and the dead.71 Sites of Memory and Feeling The Chapel of Our Lady of the Afflicted is unique. Built in 1779, it was once housed within the Cemetery of the Afflicted (built 1774), the first cemetery in São Paulo and one of the first in the country. Church burials were standard at the time, but the expense made them inaccessible to the indigent and those hanged at the gallows. The cemetery is one of the few standing remnants of old São Paulo. Tucked away at the end of a short, dead-end alley, the chapel’s humble, weathered façade contrasts with the neighborhood’s “Oriental” lanterns and ornamentation (Figure 3). The cemetery is believed to have been Chaguinhas’s final resting place, though the documentation is unclear. Its history is intimately tied to the gallows, and today, the small chapel is about 200 meters from the Church of the Hanged.72 “religious” by practitioners; Leonard Primiano, “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife,” Western Folklore, 54, no. 1 (1995), 37-56. 69 As Milan Kundera famously wrote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”; see The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Perennial Classics, 1999), 4. 70 Interview, July 21, 2014. 71 Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 25. 72 Wanderley dos Santos, “Nossa Senhora dos Aflitos,” 1978, in AMASP, folder “Capela Nossa Senhora dos Aflitos.”100 anos de serviço funerário, published by the City of São Paulo, claims the Cemetery of 63 Inside, the old, diminutive chapel is a departure from São Paulo’s modern immensity. The short, wooden pews that are crammed into the nave make the structure feel even smaller than it is. The smell inside is a distinct mix of wood, must, and the wear of centuries. Despite having been renovated in 2011, the chapel is in poor condition, with its dull grey paint peeling from the walls. Even some of the images of saints that adorn the walls’ nooks and shelves are worn, with chips in the paint showing the white plaster underneath. But despite the chapel’s simplicity—or perhaps because of it—devotees often speak of it as “serene,” “tranquil,” and “full of good energy.” Unlike the Church of the Hanged, which sits along the busy Rua Liberdade, the Chapel of the Afflicted is quiet. Mass only punctuates the silence once weekly. During my time there, a devotional group visited every Monday at noon to recite the Mil Mesericordias, their perpetual call and response of, “For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and the whole world,” sacralizing the chapel’s soundscape. When I visited, devotees would amble in, sometimes chatting with Dona Renata, the chapel’s administrator, as they bought candles to light for the souls. Some prayed before the saints and Marian images placed throughout. Even more, however, prayed to the Afflicted was the first in the country. This is a plausible claim, as cemeteries were uncommon at the time, and the idea was only beginning to enter public discourse. Even paupers were often buried in graveyards on church grounds, though typically not in the churches themselves. For more on the history of the Cemetery of the Afflicted, see Antônio Barreto do Amaral, “O Cemitério dos Aflitos - A Capela dos Aflitos,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geografico de São Paulo 73 (1977), 22-27. Cidade de São Paulo, 100 anos de serviço funerário (São Paulo: Prefeitura do Município de São Paulo, 1977), 7-8. Renato Cymbalista, Cidades dos vivos: arquitetura e atitudes perante a morte nos cemitérios do Estado de São Paulo, (São Paulo: Annablume and FAPESP, 2002), 41. Laís de Barros Monteiro Guimarães, Liberdade (São Paulo: Prefeitura do Município de São Paulo, 1979), 127-129. 64 Chaguinhas. Some say Chaguinhas was held in the chapel before being taken to the gallows. Today, his devotees summon him by knocking three times on a large wooden door before making a petition. Many write petitions on pieces of paper—usually mass intentions—which they fold and jam into the door’s cracks and crevices. Flowers at the foot of the door and small metal plaques are ex votos, left thanks to Chaguinhas are testaments to favors received (Figure 3).73 73 This practice resembles prayer at Shinto shrines, where practitioners often clap twice to call and show respect to the deities, as well as to ward off evil spirits. Though no sources reliably date the practice at the chapel, some Japanese influence is possible given the city’s large Japanese population, which began to convert to Catholicism en masse in the 1950s. For some history of the shifting religiosity of São Paulo’s Japanese immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century, see Rafael Shoji, “The Failed Prophecy of Shinto Nationalism and the Rise of Japanese Brazilian Catholicism,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 35 (2008): 13-38. 65 Figure 3. The Chapel of Our Lady of the Afflicted. (A Capela Nossa Senhora dos Aflitos.) The arched doorway on the left side of the chapel leads into the candle room. 66 Figure 4. A wooden door in the Chapel of the Afflicted. Devotees knock on it three times to summon Chaguinhas. The small pieces of paper in the door’s crevices are petitions, typically written on mass intention forms provided by the chapel. Some devotees leave flowers as ex votos in thanks for favors received. Dona Renata suggested that the colored ribbons (fitas) are left by Umbandistas. Note that devotees used to knock on the door at the chapel’s entrance, and that this door was a later installation. While it is unclear when, exactly, it was installed, it does not appear in photos from the 1970s. 67 The Church of the Hanged and Chapel of the Afflicted are what Pierre Nora calls sites of memory. They help sustain the memory of the neighborhood’s past, and are themselves sustained by devotees’ will to remember. Other than these two small chapels, nothing in Liberdade memorializes its history of death and suffering. No plaque commemorates the gallows’ victims, and no mural depicts the stockades or sites where slaves were disciplined and humiliated. While some claim the neighborhood’s name, Liberdade, commemorates the Chaguinhas incident—the crowd supposedly cried “Liberdade!” while pleading for Chaguinhas’s innocence—this explanation is probably spurious. More likely, the name commemorates Brazilian independence. One scholar suggests the name may have even been an attempt at the “banishment of the stigma that the public gallows carried.”74 No statues or tombs represent the gallows victims or the dead laid to rest in the Cemetery of the Afflicted. Some sources suggest that when the Catholic Church parceled and sold the cemetery in 1886, the bodies were disinterred and relocated in the new Cemitério Consolação. It is not clear whether this relocation ever happened. It probably did not. The cemetery was a pit grave for the indigent—that is, the socially dead. Even if their bodies were relocated, there is no indication of it in Consolação. Many say Liberdade is built on the bones of the dead.75 74 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7. Maria Vicentina de Paula do Amaral Dick, A dinâmica dos nomes na Cidade de São Paulo, 1554-1897 (São Paulo: Annalumbe, 1996), 241. Liberdade was named such on December 20, 1905; Antonio Bareto do Amaral, Dicionário de História de São Paulo (São Paulo: Governo do Estado de São Paulo, 1980), 276. 75 On the sale of the cemetery, see AMASP, Folder “Capela dos Aflitos,” subfolder “Histórico.” 68 I met Deise on a hot day in December. She was visiting the Chapel of the Afflicted with her young nephew, to whom she was teaching the devotion. Like many others, Deise learned the devotion from her parents, but she only began practicing it in earnest during a time of crisis. She had been out of work for some time and was becoming desperate. “I came to this church because a friend told me about it,” she explained. “He’s a person who works in a terreiro. He’s from Candomblé. And one day… he took me and said ‘go there to the church of the souls and light candles for your ancestors.’” Deise lamented what she thought was a Brazilian tendency to forget the dead. “We need to worship those who came before. Here people say that when you die, it’s over. But in other religions, people don’t die. The body dies, but the soul of the person lives on.” So Deise started to come and pray to her ancestors, growing closer to them. In time, she heard the story of Chaguinhas and learned more about the neighborhood. There’s a whole history here in São Paulo, here. I was just telling him [my nephew], up by Praça Liberdade was the home of the gallows, the place where the slaves were hanged. And below, a big cemetery. There are all these bones down there, but as no one is interested in rescuing this history, no one mentions it. You put another ethnic group here, the Japanese, and it’s tudo certinho, tudo resolvido (all proper, all resolved), as if the neighborhood never had Africans and blacks, despite that they were here for almost 300 years.76 Deise was a black activist, and she worried that the city’s celebration of the Japanese obscured the neighborhood’s black history. Most Paulistanos only know Liberdade as the “Oriental neighborhood” or “Japanese neighborhood,” famous for its Sunday street fair where you can eat tempura and huge gyoza, Japanese dumplings the size of a child’s fist. While the municipal government probably did not wage a concerted campaign of historical 76 Interview, December 15, 2014. 69 erasure, it commemorated Japanese immigrants while doing little to acknowledge the neighborhood’s more tortured past. Public officials and intellectuals have not always embraced the city’s Japanese population. The Japanese immigrants that began arriving at the turn of the twentieth century tended to be agricultural laborers, most of whom expected they would soon return to Japan. During the first waves of Japanese migration, officials’ and intellectuals’ reactions were often mixed, vacillating between the desire to embrace a “Japanese” tendency toward “economic and social development” and the fear that Japanese would never fully assimilate.77 By the early 1960s, it was clear that the city’s Asian population—which came to include Chinese and Korean immigrants—was here to stay, and the city saw an opportunity in their presence. In 1969, the journalist Randolfo Marques de Lobato proposed a Program of Orientalization that would make Liberdade a tourist destination by visually transforming it to resemble the Chinatowns in New York City and San Francisco. The city soon approved the plan and carried out the remodeling by August 1973, having installed a large torii, or gate traditionally found at the entrance to Shinto shrines, on Rua Galvão Bueno, as well as 77 About 189,000 Japanese immigrants settled in Brazil between 1908 and 1941. See Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 83; and Shoji, “Failed Prophecy,” 16-17. For a detailed discussion of the hopes and anxieties that surfaced in debates on Japanese immigration, see Lesser, “Searching for a Hyphen,” in Negotiating National Identity, 81-114. Some commentators were concerned that the “Oriental races are unassimilable” and would endanger the nationalist project of “whitening” the population (100). Reverse migration from Brazil to Japan became more common at the end of the twentieth century as Brazil entered a period of economic volatility and Japan’s economy was booming and in need of laborers. Some scholars argue these numbers will level off or decline as Japan enforces stricter immigration policy. See David Mackenzie and Alejandra Salcedo, “Japanese-Brazilians and the Future of Brazilian Migration to Japan,” International Migration, 52 (September 2009): 66–83. On tensions following this reverse migration, see Norimitsu Onishi, “An Enclave of Brazilians Is Testing Insular Japan,” New York Times, November 1, 2008. 70 stylized lanterns (see Figure 3) and sidewalks with black-and-white mitsu tomoe, or a Japanese abstract shape that looks like three commas in a whorl.78 While Deise worried Liberadade’s prevailing Japanese character makes it seem “as if the neighborhood never had Africans and Blacks,” places like the Church of the Hanged and Chapel of the Afflicted are still standing. They and the devotions within them are refuges for “anchor, express, and condense” collective memory, in the words of Pierre Nora.79 Devotees like Deise cultivate this memory through their verbal reflections, religious practice, and sometimes, the material culture of their devotion. They represent the dead, and in so doing, recall that which risks being forgotten. After reflecting on the neighborhood’s history, Deise continued without pause: I was explaining to him [my nephew] that it was the slaves who built this church here in 1700, and right there is the little room of Chaguinhas, where people stayed before being hanged. They stayed there, imprisoned, they prayed, and before being hanged… they had this ritual of the souls. And so the question of my devotion comes to this: I have this habit of the cult of ancestors, of praying for the ancestors, because I believe when they are well, I’m well too… because you’re a part of them. That’s to say, I have, I must have a trace of my mother, of my grandfather, of my great grandfather… you always carry something. People don’t die. If you have a child, the child will eternalize you by some trace. Skin, hair, something. The person doesn’t die. There’s a cycle of life that’s continuous, and we don’t take account of this continuous cycle of life [often enough]. So, the cult of the souls is exactly this.80 Reflecting on the devotion, Deise recalled an ancestral past as well as the broader cultural memory of slavery. Through the devotion, Deise “carried something” from the past into the present, and passed it on to the future. 78 Cecília Saito, “O espaço residual no bairro da Liberdade como linguagem e comunicação,” ABEJ Papers (March 2008): 1; and Guimarães, Liberdade, 91. 79 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 24. 80 Interview, December 15, 2014. 71 Like many others, Deise learned the devotion from her parents but began practicing it in earnest during a period of hardship. Faced with unemployment, she sought the souls’ help in the attempt to confront her then-present suffering. And when we spoke, decades after she began practicing the devotion, Deise was passing on the devotion to future generations via her nephew, who she hopes will include her in his prayers once she joins the ranks of souls. “I told him, when I die, if you want to light a candle for me, you have to first light a candle for grandma, then I don’t know who, and only then you light one for me.” “Everyone that goes to the Chapel of the Holy Cross of the Hanged on Mondays has their mind transported to the past, to slavery,” wrote the journalist Terezinha Rocha in a 1972 report on the church for O Cruzeiro, a monthly magazine. Then as today, devotees at the Church of the Hanged were diverse. “They are men, women, and children… They are black and white, of different social classes and religions, fraternizing. They all seek the support of the souls” (emphasis original). At the time of the report, some devotees were old enough to remember old São Paulo. Rocha spoke with Dona Cecília, a 106-year-old-black woman, who witnessed the gallows and stockades first hand. “When I come to the church, it’s like I’m seeing the stockades… a victim of his own color, tied to the pillar, flogged, and then hanged.” With tears in her eyes, she whispered, “The stockade… what a horror.”81 81 O Cruzeiro, August 23, 1974, 76. Journalists often commented on the diversity of devotees. For example, a 1967 report relates that “It isn’t known why, but on Mondays it is almost impossible to enter the church. Afflicted people, of all social levels, come in search of favors… it’s said that the souls of the hanged never neglect to attend anyone’s petitions.” Diario Popular, September 17, 1967. 72 Devotees today continue to remember the horrors of slavery at the chapel. I recall one of my earliest interviews with Maria, a seventy-seven-year-old devotee who was a member of the church’s brotherhood. She told me she lived in Embu das Artes, a city nearly two hours outside of São Paulo by bus. While in good health, Maria walked with a cane, and the journey could not have been easy. When I asked why she did it, she matter-of-factly replied, “It’s because here is where the slaves were hanged, right?” While any number of souls were hanged at São Paulo’s gallows, most devotees I talked to focused on the souls of hanged slaves. Like Chaguinhas—and unlike, say, a common murderer—the slaves are thought to have suffered unjustly. And like the purgatorial souls I discussed in Chapter 1, they have been forgotten, now known only by their servitude and the nature of their death.82 The memory of slavery is not only important for black devotees. Earlier, I introduced the reader to Beatriz, a Catholic-turned-Spiritist-turned-neo-Pentecostal from Pernambuco. Though she was white, she too invoked the memory of the gallows. “This church,” she paused, “I’ve heard it said I’ve heard it said that this church has a very sad story, really very sad. Once there were lots of slaves in the country. Here, when slaves were old, they were no longer useful, no longer able to work on the farms of the rich men here, the coffee plantations, they sent them to be hanged here, in this place. And so this, this hurts our hearts… because they were black, understand?” Tears came to Beatriz’s eyes and she had trouble speaking. “Very strong,” she murmured. I nodded sympathetically, agreeing, “Yes… 82 Interview, May 5, 2014. 73 very strong.” She breathed and regained her composure. “And they say, people say, that passing here at certain times at night, one can still hear screams and sounds of terrible suffering. Because when [the slaves] grew old, they were brought here and hanged. It’s because of this that [the church] has this name… because there was a lot of suffering in this place.”83 Many São Paulo sites associated with the devotion to souls are thought of as haunted. Writing about the Chapel of the Afflicted, one blogger relates reports of windows breaking “by themselves,” “groans and tearful voices” late at night, and apparitions of “people with broken necks.” But “others say that Chaguinhas has cured people and made miracles,” he writes. Both the Church of the Hanged and the Afflicted—as well as the building in which the “thirteen souls” burned to death (see Chapter 3)—feature in haunted tours of the city, as well as a “terror tour” brochure published by São Paulo’s own tourism board.84 The devotion to souls occupies the space between history and memory. The memories recalled by visitors to these sites—the legend of Chaguinhas, the memory of those hanged at the gallows, the miracles attributed to the souls—do not always past historical muster. Chaguinhas, though present for so many devotees, is but a faint trace in São Paulo’s 83 Interview, July 7, 2014. 84 “Capela Nossa Senhora dos Aflitos - A Capela "Assombrada" (Série: Bairro da Liberdade),” accessed April 10, 2016, http://umaoutrasampa.blogspot.com/2013/06/capela-nossa-senhora-dos-aflitos-capela.html. See “Roteiro de Terror em São Paulo,” accessed March 20, 2016, http://www.cidadedesaopaulo.com/sp/br/noticias/4931-roteiro-do-terror-em-sao-paulo. There are a number of commercial walking and bus tours that visit these sites. On ghost hunting, see the YouTube videos, “Caça Fantasmas Brasil Capela dos Aflitos SP,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chebWPo0fTY, accessed March 20, 2016. “#SPASSOMBRADA - CAPELA DOS AFLITOS | Lenda Urbana ft. Milho Wonka” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmusWN28k5Q, accessed March 20, 2016. 74 archives. The souls of the hanged are even further gone. Their individuality further gone, they are partially anonymized, known only by the state-sanctioned violence that took their lives. Souls and Saints What are souls? For devotees, they are the suffering dead. As I have noted, the contemporary cult of the souls grew out of a long tradition of purgatorial devotionalism. Devotees emphasis on souls’ suffering attests to this history, even when devotees give little thought to purgatory. Of course, some saints too are thought to have suffered; martyrdom is painful, but a way into the kingdom of God. But while suffering is not unique to the devotion to souls—plenty of observers have remarked on its salience in Brazilian Catholicism—it is especially salient there.85 Devotees light candles because “souls need light,” and offer water and bread to quench the souls’ thirst and hunger. This suffering binds the living and the dead, and underpins a relationship of mutual aid. As one devotee explained, the souls “suffered so much, so they need lots of prayer, and they help us a lot.”86 Purgatory is historically important to the devotion to souls, but devotees today do not always believe in it. While still Catholic dogma, the Church has deemphasized 85 As the Dutch Franciscan Bernadino Leers observed in a pastoral essay on Brazilian rural Catholicism, the image of Christ suffering is the “image most alive in the religious language of the people.” People “better understand a maltreated Christ on the cross or a dead Christ than the mystery of the resurrection”; see Leers, Catolicismo popular e mundo rural: um ensaio pastoral (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1977), 80. Similarly, the authors of História da igreja no Brasil write, “Within the humblest classes, religiosity appears marked by ‘suffering.’ It essentially represented the spirituality of the cross. The salvation of the soul was situated toward the ‘other life’ and was achieved through the purgation of the body in this world” (222). 86 Interview, May 26, 2014. 75 purgatorial doctrine since Vatican II.87 Priests rarely mentioned the purgatory during mass at the popular devotional sites I visited, and many observant Catholics take issue with it.88 On the other hand, devotees regularly talked about reincarnation, which is a considerably more salient concept in Brazil. Surveys have suggested that somewhere between twelve to thirty-seven percent of the Brazilian public believes in the idea. While these numbers are wildly divergent, it is telling enough that no one has thought to survey the popularity of purgatorial doctrine.89 When I asked devotees where the souls of the dead reside, their responses fell into one or more of three general categories: the Catholic afterlife, parallel or higher worlds, and earthy places. By the Catholic afterlife, I simply mean that devotees often described souls as 87 On the decline of purgatory post-Vatican II, see Diane Pasulka, Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 13. 88 Though priests rarely mentioned purgatory at the Liberdade churches, those at the Sanctuary of the Souls referenced it more frequently. The Sanctuary is run by the Missionaries of the Sacred heart, an organization with a historical interest in purgatory. Victor Jouet, an early Missionary, founded the Association for the Souls in Purgatory in Rome, as well as the Museum of Purgatory, which is located in the Chiesa del Sacro Cuore del Suffragio in Rome, which houses ostensible material evidence of the purgatorial souls actions on earth. Jouet also published the periodical Le Purgatoire between 1910-1912, as well as a number of devotional books and pamphlets. See, e.g., Pratique de tout suffrage: ou mois des âmes do purgatoire (Issoudon: Editions Dillen, 1904) and Un petit tour par le purgatoire (Québec: Garneau, 1979). For a more detailed discussion of Jouet, refer to Pasulka, Heaven Can Wait, 128-134. 89 A 2007 Datafolha study claims 37% of Brazilians believe in reincarnation, while a 2011 international Ipsos/Reuters poll claims 12% believe, with Brazil being second only to Hungary Patricia Reany, “Belief in a supreme being strong worldwide: Reuters/Ipsos poll,” Reuters, April 25, 2011, accessed April 18, 2015, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-beliefs-poll-idUSTRE73O24K20110425 and “97% dizem acreditar totalmente na existência de deus; 75% acreditam no diabo,” Datafolha, May 5, 2007, accessed April 18, 2015, http://datafolha.folha.uol.com.br/opiniaopublica/2007/05/1223861-97-dizem-acreditar-totalmente-na-existencia-de-deus-75-"acreditam-no-diabo.shtml. A 2009 telephone survey of 4,013 residents of the U.S. by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life suggests “24% of the public overall and 22% of Christians say they believe in reincarnation.” See “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” Pew Research Center, December 9, 2009, accessed November 29, 2016, http://www.pewforum.org/2009/12/09/many-americans-mix-multiple-faiths/. 76 existing “at the side of God and Jesus,” or in heaven, hell, or purgatory. Devotees also suggested that souls reside in parallel or higher worlds—a different “plane” of spiritual evolution, a “level above us,” or within different “stages” or “grades.” Some devotees explicitly referenced Kardecist literature, said they visited Kardecist centers, and/or identified as Spiritist during these conversations, which is unsurprising given Kardec’s emphasis on spirits’ progressive evolution and perfection. Finally, devotees suggested that the souls have some earthly existence—that they “here near us, protecting us,” that the souls “gather near the cruz das almas on Mondays,” or that they are “wandering the earth” if they “have not received spiritual comfort.” These types of afterlife are not mutually exclusive, and some devotees’ responses traversed several of them. One devotee who identified as spiritist but said she “frequents the Catholic Church” and “likes the worship services of R.R. Soares,” a neo-Pentecostal pastor, suggested, “There are souls that are in purgatory. There are others that are already illuminated [Tem outras que já recebeu luz]. It’s by steps. It’s by stages.” Another said, “For me… what I think is that they’re there in heaven with God, right? And when He gives the order for them to come here to earth, to do something, they descend and come, but only for a while.”90 There is not always a neat correlation between religious affiliation and conceptions of afterlife. João, a fifty-one-year-old white devotee who frequented the Chapel of the Afflicted, 90 Interviews, May 26 and October 20, 2014. 77 said that souls are not in purgatory but “other stages… evolutionary planes.” When I suggested this sounded Kardecist, he acknowledged the similarity but affirmed his Catholic identity. “Right, well, I know plenty about this spirituality, but I’m Catholic. Charismatic Catholic.”91 Whether or not devotees believed in purgatory, they prayed to suffering souls. At most devotional sites, devotees left written requests to the souls on mass intention forms. I was fortunate enough to look at 180 of these forms left at the Chapel of the Afflicted. Because the chapel’s administrators had not sorted the forms, regular mass intentions were mixed with requests for the souls, and forms deposited in the mass intention box were mixed with those folded and wedged into the wooden door at which devotees prayed to Chaguinhas. Forty of these forms mentioned souls, and many listed several types. Table 2.1 lists these souls in order of frequency. 91 Interview, May 5, 2014. 78 treze almas thirteen souls 14 alma do (fulano) soul of (someone) 12 almas aflitas afflicted souls 7 todas as almas/almas em geral all the souls/souls in general 6 almas do purgatorio souls of purgatory 5 almas necessitadas needy souls 5 almas dos enforcados souls of the hanged 4 almas abandonadas abandoned souls 4 almas injustiçiadas wronged souls 3 almas esquecidas forgotten souls 3 almas desesperadas desperate souls 3 almas benditas blessed souls 2 almas afogadas drowned souls 2 almas queimadas burned souls 2 santas almas benditas holy blessed souls 2 almas aflitas benditas blessed, afflicted souls 1 as 7 correntes das almas penadas the seven currents of wandering souls 1 todas as tres, todas as nove almas all the three, all the nine souls 1 almas das suicidas souls of suicide (victims) 1 almas dos antepassados souls of the ancestors 1 almas de luzes souls of light 1 almas assassinadas murdered souls 1 almas dos moradores rua souls of the homeless 1 almas criancas assassinadas souls of murdered children 1 almas dos presidiarios souls of the convicts 1 almas dos Aideticos souls of AIDS victims 1 almas dos Cancerosos souls of cancer victims 1 almas dos escravos souls of the slaves 1 almas dos soldados souls of the soldiers 1 13 almas penadas e enforcadas 13 wandering and hanged souls 1 as almas the souls 1 Figure 5. Types of Souls Mentioned in Written Requests. This table is meant to illustrate devotional variety and not to provide a representative sample of kinds of souls’ respective popularity. The numbers are skewed somewhat, as some devotees clearly wrote multiple requests. Still, I think it is fair to say that the thirteen souls and afflicted souls are among the most popular. 79 Like most religious rituals, the devotion to souls is polysemic. It accommodates innovation and different interpretations. One devotee of the thirteen souls told me, “Man, you’re going to go crazy trying to figure this out, because everyone has their own way.” João, the charismatic Catholic at the Chapel of the Afflicted, said, “If you keeping coming here on Mondays [and talk to devotees], you’ll see a variety of responses. You’ll see a path for each unique belief.” João, for his part, prayed to doormen’s souls, protectors’ souls, and guardian souls, which I never heard other devotees mention. Devotees’ innovations follow certain patterns. Though João was the only one who talked about protectors’ souls, many devotees asked for protection. Similarly, the door is an important trope in Brazilian religion. The Afro-Brazilian entity Exú, for example, is often described as a doorman of sorts, both able to keep threatening forces at bay and to open paths on one’s spiritual path. While innovative, João’s devotion is constrained by, and only intelligible within, a relatively stable devotional grammar.92 The table above shows that there were permutations of common kinds of souls. Devotees prayed to the blessed souls, afflicted souls, and thirteen souls, but some prayed to the blessed, afflicted souls, the thirteen blessed souls, and other combinations thereof. Sometimes devotees saw these as synonymous names for the same thing—blessed souls was often shorthand for the thirteen blessed, wise, and knowing souls, for example. Other times, they saw each of these souls as distinct kinds. 92 Interview, May 5, 2014. I borrow the linguistic metaphor from Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), which I dwell on further in Chapter 5. 80 Even the kinds of souls that only appear once in the table above—the souls of the slaves and souls of murdered children, for example—follow some general patterns. Most souls suffered in life or died violently at the hands of others. Others are the socially dead: abandoned and forgotten souls, souls of the slaves, convicts’ souls, souls of the homeless. These souls need devotees’ prayers because they have been otherwise forgotten. As we saw last chapter, suffering and anonymity were important motifs in the purgatorial devotionalism of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Monday is also a time to pray to familial dead. Despite the inconvenience of the weekday, cemeteries tend to be busier on Mondays. People visit the tombs of their departed loved ones, often stopping to pray to popular saints or at the cruzeiro das almas. We have already seen that historically, the faithful distinguished between the souls of loved ones and the anonymous souls in purgatory. That distinction holds today. And as the Brazilian sociologist Pedro Ribeiro de Oliveira notes, the faithful today also make requests to their familial dead. He suggests that dead family members are like “little saints,” because families “comport themselves in relation to their dead as if they were saints,” petitioning them for intercession with God in heaven. These saints “are distinguishable from the category of ‘souls’ because they are identified as individual persons.”93 93 An administrator and lay historian at Cemitério da Consolação said that Mondays are always busier than weekends, and my observations suggested this was the case. Fieldnotes, March 10, 2014. On “little saints,” see Pedro Ribeiro de Oliveira, “‘Pequenos Santos’: Uma Devoção Familiar,” PLURA, Revista de Estudos de Religião 2, no. 1 (2011): 80, 87. 81 When I asked devotees to explain the difference between saints and souls, many asserted, “All saints are souls!” While this may be propositionally true, they distinguished between them in practice. When devotees pray to “the souls,” they rarely see this as equivalent to the saints; it is not just a convenient catch-all category. They direct prayers to specific saints and to specific kinds of souls, and the distinctions they make are meaningful. Deise, for example, initially objected to her Candomblé friend that suggested she pray for her ancestors. “He asked, and I said, ‘I already pray the souls.’ And he said, ‘No, you have to care for they who care for you.’” Later, she was even more explicit. “My ancestors are one thing, and the souls another.” Still, she prayed to both at the same place and on the same day.94 Like Deise, other devotees seek help from both the souls and the familial dead. To be clear, some do not—Olegário, an observant Catholic, insisted that he never asked his departed loved ones for anything, but rather only prayed for their eternal well-being. But devotees are idiosyncratic. In suggesting devotees treat the familial dead like “little saints,” Oliveira says that they understand family members to be in heaven and able to intercede on behalf of the living. But not all devotees I spoke with offered such orthodox Catholic interpretations. For example, Carol, a wealthy healthcare professional, opined that the souls “have a force… I feel this force of the souls, that comes from within the souls. It’s a thing you can’t explain, understand? In words. Because they’re feelings [sentimentos], right? Feelings can’t be explained. My father disincarnated ten years ago and my mother twelve… 94 Interview, December 15, 2014. 82 and sometimes they appear to me, they come to me. Something happens and my father comes and gives me advice.” Carol’s use of disincarnated belied her Kardecist sympathies. “So, I’m Spiritist,” she said. “I’m Catholic but I frequent Spiritist centers. I don’t think about it too deeply.”95 Souls and Spirits Soul and spirit are closely related—and sometimes synonymous—terms within devotees’ religious vocabularies. For many devotees, the word soul (alma) is so familiar that its meaning seems self-evident. But like the devotion to souls itself, soul is ambiguous—and thus able to accommodate a variety of meanings. It can refer to a being’s essence, temperament, or emotional center, its formative life principle, and so on. In the context of the devotion, however, devotees typically use soul with some specificity, to refer to the abiding human essence that survives physical death. For most, it is broadly synonymous with spirit. “The soul is the spirit,” affirmed one devotee. “It’s the spirit that God put in us,” explained another.96 When pressed, some devotees distinguished between soul and spirit. When I asked José, the director of an Afro-Brazilian center, the difference, he suggested they are “basically the same thing. The soul is the element that is not incarnated, that doesn’t have a material, earthly aspect. Spirit implies something denser.” As we talked, his cat, Vinicius, meowed. “Does a cat have a soul?” I asked. “A cat has a spirit. But not a soul. It could be that soul is a 95 Interview, October 27, 2014. 96 Interviews, July 21, 2014 and August 4, 2014. 83 human nomenclature. But spirit is more like a bundle of energy that has some relation to the universe. A cat has a bundle of energy, plants have a bundle of energy. I’m not sure, really.” Like entity, a term common in Umbanda, spirit can reference various invisible, immaterial beings that may never have been embodied outside of ritual, such as the orixás, certain Exu spirits in Umbanda, and any number of “ghosts, visages, [and] apparitions.”97 Despite the similarity of soul and spirit, the terms have different connotations. Soul and spirit index different theological discourses. Of course, one can find both terms in, say, Catholic or Kardecist discourse. But in common usage, soul conjures a constellation of Catholic associations, like suffering, neediness, purgatory, and intercession. Spirit, on the other hand, invokes Kardecist associations like evolutionary planes, progress, and goodness. One would be hard pressed to find someone reference the “spirits of purgatory” or the “spirits of the hanged,” for example. Likewise, I never heard devotees refer to “highly evolved souls.” These constructions make grammatical and semantic sense, but they are awkward in the context of the devotion. Not all spirits are benevolent. Devotees mentioned “terrible spirits” or “less evolved spirits,” but they never prayed to them. These spirit have a place within Brazilian Kardecism, but they are not the object of devotion. Rather, they are seen as the cause of affliction, and Kardecist ritual aims to rid people of “obsessing” spirits. On this logic, some Kardecists condemn the devotion to souls. “My sister nags me,” said one devotee. “She says the souls 97 Interview, June 22, 2015. Luís da Câmara Cascudo, Dicionário do folclore brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro: Edições de Ouro, 1969), 312. 84 don’t need light, they already have their own.” Her sister warned that by lighting candles to souls, one risked attracting spirits that “still need light.”98 Like many devotees, Marina avoided lighting candles at home. “At home is dangerous, the priests say you can’t light candles at home.” She explained that while it is okay to light a votive candle for Jesus or your guardian angel at home, “The people say you can’t light candles for souls at home… the souls are around. So they can enter your house. Candle for the souls, you have to light in the church.”99 Many devotees were adamant about this prohibition. Carol, the Catholic and Spiritist devotee who said her disincarnated father gives her advice, explained, “I don’t light candles at home for the souls. I don’t know if it’s good or not, but according to the Spiritists, you shouldn’t light candles at home.” Another devotee who was visiting the tombs of the thirteen souls with her husband was more explicit: “They say—my grandmother, my mother—they always said that a candle for a person that died, even for my deceased father or mother, isn’t good, because you can call a terrible spirit that’s unattached, that needs light. And that spirit is unattached. And it comes to a candle, a flash of light, it goes there to get a little of the flash.”100 Though devotees use characteristically Kardecist language when warning against lighting candles at home, I do not think the prohibition necessarily indicates Kardecist 98 In 1897, Bezerra de Menezes published Insanity Through a New Prism, which argued that insanity without a biological basis was caused by spirit obsession. I agree with David Hess that the emphasis on spirit obsession is a “Brazilianization of Kardec’s doctrine.” See David Hess, Spirits and Scientists: Ideology, Spiritism, and Brazilian Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 81-98. Interview, October 20, 2014. 99 Interview, October 20, 2014. 100 Interviews, October 20, October 27, and July 21, 2014. See also Vilenha, Salvação Solidaria, 67. 85 influence. As we saw last chapter, Brazilians and Portuguese worried about wandering souls (almas penadas) well before Kardecism arrived in Brazil. The notion that the souls of the dead wander the earth and dwell in built spaces is not unique to Kardecists. What Brazilian Kardecism has furnished, however, is a coherent theoretical vocabulary for interpreting this earthly presence. Modern Catholic theologians have tended to dismiss seemingly supernatural perturbations as demonic and argued the dead cannot linger among the living. While it is dangerous to light candles for souls at home, churches and cemeteries are safe places for practicing the devotion. Even though devotees prefer to light candles for the dead at churches associated with souls, any Catholic church with a candle room will suffice. One devotee suggested the church offers some sort of protection: “I don’t think they enter [the church]. They stay at the door. It’s a place more… all the time, there’s someone praying.” But yards, too, are appropriate places for lighting candles. The issue seems not to be whether or not souls can enter spaces—after all, people say the Church of the Hanged is haunted—but whether or not they linger. There is little reason for them to linger in a yard, and no walls to keep them inside. In one’s home, on the other hand, the dead can act like unwanted guests.101 The souls of the dead dwell in human places. They linger at sites of memory, wandering through cemeteries and haunting places of urban violence. They also move through space, drawn to the flame of the candle in hopes of getting “a little of the flash” to 101 Interview, July 7, 2014. 86 illuminate their otherworldly path. Even then, however, they cling to the living, staying inside houses and becoming “attached” or “obsessed.” Their perennial proximity to the living suggests they are bound to our will to remember. As LeGoff writes, “The dead only exist through and for the living.”102 Devotional Spaces For most practitioners, candles are an integral part of the devotion to souls. This means that the devotional spaces require a place to light candles. Without such a place, there is no regular cult of the souls. For example, we might expect that practitioners would light candles for the dead at Our Lady of Good Death in central São Paulo, but that church only has electronic candles. Similarly, while there is a flourishing practice at Our Lady of the Rosary of the Blacks (Igreja Nossa Senhora do Rosario dos Homens Pretos) in Rio de Janeiro, there is almost none to speak of at its São Paulo equivalent, which lacks a candle room. Some light candles around the church, particularly at the famous statue of Mãe Preta (a black wet nurse) outside the church. But most seem to prefer to do so in designated spaces.103 Catholic churches’ candle rooms are accessible. Their doors are literally open, and people enter because they can. Unlike Afro-Brazilian centers—many of which have a cruz das 102 LeGoff, The Birth of Purgatory, 209. 103 There is little reason to travel to churches without candle rooms to pray for the souls. Unlike the saints, for example, churches do not have images of souls that act as devotional aids, and those churches colloquially known as the “church of the souls” all have candle rooms. Likewise, while one could attend occasional masses for the souls, these are usually recited at the major devotional sites. Lighting candles is so integral to the devotion that Monique Augras refers to practitioners as queimadores, or “burners.” Augras, A segunda-feira é das almas, 16. 87 almas for lighting candles to souls—Catholic churches are typically open to the public during normal business hours. As Patricia Birman observes, “the sight of Umbandistas and Candomblecistas in Catholic churches practicing their rites and observing their sacraments does not cause any astonishment.” This is not to say that observant Catholics never express disapproval, only that serious confrontations are relatively rare. The mães-de-santo that told fortunes out front of the Church of the Hanged regularly entered and often chatted with priests and the chapel’s employees. On the other hand, Dona Renata, the administrator of the Chapel of the Afflicted, told me she used to try to prevent Umbandistas from leaving offerings of food and colored candles. “I don’t have any prejudice against these religions,” she said, “but the church isn’t the place to leave an offering. And I don’t want to clean it up.” The chapel’s visiting priest, however, told her not to interrupt practitioners leaving offerings, and that she could throw out the offerings after they leave.104 Birman has suggested that the devotion to the souls is a “peripheral mode of belief.” “The cult of the souls, known as part of the dominion of the Catholic Church, is realized in its peripheral spaces, on the sidewalks, in front of churches, in the small niches in their vicinity.” This has implications for practice. Candle rooms are separate rooms, located away from the nave—not just banks of candles along a wall or tucked away in a transept. At São Paulo’s major devotional sites—the Church of the Hanged, Chapel of the Afflicted, and 104 Paul C. Johnson calls Catholic churches as “semi-public spaces,” noting that his informants would visit to participate in certain rituals, often wearing telltale Candomblé apparel; see Secrets, Gossip, and Gods, 123. Patricia Birman, “Modos periféricos de crença,” in Catolicismo: unidade religiosa e pluralismo cultural, ed. Pierre Sanchis (Rio de Janeiro: Edições Loyola, 1992), 167. Fieldnotes, October 13, 2014. 88 Sanctuary of the Souls—devotees can enter directly from the street, without passing through the nave. At the Church of the Hanged, the loud whir of exhaust fans drowns out the sound of mass and the commotion on the streets. The ebb and flow of devotees follows no set schedule, and devotees’ personal practices vary greatly. Some enter, light their candles, say a quick prayer, and leave. Others linger, bearing the heat of the candle room to pray slowly and solemnly.105 In an online video about the Sanctuary of the Souls, Padre Valmir, the church’s rector, reflects on devotees’ tendency to pray over the flame of the candle for long periods. “It’s curious, something that calls the attention of the devotees, of the people who come to the Sanctuary… if you go there and observe, people stay, sometimes half an hour, contemplating the lit candle, praying in silence, with this serenity. It’s very beautiful, this identification of the person with the symbol of the candle.” Padre Valmir’s reflections emphasize the devotion’s serenity and symbolism, presenting the practice as safely within Catholic tradition and doctrine.106 105 Birman, “Modos periféricos de crença,” 168. Devotees related other practical reasons for frequenting popular devotional sites. For those devotees with cars, the Sanctuary of the Souls is convenient, located along a major throughway and features a relatively large, gated parking lot. Both the Chapel of the Afflicted and Church of the Hanged are near a centrally located metro stop. While cemeteries are also appropriate devotional venues, they are not always easy to access. Even the city’s most central cemeteries like Cemitério Consolação, are somewhat out of the way, and finding and walking to the cruz das almas can be time consuming. Likewise, devotees may find cemeteries creepy or dangerous. Local media regularly reported assaults and rapes at the more remote cemeteries, which can be large and lacking in security personal. Some devotees also complained that homeless sometimes linger near the cruz das almas, waiting for offerings of cigarettes and cachaça left for Exú. Of course, while many popular devotional sites are easy to access, convenience is not everything. People travel from throughout the city—and sometimes from nearby cities—to pray at these sites. 106 “Santuário das Almas em São Paulo,” TV Arautos, accessed March 20, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eWx-EaaW-Y. This video was produced by Os Arautos do Evangelho (The Heralds of the Gospel), an International Association of the Faithful of Pontifical Right, one of 122 organizations with the “official recognition and explicit approval” of the Holy See. 89 But for most devotees the candle is not only a symbol. The flame of the candle does not just represent light—it is light. And because the “souls need light,” they come to the flame of the candle. If the flame were only a symbol, devotees would not avoid lighting candles at home for fear of attracting unattached spirits. While Padre Valmir emphasized devotees’ contemplative comportment before the lit candle, chapel employees told me that some devotees stand over their candles to guard the flame for fear that others may extinguish it or light their own candles with it. I never spoke with any devotees who took such precautions, but many would only light their candles with matches. “Sometimes I forget,” explained one devotee, “but before lighting [with another candle], they say that we have to ask permission.” She had not always done so, but then another devotee disciplined her, “She said: when you go to light a candle and don’t have a match, you ask permission! Now I always ask.”107 Churches can also be essential to ritual efficacy. The Novena to the Afflicted Souls, for instance, must be prayed in a church on nine consecutive Mondays. The novena insists that “before finishing the novena, your will receive your favor” and that “even those without faith will be moved by what will happen.” While clearly violating the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which forbids practices attributing “the efficacy of prayers or of the sacramental signs to their mere exhibition or performance, apart from the interior 107 Fieldnotes, May 4, 2014. In her study of the devotion, Maria Vilenha bluntly states that “the candle is not a symbol.” See Vilenha, Salvação Solidária, 95. 90 dispositions they demand,” prayers like this are immensely popular, and church employees seem uninterested in suppressing them.108 While churches and their candle rooms are important to the devotion, these structures are sometimes built to accommodate existing devotion. That is, the devotion does not just require space, but makes it. The intense devotion in Liberdade precipitated not only the construction of the Church of the Hanged, but also changes in its environs. A variety of entrepreneurs have capitalized on the devotional traffic, such as the fortune tellers and flower and herb vendors who sell their goods and services outside the chapel’s front gates. In 1934, a Portuguese family opened Casa de Velas Santa Rita next to the church, which sold candles to devotees. In response to popular demand, the store’s owners founded Imagens Bahia, which produces Catholic and Afro-Brazilian resin images. Today, that company is the largest producer of such images in Brazil, and exports its products throughout Latin America, as well as to Portugal, Spain, Germany, and the United States. Casa de Velas Santa Rita still operates at the same location next to the chapel, opening earlier and closing later on Mondays, when they set up a temporary table to sell white candles to devotees.109 108 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed., 2111, accessed August 22, 2016 http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c1a1.htm. 109 On the chapel’s reconstruction, see Wanderley dos Santos, “Santa Cruz dos Enforcados.” On the Casa de Velas Santa Rita, see “Sobre a empresa,” accessed March 21, 2014, http://srita.com.br/pagina.aspx?id=1. Interview with Nelson Ferreira Dias Rodrigues, “De cachimbos às imagens religiosas,” Museu da Pessoa. Video and transcript available at http://www.museudapessoa.net/pt/conteudo/historia/de-cachimbos-as-imagens-religiosas-43668, accessed March 21, 2016. 91 Conclusion Looking at photos of old São Paulo, one is struck by how little the sprawling, twenty-first century metropolis resembles the modest city of the late nineteenth. In 1890, the year before the Church of the Hanged was built, São Paulo had about 65,000 inhabitants. By 2010, that number had grown to over eleven million. The city’s old topography never stood a chance of survival. It was buried under successive waves of twentieth century migration and modernization. Its rivers were canalized, its verdant spaces submerged in asphalt, and most of its old buildings razed and replaced with condominiums. Gallows’ Field, the neighborhood where Chaguinhas was hanged, once marked the city’s southernmost limit; today it is in the middle of the Zona Central. Renamed Liberdade (“Freedom”), its grim past is unknown to many. But buried deep under city streets, the dead do not rest in peace. They haunt the living, the rumors of their cries reminding the living that São Paulo was built the suffering of the dead.110 110 For population figures, see “Tabelas,” accessed August 22, 2016, http://smdu.prefeitura.sp.gov.br/historico_demografico/tabelas.php. Interestingly, Antonio de Toledo Piza and Estavão Rezende—the historians who debated the arcana of Chaguinhas’s final days most thoroughly—cared little about who else was hanged at the gallows, and largely ignored its impact on São Paulo devotional life. At least in my reading, their laborious efforts to pin down the date of Chaguinahs’s execution were not in the interest of simply “getting it right,” but rather served as commentary on the political judgment (or lack thereof) of Martim Francisco (see footnote 2 above). These details are unimportant to most devotees, who were uninterested in the political legacy of a early-nineteenth-century politician. This is Nora’s distinction between memory and history. What devotees find relevant—bad and unjust death, miraculous survival, devotional history—tends to fall “beyond the thresholds of credibility” for historians; see Stephan Palmié, Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 5. As Paul C. Johnson notes, matter, memory, and spirit are intertwined. Even as material objects can be “permeated by the spirits of history, they also work on spirits and take part in producing, presenting, and shaping them”; Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 3. 92 The stories devotees tell about the dead are also a way of talking about São Paulo. I’ve noted that while memory appears to be about time, it is preeminently about space. And, in turn, while it “appears to be preeminently a matter of the past, it is about the present.” When devotees like Deise comment on history—or its concealment—they are also making political statements. Memories inhabit spaces, and they inflect devotees’ movements through them. Ghost stories are spatial stories. The stories that devotees tell both describe São Paulo and prescribe movement through it. Paulistanos are famous for being always on the move, and in Part II, we examine their religious movement and its consequences.111 111 Smith, To Take Place, 25. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 93 Part II: Trajectories 94 3 Transit: Religious Movement in São Paulo As we saw we have seen so far, devotees move. I already introduced Deise, a devotee I met at the Chapel of the Afflicted. Early in our conversation she talked about her involvement with Candomblé, speaking openly even though we were chatting beside Dona Renata, the chapel’s administrator. She was also explicit about her religious movement. When I asked Deise about her religious affiliation, she told me, “If it were the census, I’d say Spiritist. I’m of a more Spiritualist line. I can go to a Candomblé terreiro, just like I can come to a [Catholic] church. You don’t necessarily have to have the religion, you have to be where you feel good, where you have a connection [tem trânsito] with something that you think is more elevated.”112 Note Deise’s use of spatialized, kinetic language. She first responded in terms of identification, as was appropriate to my question: “What is your religion? How would you answer on the census?”113 But she quickly spoke of religious places (like Catholic churches or Candomblé terreiros) that engender feelings of well-being (“you have to be where you feel good”). In interviews, many other devotees did the same. At the Chapel of the Afflicted, I met Iwi, a third-generation Japanese woman in her early fifties. “I feel good when I come 112 On the devotion as pilgrimage, see Terezinha Rocha, “O dia das almas na Igreja dos Enforcados,” O Cruzeiro, August 23, 1972, 76; and Guimarães, Liberdade (São Paulo : Prefeitura do Município de São Paulo, 1979), 127. Interview, December 15, 2014. Note that in In colloquial usage, to have trânsito with something means to have a connection or influence with it. 113 In Portuguese, Qual é a sua religião ou culto? See item 6.12 on the sample questionnaire (Questionário da Amostra), available at http://censo2010.ibge.gov.br/coleta/questionarios.html, accessed July 16 2015. 95 here,” she told me. Iwi had only started the practice a few months earlier, and was there praying to the thirteen souls at the recommendation of a homeopathic doctor.114 As we were talking, I noticed that Iwi was wearing two necklaces: one with a small, gold Medal of St. Benedict, and another with a bronze medallion with the eight trigrams of the I Ching around a yin and yang symbol. When I asked about them, Iwi explained, “I walk with both of them. This Medal of St. Benedict, I put it on as soon as I get up. This other is… I’m a practitioner of Tai Chi. This here has a symbol, the yin and the yang, the inside and outside. So then, everything leads to one thing, to a path. That’s why I’m a very open person, very eclectic. So, for me, everything is valid. Everything that does well, everything that makes me feel good, is valid, no?” I told her that I heard other devotees say similar things, and they might go to, say, a Buddhist temple and Spiritist center on the same day. “The doors are open,” she replied. “The doors are open.”115 Like Deise, Iwi’s used spatial metaphors to describe her religious practice. She likened herself and religions to buildings, which while distinct enclosures are “open” to the outside world. She also spoke of religion as a path or journey, telling me she “walked” with different medallions and traveled along caminhos (“paths” or “ways”), through religions’ “open doors.” These are familiar metaphors, used often to describe any number of endeavors that require disciplined progress toward a goal. But while not unique to Iwi and other devotees, I think that they are more than just figures of speech. When devotees talked to me 114 Interview, November 10, 2014. 115 Interview, November 10, 2014. 96 about their religious journeys, they spoke concretely. For them, moving between religions was nothing abstract. It meant taking to São Paulo’s concrete and asphalt, crossing the city, and entering the physical spaces inhabited by different religious institutions.116 Whereas in the last chapter I considered devotional venues as “sites of memory” that are places for confronting the violence and trauma of São Paulo’s past, here I focus on movement through devotional sites. That people with diverse religious commitments would go to Catholic churches to light candles to the dead suggests a common understanding of the ritual significance of religious space. So far, I have suggested that religions do not combine and mix, but that people move between religions. In this chapter I get even more specific, suggesting that devotees do not only move between “religions,” but also—and primarily—between specific institutional spaces. Religious Transit During a course on mediumship development at a large Umbanda temple in Zona Norte, a student asked the class about the difference between religion (religião) and religiosity (religiosidade). This instructor pushed students to think critically, and in this session, he required each to ask a question to the rest of the class. In this case, several students gave rambling, unclear answers, prompting the instructor to offer his own. Religion, he said, is a system, while religiosity is about practices. He then illustrated the distinction 116 On religion as a path “defined by sets of practices that individuals or groups view as effective in attaining goals associated with special things,” see Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 47. 97 with the example of going to a Catholic church to light candles to the souls. “Do you need to be Catholic to do this? No,” he said. “This is an example of religiosity.”117 The instructor’s comments are telling. Like the phrase “spiritual but not religious,” his recourse to “religiosity” is meant to signal a type of ritual behavior oriented toward a transcendent reality that is not bound to any institution. This attitude, widely held among practitioners of Umbanda, is accepting of religious movement, and even expects it. But in contrast North American spiritual seekers or “metaphysicals,” whom some scholars have characterized as anti-institutional, the instructor illustrated his point with the example of going to a Catholic church. This not only suggests a different attitude toward institutions, but also reveals an assumption about the importance of space: non-Catholics should pray to souls in Catholic churches, because they are proper places to do so. I was somewhat surprised by this exchange, as the souls were often part of the temple’s public rituals. Hymns to the pretos velhos began with the call, “Adorei as almas!” (I adore the souls!), and the temple held rituals dedicated to entities like Exu Caveira das Almas. While this temple did not have a cruz/cruzeiro das almas (cross of the souls) or casa das almas (house of the souls)—common but not necessary features of many Umbanda centers—even practitioners at centers with them will visit Catholic churches to pray for the souls.118 117 Fieldnotes, July 1, 2014. 118 Take, for example, Marcos, a forty-year-old Umbandista and exu medium who occasionally visited the Chapel of the Afflicted. He was an initiate at Federação Espírita Pai Joaquim, an Umbanda center near the Arthur Alvim Metrô station in Zona Leste. The center had a cruz das almas before which practitioners lit white candles, and souls were sometimes part of the rituals there. But still, Marcos practiced the Monday devotion at 98 Even though practitioners at some Umbanda temples pray to the souls, devotees seem to understand sites like the Church of the Hanged as qualitatively different. Just as devotees of Our Lady of Aparecida will pray to her at home but may also go on pilgrimage to her basilica, devotees of the souls find São Paulo’s popular sites privileged places for accessing the dead. As in Catholicism, space is often ritually significant in Umbanda. Certain spaces are associated with specific entities, such as pomba giras with three-way intersections, and (male) exus with four-way crossroads. At the Cultural Institute, priests described rituals that had to be practiced at particular places: one ritual required leaving bread, candles, coins, water, and rope for orixá Iansã at a cruzeiro das almas in a cemetery; another necessitated visiting wooded area on a Monday to leave sweet rice for the pretos velhos. The souls, like these other beings, have their time and place.119 Scholars have increasingly attended to the “dynamism” and “fluidity” of religion in Brazil, and since the end of the twentieth century, a substantial body of literature on religious transit has emerged since the end of the twentieth century. The timing coincides with dramatic changes in the Brazilian religious landscape. At the end of the twentieth century, Pentecostal affiliation grew exponentially—from 3.9 million in 1980 to 17.7 million in 2009—as more Brazilians than ever declared themselves “without religion,” and Catholic affiliation was at an all-time low. Talk of the “religion of Brazilians” and popular claims like more conventional sites like the Liberdade churches. On the casa das almas, which some explicitly say is for purgatorial souls, see e.g., Renato Ortiz, A morte branca do feiticeiro negro (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1978), 91. 119 For further discussion of the cult of the souls in different religions, see Vilenha, Salvação solidária, 75-79. 99 “to be Brazilian is to be Catholic,” while always examples of dominant discourse that marginalized non-Catholic traditions, appear increasingly anachronistic in the face of the growth of Protestantism and greater visibility and acceptance of Afro-Brazilian traditions.120 120 The phrase “trânsito religioso” first came into use in the early 1990s as a way to grapple with the changes wrought on the Brazilian religious field by the “aggressive missionary style and strong religious competition” of the Pentecostal churches. The concept is intimately connected to, but marks a progression from, concepts like religious syncretism, “popular ecumenism,” or bricolage, which many scholars take as having characterized the Brazilian status quo from at least the turn of the twentieth century—or from the colonial period, according to some scholars—until the 1960s. Drawing on North American sociologists like Peter Berger, Roger Finke, and Rodney Starke, Brazilian scholars came to see Pentecostalism as a harbinger, if not the vehicle, of the religious configuration of modern societies, in which multiple, distinct religions compete for followers in a religious marketplace. In this model, identity comes to the form, and the possibility of multiple religious identities is severely limited; Machado and Mariz, “Sincretismo e Trânsito Religoso,” 27. By the early twenty first century, however, “religious transit” came to refer specifically to switching affiliation. The study that set the tone for the next decade was Ronaldo de Almeida and Paula Montero, “Trânsito Religioso No Brasil,” São Paulo Em Perspectiva 15 no. 3 (July 2001): 92-100. Almeida and Monteiro’s work drew from a 1998 research study, “Comportamento Sexual da População Brasileira e Percepções do HIV/Aids,” which was designed, among other things, to gauge the effect of religious influence on sexual comportment. The study, which had 3,600 respondents from throughout Brazil, asked respondents their current religion and the religion they were raised in, thus providing data by which Almeida and Montero could map trends in switching affiliation. See also Ronaldo de Almeida, “Religião na metrópole Paulista,” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, 19 no. 56 (2004): 15-27. A 2004 survey by Centro de Estatísticas Religiosas e Investigações Sociais, which is linked with the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops, asked similar questions and found that the majority (58.9%) of respondents who switched affiliation moved to “evangelical Protestantism.” This survey did not, unfortunately, distinguish between the mediumship religions and grouped them all into the category “other religions”; see Silvia Regina Alves Fernandes, Mudanc ̧a de religião no Brasil: desvendando sentidos e motivações (São Paulo: Palavra & Prece, 2006). See also Ricardo Bitun, “Nomadismo Religioso: trânsito religoso em questão,” Horizonte 9 no. 22 (2011): 493-503. Mariane Ranzani Ciscon-Evangelista and Paulo Rogério Meira Menandro, “Trânsito Religioso E Construções Identitárias: Mobilidade Social de Evangélicos Neopentecostais,” Psico-USF 16 no. 2 (2011): 193-202. Alessandro Bartz, Oneide Bobsin, and Rudolf von Sinner, “Mobilidade Religiosa No Brasil – Conversão Ou Trânsito Religioso?” in Religião e Sociedade: Desafios Contemporâneos (São Leopoldo: Sinodal, 2012), 231–68. For a work that uses the framework of religious transit but makes space “an object of explicit reflection,” see Miriam Rabelo, “Moving between Religions in Brazil: Space and the Analysis of Religious Trajectories,” Current Anthropology 56, no. 6 (2015): 848–64. On religious fluidity, “porosity,” and “the religion of Brazilians,” see Pierre Sanchis, “Religiões, religião… Alguns problemas do sincretismo no campo religioso brasileiro,” in Fiéis & Cidadãos: Percursos de Sincretismo no Brasil, ed. Pierre Sanchis (Rio de Janeiro: Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2001), 9-57. 100 In most of this literature, religious transit refers to shifting religious affiliation. Drawing from census data and questionnaires, these studies trace broad patterns of religious migration. For example, in their landmark “Trânsito religioso no Brasil,” Almeida and Monteiro suggest Catholicism is a “universal donor” that loses adherents to nearly all other major religions. The transit among these other religions is more complicated. For example, the authors found substantial movement between neo-Pentecostal and Afro-Brazilian traditions, but almost none between Kardecism and Pentecostalism. For those familiar with religion in contemporary Brazil, these findings will make intuitive sense. While neo-Pentecostal churches like the Igreja Universal are known for aggressive condemnation of the Afro-Brazilian traditions, both traditions are concerned with managing spirit possession. Many who are afflicted by involuntary spirit possession will visit Afro-Brazilian and neo-Pentecostal churches in hopes of learning to manage the spirits.121 While these studies are useful, their measures have some inherent limits. As Ronaldo de Almeida notes, “From the perspective of the census, evangelicals (historical Protestants [i.e., non-Pentecostal Protestants] and Pentecostals) could be considered the ideal religious people. That is, their declarations coincide, in most cases, with a more or less uniform set of 121 Almeida and Montero, “Trânsito Religioso No Brasil,” 97-99. On the movement between Afro-Brazilian traditions and the neo-Pentecostal churches, see Pierre Sanchis, “O campo religioso contemporâneo no Brasil,” in Globalização e religião, eds. Ari Pedro Oro and Carlos Alberto Steil (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1997), 103-117; Patricia Birman, “Cultos de possessão e penetecostalismo no Brasil: Passagens,” Religião e Sociedade, 17, no. 1-2 (1996): 90-109 and “Percursos afro e conexões sociais: negritude, pentecostalismo, e espiritualidades,” in As religiões no Brasil: Continuidades e rupturas, ed. Faustino Teixeira and Renata Menezes (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2006). Vagner Gonçalves da Silva, “Transes em trânsito – continuidades e rupturas entre neopentecostalismo e religiões afro-Brasileiras,” in As religiões no Brasil, 207-228. For a discussion of possession in Afro-Brazilian religions and neo-Pentecostalism, see Stephen Selka, “Demons and Money: Possessions in Brazilian Pentecostalism,” in Spirited Things, 155-176; see especially 158-59. 101 ideas, rituals, behaviors, understanding of the world, etc.” Pentecostals emphasize identity and strict affiliation, and this emphasis shows in measures of religious identity. Afro-Brazilian traditions suffer from the inverse problem. Practitioners of these traditions often identify as Catholic on the census. Sometimes, scholars have argued, this is out of fear of reprisal from the government. But it is also the case that many (if not most) Candomblé initiates, for example, are baptized and identify as Catholic. In many Candomblé terreiros, Catholic baptism is a prerequisite for initiation.122 So far, the Brazilian census and other major surveys have not thoroughly measured multiple affiliation and different levels of participation. As of 2010, the structure of the census form, which offered just a single line for declaring religious affiliation, discouraged respondents from declaring multiple affiliations. Further, the census and other surveys have neglected to distinguish between affiliation and participation. But if, as the Umbanda instructor asserted, you do not need to be Catholic to practice the devotion to souls, this would be a useful distinction. Just as one need not be Catholic to pray in a Catholic church, one need not be an initiate to visit an Umbanda temple. At the temple I frequented, hundreds would attend weeknight consultations with spirits. Few of these visitors were initiates. Most were occasional visitors who were just curious or, more often, sought the spirits’ help with a particular pressing concern. 122 Almeida, “Religião na metrópole Paulista,” 19. On baptism and the relationship between Catholicism and Nagô Candomblé, see Beatriz Gois Dantas, Nagô Grandma and White Papa: Candomblé and the creation of Afro-Brazilian Identity (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 78-81. Dantas’s informant, a Nagô mãe-de-santo, affirmed, “We don’t mix. We don’t mix with Toré or Umbanda or any of that stuff. Nagô has its own place. We only mix with the Catholic Church.” 102 Kardecist Spiritism is similarly underrepresented in census and survey findings. As with Umbanda, which first emerged among Kardecists in the state of Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s, there are different levels of participation in most Kardecist institutions. Their services are often free, and at larger centers, one can casually drop in to consult with mediums and listen to lectures. Furthermore, the basic tenets of Kardecism have become broadly familiar to Brazilians via high-profile mediums like Chico Xavier, popular films and telenovelas with Kardecst themes, and “spiritist novels,” which claim to relate stories narrated to spirit mediums from the beyond.123 For devotees, as for many non-Pentecostal Brazilians, religious identity is not always closely correlated with participation. When I asked devotees, “What is your religion?” I found that many would identify as “católica, apostólica, romana” even though they visited other religious sites. Catholicism remains important in Brazilian public life and to many Brazilians’ sense of identity, and some devotees are reluctant to take on other labels. For 123 On the emergence of Umbanda, see Brown, 38-41. Regarding the historical reasons for Kardecist centers being free of charge, scholars like Yvonne Maggie and Dain Borges have argued that the Kardecist emphasis on charity emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as emerging “high spiritism” Kardecist institutions began emphasizing charity and free services, both as a way to distinguish themselves form “low spiritism” (i.e., Afro-Brazilian mediumship practices) and to avoid accusations of charlatanism, which became a crime in under the Penal Code of 1890. See Yvonne Maggie, Medo Do Feitiço: Relações Entre Magia e Poder No Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, Orgão do Ministério da Justiça, 1992), 218-221. Dain Borges, “Healing and Mischief: Witchcraft in Brazilian Law and Practice, 1890 – 1922,” in Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society Since Late Colonial Times, eds. Ricardo D. Salvatore, Carlos Aguirre, Gilbert M. Joseph (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 190. In contemporary Brazil, this issue can be complicated given anyone can claim the mantle of “Spiritism” or “Kardecism,” and the only thing preventing them from charging for services is a general public expectation that they will not. The issue is a matter of debate, particularly as certain authors of mediumship-based literary works have become very wealthy. See Sandra Jacqueline Stoll, “O Espiritismo na encruzilhada: Mediunidade com fins lucrativos?” in Religiosidade no Brasil, ed. João Baptista Borges Pereira (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2012), 257-269. 103 example, one devotee who affirmed her belief in reincarnation and spiritual evolution told me, “I don’t know if I’m Spiritist. I don’t know. But I believe that there is life after death.”124 Taking a cue from devotees like Cleuza, who told me, “I am Catholic, but I also go to [centers of] Kardecism,” I began asking devotees whether they go to other religious places, sometimes explicitly asking if they visited Spiritist, Umbanda, or Candomblé centers. This approach prompted devotees to give more detailed responses. For instance, one devotee said, “I’m Catholic. I’m Catholic. I’ve visited evangelical churches… I’ll visit them. I didn’t frequent them. And I’ve been to a Spiritist center a few times when my mother was sick. My brother-in-law asked that I bring my mother, so I brought her. Again, I didn’t frequent it. But I don’t see anything wrong with it.” Her religious identity constrained her religious practice without fully determining it. For others, the relationship between identity and practice is even more obscure. I met devotees who called themselves Umbandista, Spiritist, and “without religion” who visited Catholic churches every Monday. Given their stable identities, these devotees’ movements would not have registered on the usual surveys of “religious transit,” which have asked questions like, “What was your original religion?” and “What religion are you now?”125 124 Interview, May 29, 2014. 125 Interview, June 21, 2014. A survey could conceivably offer a more thorough portrait of religious participation by asking respondents to, say, list or check off all the religious places they visited in the past two years. I have not seen any such survey in Brazil. While it would still be limited in that respondents might not perceive certain sites as religious—or may simply not remember where they have gone—asking questions that do not assume equivalence between religious identity and participation could be revealing. 104 These devotees’ testimonies call our attention to the physicality of religious movement. Questionnaires and other measures of religious transit have only measured shifts in identity. But devotees do not just move between “Catholicism” and “Kardecism” as identities, or even as systems of belief—they also move between specific religious places, between this church and that Spiritist center. Like devotion to saints, orixás, and the various entities associated with Umbanda, the devotion to souls depends on place. Some places, like the home, are unacceptable for practicing the devotion. Others are acceptable, like any Catholic church with a candle room. But devotees prefer sites like the Church of the Hanged and Chapel of the Afflicted—places with a special connection to the dead. For them, space matters. Urban Trajectories In São Paulo, moving between religions means moving through the city. “We live here and we can go to a ton of places,” Cristina told me. “We have access!” A forty-seven-year-old devotee and avowed video game fanatic, Cristina was telling me about Seicho-no-Ie, a Japanese new religion that is popular in Brazil and has a large center in Jabaquara, a neighborhood in Zona Sul. Though far from home, it was near the final Metrô stop along the blue line—the same line that passed under the Church of the Hanged and stopped near the Sanctuary of the Souls. Cristina went often, and she offered to take me with her. “There in Seicho-no-Ie, without having gratitude for your ancestors, for people who have already died, for your family, there’s no way you’re going to have happiness,” she said. Sometimes 105 Cristina’s mother chided her for going. “I tell her, ‘I follow everything that is good for me,’ understand?” When we met that August afternoon, Cristina had just finished her shift at the Spiritist Federation of the State of São Paulo (FEESP, pronounced FEE-SPEE), the largest Spiritist center in the city. She volunteered there three days per week, administering visitors passes—fluidic “passes,” a Kardecist healing practice with roots in Mesmerism. Over coffee and cake, Cristina told me she tended to be “very agitated” in her “movements,” always anxious and unable to sit still. Though she still suffered from anxiety, FEESP was able to help. Now she could calm down, she said. “Do you know why? Because the Federation was able to indoctrinate the spirit that stays with me, [the spirit] that leaves me agitated.” FEESP is a popular destination for devotees. About one in five of those I interviewed at the Church of the Hanged and Chapel of the Afflicted had visited it. Though it was relatively close to the churches—about a kilometer walk away—its popularity among devotees is more a testament to the Federation’s power than its proximity. FEESP is highly trusted and influential, and some scholars say it is Brazil’s most powerful institution. Its nine-story headquarters in central São Paulo is probably the biggest and busiest in the world. Its long operating hours, central location, proximity to public transportation, and ample parking make it uniquely accessible. FEESP maintains its prestigious reputation through, 106 among other things, a weekly cable television program and a publishing house that prints books, a monthly magazine, and a bi-monthly newspaper.126 FEESP is an example of what de Certeau calls a “proper,” a “triumph of place over time,” a “mastery of time through the foundation of an autonomous place.” Its size is not just a durable testament to the institution’s power, but a remarkable example of temporal efficiency in a country famed for a culture of burdensome bureaucracy. One of the Federation’s directors told me the center had over 7,000 volunteers working to provide “spiritual assistance” to upwards of 9,000 visitors on weekdays and 15,000 on Saturdays.127 Even if these numbers are inflated, they do not strike me as impossible. When I met Cristina, she said she helped give passes to about four hundred visitors in two hours. During my visits, the Department of Orientation and Routing (DEPOE) was always busy. It was most visitors’ first stop, where they would visit a medium that would diagnose any spiritual afflictions. Depending on the nature of the problem, these mediums would prescribe a course of treatment that usually involved some combination of lectures and passes over several weeks for minor problems, and spirit disobsession for more serious ones (see Figure 6). 126 In his landmark study of Brazilian Kardecism, David Hess notes that while the Brazilian Spiritist Federation (Federação Espírita Brasileira, or FEB) is the “leading national federalizing body” in Brazil, FEESP is “probably the largest [Federation] in Brazil, and much larger than the FEB itself”; Spirits and Scientists, 28. 127 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 36. Fieldnotes, February 27, 2014. 107 Figure 6. Ticket for Spiritual Assistance. From the Spiritist Federation of the State of São Paulo. On this visit, the medium with whom I consulted authorized me to attend a lecture on six consecutive Fridays at 3:30 p.m. I was also permitted to receive six passes, anytime between 8:30 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. on Fridays. Such tickets are one means by which FEESP manages a large volume of visitors. 108 Cristina had been volunteering as a medium at FEESP for nearly twenty years and practicing the devotion to souls for over thirty. She always visited the Chapel of the Afflicted, as was family tradition. Her father and her grandparents went there, and Cristina began going in earnest when she was sixteen or seventeen to desperately plead with the souls to save her parents’ troubled marriage. Her grandparents told her the “souls always attend our pedidos,” and when she prayed to them, they delivered. They had helped her with other problems since then, like finding a job. She learned the ritual from her father, who told her, “You go there to the church, take a candle. Hold the candle. Don’t put the flame to the underside of the candle—hold it, put it down, and light it. And never forget to pay your promise [pagar sua promessa] after what happens. When you need relief, ask the souls.” For some devotees, the Church of the Hanged and the Chapel of the Afflicted form part of a devotional circuit. Their proximity and shared history compel some devotees to visit both to say, pray to the souls of the hanged at Church of the Hanged and Chaguinhas or the paupers and slaves buried near the Chapel of the Afflicted. Still, many devotees preferred one church or the other. Some did not know about the tiny, almost hidden Chapel of the Afflicted. Others, like Cristina, almost never visited the Church of the Hanged. “There at the Hanged, you light a candle and they put it out. They don’t have respect. The people that work there don’t have respect… I want the souls to be able to enjoy the light for at least a little while, so I come here.” Neither did Cristina think highly of the devotees who frequented the Church of the Hanged. “The people that go there, lawyers… they’re powerful and acquisitive people.” These people do not know or care about the Chapel of the Afflicted, 109 she insisted. All the better—with less people, she could light her candles in peace, knowing that Dona Renata would let them burn uninterrupted. I was intrigued by Cristina’s attention to candles. While it was not rare for devotees to take a series of precautions with candles—not lighting candles using other devotees’ flames, not using candles that had fallen over, insisting on the significance of using a certain number of candles—Cristina was a practicing Kardecist. I had visited FEESP long before meeting Cristina, and I always asked volunteers if they used candles at the center, knowing they did not. “Spiritists never use candles,” one of the center’s directors told me. “They’re not necessary.”128 Representatives of Brazil’s most powerful Kardecist institutions present this as a simple matter of fact. For example, on its “Frequently Asked Questions page,” the Brazilian Spiritist Federation states: Spiritist practiced is realized with simplicity, without any exterior worship, according to the Christian principle that God must be adored in spirit and truth. Spiritism does not have priests, nor does it adopt or use in its practices: altars, images, floats, candles, processions, sacraments, concessions of indulgence, canonicals, alcoholic or hallucinogenic drinks, incense, smoke, talismans, amulets, horoscopes, cartomancy, pyramids, crystals or any other objects, rituals, or forms of exterior worship. (Emphasis added.)129 This attitude dominates institutional Kardecism in Brazil and indicates the limits of Kardecist orthopraxy. I heard lecturers at FEESP express this sentiment and even cite parts of this dictum verbatim. On websites and forums, more doctrinaire practitioners will cite it, usually to discipline errant ones. “The doctrine doesn’t say anything about lighting candles,” one practitioner asserted in response to a question about whether spirits benefit from 128 Fieldnotes, February 27, 2014. 129 “Dúvidas mais frequentes,” FEESP, accessed July 7, 2016, http://www.febnet.org.br/blog/geral/o-espiritismo/duvidas-mais-frequentes/. 110 candlelight. “Spirits don’t need candles and the like. Other than lighting up the room, candles have no use within spiritism. They don’t add anything to the capacity or knowledge of the Spirits.” Given that Kardec had nothing to say about candles, this prohibition is a clear example of “boundary work.” In Brazil, Kardecist institutions have taken shape in contrast with Catholicism and the Afro-Brazilian religions and those traditions’ perceived ritual excess.130 Cristina was aware that her devotion to souls transgressed Kardecist norms. “No, they don’t light candles. That’s why my mother is against me coming here… my mother doesn’t like lighting candles, but I light candles for the souls, for the saints… but Spiritists don’t light candles, it’s true.” I told her I thought this was strange since she just told me she was a medium at FEESP. “So… I’m Spiritist, but I cannot leave [the Church completely]. I was raised Catholic.” In a later conversation, she reflected on the tension further. “I’m not going to change the way I think because of Kardecism. Souls need light. They need light, so you light a candle. I’m not going to change because of Kardecism. It’s like I told you: there are people who go to FEESP, learn all this, then go to a center with pretos velhos.” She was not going to give up her devotion to the souls, and she did not expect others to give up the pretos velhos. “You can’t. You can’t. You can’t just deny them.” Cristina’s past meant 130 I borrow the phrase “boundary work” from David Hess, whose important study of Brazilian Spiritism adapted the term from Thomas Gieryn, “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science,” American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 781-795. 111 something to her. As she traversed São Paulo, visiting different religious sites across the city, she was mostly returning to places she had already been. 131 The Familiar Dead The devotion to souls is familiar. Devotees are accustomed to the practice and well acquainted with the devotional sites they frequent. And, for many, the devotion is also familiar in the sense of being family tradition. Like Cristina, most devotees learned the practice from their parents and grandparents. Last chapter I analyzed how suffering forms the basis for a relationship of mutual aid between the living and the dead, inflecting their trajectories through terrestrial space. When devotees like Cristina visit the Chapel of the Afflicted, they remember its history. “People like to come here [instead of the Sanctuary of the Souls] because they want to go where people suffered, where you have to give light,” she said. But her family history also gave her devotion emotional depth. The souls saved her parents’ marriage, and as we talked about her devotion, she repeatedly invoked her father and grandfather, in whose “more spiritualized” footsteps she saw herself following.132 131 Interviews, May 19 and August 7, 2014. 132 More than other devotional sites in São Paulo, the Sanctuary of the Souls—which is the largest, if not the most popular site for the devotion in the city—exemplifies the effort to steer the devotion toward Catholic orthodoxy. There is no question that some practitioners there transgress Catholic norms there—I regularly saw colored candles left by Umbanda practitioners at tables, and the church’s rector, Padre Valmir, complained to me about Spiritists. But the Sanctuary is effective at managing perceptions. Despite the many devotees who pray to the thirteen blessed souls, the afflicted souls, spirits of light, and other beings with no clear place in Catholic orthodoxy, YouTube videos and press materials emphasize the Sanctuary as a place of familial remembrance. Throughout the structure, walls and columns are covered by tens of thousands of tiles with the names and dates of birth and death of the dead. 112 Reflecting on twentieth-century North American Catholicism, Robert Orsi writes, “family dynamics are one spring of sacred presences—saints and the Mother of God draw on the intimate histories of relationships within family worlds (always as these are shaped and inflected by culture and society). The saints borrow dimensions of their identities from family members who in turn become associated with particular saints.” I think we can extend Orsi’s observations to contemporary Brazilian devotees—whether of the souls, saints, or orixás and Umbanda entities or saints, but also of orixás. But in the cult of the souls, the familial dimension is especially pronounced because family members are not just associated with the dead—they often are the dead. When they die, they join the souls’ ranks and become incorporated into devotees’ Monday prayers.133 No word better captures the complex mix of emotions evoked by the devotion to souls—the sadness and longing for those who have gone, but also the indulgence in this sadness—than the prized sentiment of saudade. Despite the first world stereotype of Brazilians as “poor but happy,” as Nancy Scheper-Hughes points out, “much of the literature written by Brazilians about themselves eventually returns to the subject of ‘Brazilian sadness’ and melancholy.” Even the “reckless surrender to carnaval… is a necessary corrective to the sadness and melancholy of the everyday.” It is a far-reaching sentiment: one could have saudades for people and places, but also “particular smells, foods, colors, or sensations from the past that were associated with poignant events and loved ones.” But more than anything 133 Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 13. 113 else, the death of a loved one provides “the most potent source of saudades.”134 In São Paulo’s cemeteries, those “gardens of memory,” this lapidary sentiment is ubiquitous (Figure 7).135 134 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 434-437. As Scheper-Hughes and others point out, the embrace of saudade as central to the Brazilian national character is expression of “the dominant and ‘official’ cultural self-identity,” constructed by a long line of artists and intellectuals around the turn of the twentieth century. The Portuguese, too, celebrate the emotion, and in the early twentieth century, the poet and writer Teixeira de Pascoaes heralded the Saudosismo literary movement, which celebrated saudade as the “Lusitantian spirit.” See Teixeira de Pascoaes, O Espírito Lusitano ou o Saudosismo (Porto: Renascença Portuguesa, 1912). Anthropologist Roberto DaMatta calls saudade “a basic social category,” and one fundamentally related to death. “The more saudade, the more intense the memory of the dead or the place. The less saudade, [there is] less intensity in recall”; A casa e a rua: Espaço, cidadania, mulher e morte no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1997), 155. 135 I am using “gardens of memory” more poetically than precisely. Garden-cemetery is a technical term for the type of park-like cemeteries that became common in England and the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. See Michel Ragon, The Space of Death: A Study of Funerary Architecture, Decoration, and Urbanism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 209-10. Cemitério Consolação, pictured in Figure 7, is decidedly not a garden cemetery, as it is densely populated with large, ornate tombs. Garden cemeteries are, as Santos points out, a “relatively new model in Brazil… defined by a configuration in which the graves are located in extensive lawns, with no buildings above ground level, and [in which the dead are] identified via standardized gravestones”; Aline Silva Santos, Morte e paisagem: Os jardins de memória do crematório municipal de São Paulo (MA Thesis, University of São Paulo, 2005), 71. 114 Figure 7. Tomb at Cemitério Consolação. 115 Saudade is not depression to be avoided, but a bittersweet yearning for the beauty of what was. Saudade “unites and attaches,” writes Scheper-Hughes. “To evoke saudades protects and conserves; indeed, it enshrines memory. Saudade has been described as the ultimate nourishment of love… it strikes and is felt inside, in the heart and chest of a person.” In both English and Portuguese, emotion has kinetic associations and etymology. “Motion” is part of the word, all the way back to the classical Latin. In colloquial usage, we speak of profoundly emotional events as “moving,” both internally (“Seeing images of starving children, I was moved to tears”), and externally (“…and to devote my life to ending hunger”). Saudade is no exception. It prompts action, enshrining memory through recall and repetition. The feeling of saudade is never fleeting; it is, by nature, an emotional place to which one returns. That is why it is so evident at sites of memory like cemeteries and churches. Devotees do not just have saudades when they visit the Church of the Hanged, they go there to evoke the feeling.136 “[I light candles for] some friends I’ve lost, and family, like my uncle. When I’m here, I feel good. Particularly. And I even feel that the other side is well,” said Bruno. Bruno was one of the few younger devotees I met, a São Paulo native in his late twenties who described himself as “a kind of eclectic dude.” “I like a little of everything,” he told me, relating his experiences reading Alan Kardec and Chico Xavier, and even his occasional visits to a Seventh Day Adventist church that his father occasioned. Unlike many others, Bruno 136 Ibid., 440. The Oxford English Dictionary traces “emotion” back to the classical Latin ēmōt-, the past participial stem of ēmovēre, meaning “to remove, expel, banish from the mind, to shift, displace.” See “Emotion,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2011. 116 did not make requests to the dead. “I only ask for blessing,” he said. “The fact that you’re remembering, recalling the someone that did right by you, it leaves you with even more saudade… and I feel in that moment it’s doing me well. So, I think that’s cool.”137 The devotion to souls is a way of coping with loss, but it is not meant to provide closure. Even though some devotees take it as a means of ensuring souls’ salvation, it is an ongoing practice. Like the purgatorial culture from which it sprang, the devotion maintains relationships between the living and the dead. The pull of saudades is as enduring as the marble and granite into which the word is so often engraved. It can sustain the devotion even in the face of conflicting religious commitments. As we saw with Kardecists’ distaste for “exterior worship,” Kardecist discourse can militate against religious movement. Still, plenty of devotees visit Kardecist centers. After all, as different as Catholic and Kardecist doctrine about and rituals engaging the soul can be, the devotion to souls and Kardecism are both premised on the immortality of the soul and possibility of continual communication with it beyond biological death. Likewise, even those Kardecist institutions that distinguish themselves from Catholic ritualism, such as the FEB and FEESP, tend to be overtly ecumenical. Pentecostal churches, on the other hand, can be combative, and it is unsurprising that few devotees identify as evangélico (which in Brazil is often a synonym for Pentecostal). Beatriz, one of the two Pentecostal devotees I interviewed, told me she practiced the 137 Interview, August 4, 2014. 117 devotion out of love for her mother. “I bring candles for her. I go to mass for her. I pray for her. Our Father, Hail Mary, all these things for her.” A month earlier, Beatriz returned to her home city of Recife to take care of her mother’s tomb. When she got there, it was a mess. “Everything broken, all ugly. So I went there, fixed it up, put nice ceramic [tiles down on the tomb], and made it beautiful. I put a plaque with the date she was born and disincarnated.” She acknowledged that her church discouraged this sort of behavior. But her mother was also the object of her prayers, along with the suffering souls to whom Beatriz would pray a novena and petition for help. “The evangelicals say you don’t need to do it because [the dead] are sleeping” until the bodily resurrection. “They say it’s just throwing your money away. For me it’s not. For me it’s a matter of respect.” Having known her parents’ devotion, she worried that now that they had “died or disincarnated… they could be missing everything they were doing before.” She was not going to forsake her parents’ memory and eternal well-being out of fidelity to her church.138 The demographics of devotees is relevant here. Like Cristina and Beatriz, most São Paulo devotees at the major Catholic devotional sites are middle aged or older. They learned the devotion during their youth, in an era during which the devotion was even more popular than it is today. Their age also means they are familiar with death, often of the parents or grandparents who taught them the devotion. It is what Thomas Tweed calls a transtemporal practice, moving devotees back and forth through time. It transports practitioners back to 138 Interview, July 7, 2014. 118 their youth, to the days when they stood alongside parents and grandparents before the fiery heat of the candles, learning how to pray to the dead. But the devotion is not just a cult of memory. It also promises of a way of engaging the deceased as they are now: disembodied and departed, immortal souls with whom it is possible to have continued relationships.139 As I suggested earlier, we can distinguish between the familiar dead and the various, collective kinds of souls like the souls of the afflicted. This analytical distinction reflects devotional practice. As Deise insisted, “My ancestors are one thing, and the souls are another.” Devotees pray to both on the same day, at the same time, and in the same places, but they treat the familiar dead differently. When devotees pray for departed loved ones, they typically address them individually. They also do not make pedidos to family members as often as they do to collectives like the thirteen blessed souls, but some still ask their departed loved ones for help.140 One devotee who learned the practice from now-deceased parents said, “Sometimes they appear to me, and when they come, if something is happening to me, my father will come and warn me. Once he came and gave me a slap in the face, and I said to myself, ‘Nossa, I have to do something to change my life.’ You know, in the sense that I was not on the right path. Then I think rationally and go back and everything works out.” In the same vein, another devotee told me, “Often times you pray and suddenly dream about a person 139 Thomas A. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Catholic Cuban Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 94-95. 140 On the familiar and general dead, see Oliveira, “Pequenos santos.” Interview, December 15, 2014. 119 important to you, and he shows you some path. I think, since they have already experienced [já passam por] many things we experience, they know what path to take.”141 The devotion’s familial dimension gives it added emotional depth. Throughout this study, I have asked why devotees with different religious commitments pray to the souls of the dead in Catholic churches on Mondays. And as we have seen, there are myriad answers to this question. The designation of Mondays as the “day of the souls” came out of twelfth- and thirteenth-century theological debates about the nature of purgatorial souls’ suffering and temporary reprieve on Sundays. Devotees say they pray to souls because “souls need light,” but also because they are very powerful and able to help the living. They light candles for the dead in churches and cemeteries because it is dangerous to do so at home, and because these are understood as proper places for the devotion. And I hope to have showed that many practice the devotion because their parents and grandparents taught it to them. And for those whose loved ones have passed away, the devotion is a means of honoring their memory and communing with their immortal souls—alongside other kinds of anonymous, suffering souls that are so often the object of their prayers.142 Conclusion Devotional sites are not just destinations, but places to which devotees return. To use a musical metaphor, we might think of them as refrains. Periodic repetition is integral to the 141 Interviews, October 27 and July 7, 2014. 142 On the relationship between purgatorial devotion and the family cult of memory in nineteenth century France, see Cuchet, “The Revival of the Cult of Purgatory,” 79. 120 production of sites of memory. Sites of memory, says Nora, depend on the will to remember, and the act of remembrance is always a return. As Paul Ricouer writes, “To remember is to have a memory or set off in search of a memory” (emphasis added). Remembering is “doing something.” To claim that devotees engage in spiritual transit is not to say that their movements are random. Their itinerancy implies an itinerary. For Cristina: on Monday, the Chapel of the Afflicted in Liberdade; on Wednesday and Thursday, the Spiritist Federation of the State of São Paulo in Consolação; on Friday, Seicho-no-Ie in Jabaquara. There is a regularity to her religiosity.143 An urban anthropologist has proposed the notion of the “circuit” to make sense of peoples’ movement through urban space: circuits “unite establishments, spaces, and other urban structures characterized by the exercise of a particular practice or offer of a particular service.” So while critics painted Brazilian neo-esotericism as incoherent, superficial religious consumerism, analysis reveals clear patterns in neo-esoteric “installation and distribution of spaces, norms of operation, calendar of activities, and even in discourse.” Paulistano New Agers go to some places but avoid others: they prefer “oriental” religions and exploring bioenergy, for example, but tend not to visit Afro-Brazilian centers. Similarly, while the devotees I spoke with favored Kardecist and, to a lesser extent, Afro-Brazilian centers; few were interested in Protestantism or, say, the Hare Krishna kitchen not far from Liberdade.144 143 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4. On the notion of the refrain as an orienting device, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Of the Refrain,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 311-350. 144 José Guilherme Cantor Magnani, “Neoesotericismo na metrópole,” in Da periferia ao centro: trajetórias de pesquisa em antropologia urbana, 115-157. On the definition of circuit, see Magnani, “Quando o 121 Like these neo-esotericists, devotees’ movements exhibit some clear patterns. They tend to frequent the same types of places—Catholic churches, cemeteries, Kardecist centers, and to a lesser extent, Umbanda and Candomblé centers. They also cross paths with neo-esotericists. Many of the devotees I spoke with in Liberdade occasioned broadly “oriental” locales like Buddhist temples, and dozens (if not hundreds) of devotees visited the Chapel of the Afflicted at the advice of a homeopathic doctor, Dr. Efrem, who I discuss at length in Chapter 5. Few regularly visited Pentecostal churches, though many told me they paid occasional visits. And other sites, like a nearby Hare Krishna temple or the Church of Happiness in Vila Mariana, are outside the trajectories of most. By attending to practitioners’ movements through urban space, I suggest we might build upon studies of religious transit that focus on switching affiliation. This literature has helpfully called attention to the seismic changes in the Brazilian religious field near the turn of the twenty-first century, particularly the growth of Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches. Relying largely on quantifiable survey data, these studies have focused largely on shifts in identity. In the United States, some surveys have explicitly asked about varied religious participation. A 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, for instance, shows that one-third of Americans attend services at more than one Campo é a Cidade: Fazendo Antropologia na Metrópole,” in Na metrópole: textos de antropolgia urbana, ed. José Guilherme Cantor Magnani and Lilian de Lucca Torres (São Paulo: Edusp, 1996), 45. Brazilian criticisms of neo-esotericism resembled some North American scholars’ disapproval of American “spiritualism,” or, in the words of Robert Bellah, “Sheliaism.” For a discussion of and response to these critiques, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2005), especially pp. 269-287. 122 place, and most attend services of a faith different than their own. (Twenty-six percent of Protestants indicated they attended services of different Protestant churches, and fifteen percent said they occasionally visited Catholic churches; on the other hand, eighteen percent of Catholics indicated they attended Protestant services.) Our understanding of religion in Brazil would benefit from such studies. But more ethnography, too, will help show how individuals’ religious trajectories relate to these broader trends.145 Attending to devotees’ movements also shows how they find significance in places and events that are not obviously religious, like dangerous intersections, gallows and stockades, and office fires. To borrow a definition from one sociologist of religion, we could say that “spirituality is produced in multiple social institutions, including many that we regularly do not consider religious.” That definition of spirituality grew out of fieldwork with Cambridge “metaphysicals,” who are different than Brazilian devotees of the souls. Spirituality is not an equivalent term in São Paulo and Cambridge. It has different connotations in each place. In the Brazilian context, the term does not imply a religiosity free of “organized religion”; as we have seen, devotees are comfortable participating in institutions. Likewise, in Portuguese, espiritualidade can refer to the place where spirits reside. Kardecists, for example, often refer to “our friends in the spirituality.” But I embrace these differences. We might say devotees engage in spiritual transit—that is, that their 145 “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” Pew Research Center, December 9, 2009, accessed November 29, 2016, http://www.pewforum.org/2009/12/09/many-americans-mix-multiple-faiths/. 123 movements are linked to those of the spirits, and that neither the living nor the dead are confined to explicitly religious spaces.146 When we attend to religious movement, we become attuned to its effects. For example, before Edir Macedo founded the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, the country’s largest neo-Pentecostal church, he experimented with Kardecism. Macedo came to denounce these religions as demonic, but the style of Pentecostalism he created bear the marks of Macedo’s and his early congregations’ past. As one sociologist writes, “the terreiro is constituted within Pentecostal worship itself, while the exus and pomba giras are ‘adoricized’ [adorcizado] to be triumphantly exorcized.” While never an active Kardecist, Macedo used his familiarity with the mediumship religions to building his church. As he proselytized in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, he knew what his flock was carrying with them. Like an animal whose dash through a forest carves a trail, we might say that the movement of Macedo and his followers cleared the way for future movement.147 In the next chapter, I more fully consider the effects of movement, suggesting that transit engenders transfer. While Edir Macedo was a leader whose fluency in Pentecostal Christianity and familiarity with mediumship traditions allowed him to build a powerful church, the movements of everyday people also leave traces. Sometimes these traces are visible, like the melted colored candlewax at the Church of the Hanged. Sometimes those 146 Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 182. 147 Pierre Sanchis, “O campo religioso contemporâneo no Brasil,” 109. Edir Macedo, Nada a perder: Momentos de convicção que mudaram minha vida (São Paulo: Planeta, 2012), 74ff. 124 traces are almost unreadable, knowable only through close observation or attentive conversation. In either case, when devotees move, they carry their past with them into different ritual environments. 125 4 Transfer: Traces of the Dead “She asked for the means to build a terreiro, and now she’s come to pay her obligation,” Leia said, gesturing toward Olinda, her mãe-de-santo. Olinda was standing near her silver Renault, busy talking on the phone. “That is, she came to give back what she got.” Leia had just finished leaving popcorn and small plastic cups filled with coffee on the tombs of each of the thirteen souls. We were at their shrine in Cemitério São Pedro, a large municipal cemetery in Zona Leste. Large trees shaded the area where we stood, and we could hear sabiá singing their famed birdsong. Leia and her mãe-de-santo were visiting São Paulo for a few weeks, having traveled from Manaus, a city in northern Brazil, to participate in Afro-Brazilian religious festivals on the São Paulo coast. They also came to thank the thirteen souls. “What is paying an obligation?” Leia asked. “It’s a matter of giving thanks, really.” Leia called Olinda over to us and introduced me as a researcher. Olinda was reluctant to talk, saying they had to go soon, but said she could answer a few questions. “Can I smoke a cigarette?” she asked. “For me, talking without smoking…” Lighting a Dunhill, Olinda began narrating her religious biography. Born in Fortaleza to a Pentecostal family, her mother thought she was possessed by a demon. “The pastor told my mother to give me to someone else. She gave me away.” Eventually she encountered Zé Bruno, an Umbanda master who informed her that she was suffering from these problems because she was a spirit medium, “that I had spirits of the depths with me.” Under his guidance, Olinda was initiated into Umbanda at seven years old and stayed in his terreiro for twenty-one years. In 126 time, Zé Bruno told her to follow her calling and “find other religions.” She was initiated in Candomblé, and said her new terreiro in Manaus incorporated “all of my roots, Umbanda, Angola [Candomblé], and Ketu [Candomblé].” And, she added, “it has a space for the thirteen souls.” I had thought these things were forbidden in Ketu Candomble, I began to say, but Olinda interjected. “No! Pay attention! I have roots from twenty-one days of birth until seven years, and I can’t throw this all away. Now, everything has to have its place. I have a big place, and saint has its place and the souls have theirs. The place for the church of the souls is the church of the souls. I can’t abandon my roots… I’m not going to throw this all away. When it’s the day for Candomblé, it’s only Candomblé. When it’s the day for Umbanda, it’s Umbanda. I don’t mix. If I leave something to the side, it’s because the people of Candomblé don’t cultivate caboclos or souls.”148 148 Interview, October 27, 2014. Despite claiming that she was in a rush, Olinda spoke with me for over forty minutes, most of which was soliloquy. She was eager to tell her story, and repeatedly suggested I write a book about her life. Though I did not notice it at the time, after rereading the transcript of our discussion, I realized that the significant events in her life all occurred at ages that were multiples of seven. “I’m a twin, born at seven months,” she said—a way of signifying premature birth but also, and even more so, a means of saying “I was eager to be born” within Afro-Brazilian tradition. As evidence of her possession, she said, “They put me and my sister in the crib, and my sister stayed… But when my mother came to get me, or the nanny came to get me, they’d only find my sister. I’d be on the floor, laying on the floor, or under the bed. They say that sometimes I’d go missing for twenty-one days.” Olinda also said that she was initiated into Umbanda at seven years old and stayed in Zé Bruno’s terreiro for twenty-one years. Her mother told her father she had died, and that when he returned from Italy, tended her grave for twenty-one years before learning the truth. We might read Olinda’s numerological emphasis as evidence of a particular speech genre—in this case, a style of spiritual biographical narrative common among practitioners of Black Atlantic traditions. Drawing from Bakhtin, Elizabeth Pérez defines speech genre as “a type of utterance that shares both the thematic contents and situational context for the performance of similar communicative events. The stability of speech genres over time derives, in part, from the frequency of their recurrence within groups or among members of particular social strata.” Pérez’s analysis focuses on initiation narratives in Lucumí, in which initiates present initiation as an “unchosen choice” that following affliction. While Olinda’s story was not strictly about initiation, she too explained her foray into Umbanda as a way of coping with the “spirits of the depths” that had unsettled her life. Other elements of her story, like the chthonic themes of premature birth (“sou de sete meses”), false death 127 I do not think Olinda’s insistence that she did not mix was deceitful or cynical. Multiplicity is not the same as mixture. Olinda distinguished between different traditions—Umbanda, Angola Candomblé, Ketu Candomblé, Catholicism—while participating in all of them. When she said “everything has to have its place,” she meant it both conceptually and in her terreiro—she could not give up these things, and so had altars to souls, orixás, and Umbanda entities under the same room. In Brazil, I have suggested, mixture is a loaded metaphor, conjuring associations with a national ideology of racial miscegenation that many still embrace today. It is also a clumsy one, particularly for describing the religiosity of devotees like Olinda. It is possible to collapse religious distinctions in synthetic projects, but it is also possible to move between religions, maintaining distinctions between each. Last chapter, I used the term transit to characterize how devotees move between religions. Their movement, I have suggested, is motivated by affective ties. Devotees visit places and engage in practices that make them feel good. But they also go to places associated with the people and beings important to them—the Pentecostal church frequented by a sister, the Kardecist center where a mother volunteered, the Catholic church where grandparents prayed to the dead. Sites popular for the devotion to souls are not just destinations. They are places of return. Olinda returned to São Paulo to give thanks to the thirteen souls, to “give back what she got.” And when Olinda gave back to the souls, she (Olinda said her mother told her father that she had died, and that he took care of her grave for twenty-one years), being “under” the bed or crib, are common themes in Afro-Brazilian spiritual biographies. Elizabeth Pérez, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 149-151. 128 brought something else with her: popcorn for Obaluaê and coffee for the pretos velhos, which Leia left atop the souls’ tombs. Before being initiated into Ketu Candomblé, Olinda’s pai-de-santo told her, “You have to get rid of all this you want me to initiate you,” referring to the souls and the Umbanda entities. But she refused. “I said, ‘If you want to initiate me, you’re going to have to accept it, because I’m not throwing anything away.’ Because this here gave me my life.” She was attached to the caboclos and the souls. “They sustain me, and I feel good. My family, thank God, my children are well, none are addicted to drugs, they’re all good parents. I won’t let anyone stop me. Because I came from these roots.” When devotees move between religions, their movement changes those religions. In this chapter, I explore how transit precipitates spiritual transfer. When I first started speaking with Leia, she demurred, telling me, “You should talk to Olinda. She has more baggage than me.” In her colloquial usage, baggage was not a burden, but the wisdom of experience. Olinda carried her baggage with her. She had been praying to the souls and cultivating her caboclo before being initiated into Ketu Candomblé, and would not throw them away. They were not just habits or beliefs, but personal beings who helped her and made her life what it was. Affectively bound to them, she brought the caboclos and souls with her as she built a Ketu Candomblé terreiro, and brought the orixás and pretos velhos to the tombs of the thirteen souls. Movement is never inert. 129 Affective Ties Like Olinda, other devotees have built altars or chapels for the souls. Those who have the space—rare in São Paulo—may build small yard shrines. They can also be configurations like Olinda’s, housed inside a larger terreiro or center. As I mentioned last chapter, many Umbanda centers have cruzes das almas, or crosses of the souls, where practitioners can light candles for the dead. These are common enough that one Umbandista told me, “An Umbandista who does nothing for the souls is not an Umbandista.”149 In May 2015, devotees in Tatuapé, an industrial neighborhood in São Paulo’s Zona Leste, built a chapel to the thirteen souls. The chapel was part of the Spiritualist Brotherhood of Force and Faith, a religious center with “roots in the African religious matrix,” as its director explained to me. Visiting one Monday afternoon a few weeks after the chapel opened, I was greeted by Isabelle, one of the center’s volunteers. After I had waited for a few minutes at the entrance, sitting across from a small altar to the pretos velhos, Isabelle led me into the chapel—a long white narrow room with a window along the right side. It was plainly adorned, with a few potted plants and a single wooden bench before an altar. The altar to the thirteen souls was also simple: thirteen wooden crosses, each about a foot tall, hung along the back wall. Five small tables in front of the altar each held an image of a Catholic saint. Thirteen small glass cups of water lined the wall, and though they were empty at the moment, Isabelle said the cups usually had candles in them.150 149 Interview, December 1, 2014. 150 Fieldnotes and interview, June 22, 2015. 130 Isabelle told me that José, the center’s director, had to take care of a few things before speaking with me. While José struggled to rescue his cat, Vinicius, who was stranded on one of the center’s rafters, I asked Isabelle about her experiences with the thirteen souls. Like most devotees in São Paulo, she said the devotees at the center identified the thirteen souls with the thirteen unidentified victims of a 1974 office fire (which I discuss next chapter). She affirmed the souls’ power. “Everything I asked, I received,” she said. “Whenever I talk about them I get goosebumps. Look.” She held up her arm and showed her skin. As she talked about some of the favors she received—help finding work, help buying a house, help with unspecified health issues—she shuddered, getting goosebumps again. Genuflecting, Isabelle brought her palms together in prayer, thanking the thirteen souls. After Isabelle left to take care of other business, I sat in the chapel alone for a few minutes while waiting for José. Hearing the hiss of spray paint, I peered out the window and saw a volunteer spraying a row of thirteen white candles with gold paint. When João entered, dressed in shorts and a black t-shirt, I could see the tattooed inscriptions of José’s religious commitments: on his left forearm, a black and red band in homage to Exú; on his left inner wrist, a black outline of Brazil; on his right calf, images of Ogum and Iansã. Like many mediumship-based religious centers in São Paulo, José explained that the Spiritualist Brotherhood is not “only Umbanda or Candomblé. We embrace spirituality.” His mother, a benzedeira (“blesser” or healer), taught him about the thirteen souls when he was young. He never gave up devotion to them, teaching it to others who visited his center. Even before the chapel’s opening, the devotion to the thirteen souls formed one of the pillars of the center’s 131 ritual life. In time, their gratitude to the souls was so great that they felt compelled to build a chapel in their honor. As José talked, I was curious to hear what he made of the place of suffering in the devotion. He and others sometimes referred to the thirteen souls as “spirits of light,” despite identifying them as the with the anonymous victims of an office fire. What do you think of the thirteen souls’ suffering at the moment of their death? I asked. “There’s an empathy, really,” he suggested. “For example, charity is empathy—you have to put yourself in the place of another person. I think so, that there’s a relation of empathy. I think every spirit, after reaching a universal consciousness of things, perceives our earthly suffering, and this generates empathy. But there’s nothing obligatory.” The devotion to souls is a way of confronting suffering and coping with grief, I have suggested, and José’s comments highlight how this confrontation can generate empathy. Neuroscientists have offered a helpful distinction between two types of empathy: affective and cognitive. Affective empathy is a sort of “emotional contagion” in which our perception of others’ emotions produces similar states within us. It appears to be neurologically distinct from cognitive empathy, which is the ability to understand others’ emotional states and loosely synonymous with theory of mind. The devotion can arouse either. At the moment we spoke, José’s empathy for the thirteen souls was more like the latter. But many devotees—such as Beatriz, the Pentecostal convert who came to tears when talking about hanged slaves—had visceral, involuntary bodily reactions as they spoke about the souls, like 132 quivering voices, tearing eyes, shortness of breath. Some were so overcome with emotion that they were unable to speak.151 Devotees are empathetic and sensitive to the souls’ suffering, but they also said the devotion made them feel good. It is not a penitential practice. Confronting suffering means facing it, grappling with it, but even more so, the attempt to alleviate it. When devotees prayed, they wept with sadness. But they also smiled and felt a sense of calm. At the Spiritualist Brotherhood, Isabelle’s goosebumps were a corporeal testament to her connection with the souls. While practitioners do not typically “incorporate” the souls in a mediumistic sense, the devotion engenders sensory engagement with the dead. “Every time you pray, you create a spiritual bond with them, and they manifest themselves. You don’t need to be a medium, because they can enter into your dreams,” or sometimes even the physical world. “Here, for example, we honor the souls, we pray and make pedidos, and all our prayers were answered. Manifestations are commonplace, sometimes we hear heavy footsteps and no one is there.” Like North American evangelicals who “learn to hear God” through regular prayer, the devotion can discipline practitioners into interpreting sensory data as evidence of souls’ presence.152 151 Empathy is a relatively new term, having first been coined in 1895, and its usage is far from consistent. In distinguishing between emotional and cognitive empathy, I mean only to draw attention to the fact that many devotees feel what they understand to have been the souls’ suffering, not just understand it. There are also other cognitive abilities at play here, not the least of which is imagination—after all, devotees are not seeing the souls suffer in front of them, but rather imagining how it must have been at the hour of their death (or at present, if they understand the dead to be in a painful state). For an overview of research on empathy, including the terms varied and sometimes contradictory denotations, see Jean Decety and William John Ickes, eds., The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). 152 These examples recall what Lurhmann, Nusbaum, and Thisted call the “absorption hypothesis.” They ask: “How does God become real to people when God is understood to be invisible and immaterial, as 133 Practitioners’ involuntary bodily responses suggest one way that devotees carry the souls with them. The practice transforms practitioners, binding the living and the dead and inculcating the souls’ presence into practitioners’ bodies, becoming part of their bodily habitus. Carrying the souls—or the orixás, or caboclos—changes the way one carries oneself.153 Their tears, trembling hands, and goosebumps suggest the depth of their affective ties with the dead. Last chapter, I argued that devotional sites are not just places practitioners go, but places to which they return. Even those who visit other religious places continue to practice the devotion in churches and cemeteries out of a sense of obligation and attachment. This “sense” is sensory: affective ties are always felt, generated by and generative of emotion. Enduring emotional connections with souls and spirits helps explain how transit provokes what I am calling spiritual transfer. In “Moving Between Religions in Brazil,” God is within the Christian tradition?” They suggest that the experience of God is learned through interpretation (via socially taught categories for identifying divine practice), practice (regular disciplining, such as via prayer), and proclivity (“a talent for and willingness to respond to practice”). Tanya M. Luhrmann, Howard Nusbaum, and Ronald Thisted, “The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelical Christianity,” American Anthropologist 112, no. 1 (March 1, 2010): 66–78. Put another way, there is an “aesthetics of sensibility” when it comes to spirits and other dead. That is, the dead are ephemeral, and their presence is registered through a disciplined sensory engagement. See Kristina Wirtz, “Spirituality, Agency, and Materiality in Cuba,” in Spirited Things, 102. 153 In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman famously writes, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” So do we all. This was the observation that led Marcel Mauss to propose the notion of habitus, later adapted by Bordieu: “I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realized it was at the cinema. I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Pans; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema.” We may pick up the comportment of those around us—the gesticulations a friend makes to emphasize his points, a news anchor’s way of delicately replacing her glasses after they slide slightly down her nose, the way a teacher writes the letter F on the blackboard. This, in the words of Leia, is our “baggage.” Marcel Mauss, “The Notion of Body Techniques,” in Sociology and Psychology: Essays by Marcel Mauss (London: Routledge, 1979), 100. Unlike Bourdieu, I am not, here, talking about a particular “structured and structuring” class habitus; as I indicated in the Introduction, I did not see any clear connection between the devotion and class. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 101-102. 134 Miriam Rabelo traces the trajectory of Lurdinha, a mãe-de-santo in Salvador, Bahia. Like Olinda, Lurdinha moved from Umbanda to Candomblé and did not want give up the caboclo and exu spirits that the “orthodox” Candomblé houses consider syncretic aberrations. Rabelo argues that whereas the African orixás are distant and superior, “caboclos and exus like to mingle with humans; they drink, smoke, chat, and give advice.” Adepts form “very personal and affectively charged bonds with these spirits.” Like the souls, they become friends. When priestesses like Lurdinha and Olinda found terreiros, they often bring these friends along, incorporating them into their terreiros’ ritual space. “It is the force of these affective ties, rather than the persistence of beliefs, that sets syncretic work in motion.”154 The force of affective ties offers a more convincing account for so-called syncretism than the “camouflage theory,” which says that orixás “hide behind” Catholic saints. For example, an employee at the Church of the Hanged, said that slaves, unable to openly worship their gods, would hollow out images of Catholic saints and hide images of orixás inside. Many others have offered similar explanations: in a video about Casa de Oxumaré, a famous Candomblé house, an adept says that slaves hid their orixá statues within altars to saints, taking them out only when the masters were out of sight. Though plausible (if apocryphal), these accounts fail to explain why so many Candomblé adepts are devoted to saints despite legally guaranteed free exercise in Brazil. One simple explanation is that these saints are familiar beings for whom devotees feel something. If we think of religion as a 154 Miriam Rabelo, “Moving between Religions in Brazil,” 852. As scholars like Catherine Bell have noted, prioritizing belief over action (or in this case, affect) has been perennially at issue in the study of religion. See Catherine M. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 135 “network of relationships between heaven and earth involving humans of all ages and many different sacred figures together,” we might say that for many, saints and souls are key nodes in this network.155 Olinda insisted that though she had an altar to the souls in her terreiro, she was not mixing. She differentiated between religions, conceptually and spatially. As she said, “Everything has to have its place.” We see a similar attitude among practitioners of other Black Atlantic traditions. For example, Elizabeth Pérez tells of Ashabi Mosley, the head priestess of a Lucumí house temple in South Side Chicago. Before her initiation into Lucumí (commonly known as Santería), Ashabi was initiated into Palo Monte, the “Kongo-inspired Afro-Cuban religion,” and was a practitioner of Puerto Rican Espiritismo. She and her followers celebrated these traditions within the temple, and Ashabi maintained a nganga—“a cauldron that contains the organic, mineral, and manmade sacra” of Palo Monte—in an alcove near the bathroom. Pérez observes that the nganga’s spatial marginalization reflected its subordinate position of Palo Monte in the temple. But while subordinate, its presence suggests that like Olinda, Ashabi could not just abandon her roots.156 155 Fieldnotes, March 24, 2014. For other examples, see, e.g.., “Candomblé: Brazil's Most Popular Religion You Know Nothing About,” YouTube video 2:17, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnQfOXUFHws (accessed July 21, 2016). Note the adept’s language: “For instance, in this altar here, it used to be, in the old days, it used to be full of Catholic saints, and the orixás—there is a door behind the altar, and the orixás used to be hidden inside.” This temple, like some others, seems to have largely done away with images of Catholic saints. For more on the masking of saints and anti-syncretism, see Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and the Gods, 71; and Palmié, “Against Syncretism,” 81-83. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 2. 156 Elizabeth Pérez, Religion in the Kitchen, 40-41. 136 The first definition for the term transfer in the Oxford English Dictionary is “to convey or carry from one place, person, etc. to another.” In saying transit can engender spiritual transfer I mean to highlight that devotees’ movement transforms religions—and particularly, religious spaces. In a way, movement can be a quality of a given space. In colloquial Portuguese, one way to say a place is busy is to say está muito movimentado—literally, “it’s very movement-ed.” With respect to devotional sites, the faithful may see this movement as a sign of a saints’ or souls’ holiness and efficacy. As one priest said about St. Expeditus, one of São Paulo’s most popular saints, “He wouldn’t be so popular if the devotion didn’t work!” In the 1960s and 70s, observers wondered at the multitudes visiting the Church of the Hanged to pray to the souls, and journalists published pieces that only increased its prestige.157 Second, by transfer, I mean that when devotees move between religions, they “convey or carry” things with them. My use of the word things is deliberately ambiguous, and should not be taken to mean strictly material objects. While it is true that devotees do bring heterodox physical objects (like colored candles) with them, they also bring beliefs (like reincarnation), practices (like unapproved prayers and simpatias), and comportments (such as always exiting holy places while facing inward). But the distinction between these things is 157 “Transfer,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2016. Fieldnotes, October 27, 2014. Of course, a saint’s reputation for efficacy can be advertised, and many suggest that that St. Expeditus’s popularity in São Paulo is due largely to Eli Corrêa, a popular radio personality who promoted the devotion in the 1980s and 90s. Fieldnotes, September 15, 2014. Elenice Rampazzo, “OIII GEEENTEEE!!! O SANTO NO AR!!!! A propagação da devoção ao Santo Expedito por intermédio do programa de radio ‘Eli Corrêa’” (MA thesis, Pontifícia Universidade Católica São Paulo, 2006). 137 somewhat artificial. The church forbids colored candles not because the Holy Spirit has an inherent repulsion to dyed paraffin, but because these objects are charged with particular meanings in the representational economy of the Brazilian southeast. When I told one Catholic priest that devotional candles were often colored in the United States, he replied, “Oh yeah? Well… you don’t have Umbandistas in the United States!”158 It might be more meaningful to say that devotees bring configurations—of belief, practice, comportment, and ritual objects, but also of experience, emotion, doubts, and fears—when they move. While exactly what they bring changes, depending on the person and the context, the more salient point here is that we all have baggage. No one ever travels alone. The Useful Dead With respect to the cult of the souls, the notion of spiritual transfer is also a way of making sense of the souls’ purported efficacy. It comes from, and is a way of characterizing, the system of mutual aid that maintains the relationship between the living and the dead. Like the saints, whom Peter Brown has elegantly called the “very special dead,” even the somewhat-less-special dead are able to help the living. “[I pray] because they’re very powerful,” explained a devotee at the Chapel of the Hanged. She continued, “If you have faith you’ll attain [any favor], I already received a lot of favors.”159 For almost all devotees, the souls’ power was indisputable. “My mother always said that when you pray to the 158 Fieldnotes, October 27, 2014. 159 Interview, May 19, 2014. 138 souls… you’ll receive every miracle you could need in life, because the souls are so powerful,” another told me. Devotees had multiple motivations for practicing the devotion. Many told me they were honoring family tradition, that “souls need light,” or that they wanted to remember all those who had been forgotten. But as one devotee told me, people “principally start when there’s something in your life that’s not going well.” The souls’ reputation for efficacy sustains the contemporary devotion.160 Devotees commonly explained the souls’ ability to help the living in terms of intercession. At the Spiritualist Brotherhood, José told me that the devotion to the thirteen souls “grew in São Paulo because people sought their intercession… and obtained miracles.” Later, he explained the process: “You make a request, you solicit their intercession—and, the Catholic belief says the souls need prayer, need supplication, so they can be comforted.”161 Like many others, José described the living and dead as bound in a relationship of mutual aid, where devotees offer their prayers and the flame in exchange for the souls’ heavenly help. The notion of intercession is familiar to devotees by way of the cult of the saints. In Catholic theology, intercession is “the act of pleading by one who in God's sight has a right to do so in order to obtain mercy for one in need.” However, it “differs from all other species of prayer because the benefit sought is for another.” That the saints, angels, and Mary can intercede for the living has been dogma since the Council of Trent. The capacity of the dead 160 Interview, October 27, 2014. 161 Interview, June 22, 2015. 139 to intercede for the living, on the other hand, has been a matter of some debate.162 But today, that capacity is clearly defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states: In full consciousness of this communion of the whole Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, the Church in its pilgrim members, from the very earliest days of the Christian religion, has honored with great respect the memory of the dead; and 'because it is a holy and a wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins' she offers her suffrages for them” (Lumen Gentium 50; cf. 2 Macc 12:45.) Our prayer for them is capable not only of helping them, but also of making their intercession for us effective. (Emphasis added.)163 Many affirmed souls have no power of their own. When I asked Beatriz, the Pentecostal convert, why “souls have the power to help people,” she corrected me. “Look: they do not have any power at all. They say… I don’t know, because I’ve never disincarnated, but it is said that they go to the Son of the Father, Jesus Christ, and ask. They ask Him… They go and intercede with the Son, the Son intercedes with the Father, the Lord of all, He that created everything.” Others offered similar explanations when I implied that souls could help the living. “It’s not they that help,” said Elis. “They can intercede for you—I believe it’s like this—they intercede and bring your pedido to other spirits, like Jesus.” Like Beatriz, Elis had been raised Catholic but moved toward different religions. She said she 162 P.J. Mahoney, “Intercession,” in New Catholic Encylopedia, 2nd ed., vol. 7 (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 519-520. “The capacity for the dead to act in the world and/or appear to the living has been a subject of debate since the days of the Church Fathers. While Augustine, who Jean-Claude Schmitt names the “true founder of the Christian theory of ghosts,” strongly argued against apparitions of the dead—having held that only a only a “spiritual image” of the dead could appear to the living, and even then might be introduced by demons rather than the dead themselves—ghosts never fully disappeared. Some, like Peter the Venerable, the eighth abbot of Cluny—the prestigious monastic order responsible for institutionalizing All Souls’ Day in 1030—wrote reports of the dead appearing to the living in dreams, which served to “confirm Cluny’s vocation to save souls in purgatory from their agony in the hereafter.” See Ghosts in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 19-22, 71, 75. 163 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed., 958, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p123a9p5.htm (accessed June 21, 2016). 140 no longer went to mass, but instead frequented a small Spiritist center in Ipiranga, the neighborhood she grew up in.164 Intercession is a type of transfer. By praying to the dead, the dead are able to pray for—and deliver the pedidos of—the living. Perhaps to the chagrin of some Catholic theologians, most devotees who invoked intercession saw it more in terms of souls’ delivery of pedidos than their prayer for the living. Elis was explicit about this, saying that the souls bring pedidos to other, more powerful or holy spirits. One devotee likened it to a corporate hierarchy, saying, “I think it’s like this… a firm has a director, right? And then it has a manager? And then a supervisor, for you who are there below, and can’t speak with the director or the manager. You have to speak with the supervisor, and the supervisor goes there in the manager’s office and says, ‘Look, Elis, she wants a raise [ela tá querendo aumento].’ And the manager says, ‘I’ll go see with the director if we can give her a raise.’ I think there’s a scale like that.” The souls are lowly, but that means they are near us, able to carry our requests up the corporate ladder.165 Even when devotees did not invoke intercession as the mechanism of souls’ power, they offered explanations that relied on souls’ spatial proximity and similarity to the living. After talking about intercession, the Spiritualist Brotherhood’s director suggested the thirteen souls “exist in a parallel world to the earth, which isn’t material, but in some way they have control over the materiality of things here on earth… they manipulate this plasma, this thing 164 Interviews, July 7 and July 21, 2014. 165 Interview, July 21, 2014. 141 of terrestrial life.” José’s language was typical of Kardecism, and several others drew from Kardecist or broadly “harmonial” language, explaining that souls could help by manipulating energy or vibrations. Marina, a professed Kardecist, used more material language: “It’s as if the blessed souls were people like us. That’s why I think they’re here with us, they’re present. They know what you need and I need, as if they were friends.” Likening the souls to Patrick Swayze’s character in Ghost, she said that if you need something from someone, the souls will go to them, “blow” and “move themselves rapidly” to get that person’s attention.166 For all the diversity in their explanations, most devotees agreed that souls are in a special position to help the living because of their likeness to us. Like Marina, devotees often described them as friends. Deise, the devotee who was visiting the Chapel of the Afflicted with her nephew, told me, “I call the souls my friends… I pray for the thirteen souls, the afflicted souls, they’re my friends.” Another said she would talk with the souls while working as a street vendor. Selling her wares without a license, she had to worry about police in addition to thieves. The souls, she said, would advise her on where to set up shop and protect her when she faced trouble. “I can walk right through [the police] and they won’t see me, or 166 Interviews, June 22, 2015 and July 28, 2014, respectively. I borrow the term “harmonial” from Sydney Ahlstrom, who defines harmonial religion as “those forms of piety and belief in which spiritual composure, physical health, and even economic well-being are understood to flow from a person’s rapport with the cosmos.” This style of religiosity bears obvious similarity to Catharine Albanese’s more recent work on “metaphysical religion,” but here I find Ahlstrom’s emphasis on harmony more applicable to the Brazilian context. While Brazil and the United States have very different religious histories, this language—which comes largely from Swedenborg and Mesmer—took hold in both nations for similar reasons, not the least of which were Spiritualism and Spiritism. Sydney Ahlstrom, “Harmonial Religion since the Later Nineteenth Century,” in A Religious History of the American People, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 1019. Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 142 they’ll see me and not stop me… I know that I really believe, and I say the souls are my friends.”167 Put another way, theological explanations of efficacy are secondary to devotees’ affective ties with the souls. Most seemed as unconcerned with the mechanics of souls as Facebook users are with the physics of fiber optic cables and the nuances of Internet architecture. “I don’t know how to explain, but they help, they help,” one devotee admitted. Almost all devotees took this as a matter of fact. Whatever other profound and moving meanings are part of the devotion, what Guillame Cuchet calls souls’ reputation as “practitioners of small-time thaumaturgy” helps account for why thousands of people visit devotional sites on Mondays—and why many have spent their time and money on building new sites, like the Shrine to the Thirteen Souls.168 Time and time again, devotees told me they began praying to the souls while in a time of need, and that their prayers were answered. Even though many devotees say their practice is motivated by souls’ need—their need for prayer, for light, and for the help of the living—this need sustains a relationship of mutual aid. If souls were powerless to help the living, devotional sites would merely be haunted. Souls would be demoted to ghosts or obsessing spirits. The potential for reciprocity makes the souls useful, and the souls’ utility makes them relevant. 167 Interviews, December 15 and July 7, 2014. 168 Cuchet, “The Revival of the Cult of Purgatory,” 83. 143 Devotional Traces At the Church of the Hanged, one of the most popular places to pray is before a small wooden cross. About a meter tall, its sits on a table near the nave’s front doors. Its dark, unadorned wood mimics the original Holy Cross of the Souls of the Hanged, which, mounted high on the wall behind the altar, is out of devotees’ reach. Many, like a ninety-year-old woman visited the church every Friday, always in black mourning dress, seemed pained as they bowed their heads in prayer, gripping the base whose wood was worn smooth from the touch of many hands. Some clutched their rosaries as they prayed, and others prayed with their palms out toward it. And on Mondays, devotees left dozens of copies of the Novena to the Afflicted Souls at the cross’s base. “Whatever else religions do,” writes Thomas Tweed, “they move across time and space. They are not static. And they have effects. They leave traces. They leave trails.” This is because religions are embodied, and bodies leave marks as they move. A woman walking through a field leaves a fleeting impression of her path, marked by bent stalks of grass and footprints in the dirt. The stone steps of the Chapel of the Hanged have been burnished by the feet of the many faithful. In the words of de Certeau, these marks are “the fascinating presence of absences” that hint at the movements of those who came before.169 The printed Novena to the Afflicted Souls is also a trace. It is a different kind of presence of a different kind of absence; unlike a footprint, it is not the impression of a body 169 Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, 62. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 21. 144 on a surface.170 Rather, it is a deliberate deposit, like chewing gum on a Metrô seat or a Bible in a hotel room’s nightstand. Unlike the wax of a white candle, its purpose is not obscure to us. Unlike a footprint, the Novena tells a story with words. (See Figure 8.) 170 Tim Ingold, “Footprints along the path,” in The Life of Lines (New York: Routledge, 2015), 60-63. 145 Figure 8. Novena to the Afflicted Souls. Collected June 2014. Typographical and grammatical errors preserved in translation. NOVENA “THE AFFLICTED SOULS” This novena is prayed only on “Mondays” Every time [you go to] the Church, “bring 09 (nine) copies of this Novena, one candle ”, offering to the Afflicted Sous ETERNAL FATHER, I OFFER YOU THE BLOOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, FOR THE RELIEF OF THE SUFFERING SOULS THAT STILL ENDURE IN PURGATORY. I BEG YOU, MY JESUS CHRIST, THE SAVIOR OF THE WORLD, THAT YOU RETURN THEM THE LOST LIGHT, AND YOU, HOLY AND BLESSED SOULS, WHO ARE SO POWERFUL, I BEG YOU, INTERCEDE TOGETHER WITH OUR POWERFUL LORD JESUS CHRIST, REDEEMER OF THE WORLD, FOR THE LIVING SUFFERERS ON EARTH, AMONG WHOM I ALSO FIND MYSELF. I BESEECH YOU, BLESSED SOULS, TO ACCEPT MY PRAYER. GIVE THEM, LORD, ETERNAL REST AND ILLUMINATE THEM IN PERPETUAL LIGHT. REST IN PEACE, AMEN. (MAKE THE PEDIDOS) Pray: 01 – Our Father – 02 – Hail Mary – 03 – Glory be to the Father Who does not have faith will be moved by what will happen. It is so moving that by the third Monday, you will see your pedido answered. Good luck!!! 146 The Novena is a trace, and it also bears traces within it. Unlike the professionally printed santinhos—small images of saints with prayers on the reverse—devotees photocopy or hand copy it, sometimes modifying it in the process. In the version above, one devotee chronicled her devotion, reporting her nine successive visits to the Church of the Hanged. That is, judging by the handwriting, the devotee was probably a woman—but it is not so certain. And because the Novena was photocopied, the handwriting says nothing about the devotee who left it. This is to say that traces are always only “partly readable paths,” always ambiguous and uncertain.171 This uncertainty is evident in the content of Novena to the Afflicted Souls, which is always changing. Over the course of 2014, I collected several dozen Novenas at the Church of the Hanged, Chapel of the Afflicted, and Sanctuary of the souls. Twenty-six of these were unique copies, and these varied widely. Some referenced purgatory while others did not; some had but a brief prayer that invoked God and Jesus, while others (like Figure 8, above) had a lengthy one; some listed graces devotees had received. Still, while there are potentially limitless versions of the Novena, it also seems to have a few consistent features. This makes sense: every iteration is a reiteration. Difference is built upon sameness. Its basic structure is something like this: 1. Instructions: Pray the novena on Mondays at a church (or, in one version, cemetery), each time bringing nine copies of the novena and lighting a candle. 2. Reassurance1: You will receive a grace before completing the novena. (This is present in most versions, but not in Figure 8) 3. Prayer1: God, I offer you the blood of Jesus Christ in relief of the souls; Souls, I beg you to intercede for me. 4. Prayer2: Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory be to the Father 171 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xviii. 147 5. Reassurance2: Even those with little faith will be moved. Your grace will be delivered by the third Monday of the novena. Whatever else the Novena does, it sets the terms for practitioners’ relationships with the souls. It demands movement by requiring that devotees go to a church (or cemetery) to light candles. It also reproduces movement by mandating that devotees leave copies of the Novena, allowing others to discover the prayer. (This seems to work, as I spoke with two practitioners who had started praying to the afflicted souls after seeing the Novena.) Its appeal is heartfelt and enticing. It recognizes the reader’s suffering and promises to alleviate that suffering, and fast. Suffering and mutual need underpin the relationship between the living and the dead. The Novena begins with a plea to God “to alleviate of the suffering souls that still endure in purgatory” and begs Jesus Christ to “return them the lost light.” Even the language invoking Christ is visceral—in each of the innumerable versions, the devotee offers “the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” The version above emphatically emphasizes the pitiable condition of the devotee, who finds herself among “the living sufferers on earth.” The novena promises to help the afflicted souls, and in so doing, to deliver the devotee from her own suffering, and fast. “It is so moving that by the third Monday, you will see your pedido answered.”172 172 The novena is common enough at popular devotional sites that it would be hard for church employees and clergy to stop it. But the novena does not have ecclesiastical approval. It probably never will. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (2111) explicitly forbids practices attributing “the efficacy of prayers or of the sacramental signs to their mere exhibition or performance, apart from the interior dispositions they demand.” The staff of the Church of the Hanged occasionally distribute a small, ecclesiastically approved brochure that explains the devotion to souls and has an alternative “Novena for the Souls,” which neither makes miraculous guarantees nor diminishes the necessity of faith. It even instructs the reader to “Only use prayers 148 In this chapter, I have left the term pedido untranslated, as it warrants some discussion. While typically translated as “request” in religious contexts, like saudade, pedido has a variety of overlapping English translations, none of which fully capture its range of meanings. Derived from pedir (to ask), it is one of most the most commonly used words in Portuguese. It usually means “order” or “request,” such as at a store or restaurant. It can also mean “inquiry”—when one contacts customer service, one makes a pedido. Finally, it can mean to make a wish: for example, in an episode of A Viagem, a popular Spiritist-themed telenovela, a couple sees a falling star. The husband turns to his wife, saying tenderly, “Faça seu pedido” (Make your wish).173 The pedido is common among many of Brazil’s religions, and in this context, it usually means something between a request and a wish. In making a pedido to saints and souls, one beseeches their help, but does not demand it. The anthropologist Renata de Castro Menezes has described what she calls the “etiquette of the pedio,” a way to ask. The language of pedidos, she notes, is stylistically distinct from everyday speech, often employing a formal tone, established partly through the use of the pronouns “tu” and “vós” (you), common in Catholic oratory but rare in everyday speech in southeastern Brazil. Practitioners often lavish superlatives upon the beings to whom they pray; the souls, we have seen, are often described as “powerful,” and Menezes notes that devotees of Saint Anthony commonly approved by the Church. This way, we have certainty that we pray with the entire Church. The prayer included in this santinho is approved by the Church.” 173 In their authoritative frequency dictionary of Portuguese, Mark Davies and Ana Maria Raposo Preto-Bay, list pedir as the 235th most commonly-used word. See Mark Davies and Ana Maria Raposo Preto-Bay, A Frequency Dictionary of Portuguese: Core Vocabulary for Learners (New York: Routledge, 2008). 149 call him “glorious.” They are careful not to ask for too much or for superfluous things, as well as to be thankful for past favors received. Dona Renata at the Chapel of the Afflicted explained how devotees could frame their pedidos in terms of other people: if a mother disapproves of her daughter’s boyfriend, she might ask that the souls help her job application in a foreign city, where she would be out of his reach.174 Devotees sometimes use commercial language and comportment in making pedidos. They talk about “paying” promises. “Never forget to pay your promessa after you receive a favor,” one devotee insisted. And like debts, promises are transferable. One devotee who had been visiting the Chapel of the Hanged for about three months explained, “My mother, ah… made this agreement with the souls that, every time I close a good deal, I would come here and light a candle. So she made this promise, and it’s only me that has to pay!” She laughed at her predicament, continuing, “Every time I close a good deal, I have to come here… for the rest of my life!”175 Devotees also worry about being in the souls’ debt. While I was hanging around the administrative desk at the Chapel of the Afflicted, a devotee approached Dona Renata and asked to buy eight candles. As she had just bought a pack of eight candles not ten minutes earlier, Renata asked her what happened. “One of them fell over,” she explained. Renata 174 While the pedido is especially prominent in Catholic devotional culture, it is also common within the Afro-Brazilian religions—particularly the loose style of religiosity that tends to be characterized as Umbanda—and Kardecism. At the Spiritist Federation of São Paulo, for example, there is a wooden box in the consultation area where one can deposit vibrações (vibrations), which in this context is just a synonym for pedido. On the Catholic context, see Renata de Castro Menezes, “Saber pedir: A etiqueta do pedido aos santos,” Religião e Sociedade 24, no. 1 (2004): 46–64. Fieldnotes, September 15, 2014. 175 Interviews, May 19, 2014. 150 offered a candle free of charge. “No, I need all eight. It’s a ritual.” When Renata offered a package of eight for free, the devotee insisted on paying. I thought little of it until months later, when another devotee paid Renata with a one real note, a denomination that is no longer in circulation. Though valid, Renata thought it was not and gave it to me, laughing as she explained devotees will scrounge up change if they need to, and that they almost never take candles for free or on credit. “They’re not worried about owing me money,” she said. “They don’t want to be in debt to the souls.”176 Renata, however, resisted seeing devotees’ relationships with the souls as merely transactional. I once asked her if there was any significance to the number of candles people buy, suggesting that maybe some bought more in hopes of currying the souls’ favor. “Michael, you ask impossible questions,” she said, slapping her hands together in a gesture that signified she had no idea. But after thinking about it for a moment, she said that sometimes devotees buy more candles after receiving a favor, as a way of showing thanks. “It’s not just an exchange,” Renata said, but more like a “seeking” or a “day-to-day conversation.” It could be that Dona Renata was trying to put a good face on the devotion, perhaps to contrast it with the neo-Pentecostal churches we had been talking about earlier, which she characterized as money-hungry “aberrations.” But she also had thought deeply about the devotion. After all, she had been working at the chapel for thirteen years and talked to devotees week in and week out. When she first started working there, she said, she 176 Fieldnotes, May 5, 2014 and February 23, 2015. 151 did not like the devotion very much. But in time she came to see it as beautiful. She told me that devotees do not have a simple, tit-for-tat relationship with the souls. “It is not magic,” she insisted.177 In highlighting the enduring, personal connections that devotees have with the souls, Dona Renata’s comments remind us of the depth of devotional life. This is important, lest we see the devotion as coldly transactional, as some scholars have. “These potent mediators inevitably follow a principle of exchanges [trocas],” writes Monique Aguras in her study of the 177 Fieldnotes, September 15, 2014. The cult of the souls’ ostensibly instrumental quality has prompted some scholars to characterize it as “magical.” In her study of the devotion in contemporary Rio de Janeiro, Monique Augras writes, “Devotees that we observed and interviewed searched practical and immediate solutions for their problems. They spoke of ‘faith’ and ‘favors’ received.” But behind these terms, she submits, is “the presence of old magic”—that is, the technique of appealing to supernatural forces to bring about a “concrete objective.” Citing Mauss, she submits that magic is the “art of doing,” aimed towards specific, worldly issues, while religion “tends to be abstract.” Augras is sensitive to magic’s problematic genealogy, noting that all too often, “magic is the religion of others.” Why, then, defend the term’s analytical utility? At one level, she toes the classic social scientific line in seeing magic as analytically and ontologically distinct from religion. But the term also does work for Augras. Like most observers, Augras notes the apparent syncretism—or, in her preferred language, “porosity”—in the devotion to souls. Magic offers a conceptual means make sense of it. Demoted from religion to magic, the devotion becomes a free-floating, transposable “technique” aimed at “pure efficacy,” lacking religion’s systematic coherence. While I laud Augras’s attention to “dynamism, exchanges, and transformations, and at the level of the devotee, the possibility of walking ‘a thousand paths simultaneously or successively,” I suggest we do so without resorting to the fraught analytic distinction between religion and magic. It is no coincidence that talk of magic tends to surface in discussions of syncretism. Batside, for example, talks about a magical “principle of addition,” the unsystematic, syncretic accumulation of techniques. Antônio Flávio Pierucci, from whose work Augras draws, follows the likes of Durkhiem and Evans-Pritchard in arguing that “Magic is less a system of beliefs than a conjunction of practices.” Magic, it would seem, offers a way to talk about marginalized practices, or even popular practices that are not aligned with a particular orthodoxy. But like syncretism, it can only do so by positing a point of essential stability—usually an implicitly normative notion of Catholicism, Kardecism, or Yoruba-based Candomblé—against which to measure change, cultural “survivals,” and other varieties of spiritual deviance. See Augras, A segunda-feira é das almas, 13-14. Antônio Flávio Pierucci, A Magia (São Paulo: PubliFolha, 2001), 83-85. I do not think magic is a useful analytic term, but it is important to recognize that it is an emic one. Books on magic are abundant, and simpatias (magical formulae)—a term I suspect comes from the academic distinction between “sympathetic” and “contagious” magic—are a prominent feature of Brazilian religion. And while none of the practitioners I spoke with described the devotion as magical, prayers like the Novena to the Afflicted Souls and the Prayer to the Thirteen Souls are often included in grimoires like The Book of St. Cyprian. 152 devotion in Rio de Janeiro. While devotees’ language and comportment can support such an interpretation, it can also undermine it. It is true that they talk about “paying promessas” and refuse to take candles on loan. But as Menezes observes, the pedido is “thanked… no one speaks of ‘paying a pedido.’” I would add that pedidos are a much more common way of interacting with the souls, as promessas are often reserved for more desperate situations. “Not every thanks given to a saint is payment for something,” writes Menezes.178 This is not to say that the devotion to souls is completely unlike exchange—only that, in the words of Dona Renata, “it’s not just an exchange.” There is a mode of argumentation, common in scholarship on religion in Latin America, that tends to interpret religion in terms of a ham-handed Marxist structuralism. Religion, in this line of thinking, reflects and reproduces a particular socioeconomic configuration and all the inequality that goes along with it. I am not convinced by this tautology. The cult of the saints, for example, may have been borne of late Roman systems of patronage, but Catholics the world over are not mired in patronage politics.179 178 Augras, A segunda-feira é das almas, 13. Menezes, “Saber pedir,” 52. 179 Diana DeG. Brown, for example, argues that Umbanda is characterized by “personal, dyadic, patronage relations” that “reproduce the relations of class domination”; see Umbanda, 12, 87. Similarly, Rowan Ireland invites “the reader to consider that they [i.e., Afro-Brazilian religions] might be reconstituting patronage politics”; Kingdoms Come: Religion and Politics in Brazil (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 5. See also David Stoll, Is Latin America turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990), 114. One of the most startling arguments in Roger Bastide’s otherwise careful magnum opus holds that magical, syncretic sects like Umbanda and macumba—unlike the “authentic” Candomblé—reproduce the individualistic logic of capitalism, thus fomenting “social parasitism” and immoral “tendencies that may range from rape to murder” (The African Religions of Brazil, 25, 403). This same mode of argumentation accounts for the thinly-veiled optimism surrounding the rapid growth of Pentecostalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. For example, in Tongues of Fire, David Martin argues that the rise of evangelical Protestantism in Latin America is a phenomenon of major cultural and political significance because a “free, voluntaristic evangelical Protestantism is the creator of free social space,” which is an essential characteristic of modernity. The genius of Protestantism, according to Martin, is its “autonomous mobilization 153 More importantly here, the language of commercial exchange does not adequately capture the devotion’s deeply affective qualities. This, I think, is more a problem with the ideological investments of contemporary economic thought than the nature of commercial transactions. As David Graeber argues in his history of debt, economic discourse (and the social theory that draws from it) tends to view human beings as “self-interested actors calculating how to get the best terms possible out of any situation,” which is “curious, considering experimental psychologists have demonstrated over and over again that these assumptions simply aren’t true.” We often make “irrational” economic choices, motivated more by emotion, impulse, and laziness than careful calculation of financial self-interest.180 The etiquette of the pedido suggests this spiritual transfer is more delicate than a simple commercial exchange. True, the pedido has a vaguely transactional quality: the devotee asks a supernatural being for something, and if he receives it, gives thanks for some amount of time. This amount of time may be predetermined, as in the Novena to the Afflicted Souls, but it is typically unspecified. However, though this give-and-take is a necessary component of the pedido, it is not sufficient to sustain devotional relationships. Devotion relies on and reinforces affective ties between devotees and saints or souls. As the strength of these relationships change, so too do the ways devotees talk about them. of mass consciousness” that “energized individual persons” and was “active, participatory, fissile, egalitarian, and enthusiastic.” Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 274. Aside from the historical dubiousness of the argument that American voluntarism is, to adapt Tracy Fessenden’s argument, the “free gift” of Protestantism—not to mention that there is little data to support that Protestantism has promoted voluntarism elsewhere—I do not think it is the scholar’s place to celebrate a given religious configuration as an edifying tonic for an implicitly backwards peoples. 180 David Graber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Hoboken: Melville House, 2011), 90. 154 Most of those I spoke with called themselves devotees of the souls, saying “sou devota” or “sou devoto,” a grammatical construction that signifies a permanence in its use of ser rather than estar.181 In its most basic sense, “devotion” is a formal vow of fealty, and with respect to the souls, indicates an especially strong relationship. But devotion is not the only type of relationship that one can have with supernatural beings. Not all those I spoke with claimed the label of devotee, and it was apparent that some were fleeting or novice practitioners. Sometimes, devotees of the souls or a particular saint may make a pedido to another understood to be particularly skilled in certain affairs. At the Church of the Hanged, I often saw deposited “Sandals of St. Anthony,” a type of novena printed on sandal-shaped paper that was typically used for help in finding or repairing a relationship with a husband or wife. Similarly, many beseeched St. Expeditus for help with urgent financial or legal matters. And like Olinda and José, the devotees I spoke with also ventured outside the “church triumphant,” forming relationships with caboclos, pretos velhos, and orixás. These relationships between natural and supernatural beings would be better thought of in terms of altruistic reciprocity than as commercial transactions. As with a friend from whom one might need a favor, the faithful want to remain in these beings’ good favor. 181 As in Spanish, both ser and estar mean “to be,” but ser is used to indicate permanent or inherent features, and estar is reserved for temporary ones. No one says estou devoto; devotion, by nature, is an abiding engagement. 155 Conclusion Motivated by affective ties, devotees go out of their way on Mondays, spending time to travel to devotional sites to pray, light candles, and thank the souls. This movement leaves traces. The piles of Prayers to the Thirteen Souls and Novena to the Afflicted Souls, the constant flux of devotees, and the soot from countless paraffin candles marks devotional sites as special. What I am calling spiritual transfer is not just a “carrying across” denominational boundaries, but is a process inextricable from religious movement and inherent to religious space. Religious spaces are generated, made by the bodies that build them, pass through them, dwell in them, and leave things in them.182 Transfer is also inherent to religious devotions, which are by definition ritual means of engaging spiritual beings. With respect to the devotion to souls, the image of the candle will help illuminate this point. Like Charon’s ferry on the river Styx, the candle is a transport vessel between this world and the next. The Portuguese word for candle, vela, is a back-formation of the verb velar, meaning to keep wake or vigil. Derived from the Latin vēlum, it can also mean the sail of a ship. The candle is thus intimately linked with the dead and with movement, both etymologically and culturally. In the nineteenth century, people would light candles over the deceased to drive away evil spirits. A period of sumptuous funerals, the wealthy would spend enormous sums to have hundreds of candles burned for their souls’ 182 Thomas A. Tweed, “Space,” Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, 7, no. 1 (2011): 116–23. 156 sake. For devotees, the candle lights the way of the dead, but also carries the prayers of the living into the afterlife.183 Transit begets transfer between realms, and also between religions. While some scholars would call the net effect of these movements syncretism, I have argued that religions do not “combine” without people moving between them. And when people do move, the result is not always mixture, as we see with devotees like Olinda. She and the other devotees I spoke with recognized religious differences and were not interested in crafting theological syntheses. Rather, they went to religious places, formed relationships with supernatural beings, and sometimes, carried this “baggage” with them as they moved into or built new places. Building something new requires materials, tools, and labor, and this all has to come from somewhere. When Olinda built her Ketu Candomblé terreiro, she incorporated elements from Umbanda, Angola Candomblé, and the cult of the souls. And when she visited the thirteen souls’ tombs in Cemitério São Pedro, brought these things with her, depositing offerings to the pretos velhos and Obaluaê at their shrine. But how did the nameless dead buried in this cemetery become consecrated as the “thirteen souls”? It is to this transformation that we turn next. 183 Reis, Death is a Festival, 82, 110-111. 157 5 Transformation: Death and Rebirth I met Marina on a chilly Monday afternoon in July outside the Chapel of the Afflicted. She had started praying to the souls about ten years earlier, and when I asked her to tell me more, she was eager to talk. “I received marvelous things, things I really needed.” She said the souls helped her with her small business. “I’d think of a client, and then she’d call!” she insisted. Describing her “journey” at length, she identified as “Catholic but Kardecist as well. I’ll die believing in reincarnation.” In addition to the chapel, she said she regularly visited the Spiritist Federation of the State of São Paulo, as well as Perseverança, a large Spiritist center known for its humanitarian work in northeastern Brazil.184 Marina often prayed to the thirteen blessed, wise, and knowing souls (treze almas benditas, sabidas, e entendidas). The thirteen souls are among the most popular in São Paulo, in part because they are tied to the city’s history. Most devotees identify them with thirteen people whose bodies were burned beyond recognition in a 1974 fire at Edifício Joelma, an office building in the city center. But when I asked Marina if she prayed to the thirteen souls of Joelma, she shook her head no. “I had an experience with them, but I didn’t like it… I didn’t feel a divine resonance. Not everyone who burned to death has a level of evolution… where they can help you.” 184 Interview, July 28, 2014. 158 When Marina prayed to the thirteen souls, she prayed to “the thirteen souls of the Chapel of the Afflicted.” With those souls, she said, she felt safe. She had also grown fond of the small chapel, which she learned from Dr. Efrem, a homeopathic doctor who recommended the devotion to help resolve relationship issues. I later spoke with the doctor and about a dozen devotees who had come to the chapel on his recommendation many of whom knew yet others who also began practicing the devotion at his suggestion.185 This chapter considers the vernacular creativity of devotees like Marina, who transform and adapt practice to suit their needs. Like many devotees, Marina moves between religions. Her devotion, though innovative and even subtly transgressive, is not indiscriminate. While Marina and other devotees sometimes modify practices, they do so according to certain norms. Like the Novena to the Afflicted Souls we encountered last chapter, the iterations of their practice are always reiterations. Following de Certeau, we can extend the linguistic metaphor even further and liken devotees’ innovation to everyday speech: however novel, any intelligible utterance makes use of a shared grammar and lexicon.186 Marina’s “established vocabulary” made use of religious discourse, but it was not only religious. It drew not just from the ritual language and theological discourse salient in São 185 Interview, July 28, 2014. 186 On “vernacular religion,” see Leonard Primiano, “Vernacular Religion.” Primiano coins the term to “address a heritage of scholarly misrepresentation” and “remove the connotations I do not like in ‘folk’ and ‘popular’” and emphasize the creativity of “personal, private” religious expression. See also Albanese, who uses the concept as a way of conceptualizing a “metaphysical” tradition in the United States; Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 9. On everyday practice and speech, see de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xiii. 159 Paulo, but also from stories of the city. Like the popular devotion that followed the miraculous circumstances of Chaguinhas’s death, the story of the thirteen souls is one of rebirth. It is a story of how the unidentified victims of an office fire were reborn as the thirteen souls, becoming beloved objects of devotion. It is also the story of how the devotion to souls was reborn, adapted to confront this urban tragedy. The stories devotees tell about the thirteen souls are what de Certeau calls “spatial stories.” “Every story is a travel story—a spatial practice,” he writes. I have suggested that in São Paulo, religious movement means moving through the city. When Marina told me about her devotion, she told me about the places she went. As she talked about the thirteen souls of Joelma, she related her experience (“I did not feel a divine resonance”) to infer their qualities (“not everyone who burns to death has a level of evolution”) and privilege one place (the Chapel of the Afflicted) over another (the tombs of the thirteen souls in Cemitério São Pedro). Devotions, I suggest in this final chapter, are not just about transit and transfer but also about transformation. They grow and change. While I have argued the contemporary practice comes from a tradition to purgatorial devotionalism, it is not static. Devotees like Marina change it, though always within certain bounds. And sometimes they transform new dead into objects of devotion, turning the tragedy of pointless death into hope for a better life. 160 The Fire at Edifício Joelma On the morning of February 1, 1974, Brazilians watched their televisions in horror as people leaped from a burning office building. At 8:30 a.m. that morning, Edifício Joelma caught fire. An air conditioning unit on the building’s twelfth floor short-circuited, and soon, most of its seven hundred occupants, clustered in its upper floors, found themselves trapped. As the fire spread, people fled, trampling others in the confusion. There were no fire escapes, and for most, descent was not an option. By 10:00 a.m., over one hundred people had gathered on the building’s roof, hoping to rescued by helicopter. But there was no heliport, and with the fire at its peak, pilots had trouble making an approach. So rather than being burned alive, some decided to jump. Police standing atop their cars, blaring through megaphones, tried to calm horrified bystanders and those trapped inside the building. But the scene was grim. Firefighters were slow to arrive and lacked the basic equipment needed to enter the building. Helicopters kept trying to approach or land on nearby buildings, but had no luck in rescuing the victims stranded on the roof. People kept jumping. The crowd that had gathered on the streets held up signs to the stranded reading, “Calm” and, “Don’t jump, help is near.” Firemen were finally able to enter Joelma at 1:00 p.m., four-and-a-half hours after the fire began. An hour earlier, a rescue helicopter got close enough to rescue survivors on the building’s roof. By then the fire abated, largely because there was nothing left to burn. Folha de São Paulo reports that when rescue teams entered, they “encountered charred bodies, clothes and shoes strewn about, stuck fire sprinklers, paper, twisted steel.” The fire 161 was extinguished an hour later. All told, the fire claimed at least 187 lives and over 300 wounded, affecting more than half the workers occupying the building that day. The victims’ youth—their median age a mere twenty years—made the deaths all the more traumatic. It is generally accepted as the one of the worst tragedies in the city’s history.187 Forty years later, Edifício Joelma is unremarkable in appearance. Renamed Edifício Praça de Bandeirantes in 1978, the building’s owners have whitewashed its interior—and tried to erase its past. No memorial marks the fire, and security guards are forbidden from discussing it or permitting curious visitors to enter. But as Brian Ladd observes, memories tend to “cleave to the physical settings of events.” The building’s proprietors still have difficulty renting the space, even at below-market rates. On the fortieth anniversary of the fire, O Estado de São Paulo reported that Edifício Joelma continued to “inspire ghost stories.” People report hearing screams from the building’s dark corners, and some employees claim to have seen cars driving themselves.188 Ghost stories are a way of talking about the past. We might understand them as “a discourse on history merely encoded in an idiom different from the one with which we feel 187 The information in the preceding paragraphs was culled from a variety of newspaper sources published shortly after, but also in the decades following, the fire. See especially an eight-page special insert, “A anatomia de um incendio,” Folha de São Paulo, February 3, 1974. See also Cláudio de Souza and Andrezza Arnone, “Inferno no Joelma, trinta anos depois,” Diário de São Paulo, February 1, 2004; Folha de São Paulo, January 30, 1994. News reports vary on the number of dead, but as of March 1, 1974, the official count was 187 (Folha de São Paulo, March 1, 1974). Some reports list the dead as low as 184 (Folha de São Paulo, September 15, 2001) to as high as 189 (Diário de São Paulo, February 1, 2004). On the median age of victims, see Diário de São Paulo, 16 February 1975. On the Joelma tragedy relative to others in Brazil, see Milton Parron, São Paulo, a trajetória de uma cidade: história, imagens e sons (São Paulo: Editora Nobel, 2003), 64. Note that the death toll of the 2007 TAM accident at Congonhas airport was slightly higher, at 199. 188 Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1; O Estado de São Paulo, February 1, 2014. 162 at home.” In the case of the Liberdade churches, the stories of late-night screams are reminders of the brutality of slavery upon which Brazil was built. Joelma’s ghost stories are even more layered, and speak to a different set of injustices. People say Edíficio Joelma was built above an old Tupí graveyard, so was doomed from the start. Folha de São Paulo reported that some believe the fire “occurred because a stockade operated here in the nineteenth century.” (In fact, the short-lived stockade was about half a kilometer away.) The site is also famous for the “Crime of the Well.” The grounds on which Joelma was built were once private residences. In 1948, a young professor of organic chemistry at the University of São Paulo killed his mother and two sisters and hid their bodies in their backyard well. When the police came to search the professor’s yard, he excused himself to the bathroom and shot himself in the chest.189 “Haunting,” writes Avery Gordon, “always registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present.” Joelma’s ghost stories surface anxieties about the fragility of human life. In the days following the fire, these anxieties were in no short supply. Two days after the tragedy, one journalist lamented, “It is as if the fire attacked a vital point in the living and complex organism of the city.” It seemed to reveal the fragility of modern life, and the “very reason for being in a metropolis obsessed with its own enormity.” Another journalist reflected that anyone “observing the calcified 189 Stephan Palmié, Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 3; O Estado de São Paulo, February 1, 2014; On the stockade’s location, see Laís de Barros Monteiro Guimarães, Liberdade (São Paulo: Prefeitura do Município de São Paulo, 1979), 60, 66. 163 corpses and twisted iron had the impression that all was irrevocably lost.” One woman at a funeral painted a grim picture of urban life: “Thank God, I live in a house and I’m free of the drama of families that live in apartment buildings in the center of the city. Here, in Cemitério Vila Alpina, we have a crematorium with ovens to burn cadavers. These buildings are ovens that burn the living.”190 Haunting “is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done,” says Gordon. It demands a response. The restless dead must be put to rest—or the very least, acknowledged. In Brazil, I have argued, the devotion to souls is one way of confronting the suffering dead. Kardecist Spiritism is another. Two months after the fire, Chico Xavier, Brazil’s most famous spirit medium, penned Somos seis (We are Six). “For the Paulistano… it isn’t common to identify this or that building, this or that more or less arrogant construction,” it reads. “A building, however, which despite not appearing much different from the rest, has for two years remained alive for all of us in Greater São Paulo who witnessed the unfolding of a catastrophe of unusual proportions. We speak of Joelma.”191 Like many of Chico’s books, Somos seis was mostly produced via automatic writing—in this case, six letters dictated to Chico by the spirits of dead youths. Two were victims of the Joelma fire. Their letters offer reassurances to the living. Wilson William Garcia, who 190 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xvi; Jose Neumanne Pinto, “Um fogo queima a cidade inteira,” Folha de São Paulo, February 3, 1974, special insert, 2; Carlos Rangel Pinto, “A morte de um predio,” Folha de São Paulo, February 3, 1974, special insert, 3; Folha de São Paulo, 7 February 1974, p. 8. 191 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvii; Chico Xavier, Caio Ramacciotti, and diverse spirits, Somos seis (São Bernardo do Campo: Grupo Espírita Emmanuel, 1976), 10-11. 164 would have turned twenty-five just a week after the fire, offered reassurances to his loved ones. “Our admirable Joelma, for us, now functions as a temple in which we transform ourselves according to the laws of God. Do not believe that my suffering was much.”192 The more recent book, Treze almas (Thirteen Souls), published in 2014, tells the story of Lina, another of Joelma’s young victims whose remains were never identified. As she struggles to make sense of her unexpected disincarnation, an “evolved” spirit offers a theodicy of the seemingly senseless tragedy. The fire had to happen, the evolved spirit tells her. Past violence like the stockades and the crime of the well led to the accumulation of “a tragic, negative energy, full of hatred and revenge” at the site that Joelma came to occupy. Something had to give. The fire “destroyed much of this energy, facilitating an energetic cleaning. It renewed its atmosphere.” While the fire’s brutality may have been hard for Lina to grasp, it was a necessary corrective. It not only purged Joelma of its sins, but Lina of hers. And now, as one of the thirteen souls, Lina had a chance to help alleviate the suffering of the living.193 Joelma’s dead live on in the Brazilian religious imagination. Of the fire’s nearly two hundred victims, thirteen have become special and set apart. Known as the thirteen souls, 192 Xavier, Somos seis, 189. In 1979, directory Clery Cunha adapted Somos seis into a film, Joelma 23º Andar (Joelma, 23rd Floor). It was Brazil’s first spiritist film, though the spiritist-themed telenovela A Viagem (The Voyage) aired on Rede Tupi in 1975-1976. 193 Marcelo Cezar and the spirit Marco Aurélio, Treze almas (Editora Vida e Consciência: São Paulo, 2014), 443-444. This book is a romance espírita, or “spiritist novel,” which is a popular genre of literature in which works are purportedly narrated by the spirits of the dead. The spiritist novel and similar mediumship-based literature is not unique to Brazil—see, for example, G.W.N. Yost, Posthumous Memoirs of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (Jos M. Wade: Boston, 1896), which purports to be “dictated from the spirit world.” That said, the genre is popular enough in Brazil one can find spiritist novels at many newsstands and in dedicated sections in major bookstores. 165 their bodies have been laid to rest in thirteen adjacent tombs in Cemitério São Pedro. Though far from the city center, dozens visit the thirteen souls’ tombs every Monday. Knowing the nature of the victims’ death, devotees pour water over each tomb in slow succession and pray for the souls’ relief. Like with other kinds of souls, they make pedidos to the thirteen souls, asking for guidance, help, and health, sometimes making promessas in exchange for enduring devotion. But how did these unidentified dead become known as the thirteen souls? The Thirteen Souls of Edifício Joelma In February 2013, the television network Rede Record aired a special report, “The Mystery of the Thirteen Souls,” on its news program Balanço Geral. Speaking at the thirteen souls’ tombs, the show’s host, Geraldo Luíz, tells the camera, “these thirteen people were in an elevator.” Turning to a local specialist on “supernatural matters,” Luíz asks, “What have you found out about this story of the elevator?” “Well,” the man replies, “At the moment of the fire these people were desperate to leave. And since there weren’t emergency exits, they exited the first door they encountered, right? And the fastest way to escape was the elevator—it was the fastest mode of transport, and so they all entered the elevator. It’s just that when the fire reached the building’s electrical, the elevator stopped, they were trapped, the fire climbed up, and they died, carbonized, inside the elevator. They were all found in the elevator, dead, mixed up in there.” 166 This is the story devotees and journalists tell about the thirteen souls—that they all died together, trapped in an elevator. It is inaccurate, however. I hesitate to say it is not true, because the elevator story has taken on a truth of its own, for reasons I will explore. But none of Joelma’s unidentified victims died in the building’s elevator. As it were, there were dozens of unidentified corpses in the initial aftermath of the fire, scattered throughout the building. Though the number of unidentified victims eventually numbered thirteen, it could have been as low as seven or higher than twenty had more or less families come forward to identify the victims.194 Five days after the fire, the city buried seven victims whose bodies were beyond any possibility of recognition—the first of those to become the thirteen souls. Braving the blistering February heat and sun, over five hundred people gathered on a Wednesday morning at Cemitério São Pedro for their public funeral. Emotions ran high. Folha de São Paulo reports that one woman, though unrelated to any victims, had a “nervous crisis when she saw the first shovel full of earth fall over the coffin. She cried and hugged a friend, screaming, ‘Oh, my God, have pity on these poor ones.’” Even this early on, there seems to have been the first stirrings of devotion. “I came to pay homage to all of them, and I’ll always pay homage, because my parents and many family friends are buried here,” said another 194 On February 5, 1974, Folha de São Paulo reported that there were twenty unidentified victims. Two days later on February 7, they reported that this number decreased to fourteen. As of February 11, 1974 there were only six bodies remaining, details regarding which can be found in that day’s edition of Folha de São Paulo. 167 visitor. “Whenever I visit my parents’ tombs, I’ll also leave flowers at the tombs of these seven.”195 After these first seven bodies were buried, there remained another dozen or so corpses waiting to be identified. Friends and families slowly came forward, and as of two weeks after the fire, all but six of the remaining corpses had been identified. On March 1, a month after the fire, the city decided to bury the remaining six corpses. Folha reported that the city’s funerary service would bury all of Joelma’s unidentified near one another, rather than as indigents (as was usually done with unidentified corpses). The funerary service’s technical director explained, “It isn’t known whose body is whose, but the loved ones of the unidentified will have a place to pay homage, knowing that the mortal remains of their deceased relatives can be encountered there.” This funeral seems to have gone largely unnoticed. By then, the immediate trauma of the fire had receded, softened perhaps by the intervening Carnaval festivities.196 These obscure details of Joelma’s unidentified victims were unknown to the devotees I spoke with. They are complicated and do not make for a good story. On the other hand, the notion that the thirteen souls all burned together in an elevator is concise, plausible, and enthralling. It satisfies narrators’ and listeners’ curiosity. The narrative also does devotional labor: by positing the victims’ death as collective, it elides their individuality and transforms 195 Folha de São Paulo, February 7, 1974. 196 On February 5, 1974, Folha de São Paulo reported that there were twenty unidentified victims. Two days later on February 7, they reported that this number decreased to fourteen. As of February 11, 1974 there were only six bodies remaining, details regarding which can be found in that day’s edition of Folha de São Paulo. 168 them into a single object, suitable for devotion. It conceals the precariousness of their number by erasing potential uncertainties in their story. The only ambiguity it admits is that which is central to the devotion—the ambiguity of the victims’ identity. Some iterations of the legend even exaggerate their anonymity. Most, for example, hold that all the victims’ names and ages were unknown. Others say their bodies were burned so badly that authorities were unable to identify their sexes or even whose limbs belonged to whom. Devotees have turned the tombs of Joelma’s unidentified dead into a shrine. It is not clear when, exactly, this happened, but it seems to have been within a decade. In 1985, the newspaper Folha de São Paulo reported that “the cross of Joelma in Vila Alpina became a pilgrimage site” two years earlier. Covering an outdoor mass on the eleventh anniversary of the shrine, they write, “Organized by the Municipal Funerary Service, a ceremony for the victims of the fire united some relatives and more than two hundred faithful.” For many, it was an opportunity of devotion. Most of the attendees “went to make requests of the thirteen victims that are buried at the site and were not identified.” The report continues: At the start of the ceremony, three doves were released by children dressed in white, a homage provided by the industrialist Antonio Bodanese, 52, in retribution for graces received. “I was interned for two years with a very grave disease and was about to die. I made a promise to the thirteen souls of Joelma and completely recovered,” he explained. Angelina Soares, 50, observed dozens of people praying. Her brother was buried there. “I know that he is one of these souls that is granting me so many graces that give me consolation,” she commented.197 Like the elevator story, the shrine to the thirteen souls does work. It obscures the victims’ individuality and consecrates them as a single object of devotion. Today, the tombs 197 “Missa campal lembra os onze anos da tragédia do Jolema,” Folha de São Paulo, 4 February 1985, Geral 12. 169 are set apart from the rest, of the cemetery, protected by a wrought-iron fence and flanked by a small chapel and a replica of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. A plaque at the base of a cross near the tombs memorializes the dead as “the thirteen souls” (Figure 9). Each of the small, concrete tombs is marked only by a small granite cross reading “13 ALMAS” (13 SOULS) in gold type (Figure 10). A small chapel, built in the 1990s by a devotee in thanks to the thirteen souls, offers a quiet space for contemplation and prayer. And hundreds of ex votos line the shrine, offering gratitude for favors received (Figure 11). 170 THE THIRTEEN SOULS ONLY GOD KNOWS THEIR NAMES REST IN PEACE + 2 FEBRUARY 1974 [sic] FIRE AT EDIFÍCIO JOELMA Figure 9. Cross at the Shrine of the Thirteen Souls. In Cemitério São Pedro, São Paulo. Note that the date is erroneous. The fire occurred on February 1 and the first seven of the thirteen corpses were not buried until February 6. 171 Figure 10. Tomb of a Thirteen Soul. 172 Figure 11. The Shrine to the Thirteen Souls. 173 The shrine succeeds in setting Joelma’s thirteen victims apart as special and identifying them as the thirteen souls. The “ability to create sacred space… is inherently an exercise in epistemic power,” and the shrine is not just a devotional space but a reference point. People cite the shrine as proof that the thirteen souls are, in fact, Joelma’s thirteen anonymous victims. Priests and church officials mention the shrine when talking about the thirteen souls, and major producers of santinhos (small devotional flyers) talk about the shrine on their websites in suggesting the possible origins of the devotion.198 Other Versions of the Thirteen Souls The identification of Joelma’s unidentified victims as the thirteen souls was a post hoc religious ascription.199 While most Paulistano devotees identify the thirteen souls with Joelma’s anonymous victims, the devotion to “the thirteen souls” predated the fire at Edifício Joelma and was later applied to its anonymous victims. Just over a month before the fire, a devotee published this Prayer to the Thirteen Souls in O Fluminense, a daily newspaper in Rio de Janeiro, in thanks for a grace received: 198 Joseph Laycock, The Seer of Bayside: Veronica Lueken and the Struggle to Define Catholicism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 15. See, for example, “História das Treze Almas,” accessed September 21, 2015, http://www.ajudadivina.com.br/ajudadivina/?pagina=13-almas. 199 On the process of religious ascription, see Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Taves suggests that rather than abandoning the fraught issue of “religious experience,” we “turn our attention to the processes whereby people sometimes ascribe the special characteristics to things that we (as scholars) associate with terms such as ‘religious,’ ‘magical,’ ‘mystical,’ ‘spiritual,’ et cetera” (9). 174 ORAÇÃO DAS 13 ALMAS OH! minhas 13 almas benditas, sabidas, entendidas, a vós peço, pelo amor de Deus, atendei o meu pedido. Minhas 13 almas benditas, sabidas, e entendidas, a vós peço, pelo sangue que Jesus derramou, atendei o meu pedido. Minhas 13 almas benditas, sabidas e entendidas, peço-vos pelas lagrimas de Jesus Cristo derramou do seu Sagrado Corpo, atendei o meu pedido. Meu Senhor Jesus Cristo que a vossa proteção me cubra, que vossos braços me gaurdem no vosso coração e me proteja com os vossos olhos. Oh! Deus de bondade, vós sois meu advogado na vida e na morte; peço-vos que atendei os meus pedidos, e me livrai dos males e daí-me sorte na vida. Segui meus inimigos que olhos do mal não me vejam, cortai as forças dos meus inimigos. Minhas 13 Almas benditas, sabidas, e entendidas, se me fizerem alcançar esta graça (pede-se as graças), ficarei devota de vos e mandarei publicar esta oração mandando também rezar uma missa. Reza-se 13 Padres Nossos e 13 Ave Marias 13 dias. Osmidia Martinelli PRAYER TO THE THIRTEEN SOULS Oh! My 13 blessed, wise, and knowing souls, I ask you, for the love of God, that my request be answered. My 13 blessed, wise, and knowing souls, I ask you, by the blood that Jesus shed, that my request be answered. My 13 blessed, wise, and knowing souls, I ask you by the tears that Jesus left on his Sacred Body, may my request be answered. My Lord Jesus Christ, that your protection surrounds me, your arms keep me in your heart and that you protect me with your eyes. Oh! God of kindness, you are my defender in life and death; I ask you that my request be answered, that you free me of evils and give me luck in life. Follow my enemies, that the eyes of evil do not see me, cut down the forces of my enemies. My 13 blessed, wise, and knowing Souls, if you would deliver this grace (make your request), I remain devoted to you and publish this prayer, as well requesting a mass be prayed. Pray 13 Our Fathers, 13 Hail Marys, for 13 days. Osmidia Martinelli Figure 12. Prayer to the Thirteen Souls. O Fluminense, December 28, 1973, p. 12 (Classifieds). 175 This prayer is nearly identical to the one used by devotees in contemporary São Paulo, and a version of it hangs in the chapel at the thirteen souls’ shrine.200 José Carlos Pereira calls this ascription of an older prayer to newer phenomena “devotional mimicry” or “devotional migration,” and suggests it resulted in the resurgence of the thirteen souls, which he calls a “very old popular devotion.” While neither Pereira nor other scholarly sources date the devotion—which may be of Iberian origin—Pereira’s claim of a “resurgence” following Joelma appears plausible. In 1977, Franciscan monk Bernardino Leers called the devotion to the thirteen souls the “newest product of popular Catholic vitality” (emphasis added). And prayers to the thirteen souls seem to have been published more frequently as the decade progressed.201 Surveying the frequency with which devotees published the Prayer to the Thirteen Souls’ in newspapers, there appears to have been a marked increase in 1975-76.202 200 Most contemporary versions of the Prayer to the Thirteen Souls I have seen in São Paulo reference Jesus’ sweat rather than tears. Some versions strike the first sentence. Others mandate only a single Our Father and Hail Mary. All, however, offer space for a pedido, petition the souls for protection, and ask them to strike down the devotee’s enemies. 201 José Carlos Pereira, Devoções marginais: interfaces do imaginário religioso (Porto Alegre: Editora Zouk, 2005), 55; and Bernardino Leers, Catolicismo popular, 94. See also Brandão, Os deuses do povo, 133. Some suggest the prayer may be from The Book of St. Cyprian, an ever-changing grimoire of Iberain origin. I have not seen the prayer published in any versions of this book before the 1980s, but have only tracked down fourteen copies. 202 We can summarily quantify the devotion via newspapers, in which the faithful published prayers or short notes in thanks for graces received. Surveying major newspapers with relatively comprehensive electronic indexing, I found no mention of the thirteen souls before 1973 and then a spike in 1975-76. 176 While especially popular in Brazil, the prayer also appears in Spanish, Italian, and English. It is almost unknown among North American Catholics, but scholars have noted addressed the prayer’s use in Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. These sources offer little explanation of the prayer or its place in devotional culture, and in none of these cases do the thirteen souls appear to bear relation to recent history. They are more often described as “thirteen souls of purgatory,” or more rarely and somewhat controversially, Jesus and his twelve apostles.203 These figures should not be taken as highly accurate counts of the appearance of my search terms (“treze almas” and “13 almas”) in respective papers. Some papers—such as O Fluminense, Diario da Tarde, and Diario de Pernambuco—have very complete digital indexes. Others, like Folha de São Paulo, exclude part or all of classified ad sections (where religious notices are typically published) from electronic archives. Yet others, like A Gazeta (an important evening newspaper in São Paulo), completely lack online indexing. That said, this chart is meant to indicate a general trend. What is not clear, however, is what caused the thirteen souls’ spike in popularity. If devotees as far as Recife knew of the thirteen souls of Joelma, I would suspect there would be some documentary evidence. I suspect an outside factor—a popular telenovela, perhaps—popularized the notion of the thirteen souls, which was then applied to Joelma’s dead. 203 Though largely unknown among North American Catholics, there is some discussion of it on Catholic (and Hoodoo/conjure) websites and forums. On the prayer’s use in Venezuela, see Angelina Pollak-Eltz, La religiosidad popular en Venezuela (Caracas: San Pablo, 1994), 45-46. For Guatemala, see Celso A. Lara Figueroa, Fieles difuntos, santos y ánimas benditas en Guatemala: Una evocación ancestral (Guatemala City: 177 In Chiclayo, Peru, there is a vibrant devotion to the thirteen souls at the small Capilla de Ánimas (Chapel of the Souls). News reports of dubious historical rigor say the devotion began around 1924, when people began bringing skulls—which may have surfaced at a nearby cemetery after torrential flooding—to the chapel. In one version of the legend, the chapel burned sometime between 1948 and 1953, destroying all but thirteen of the skulls, thus giving rise to the contemporary devotion. In another rendition, flooding in 1908 washed away most of the remains buried at a cemetery. The faithful rescued thirteen skulls and put them at the base of the large cross in the area. Whatever the case, the similarities to the São Paulo devotion are clear: the remains of thirteen unidentified dead were joined together, deemed the thirteen souls, and turned into an object of devotion.204 In Brazil, the Joelma tragedy struck at a time when the devotion to souls was flourishing. In 1967, one reporter wrote that “on Mondays it is almost impossible to enter the church [of the Hanged]” due to the huge number of devotees there. In 1974, six months after the Joelma fire, another noted the “great number of weekly visitors,” there. The cult of the souls was lodged firmly in the “representational economy” of the Brazilian southeast, and furnished the means for turning these unidentified dead into an object of devotion.205 Librerias Artemis Edinter, 2003), 9. For Costa Rica, see Carlos María Campos Jiménez, Devociones populares: Introducción a su estudio en Costa Rica (San Pedro de Montes de Oca: Revista Senderos, 1984), 204. 204 See “La enigmática historia de las ‘trece ánimas benditas’ de Chiclayo,” Radio Programas del Perú, September 10, 2011, accessed September 4, 2015, http://www.rpp.com.pe/2011-09-10-la-enigmatica-historia-de-las-trece-animas-benditas-de-chiclayo-noticia_402607.html; and “Las Trece ánimas benditas, siempre en el corazón de los chiclayanos,” El Digital, December 8, 2012, accessed September 4, 2015, http://eldigital.pe/publicacion/2012/12/08/catciu/las-trece-nimas-benditas-siempre-en-el-corazn-de-los-chiclayanos#.VUt1hNOrRE5. 205 Diario de São Paulo, December 17, 1967; and Notícias Populares, August 19, 1974. I use “representational economy” in the sense offered by Webb Keane: that is, the “dynamic interconnections among 178 While the devotion the thirteen souls clearly resembles other forms of Catholic devotionalism—particularly the cult of the saints—the circumstances of Joelma’s anonymous victims’ death touches on the salient motifs in the cult of the souls. The first of these is suffering. As we have seen, the souls suffer. On the February 2, 1974, hundreds of victims suffered painful death by suffocation and fire. Fire has obvious significance in the cult of the souls, being iconic of the purifying flames of purgatory. (Tellingly, some santinhos—small devotional images—of the thirteen souls crib an image of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel rescuing purgatorial souls, but replace her with generic candles. See Figure 13.) Even Kardecist authors latched onto the fire’s purgative qualities, affirming that Joelma was “a temple in which we transform ourselves” and that the fire “facilitated an energetic cleaning.” Of course, this leaves the question of why only Joelma’s anonymous dead—and not the other 170-plus victims—became objects of devotion. There are, I think, a few reasons for special position. First, while many died on February 2, the thirteen souls are thought to have suffered more than most. Put another way, their suffering is understood to have been exceptional, rendering their deaths anomalous. In her study of religious experience, Ann Taves suggests that anomalous things and events can “stand out as special and stimulate processes of reflection and explanation.” Anomalous death, then, can mark the dead as special and invite discourse that deems them religious.206 different modes of signification at play within a particular historical and social formation.” Put another way, it refers to a semiotic field in which “words and things are distinguished and linked.” Webb Keane, “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things,” Language & Communication, 23, no. 3–4 (July 2003): 410, 421. 206 Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered, 54. 179 In the standard narrative, the thirteen souls’ exceptional death is intertwined with their anonymity. Devotees say they were burned beyond recognition. Even if that is not exactly so, the elevator legend posits their anonymity as a product of exceptional suffering. And anonymity, as we have seen, is one of the essential motifs in the devotion to souls. The souls are souls because they are anonymous and collective. That is, while the devotion names them, while it longs to remember what has been forgotten, it does so without individualizing them. Even if the identity of each corpse is unknown, it is conceivable that the thirteen victims’ names are discoverable. But no one has made such an effort. No plaque memorializes them individually. For devotees, the souls’ collectivity has trumped the victims’ individuality. Joelma’s unidentified victims died an anomalous death, and thirteen is an anomalous number. In Brazil, like elsewhere in Europe and the Americas, thirteen is considered portentous and usually inauspicious. Many see Friday the thirteenth as unlucky and though rare today, people once avoided seating thirteen guests at a dinner table. Luís Cascudo, Brazil’s most recognized folklorist, writes that thirteen is a “fateful number. People born on the thirteenth… will be fortunate.” Thirteen also fits into a complex of semiotic correspondences related to death and the dead in Brazil. It is the number of the “Death” card in the major arcana of most Tarot sets. It is also the number associated with Obaluaê/Omulu, the orixá that watches over graveyards. May 13, likewise, is the day dedicated to the pretos velhos, entities often described as the guardians of the souls in Umbanda. Most importantly, 180 thirteen corresponds to the preexisting category of the thirteen souls, obscure though it may have been at the time of the fire.207 Joelma’s unidentified victims’ suffering at the hour of death, their anonymity, and their number all invited the process of religious attribution. Devotions are not sui generis. The victims’ qualities conformed with established patterns in the devotional culture of São Paulo. This attribution was not inevitable, and its apparent strength conceals tensions and contradictions. As Marina argued when questioning devotion the thirteen souls of Joelma, “not everyone who burns to death has a level of evolution.”208 In both Catholic and Kardecist discourse, suffering can be redemptive and/or aid spiritual progress. But the prayer to them says nothing of suffering, and for devotees like Marina, the superlatives “blessed, wise, and knowing,” so often used to invoke and describe them, can seem inordinate. 207 Luís Cascudo, Dicionário do folclore brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro: Ediçiões de Ouro, 1969), 760. 208 Interview, July 28, 2014. 181 Figure 13. Santinho of the Thirteen Souls. Compare with image of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel (right). Note that the santinhos do not say anything about Joelma. They typically include the standard prayer to the thirteen souls above contact information for the gráfica that printed them. 182 Vernacular Creativity While many São Paulo devotees identify the thirteen souls with Joelma’s unidentified victims, not all do. Marcos, an Umbandista, told me, “In my understanding, there are different types of thirteen souls… the thirteen souls of the drowned, the thirteen souls of the hanged,” and so on. Marina, you will recall, distinguished between “the thirteen souls of the Chapel of the Afflicted” and the “thirteen souls of Joelma.” Some devotees, including those who associate the thirteen souls with Joelma’s victims, describe them as thirteen “beings of light,” a distinctly Kardecist phrasing. These are all variations we have seen before. As with the different souls listed in Chapter 2, the variety suggest the potential for creativity and flexibility within the constraints of the devotion’s established grammar.209 Marina learned of the thirteen souls of the Chapel of the Afflicted from Dr. Efrem, a homeopathic doctor. Two weeks after meeting Marina, I visited to Dr. Efrem at his clinic in Tatuapé, a residential neighborhood in São Paulo’s Zona Leste. The doctor, I would learn, is important in propagating the thirteen souls’ devotion in São Paulo. He claimed to have recommended it to thousands of patients, and I think his estimation is plausible. Over the course of 2014, I met a dozen or so devotees who had seen him, including Dona Renata, the administrator at the Chapel of the Afflicted. 209 Similar to what Marcos said, during a class at the Instituto Cultural, an Umbanda center, an instructor talked about the thirteen souls of purgatory, thirteen hanged souls, and thirteen drowned souls. The instructor—a former Jesuit priest—said the thirteen souls are important in catolicismo primitivo puro (“pure, primitive Catholicism”), though unfortunately did not explain more about what he meant by this. He also said the thirteen souls featured in jurema sagrada, or the ritual use of jurema—mimosa hostilis, a hallucinogen-containing plant—by indigenous peoples in the northeast. 183 Standing before the door to Dr. Efrem clinic on an overcast Saturday afternoon, waiting to be buzzed in, I saw that threshold was decorated with traces of his religious path. A horseshoe—a talisman for good luck, but also an index of the orixá Ogum—hung above a medallion with eight I Ching trigrams and a metal crucifix. The doctor opened the door and shook my hand, inviting me inside. Bespectacled and older, with thick, silver hair, the doctor was garrulous and welcoming. He directed towards the waiting area’s three large, mustard-colored imitation leather couches and apologized. I would have to wait while he finished up with another client. He insisted on turning on the television, and a women’s volleyball match blared, echoing off the room’s bare, hard surfaces. Walking over to a pile of literature, I flipped through magazines in Portuguese and English with names like Vida Simples (Simple Life) and Insight. A few watercolors decorated the mostly bare, teal walls, as did a sign reading “If you want to be cured, always count on yourself and you’re in the right place! If you want a miracle, you’re not!” A water feature steadily babbled, and the room smelled like incense.210 After a long wait, Dr. Efrem led me into his office, and we began by talking about Marina. She had worked for the doctor in 1978 or 1979, he said, when he had operated a larger clinic with ten employees. She was also a patient. “And to Marina, as with other people, I recommended the trezena [a thirteen-week prayer cycle], often, because I heard so 210 Fieldnotes and interview, August 9, 2014. 184 many favorable results.” Marina was dealing with relationship troubles, but the doctor said the trezena could be used for any number of problems. Dr. Efrem, who described himself as “muito devoto das almas” (very devoted to the souls), grew up the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Though a practicing Jew in his youth, he rejected religion when he began to study medicine. In time, however, a series of car accidents that “could not only be coincidence” convinced Efrem that “someone is trying to tell me something.” Today, like so many others, the doctor “frequents a Spiritist center” but is “also Catholic. It’s sort of, ah, a mixture. I have a crucifix, images of Christ.” His digressions were threaded with Kardecist terms and metaphysics, such as affirmations of our living in a “universe of continual evolution” and disincarnated spirits’ desire to help those on this earth. The doctor distinguished between the thirteen souls of the Chapel of the Afflicted and those of Joelma. He seemed unaware of the Joelma devotion, but when I asked about it asserted the thirteen souls have “nothing to do” with it. As he mused on the souls’ qualities, he occasionally scribbled random, sweeping marks on a notepad as if to emphasize his points. “The thirteen souls,” he said, drawing a line, “function like so”: Among all the people who died in reservoirs, among everyone who died in dams, in tsunamis… I don’t know exactly, but they are thirteen marked situations. God chose thirteen to take care of the planet. They would be special people, they were special people, in this way. There are very special people that can do what we’re unable to do. Gandhi. Mandela, recently… I don’t think I’d have the persistence to do what this man did. He was able to change things, to end apartheid in South Africa. He came here [i.e., incarnated on earth] to do this. Like many devotees, Dr. Efrem was more interested in the souls’ efficacy than their hagiography. But note the tension in his improvised description: he began by describing the 185 souls in terms of violent death—invoking some of the more traditionally Catholic components of the devotion to souls—before abruptly transitioning to speaking of “special people.” Like other devotees, he later referred to them as thirteen “spirits of light” and “more evolved spirits,” which in Kardecist and Umbandist discourse refers to highly perfected spirits that help others—incarnated or disincarnated—make spiritual progress. And as with others, he identified the souls with a vague set of spiritual luminaries. We might interpret Dr. Efrem’s shift as “code-switching” between Catholic and Kardecist themes and linguistic constructions. As with the case of Olinda, the mãe-de-santo I discussed last chapter, I do not mean to reify these traditions, creating boundaries only to demonstrate transgression. Rather, in attempting to understand religious movement, I think it helps to acknowledge that religious institutions often promote styles of discourse, cultivate religious identities, enforce theological boundaries, and position themselves in terms of other religious and secular actors. And the faithful, for their part, acknowledge these boundaries even as they cross and collapse them.211 Dr. Efrem was not doctrinaire, and the trezena he recommended to his patients indicates a comfort with different religious idioms of the Brazilian southeast. According to him, the “classic” trezena—which he also called the journada, or “journey”—“already existed in the little church, I just typed it, refined it.” It is a long document, over two single-spaced pages with minimal margins (Figure 14). 211 In “The Madonna of 115th Street Revisited,” Elizabeth McAlister suggests that Haitian Catholics “have learned to ‘code-switch’ between performances of Catholicism and Vodou”; in Gatherings in Diaspora, 135. 186 Figure 14. Excerpt of the Journey of the Thirteen Blessed Souls. Dr. Efrem’s trezena. JOURNEY OF THE THIRTEEN BLESSED SOULS For couples, if desired. It is best to begin soon after the orientation, if you have any doubt enter into personal contact from 6pm onwards, or on Saturdays from 9am onwards. For 13 consecutive Mondays, go to the Church of Our Lady of the Afflicted, located on the Street of the Afflicted in Liberdade, in the center of São Paulo. (It is a dead-end alley, the church is very small, there are several churches in the region; the trezena is only valid here). When you go there, follow this same sequence: 1. Request, right there, every time you go, (01) mass for the 13 Blessed Souls. ANOTHER 01 MASS for Saint Lazarus. 2. Right there, buy a pack of small candles, take one from the center of the pack and keep it in your bag. 3. Light the other candles in the covered area on the side of the church. Light them one by one. If there is more than one person in the church light and pray out loud an Our Father and a Hail Mary, light the other rand pray again, until you finish the pack. If one of the candles falls or goes out, relight it. 4. Then, out loud, promise the 13 Blessed Souls that, for thirteen consecutive Mondays, you will visit their sanctuary, any time and whether you feel good or bad, without interruption. 5. Request the graces you desire and every time repeat and if necessary add anything you by chance forgot during your past visits. 6. The candle remaining in your bag must be broken two times, resulting, then, in three pieces (you can bring scissors to cut the wick). With each break say out loud: as I break this candle, so too I break the force of my enemies, visible and invisible. 7. Throw the three pieces of the candle, separately, in the trough of water there. 187 Like the Novena to the Afflicted Souls, the trezena has some performative features, like the Our Father and Hail Mary, that recall a Catholic origin. But it makes use of other formulaic language that attests to other genres in the religious vernacular of the Brazilian southeast. Note, for instance, the instruction to break a candle in three pieces and say aloud, “as I break this candle, so too I break the force of my visible and invisible enemies.” This distinct, “metapragmatic” formulation is common in Brazilian simpatias, which Paul Johnson describes as simple “magical acts” or rituals “designed to produce positive effects in love or finances.”212 In his study of magic in Brazil, Antonio Flavio Pierucci suggests, “In ‘real life’… magic and religion live together, form an ecosystem.” But of course they do! For people everywhere, magic and religion always “mingle”—but to see them as mingling suggests they are distinct in the first place. The category of magic does purifying work—that is, it serves to constitute, distinguish, and protect boundaries between fields like religion and science. Put another way, magic serves as an oversaturated signifier—a catch-all term that, as false religion or superstition, bad science, and irrationality, serves to purify and protect good religion, good science, and rational modernity.213 212 Paul C. Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods, 205. On “performance features,” see Keane, “Religious language,” 63. 213 Antonio Flavio Pierucci, A Magia, 14. For critiques of the category, see especially Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Stephan Palmié, Wizards and Scientists. 188 Dr. Efrem’s recommendation of the trezena transgresses the boundaries of science, medicine, religion, religions, and magic. The doctor engages in a kind of religious transit, journeying among religions as he converted from Judaism to atheism, then moved from atheism to Catholicism and spiritism. As a licensed medical doctor who recommends the Journey of the Thirteen Souls, Efrem straddles—perhaps uncomfortably for some readers—the relatively distinct fields of medicine and religion. But the doctor is not collapsing distinctions. He is not a renegade bent on contaminating the purity of medicine and religion. Rather, Dr. Efrem is invested in maintaining the boundaries he crosses. He goes by “doctor,” and his diploma from a respectable medical school in São Paulo state hangs prominently on the wall of his waiting room. He volunteers at a nearby Spiritist center. And when recommending the trezena to patients, he insists they go to the Chapel of the Afflicted, as “the trezena is only valid here.” The trezena is uncompromising on this point. “If you do not go to the church or go to the wrong church, the trezena will be interrupted and invalidated and you must restart everything again.” During our conversation he suggested the chapel has a special energy, charged by the steady presence of devotees. For him, differences mattered. The case of Dr. Efrem and his patients like Marina suggests how iterations of the thirteen souls—and religious innovation more generally—can unfold within fluctuating local networks with uncertain boundaries. Relatively independent of the norms of religious institutions, Dr. Efrem is free to prescribe ritual practices that draw from Brazil’s representational economy. His authority and success relies on his professional status, but also 189 depends on his communicating in a familiar idiom, using the langauge of simpatias and Catholic devotionalism. And though the doctor discourages it, patients adapt his trezena despite its insistence on following it to the letter. Marina, for example, told me the “number of candles isn’t important” and that she sometimes skipped weeks and neglected to break a candle and throw it in water. What she would not do, however, was light candles at home or on days other than Mondays. Conclusion In some ways, it seems the most stable thing about the thirteen souls is their name. Even the shrine in Cemitério São Pedro, which has been successful in establishing the thirteen souls as Joelma’s anonymous victims, frequently changes. No institution polices the shrine. Once under the care of the municipal cemetery, in 1992, the mayor of São Paulo issued a decree transferring responsibility for the tombs and surrounding grounds to the Association of the Devotees of the Thirteen Souls of Cemitério São Pedro of Vila Alpina. Today that association is defunct. Employees at the cemetery said it petered out after an ardent and wealthy devotee passed away in the early 2000s. When I returned to the shrine in July 2015, it had changed yet again. Alongside the small chapel, I found that devotees had built small grottoes to house statues of pretos velhos, Iemanja (an orixá), Catholic saints, and the Buddha. Whereas traces orixá statues were swiftly removed from Catholic churches I visited, devotees were tolerant of the religious diversity at the shrine.214 214 Decree No. 32,522, November 5, 1992. Available at http://camaramunicipalsp.qaplaweb.com.br/iah/fulltext/decretos/D32552.pdf 190 But while few objected to offerings of, say, coffee or popcorn—typically associated with Afro-Brazilian devotion—some disapproved of lighting candles at the shrine. In an interview with O Estado de São Paulo, Luíz Nunes, a cemetery employee and devotee who was also a member of the neo-Pentecostal Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, complained that candles “bother the souls. People say that they need light. More than they already received?” Luiz, for his part, preferred to pour water over the thirteen tombs. He claims to have started the practice when after hearing pained screams come from the tombs late at night. Knowing how they died, he hoped the water would offer them relief.215 Even Luíz’s innovations conform to well-established devotional norms. As we have already seen, devotees often leave water for the souls to placate their thirst. Water, bread, and the flame of the candle: these are all ways to ease the suffering of the dead. Luíz may have transformed the devotion at the tombs—some say the practice of pouring water over them started with him—but he did so in a way that made sense to devotees. And despite his objections to lighting candles, he knew many visitors though it important. So instead of prohibiting visitors from lighting candles on the tombs, which some cemeteries prohibit as a fire hazard, he built a cement candle table alongside the tombs, near the small chapel. At the start of this chapter, I invoked Michel de Certeau’s likening the “practice of everyday life” to language. De Certeau draws attention to the disjuncture between cultural products and their consumption. “The presence and circulation of a representation,” he 215 “Muito além do Jardim,” O Estado de São Paulo, May 11, 2006, J8. I heard several devotees repeat the story about the scream, which they may have heard about on Linha Direta, an evening news program on Rede Globo. In 2005, Linha Direta ran a special on Joelma that opened with an interview with Luíz. 191 argues, “tells us nothing about what it is for its users.” He compares this difference to language, particularly the “construction of individual sentences with an established vocabulary and syntax.” The speaker operates within an established linguistic field, but also appropriates language for his or her own purposes. In the devotion to souls, devotees operate within an established religious field, but appropriate ritual form (syntax) and ritual language and theological discourse (vocabulary) in novel, tactical ways. Devotees are “unrecognized producers,” capable of transforming the unidentified dead of a tragic office fire into a beloved object of devotion.216 216 The Practice of Everyday Life, xiii. 192 Conclusion Inside the chapel of the thirteen souls in Cemitério São Pedro, a small wooden shelf holds things left by devotees and volunteers: a stack of several thousand santinhos to the thirteen souls, plastic cups to fill with water and leave on the souls’ tombs, a copy of the Bible, and a small statue of Our Lady of Aparecida. When I visited a week before All Souls’ Day, I noticed someone had left a book published by the Jehova’s Witnesses, titled, O que a bíblia realmente ensina? (What Does the Bible Really Teach?). In Chapter 6, “Where are the dead?” it reads, “When a person dies, he ceases to exist. Death is the opposite of life. The dead do not see or hear or think. Not even one part of us survives the death of the body. We do not possess an immortal soul or spirit” (emphasis in original).217 These are strong words, and I suspect most devotees—if not most Brazilians—would disagree with them. I never saw Jehovah’s Witnesses proselytizing at the shrine or other devotional sites, and the book—a physical trace of their transit—raises questions. Who left it behind, and why? Was its presence just coincidence? Could it have been left by a former devotee who had converted? Or was the shrine so famous that some Jehovah’s Witnesses felt compelled to correct devotees’ errant ways? All Souls’ Day was only a week away, and perhaps they had left it there in hopes of persuading someone among the inevitable throngs of visitors. I will never know for sure. When I returned on November 2, the book was gone. 217 O que a Bíblia realmente ensina? (Cesário Lange: Associação Torre de Vigia de Bíblias e Tratados, 2012). 193 Sacred space, scholars have argued, “is inevitably contested space.”218 At the shrine to the thirteen souls, there are visible signs of contestation and difference. It seems plausible that Jehova’s Witnesses had visited to deny the legitimacy of praying to the dead. But they are in the minority. Most of those who visited the thirteen souls’ tombs were devotees, and most of those devotees would agree that the dead and living can help one each other. While the details of their practice differed—some lit candles at the tombs while others poured water over them, some associated the souls with purgatory and others the pretos velhos or spirits of light—the material culture at the shrine is not just a testament to contestation. It also suggests a broad religious consensus. Almost all those who visited thought the souls of the dead survived bodily death, and that they were able to help the living. “In Brazil, the dead are spoken of much more than death,” writes Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta. The dead, he says, have a “very clear” social reality. “I remember hearing of souls and spirits well before having a clear understanding of death as something final and ultimate for a person’s existence, because, when death was spoken of, it was to immediately comment on the existence of ghosts (and/or almas penadas) that returned and demand favors from loved ones.” Though people die and leave the world of the living, they exist in “another world where they cannot only return, but also watch, disturb, or help the living” on earth.219 218 David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, eds., American Sacred Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 15. 219 DaMatta, A casa e a rua, 140-141. Similarly, Oscar Calavia Sáez, a Spanish anthropologist, writes: “The presence and constant activity of the other world in Brazil is surprising to the traveler. It is enough to 194 In this study, I have suggested the contemporary cult of the souls can be traced to a tradition of purgatorial devotionalism. In a way, this is more an observation than an argument: there is a broad historical consensus that for much of Brazil’s history, people were concerned with good death and burial. But what I hope to have demonstrated is that the sociality and dominant motifs of the colonial-era devotion continue into the present. Though purgatory has fallen by the wayside, suffering remains a dominant motif in the contemporary devotion. And this suffering, in turn, underlies the pact of mutual aid that sustains the relationship between the dead and the living. People pray to the souls because the souls suffer, but they also pray to the souls to relieve their own suffering. The contemporary devotion to souls is not a stagnant survival of baroque Catholicism. Neither is it a “syncretism” of prior beliefs, a slapdash mixture of Catholicism, folk religiosity, Kardecism, and Afro-Brazilian tradition. As we have seen, the devotion—like all ritualized practice—is able to accommodate a variety of beliefs and theological interpretations. And like all ritualized practice, the devotion to souls is lived—by practitioners who have bodies that dwell in towns and cities like São Paulo. Put another way, the devotion to souls is emplaced. To understand it, I strived not only to situate the devotion historically but also to understand how contemporary devotees practice and talk about it. Returning again and again to my interviews with devotees, I eventually came to realize that devotees tended to talk about their religious journey in spatial consider this other world an essential element of Brazilian life, or a trace of its culture, or a total social fact”; Fantasmos falados: Mitos e mortos no campo religioso brasileiro (Campinas: Editora Unicamp, 1996), 13. 195 terms. They told me about the places they went, and how they felt in those places. So, to make a small point with big implications, I have argued that devotees do not only move between religions at a conceptual level. Rather, they move between distinct religious spaces—between a Candomblé terreiro like Ilê Axé Nanã and a Catholic church like the Chapel of the Afflicted. They do different things at each place, and form connections with people, souls, and spiritual beings that compel their return. When devotees move, they carry things with them. They have baggage. Through decades of devotion, they become attuned and attached to souls and other immaterial beings, and they carry these relationships with them as they pass through São Paulo’s religious spaces. When Olinda, the mãe-de-santo from Manaus, opened her Candomblé terreiro, she was not interested in crafting some sort of theological synthesis. On the contrary, she asserted that she “did not mix.” Still, she had an altar to the souls and her caboclo spirit. She could not abandon her roots. She was bound to these dead. “I’m not throwing anything away,” she told her pai-de-santo, “because this here gave me my life.”220 From Mixture to Movement In this study’s introduction, I suggested by changing the scale of analysis—by looking at how people move between religions rather than how abstract religions combine and mix—we might avoid the problems that have dogged studies of syncretism. When I tried to understand devotees like Beatriz, the neo-Pentecostal who prayed to her mother and 220 Interview, October 27, 2014. 196 the afflicted souls at the Church of the Hanged, the language of syncretism, hybridity, and creolization offered little traction. On the one hand, these metaphors of mixture are problematically implicated in claims about Brazilian identity and racial essence. On the other, they can be analytically inappropriate to the devotion: Beatriz was not mixing religions any more than someone who holds two jobs mixes their professions. But even so, I do not fully agree with suggestions to dispense with syncretism and focus instead on the “zones of religious purity and stability that now seem most worthy of curiosity.” Successful claims to religious purity and stability are remarkable, to be sure, but not because the problem of hybridity has been solved—and certainly not because mixture is the natural, primordial state of things. Some scholars of religious transit in Brazil have argued syncretism was the traditional way of things, and is now being upended by a rational, modern model of strict affiliation, heralded by the rise of the neo-Pentecostal churches. I am skeptical of such broad claims; I doubt, for instance, religious mixture felt “traditional” to the Inquisitors who brought people like Antonia Maria, the Portuguese sorceress, to trial for conjuring the dead. Even historical actors we might call “subaltern” resisted syncretism. For instance, the historian Mariza de Carvalho Soares tells of an eighteenth-century black brotherhood in Rio de Janeiro. The group’s leader, Francisco Alvez de Souza, promoted the devotion to souls. For him, the “underlying objective of the devotion… was the displacement of any hint of paganism and its substitution with Catholicism.” Souza was especially concerned with “pagan” practices related to the dead, and disparaged “Angola blacks” who “have the abominable habit of 197 removing the cadavers of their dead kin from the tombs… [and] laying them at the entryways of churches.”221 I submit that the things we tend to call syncretism—whether theological syntheses or religious movements—are still a problem to be solved. But rather than divine the hidden sociological forces by which religions combine, there are other ways to confront the problem. One approach, increasingly common since the late 1990s, has been to attend to syncretism’s rhetorical function. As Charles Stewart suggests, we might inquire into “1) who, in the social field, is making claims of purity or mixture; 2) the historical and immediate context that gives rise to those claims; and, 3) who the claims are directed at.” In Brazil, claims of mixture have often been in service of nationalizing projects that herald the essence of the Brazilian character. And claims of religious purity, unsurprisingly, have tended to come from religious specialists who have already enjoyed a reputation for it, like the “authentically African” Nagô Candomblé terreiros in Salvador. This is a useful approach, and has been particularly productive for scholars working in Latin America and the Caribbean.222 What else can we say about the people and practices that fall outside those “zones of religious purity and stability?” In this study, I have advocated attending to space and movement—which by necessity requires paying attention to local conditions. Syncretism is 221 Soares, People of Faith, 202-203; Analyzing the same source material, Cláudia Rodrigues offers a slightly different interpretation, focusing on the performative utility of the devotion. She suggests that in cultivating purgatorial devotions, one of Francisco Souza’s primary objectives was to show the white elite that “the attitudes of the Minas [blacks] with respect to death were differentiated from the Angolas”; “Morte, catolicismo e africanidade na cidade do Rio de Janeiro setecentista,” Ciências sociais e religião, 12 no. 12 (October 2010): 31-52. 222 Charles Stewart, “Creolization, Hybridity, Syncretism, Mixture,” 52. 198 problematic for many reasons, including that it is too universalizing. It is a theory of religious change resulting from “culture contact” that ignores local context in search of universal sociological laws. But I hope to have persuaded the reader that practitioners visit devotional sites because the sites themselves matter. If an Umbanda practitioner performs an Umbanda ritual in a Catholic church, it is not because of Afro-Catholic syncretism—it is because that church matters. The Church of the Hanged is not just a generic stand-in for Catholicism. It is not just any church, but one that satisfies the basic material requirements for the devotion to souls—that is, it has a candle room and is open on Mondays. It also has a history that makes it special. Built near a gallows remembered for having ended slaves’ lives, it is remembered as a place where the suffering dead dwell. I have only begun to rethink syncretism, but if I were to suggest one phrase to guide the way forward, it would be this: movement, not mixture. Scholars have largely failed to replace syncretism with a better term because the alternatives—particularly hybridity and creolization—are just other synonyms for mixture. Parsing out a mixture’s constitutive elements is hopelessly fraught. The search for origins is doomed. But we can always trace where people go and observe what they do there. Rethinking the Dead Roberto DaMatta said that in Brazil the dead are spoken of more than death because “to speak of the dead is a subtle and disguised way of denying death.” Whether or not we agree with that judgment, it raises an important point: death and the dead are different 199 things. They are, of course, conceptually linked—as we have seen, bad death can produce wandering dead. But they are distinct in many other ways. For example, while Kardecists are concerned with disincarnated spirits, they have little to say about death and dying.223 Unlike, say, Buddhists in Japan, they are not deeply involved in Brazil’s funeral industry or known for presiding over funerary rituals. And while many devotees recalled the circumstances of their loved ones’ death on Mondays, they also prayed to souls to whom they had no living relation. Whether the thirteen souls or souls of the hanged, those souls’ death was, at best, a historical memory. The disconnect between death and the dead is even more pronounced in scholarship. That is, discussion of the dead is strikingly absent from much of the loose body of literature we might call “death studies.” In much of this work, death serves as a window into a particular people or historical period. As Robert Hertz noted long ago, death is more than the individual cessation of life. It is socially constructed. As a true Durkheimian, Hertz focused on the practice of second burial among the Dyak of Borneo to show how after someone dies, society requires ritual to recreate itself. More recently, historians have paid considerable attention to the secularization of death. Following Philipe Airès’s groundbreaking The Hour of Our Death, scholars like Gary Ladermann and Stephen Prothero in the United States and João José Reis and Claudia Rodrigues in Brazil have taken changing funerary practices as indicative of broader shifts in societies’ mentalités. And 223 Some Kardecists have told me, however, that they prefer burial to cremation, as the spirit needs time to separate from the body. Cremation can be too abrupt and endanger the process. 200 scholars of Brazil and other regions in the Caribbean and Latin America have increasingly considered how “deathways”—to use Erik Seeman’s term for “deathbed scenes, corpse preparation, burial practices, funerals, mourning, and commemoration”—have served as a point of cultural contact, conflict, and exchange.224 Death may have been thoroughly secularized in places like Brazil and the United States, but the dead remain in the religious domain. For all his many flaws, I think E. B. Tylor was right in locating the dead at the center of this theory of religion. Even in thoroughly modernized societies like Japan, in which few people state explicit belief in spirits or deities, we find abiding attitudes regarding proper conduct toward ancestors. And though the Japanese might not “believe” in gods or spirits, I think practices of ancestor veneration fall squarely under the category of religion and purview of religious studies. Whether a matter of belief or not, the ancestors in Japan—and in many West and Central African systems, Afro-Brazilian practice, spiritualism, Kardecist Spiritism, American “popular” lore, victims of a “bad death” in places like Guatemala and Argentina, and so on—are treated, 224 Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand (Aberdeen: Cohen & West, 1960); Stephen R. Prothero, Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799-1883 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); João Reis, Death is a Festival; Cláudia Rodrigues, Nas fronteiras do além: A secularização da morte no Rio de Janeiro (séculos XVIII e XIX) (Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Presidência da República, Arquivo Nacional, 2005); Erik Seeman, Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 1; see also Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Michael Angelo Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 201 whether in thought or action, as unseen agentive beings with the capacity of affecting the living. So, I wonder what “death studies” might gain from attention to the dead, as well as how this literature might help us better understand continued ritual engagement of the dead. For example, how might have the secularization of death impacted religious life in Brazil, especially considering the dead’s “very clear” social reality? Is it possible to gauge whether the dead are more or less present following the long transition from protracted funerary rites to the one-day wake and burial that is now standard? It was only after I left the field that I thought to inquire about devotees’ attitudes towards burial. How were their familial dead buried? How would the devotees themselves like to be buried? Would they prefer cremation? How do they think people should be buried, and why does it matter to them? Given the common understanding that bad death makes ghosts, I would anticipate devotees have strong opinions about the relationship between good death and the soul’s postmortem voyage. Furthermore, if the way society deals with death reveals something essential, what can we say about perceptions the dead? I do not think that the dead’s presence in Brazil amounts to a denial of death. The relationship between the two is more complicated. After all, residents of the United States seem to deny both. Rather, the death and the dead seem to be mediated by a third term—the afterlife. And for devotees, the afterlife is not so different or distant from this world. The dead are never far in time or space. They wander the human environment, dwelling in places of death and suffering. 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