Spiritism as a target of ‘annihilation’ – conceptual clarification and exemplification of a rhetorical strategy

Abstract

The rhetorical strategy of annihilation appears in situations of conflict between different world-views. It is the attempt of one of the parties involved to attribute an inferior status to the adversary. The technique requires the capacity of a social actor of influencing the public image of the phenomenon in question in a way that a public interest in the campaign becomes obvious. The success of this process of social construction depends on a twofold rhetorical talent of the ‘constructor’. The first faculty is to reduce the complexity of the challenging phenomenon to alleged ‘core elements’. The second one is to associate these ‘core elements’ to pre-established negative definitions so that the ‘enemy’ appears as a mere variant of a well-known unacceptable social phenomenon. In order to illustrate how and why the strategy of annihilation works, the article refers to the campaign against Spiritism driven by Brazilian authorities between 1890 and 1940.

Preliminary remarks

The ‘rhetoric of annihilation’ can be understood as a discursive pattern that frequently appears in situations of conflict, either in the sense of inter-religious disputes or in the sense of a campaign of secular social instances against a religious movement (Usarski, 1998). Although the expression ‘rhetoric of annihilation’ generally does not appear as such in the academic literature on associated issues, it is not an isolated concept. Rather, it is embedded in a more comprehensive theoretical context associated with the ‘interpretative paradigm’ (Wilson, 1970) and its more specific components such as Alfred Schütz’s phenomenological sociology, the sociology of knowledge elaborated by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, symbolic interactionism in the tradition of George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer or Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology. All these approaches have in common that they emphasize the fundamental role of interpretation of social actors and the importance of the processes of sensemaking for the analysis of intersubjective social realities.

From the standpoint of the associated theories, social constellations, patterns of behavior, events etc. of the present world are not, as it seems to the naive observer, meaningful by themselves. Rather they are meaningful to the extent that social actors have attributed a specific sense to them. This principle applies to any social phenomenon including forms of behavior consensually classified as deviance. According to the labeling approach, developed under the conceptual premises of the ‘interpretative paradigm’ from the late 1960s onwards, deviance has no autonomous status. Rather it is a dependent variable generated in a complicated interplay of communication through which certain individuals or groups are ‘declared’ deviant by a society’s majority. That means that deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender.’ The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label (Becker, 1967: 9) From a historical standpoint, definitions of deviance commonly accepted at a given moment in time can be understood as the outcome of former social conflicts between ideological divergent social parties. In other words opposing ‘forces’ – be they pressure groups or subcultures at the collective decision making level, actors and others on the interpersonal level, or ‘clients’ and control agencies at the organizational-processing level – struggle to define situations, types of behavior, specific acts, and the ‘essential’ character of particular individuals’ (Schur, 1971: 149)

Labeling-theory distinguishes between the dynamics of defining a consensual norm which condemns the targeted behavior and the subsequent application of the established norm. One prerequisite for setting the first step in motion is the co-existence of at least two social agents that operate in the same field of interest. Under this condition, a party involved in the quarrel may inaugurate a public discourse with the aim to publicly call the legitimacy of the adversary’s engagement in the disputed social realm into question. In this case, advocates of the party which feels the need to take action against an opponent assume the role of ‘moral entrepreneurs’ or ‘moral crusaders’ (Becker, 1967: 147–163) setting off a campaign in order to convince the social majority of the necessity of collective oppressing measures against the group in question. One important prerequisite for the success of a ‘moral crusade’ is the pressure-group’s social position and logistical competence in terms of aspects such as organizational coherence, resources, credibility or governmental support. These elements have inspired labeling theorists to trace back the constellations under which deviance-definitions have emerged, to raise questions concerning the identity of the protagonists of theses definitions and to problematize the interests behind the stigmatizing campaign.

Against this conceptual background, the expression ‘rhetoric of annihilation’ applies to a specific element of a ‘moral crusade’, that is, to the argumentative mechanisms frequently encountered in the context of a process of the definition of deviance. The immediate reference of the concept is the notion of ‘annihilation’, defined by Berger and Luckmann, as the assignment of an inferior ontological status to a challenge to a social majority’s ‘symbolic universe’ with the aim to neutralize the threatening character of the former (Berger and Luckmann, 1991: 132).

Theoretical key-questions in this respect are: How do efforts of annihilation work in a ‘technical’ sense? What argumentative strategies guarantee the success of an annihilation-process? The answer given in the present paper revolves around two intertwined rhetoric strategies. Firstly, annihilating social instances concentrate on supposedly problematic aspects of the challenging phenomenon. In other words: through the filtering of the phenomenon’s actual complexity, a pejorative ‘master status’ (Hughes, 1945) is attributed to the challenger. The second rhetorical strategy constitutive for the process of ‘annihilation’ consists in the annihilators’ attempt to transfer socially pre-established negative definitions to the simplified competitor. Under this circumstance, the latter appears as yet another variation of a phenomenon already known as ‘dangerous’, ‘suspicious’ or ‘problematic’ by the general public.

The case selected for the discussion and exemplification of the ‘rhetoric of annihilation’ is a quarrel that took place in Brazil between 1890 and 1940. The example is amply suited for and analysis in the light of the interpretative paradigm. The protagonists of the dispute were representatives of conventional medicine, who, from a determinate social position, turned against Spiritism which had recently been imported from France and whose initial activities in Brazil partly overlapped with the medical sector. The structural inferiority of Spiritism and the fact that the latter was in tension with the dominant culture in ideological terms made it an ideal ‘negative’ frame of reference which contributed to the legitimation and definitive institutionalization of the ‘conventional’ health sector.

Origin and general characteristics of Spiritism

On April 8, 1857, the French author Hyppolyte Leon Denizard Rivail (1804–1869) published in Paris (under his pseudonym Allan Kardec) his work The spirits’ book (Le livre des esprits). The book was launched nine years after the alleged beginning of the modern Spiritist movement associated with the Fox Sisters from Hydesville, New York who, according to quickly spreading rumors, had begun to systematically communicate with the souls of deceased beings. In this sense, the The spirtis’ book was one of several manifestations of the ‘fever of séances’, which were rampant at that time not only in the USA but also in Europe (Linse, 1996: 55)

According to Kardec, his publication was the result of personal observations made during sessions with mediums, that is, individuals sensitive to the immediate presence of spirits and capable of entering in direct contact with them (Kardec, 1995: 204ff.). Due to the empirical character of the observations, Kardec claimed that Spiritism is the new science, which has come to reveal to mankind, by means of irrefutable proofs, the existence and nature of the spiritual world and its relationship with the physical world. It appears not as something supernatural, but on the contrary, as one of the living and active forces of Nature, source of an immense number of phenomena, which still today are not fully understood, and because of this they are relegated to the world of fantasy and miracles. (Kardec, 1987: 25)

Besides the belief in a Unitarian Creator God, the ethical perfection of Jesus, the law of karma, reincarnation and continuous gradual evolution of the soul through the acquisition of knowledge and the fulfillment of ethical requirement, Kardec taught that the biographical manifestation of man is composed of three components. Besides the immortal soul and the perceptible body there is an intermediating subtle layer of existence called the perispirit. According to Kardec, there are no clear boundaries between the physical world and the spiritual realm. Since they are parallel, coexisting spheres, communication between incarnated and non-incarnated souls is possible through mediums sensitive to this extended reality. Any human being has certain medial talents. However, the classification as ‘medium’ is limited to individuals who have developed and express these capacities above average (Kardec, 1986: 172ff). These gifts manifest themselves in different manners. Alongside mediums who prove the presence of spirits by manipulating outer phenomenon such as by making inert objects rotate, there are mediums who ‘recognize the presence of spirits by a vague impression, a sort of shuddering sensation, running through their whole body’ (Kardec, 1986: 177). Others are classified as mediums capable of hearing spirits or perceiving them visually. Another category is that of men or women whose hands or voices are used by the spirits to transmit their messages to the material world. An important category for our purpose is that of healing mediums, that is, of individuals who heal ‘by the laying-on of hands, by the look, by a mere gesture’, to quote only some of the abilities mentioned by Kardec (1986: 185ff).

Initial evolution of the field of Spiritism in Brazil

In 1853, newspapers in Rio de Janeiro and Recife began to spread news about extraordinary phenomena allegedly experienced in the USA and Europe. From 1860 onwards, small esoteric groups gained access to Kardec’s books in French. The situation changed considerably when in 1875 the publishing house, Livraria Garnier, published Portuguese versions of The spirit’s book, The book on mediums, and Heaven and hell. Soon thereafter, Brazilian authors began to contribute to the evolution of Spiritism in the country. Moreover, periodicals such as O Echo d’Álem-Túmulo, (from 1869 onwards) or Revista Espirita (from 1875 onwards) offered the opportunity for the further elaboration and diffusion of ideas related to Spiritism. These and other publications offered space for the presentation of a series of divergent concepts that were rooted in personal preferences and interpretations of the authors involved. Something similar accounts for Spiritist groups and their ramifications founded since the 1860s, including the first local center, the Grupo Familiar do Espiritismo, established by the journalist Luís Olímpio Teles de Menezes (1828–1893) in Salvador, from which the Associação Espírita Brasileira split in 1873. Only one year later, a part of the membership split from the Associação Espírita Brasileira and has existed since then under the name, Santa Teresa de Jesus. These dynamics gave rise to a highly heterogeneous field of institutions in terms of names, concepts and publishing organs. By 1900 already 19 journals related to Spiritism had been founded. (Stoll, 2005: 50)

The institutional variety indicates that the expression ‘Spiritism’ was a fuzzy generic category rather than a precise term for an internally consistent religious branch. (Giumbelli, 1997b: 32) In fact, the designation alluded to a series of phenomena sustained by the common belief of their representatives in the presence of spiritual beings and their interference in the physical world. Beyond this common denominator, there was room for groups that focused on the study of Kardec’s books, while others kept an extended library which also contained the esoteric works of authors such as Jean-Baptiste Roustaing (1805-1879), Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1722), and Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891). Similar differences existed between ‘scientific’ Spiritists who emphasized the empirical character of extraordinary phenomena and those who considered the doctrine of a parallel world a philosophical challenge. Simultaneously there were the so-called occultist Spiritists especially interested in the manifestations of souls and their impact on the material world alongside with ‘religious’ Spiritists dedicated to the conciliation between Kardec’s teachings and Catholicism. (Arribas, 2008: 72–73).

The field was also heterogeneous as far as the presence of healing mediums in local institutions was concerned. If a center offered a therapeutic approach, it often legitimized the latter by borrowing arguments from homeopathy, which simultaneously spread across the country and soon became closely intertwined with Spiritism. One important personality in this context was the French physician, Jules Mure (1809–1858) who, after having studied the approach of Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843), had become a ‘mentor’ of homeopathy in Europe. Mure’s main project in Brazil consisted in the foundation of the experimental community Falanstério do Saí, which followed the approach of the French socialist, François Marie Charles Fourier (1772–1837). The group was located at the peninsular Saí in the south of Brazil (Federal State of Santa Catarina) and benefitted from a homeopathic institute simultaneously established by Mure. However, the whole venture eventually failed, and Mure moved to Rio de Janeiro where he founded the Hahnemanian Institute of Brazil in 1843. Later Mure and the surgeon João Vicente Martins (1808–1854) established 26 local ambulatory clinics dedicated to the homeopathic treatment mainly of slaves and poor people in Rio de Janeiro. (Sigolo, 1999: 46–47) From 1860 onwards, the influence of homeopathy over Spiritism grew stronger. Simultaneously, Spiritist centers contributed considerably to the diffusion of homeopathy since Spiritists considered Samuel Hahnemann’s immunological concept of the vital force similar to Kardec’s teachings about the perispirit, whose different degrees of purity were associated with human health.

It should be said in advance that mutual advantages of the alliance became a burden for Spiritism to the extent that homeopathy, continuously striving for official recognition, was targeted by the already dominant European-based scientific medicine. For representatives of the latter, homeopathy with its unproven principles, odd ideas, and questionable therapeutic methods, was charlatanism which had to be prevented. One paradigmatic expression of this critical position is the expert report on homeopathy published in April 1846 by members of the Academy of Medicine in Rio de Janeiro. At one point, the authors even use the formulation ‘homeopathic sect’ (Galhardo, 1928: 597) calling attention to the latter’s abusive activities that not only violated the laws of the public health system, but even threatened the country’s order (Galhardo, 1928: 344).

The anti-Spiritism campaign between 1890–1940

During the first decades after the arrival of Spiritism in Brazil, the main opponents of the movement were representatives of the Catholic Church who criticized Kardec’s teachings for being incompatible with the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Among other aspects, they condemned the belief in reincarnation, the rejection of the biblical doctrine of original sin, the idea of a continuous evolution of the individual over subsequent existences, the concept of a ‘parallel world’ and the claim that the living could communicate with the souls of the deceased. Due to these and other ‘delusions’, Spiritism was classified as a profoundly irreligious system. (Moreira, 1862: 8) Towards the end of 19th century – coinciding with the principle of religious neutrality of the State initially formulated in 1824 and reaffirmed by the constitution from 1891 – the animosity towards Spiritism came from a different direction. The main counter-arguments were now articulated by secular opinion leaders who were less interested in the religious aspirations, then and now constitutive for Spiritism, but called attention to possible negative implications of the latter for public health.

From the 1890s onwards until the 1920s, these critiques were based on efforts to label Spiritism as ‘healerism’ and ‘charlatanism’. After 1920, a third element was added, that is, the concern over collective psychological health and the suspicion that Spiritism encouraged the development of mental diseases. What overall social-historical changes were responsible for this paradigm shift?

Until the beginning of the 19th century, physicians and surgeons of varying levels of formation were active in Brazil alongside self-declared healers who applied therapeutic native practices such as European folk-procedures and techniques common among indigenous peoples. While the Brazilian population was often not very picky about the methods of treatment available, the representatives of the erudite medical knowledge of European origin began to claim a monopoly over the control of medical procedures. Especially the physicians trained at the Portuguese university of Coimbra undertook the task of distinguishing and promoting their medical repertoire against methods based on ‘superstition’ (Edler and Fonseca, 2006).

Two main factors were responsible for the upswing of scientific medicine in Brazil at the beginning of the 19^th century. First, the transfer of the Portuguese Court to Brazil and their final establishment in Rio de Janeiro in March 1808 coincided with an innovation impulse, which manifested itself in the foundation of a series of scientific institutions. Secondly, epidemics of yellow fever (Ribeiro, 1992: 93) called attention to the importance and necessity of a professionalization in the sectors of public hygiene and health on a national level.

For a while, the efforts of overcoming Brazil’s backwardness through the implementation of Portuguese standards into different fields of public life were geographically limited. The first city which profited from the trend was Salvador, Brazil’s political center in those years and location of the first residence of the royal family. It was also the place of the foundation of the country’s first medical institution, which is the School for Surgery, inaugurated in February 1808, followed by the School for Anatomy, Surgery and Medicine, established nine months later in Rio de Janeiro. In 1813, both institutions were renamed as Academies of Medicine and Surgery. Finally, in 1832, they gained the status of faculties. These institutional developments went hand in hand with the redefinition and expansion of medicine’s realm of competence. Health, until then concentrated on the curative treatment of the individual, gained a macrosocial dimension. Representatives of the growing scientific medical sector saw themselves not just as healers of individuals, but also as the guardians of society. According to an article in the Gazeta Medica da Bahia published in 1899, the physicians’ role included ‘a scientific orientation which would ensure the execution of the good laws and guarantee stability and solidity for the best plans for the country’s progress and growth’. (Schwarcz, 1993: 202).

The influence of this scientific medicine medical became visible in the privilege of defining diseases and identifying them in social conflict zones. From 1830 onwards, mental disorder carriers were treated as sick people to be isolated and controlled in specialized institutions. Another indicator for the growing social relevance of the medical sector was the growing impact of the latter over the hearings and judgments of the court. (Machado et al., 1978: 193ff.)

Alongside the power of defining and identifying diseases, the representatives of the official health system claimed a monopoly on treating and healing them. One institutional expression of this demand was the Rio de Janeiro Medical and Surgical Society, founded in 1892 as a national agency of control over the health sector (which until then had been the responsibility of the local administrators). Analogously, the Central Board of Public Hygiene (Junta Central de Higiene Pública) and the Brazilian Pharmaceutical Society (Sociedade Farmacêutica Brasileira) established in 1850 and 1851 respectively were created in order to supervise the operations of the pharmacies in the country. ¹

Efforts to regulate the medical training and to monopolize its certification point in the same direction. The first guidelines, launched in 1832, demanded from medical practitioners a diploma issued by the Faculties of Medicine in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro or by a corresponding institution abroad. These conditions empowered the caretakers of the henceforth official medical system to reject the requests made by the Hahnemannian Institute in 1853, 1881 and 1900 to set up a professorship for Homeopathy at the Faculty for Medicine in Rio de Janeiro (Sigolo, 1999: 252).

Official definitions of valid medical practices also had an impact on articles 156, 157 and 158 of the penal code of 1890, which threatened the applicants of illegal therapeutic procedures with severe punishment. The respective paragraphs listed several unlawful approaches, including Spiritism and Homeopathy, alongside other suspicious methods and paraphernalia such as magic spells, talismans, fortune telling, hypnotism and animal magnetism. According to the penal code, these kinds of procedure were capable of abusing the credulity of the people.

No other of the aforementioned phenomena suffered more from this prejudice than Spiritism. The representatives of the Brazilian health controlling agencies neglected the actual diversity of the envisaged current and directed their attention only to doctrines and activities which fit into the negative categories of ‘curanderism’ (Kelly and Griffin, 2010) and ‘charlatanism’, both understood as placeholders for irresponsible, delusive, and often harmful activities in the health-sector. The concentration of associated tendencies neglected the heterogeneity of the Spiritist spectrum. In contrast to the monolithic image of Spiritism, not all of the groups were engaged in the field of spiritual healing. Some circles were indifferent towards the healing-capacities of mediums and primarily interested, for example, in ontological problems provoked by the idea of a ‘parallel, spiritual world’, ethical consequences of the concepts of karma and reincarnation or synoptic ‘interfaith’ readings of Kardec’s writings and the Bible in search of convergences between the two religions. Ignoring this heterogeneity and according to the ideal of public health, the authorities focused, among other ‘problematic’ aspects, on the claim that the imposition of the hands of talented individuals could successfully treat corporal and psychological afflictions. Consequently, Spiritist centers that overtly propagated the approach of Hahnemann began to pay the price for their declared sympathy for Homeopathy. From 1891 onwards, there were cases in which representatives of Spiritism were imprisoned for having violated the prohibition of practicing illegal healing procedures. To avoid more severe problems, some Spiritist centers took the decision to close their doors for good. (Arribas, 2008: 92–93)

The reception of the discussion among European scientists about issues such as hypnosis, suggestion and mind control added new arguments to the Brazilian anti-Spiritism campaign. For the protagonists of the debate it was not enough to declare that the ‘parallel realities’ experienced by mediums during the séances were pathological projections of individuals with predispositions for mental diseases. Rather, the critics expressed concern for the common frequenters of the Spiritist Centers and the danger of mental manipulation during the sessions. From the perspective of the official medical system, these risks were not merely individual psycho-hygienic problems but, due to their illegal character, a threat to public order. (Giumbelli, 1997b).

Eventually, this line of arguments against Spiritism became more common than the accusations of ‘curanderism’ or even ‘charlatanism’. In the 1920s and 1930s most of the complaints against Spiritism came from psychiatrists and medical court experts, among them Leonídio Ribeiro and Murillo de Campos, both renowned representatives of the official medical system of those years. In their book O Espiritismo no Brasil – contribuição ao seu estudo clínico e médico-legal, (Ribeiro and Campos, 1931) the two authors identified the syndrome of ‘mediumpathy’ or ‘mediummania’ (Giumbelli, 1997b: 50), that is, a disease caused by frequent visits to a Spiritist center. For that reason, Ribeiro and Campos concluded, Spiritism was a social danger, which called for the intervention of the Brazilian state. Similarly, the psychiatrist Antônio Xavier de Oliveira declared in his publication with the symptomatic title ‘Spiritism and Madness’ (‘Espiritismo e Loucura’) that Spiritism served as ‘cocaine for the debilitated nervous people’, that is, for ‘the morons, and future inmates of insane asylums.’ (Oliveira, 1931: 211)

The stance of Ribeiro, Campos and Oliveira marked the culmination point of a debate, which gradually lost its momentum in the following years. In the reformulated panel code of 1940, one still finds sections that refer to acts of ‘charlatanry’ and ‘quackery’. However, Spiritism is not mentioned any longer this context. This exclusion from the catalogue of punishable offenses coincided with the fact that in the same year Spiritism appeared for the first time as a ‘value-neutral’ category of the Brazilian National Census, which since the Censo Geral do Império carried out in 1872 contains a section on religious affiliation. These were signs of ‘normalization’ and indicators of the general acceptance of a religious current, which until then had been the target of a process of public stigmatization.

The release of Spiritism from annihilation-efforts

The fact that in statistical terms Spiritism is today behind Catholicism and Protestantism the third strongest religious tradition in Brazil indicates that a process of ‘rhetorical annihilation’ is highly dependent on historical circumstances. Arguments against a new religious phenomenon are coined in accordance with the spirit of the time and can lose their urgency, strength and plausibility when the socio-historical conditions change.

Among the intertwined factors that have been responsible for the gradual transition of Spiritism from a stigmatized or even oppressed minority phenomenon to a tolerated, or even appreciated fragment of Brazil’s religious field, at least the following aspects should be considered.

Public attacks on alleged deviant phenomena rarely represent monologues. Rather, they often provoke reactions on the side of the criticized group, in the form of counter-arguments for the sake of self-defense and/or of attempts to improve a tarnished image by downplaying polemical characteristics and highlighting uncontroversial ones. Hence, it is no surprise that while the campaign against Spiritism made progress, representatives of the latter began to argue against the accusations of illegal medical practices by emphasizing the religious character of their meetings and the charitable character of their public activities. In this context, the Federação Espírita Brasileira (FEB), founded in 1884 in Rio de Janeiro with the aim to overcome the institutional fragmentation of the movement and to establish itself as an overarching platform for internal communication and external articulation, assumed already in the 1920s a vital role for the improvement of Spiritism’s image on the national level. (Giumbelli, 1997a: 106–107) One of FEB’s measures was to react on behalf of the affiliated local institutions to the accusation that spiritualists were possessed, lunatic and suffered from hallucinations. One of the consequences was that the Association coordinated the movement’s protest against the mention of Spiritism in the 1890 Penal Code (Gomes, 2013). In the decades of the anti-Spiritism-campaign, the FEB also organized more than twenty congresses at which the religious profile of Spiritism was sharpened against the background of the principle of religious freedom enshrined in the constitution from 1891.

Finally, with the increasing reputation and consolidation of the medical sector in general and psychiatry in particular, the need for legitimizing of the latter through the distinction from ‘illegal’ and ‘dangerous’ activities of Spiritism in the same field became obsolete. The fact that the number of publications defaming the latter significantly declined in the 1950s can be understood as a sign that ‘official’ medicine had finally achieved its hegemonic position. (Almeida, 2007: 192–197)

Concluding remarks

The campaign reconstructed above confirms the crucial role of two components of the ‘rhetoric of annihilation’, that is, a) the overemphasizing of ‘problematic’ aspects of a targeted phenomenon and b) the interpretation of the isolated elements as a particular expression of a wider problem that negatively affects the interest of a social majority. Between 1890 and 1940, opponents of Spiritism focused on healing-practices which (although widespread among Brazilian Spiritists) were not representative for the phenomenological diversity of the related groups. The healing-procedures were thematized without taking into account their religious context and condemned as abusive or even unlawful, on the same level as supposedly analogous approaches such as homeopathy.

What is special to the above analyzed event compared to other stigmatization-processes to the detriment of religious minorities, is the character of the ‘moral crusader’. While New Religious Movements in Germany, for instance, were a thorn in the side of a religious competitor, especially the Lutheran Church (Usarski, 1998), the campaign against Spiritism between 1890 and 1940 in Brazil was spearheaded by spokesmen of a secular instance. This difference, however, did not suspend a central pre-requisite for a successful ‘annihilation’ process, that is, the existence of a reputed, sufficiently powerful instance whose pleas are easily accepted by an adequately numerous audience.

Such a constellation is not automatically given, especially not under the conditions of an institutionally and ideologically pluralized society characterized by the coexistence of different, often antagonistic interest-groups whose relatively free interplay is guaranteed by a liberal constitution. The same is true for the religious field. There is a difference between a society dominated by one or a handful of mainstream churches – as in the case of Germany – and a country with a relatively egalitarian denominational structure or even a relatively unregulated religious market.

The finally official recognition of Spiritism as an acceptable religious option is manifest in its inclusion in the questionnaire of Brazil’s National Census of 1940. This is an indication of the gradual transition of an almost exclusively Catholic country (mirrored by the simple question asked by the first census in 1872: ‘Are you a Catholic or not’) to an increasingly religiously pluralistic society (reflected in them more than 140 responses under the rubric ‘religious affiliation’ in the last Census in 2010). This multiplication confirms Brazil’s image not only as a multicultural country, but also as a remarkably tolerant nation relatively free from government restriction of the religious field (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2011: 40, 42). One example for this liberal atmosphere is the position of the Brazilian State towards Ayahuasca, constitutive for groups such Santo Daime, União Vegetal and Barquinha. While ‘consumers’ of the hallucinogenic substance face legal problems in countries such as Spain, Belgium, Germany, Denmark (Loenen et al., 2017: 231ff.) or Great Britain (Walsh, 2015), the psychotropic tea and its associated rituals are considered a cultural heritage and protected by the law in Brazil.

One relevant subsector of Brazil’s contemporary religious field immediately related to ‘spiritual healing’ is that of New Japanese Religions, such as Seicho-no-ie and the Church of World Messianity (Ribeiro, 2016). The concentration on Spiritual Healing of these denominations is instrumental for their steady statistical growth in the last decades. The Church of World Messianity was brought to Brazil in 1950 by a handful of individual practitioners of Japanese descent who successfully propagated the technique of spiritual purification, Johrei, among the wider population. Today, Johrei-Centers can be found all over the country. The Church even runs an officially registered Theological Faculty in the city of São Paulo.

The academic study of ‘complementary’ approaches to health through ‘esoteric’ procedures of different origins, including Indian and East Asian religious traditions, is also possible for students of so-called ‘Naturology’. Authorized by the Brazilian Science Ministry, the course is offered by two private Universities, that is, the Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina in Florianopolis, and the Universidad Anhembi Morumbi in São Paulo (Stern, 2015).

An indication of a different kind for the high degree of the public acceptance of faith-healing procedures could be found in ‘objective’ articles in Brazilian daily newspapers and magazines published in March 2012 which reported that the former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, soon after he had been diagnosed with cancer, had visited the famous healing-medium João Teixeira de Faria, - commonly known as ‘John of God’ (Rocha, 2017) – in Abadiânia, Federal State of Goiás.

The fundamental changes Brazil’s religious landscape since the campaign against Spiritism and the enormous acceptance of faith-healing procedures in contemporary Brazil could not be better exemplified.