The Negro and Religion in Brazil

Raymond S. Sayers, The Negro in Brazilian Literature (New York, 1956), p. 177 and throughout.

Father Manuel da Nóbrega's letter from Bahia of August 1549 , translated by E. Bradford Bums, 'Introduction to the Brazilian Jesuit Letters', Mid-America, 44, 3 (July 1962), pp. 174-177.

'The "fetish", a material object endowed with certain spiritual powers, was almost universally misconstrued by the English in West Africa. It was generally believed that the "worship" of such objects was the beginning and end of African "superstition" and some missionaries thought the "fetish" was simply an object chosen at random,' writes the American historian, Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa, British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850 (Madison, 1964), pp. 406-407.

Luis da Cámara Cascudo , Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro (2d. ed., rev.; Rio de Janeiro, 1962), I, p. 311.

Cámara Cascudo, Dicionário, I, p. 309. 'As for that variety of witchcraft which is of direct African origin, it was to develop here upon a European base of medieval superstition and beliefs.' Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves. Translated by Samuel Putnam (New York, 1946), p. 288. Witchcraft in Iberia, however, was 'repressed and rendered comparatively harmless ... due to the wisdom and firmness of the Inquisition'. Henry C. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain (New York, 1922 [first published, 1907]), IV, p. 206.

Although the Indian has virtually disappeared from the Brazilian scene, the name of his witch-doctor, pajé, is synonymous with 'feiticeiro negro'. Cámara Cascudo, Dicionário, II, p. 555.

'Africans believe in the existence of a spiritual energy, sometimes called "vital force" or "dynamism". This power is latent in many people, animals, and things. It is the power behind religion and magic, linking them into one system.' Geoffrey Parrinder, Witchcraft: European and African (London, 1958), pp. 181-182.

Ernst Benz , 'On Understanding Non-Christian Religions', in The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology. Edited by Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa (Chicago, 1959), p. 118.

Magnus Mörner thinks that, hard work as it might be, digging deeper into Brazilian archives would turn up new documents and afford historians concerned with miscegenation a foundation more solid than the observations of foreign travellers. El Mestizaje en la Historia de Ibero-America (Mexico, 1961), p. 24. Parish records might shed light on religious instruction given to and rituals performed by both Negroes and mulattoes.

See Henry Koster, Voyages dans la partie septentrionale du Brésil depuis 1809 jusqu'en 1815. Translated by M. A. Jay (Paris, 1818) II, p. 189. At one point, Gilberto Freyre alludes to a 'certain predisposition of the Negroes and mestizos toward Protestantism, the enemy of the Mass, of saints, and of rosaries with the crucifix'. Masters, p. 272.

Nóbrega , 'Jesuit Letters' , p. 175.

João Antonio Andreoni , Cultura e Opulencia do Brasil por suas Droga e Minas. Edited by Affonso de E. Taunay (São Paulo, 1923,) p. 91.

See for example Hernani de Irajá's compendium entitled, interestingly enough, Feitiços e Crendices (Rio de Janeiro, 1932).

Frank Tannenbaum , 'Toward an appreciation of Latin America', The United States and Latin America (New York, 1959), p. 21.

Pedro Calmon , Espírito da sociedade colonial (São Paulo, 1935), p. 183.

Freyre, Masters, p. 373. The same writer cites two instances late in the eighteenth century of royal instructions to colonial officials to put up, in the first case, with 'amusements so contrary to decent customs' and, in the other, with 'this entertainment, for it is the greatest pleasure they have in all their days of slavery'. The Mansions and the Shanties. The Making of Modern Brazil. Translated by Harriet de Onis (New York, 1963), p. 265.

Among Portuguese colonists there were no indications of the uneasiness felt by some English colonists in possessing Christian slaves, evidence for which is presented in Milton Kantor, 'The Image of the Negro in Colonial Literature', The New England Quarterly, XXXVI, 4 (Dec. 1963), p. 454.

Luiz Vianna Filho , O negro na Bahia (Rio de Janeiro, 1946), p. 57.

Nina Rodrigues, Os Africanos no Brasil (Serie V, 'Brasiliana', 9) (2d. ed. rev. ; São Paulo, 1935), pp. 70-71. Cámara Cascudo, Dicionário, II, pp. 676-677. Freyre, Mansions, p. 255. Usually in the United States 'the singing of the Spirituals has accompanied the "shouting" or holy dancing which has characterized ... the ecstatic form of religious worship among Negroes'. Planters in British America were more fearful than in Brazil that 'religious gatherings' would lead to slave uprisings. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (New York, 1963), pp. 18-24.

Luis Vianna Filho, O negro ma Bahia, p. 58.

Manuel Cardozo , 'The Lay Brotherhoods of Bahia', The Catholic Historical Review, xxxiii, 1 (April 1947), p. 19.

Freyre, Masters, pp. 300, 309, 314. If Freyre's generalisation is correct, that the eighteenth was the least European century in Brazilian history, Brazil's isolation from European currents would have helped to insulate the upper class from much of the 'pseudo-scientific racism' of the Enlightenment. See Curtin, Image of Africa, pp. 40-46.

Freyre, a cultural relativist of patriarchal background, expresses no preference between 'the religion of the blacks with their dances [and] that of the whites, with their processions and Holy Weeks'. Mansions, pp. 40-41. He cites as primary sources a good many North European and North American travellers and long-time residents in Brazil. Both lay and clerical, most of these visitors—many of whom were English—showed themselves more set against Catholicism than slavery, looking down more on Portuguese ways than African. Until less biased sources are unearthed, the historian, by separating the normative from the descriptive in their accounts, may regard the bulk of these informants as trustworthy. 'English thought during the first three decades of the [nineteenth] century was more generously favourable to Africans than it had been in the past or would be in the future.' Curtin, Image of Africa, p. 235, also see p. 382.

Cited from Annaes de Biblioteca Nacional, v. 37 (1803), p. 85 in Calmon, Sociedade colonial, p. 162. But, from his wide and deep study of primary sources, C. R. Boxer flatly states that in the Colony 'the free Negro and the dark-hued Mulatto had little or no hope of ascending the social scale, whatever their aptitudes and qualifications. One or two exceptions merely confirm this rule'. Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415-1825 (Oxford, 1963), pp. 120-121.

The reasoning behind class-caste reform was not humanitarian but political. Of Pombal it may well be that he meant, as J. F. King suggests for Spanish colonial policy, 'to reward individual merit among coloured subjects, to drain off potential leadership from the coloured masses, and to create grateful new supporters of the Crown who at the same time that they reinforced the ranks of the white minority would undermine the pretensions of the creole aristocracy'. James F. King , 'The Case of José Ponciano de Ayarza: A Document on "gracias al sacar",' The Hispanic American Historical Review, 31, 4, p. 644, as cited by Mörner, Mestizaje, pp. 37-38.

The mixed blood of the most famous of all Jesuit fathers in Brazil, Antonio Vieira (1608-1697), is no exception. Although he is said to have had a mulatto grandmother, by birth, religious training, and classical culture, Vieira was Portuguese and therefore in both the Old and the New World socially white.

The leading nineteenth-century authority on slavery in Brazil places becoming a monk or priest at the top of the list of ways (according to Roman law, war or other service to the state, marriage, vocation, etc.) by which a slave might acquire liberty by prescription; yet he notes that even being an ex-slave was a hindrance for admission to regular orders. A. M. Perdigão Malheiro, A Escravidão no Brasil, I, Direito sôbre os escravos Libertos (Rio de Janeiro, 1866, facsimile 1944), pp. 155-158, 181-182. Where Europeans controlled the direction of religious orders, the belief often prevailed that mulattoes were incapable of keeping the vow of chastity, and were therefore kept out. Thales de Azevedo, As Elites de Côr, Um estudo de ascensão social (Serie V, 'Brasiliana', 282) (São Paulo, 1955), pp. 143-144.

Freyre, Mansions , p. 359.

Ibid., p. 252.

Rodolfo Garcia , 'Os judeus na historia do Brasil colonial', in Os judeus no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1936), pp. 37-44. 'The religiousness of the colonist', explains an eminent Brazilian historian, 'was perforce more superficial than deep, because in his lineage (raça) contended very contradictory impieties: the Negro's animism, the Jew's materialism, the Indian's incredulity, medieval superstitions (supersticões).' Calmon, Sociedade colonial, p. 150.

Father Lino do Monte Carmello Luna , 'Memoria sobre os Montes Guarrarapes e a Igreja da Nossa Senhora dos Prazeres', Revista do Instituto Archaelógico e Geográfico de Pernambuco, II (1870), p. 17, cited by René Ribeiro, Religião e Relacões Raciais (Rio de Janeiro, 1956), p. 75.

Sayers, Negro in Brazilian Literature, chaps. vii, ix. Gregory Rabassa, The Negro in Brazilian Fiction since 1888 (Unpubl. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1954).

Sayers, Negro in Brazilian Literature, pp. 187-188.

Edison Carneiro , 'Situacão do negro no brasil', Estudos Afro-Brasileiros. Trabalhos apresentados ao 10 Congresso Afro-Brasilelro reunido no Recife em 1934 (Rio de Janeiro, 1935), 1, p. 237.

Roger Bastide and Florestan Fernandes , Brancos e Negros em São Paulo (2d. ed., rev.; 'Brasiliana', 305) ( São Paulo, 1959), p. 84.

Father Julio Engrácia, Relação Cronológica do Santuario e Irmandade do Senhor Bom Jesus de Congonhas no Estado de Minas Gerais (São Paulo, 1908), cited by Freyre, who chides those fetish-conscious Brazilians who have both taste for the refinements of European art' and an inclination 'to be over-zealous in their Catholic orthodoxy'. Masters, p. 295.

The phrase is used by Samuel Putnam, Marvelous Journey: A Survey of Four Centuries of Brazilian Writing (New York, 1948), p. 24.

Gilberto Freyre , Ordem e Progresso (Rio de Janeiro, 1959), I, p. 301.

Artur Ramos , Introducão á Antropologia Brasileira (3d. ed.; Rio de Janeiro, 1961-2), 3, p. 50.

Putnam , Marvelous Journey, p. 18.

Rodrigues , Africanos no Brasil, p. 99.

Freyre, Ordem , I, p. 312.

At this writing the term, macumba, is used less than the distinct but more accurate names Afrobrazilian sects bear in various regions: candomblê, umbanda, changô, batuque, and others.

That of 1934 was organized in Recife by Gilberto Freyre, that of 1937 in Salvador (Bahia) by Edison Carneiro, whose extensive historical and anthropological research is too little known by the non Portuguese-reading student of African culture in the New World; e.g., Ladinos e Crioulos: Estudos sôbre o negro no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1964).

Sérgio Buarque de Holanda , Raízes do Brazil ( Rio de Janeiro, 1936), p. 108.

For feiticeiro, benzedor is the term used by Clodomir Vianna Moog, Bandeirantes e Pioneiros: Paralelo entre duas culturas (2d. ed.; Porto Alegre, 1961), p. 286. English edition, translated by L. L. Barrett (New York, 1964).

Alfredo Dias Gomes, O. Pagador de Promessas (2d. ed.; Rio de Janeiro, 1962).

Cited by Joseph M. Kitagawa , 'The History of Religions in America' , Religions, p. 21.

Harley Ross Hammond , 'Race, Social Mobility and Politics in Brazil', Race, IV, 2 (May 1963), p. 7.

Their socio-economic reasoning differs from the racist argument which holds that Christian religion but not European civilization can be imparted to racially inferior peoples. 'The savage Galla may remain a Galla and yet become a believer as perfect, of the elect as pure, as the most holy prelate of Europe. That is the striking superiority of Christianity, which derives from its principal characteristic of Grace.' Arthur, comte de Gobineau, Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (2d. ed., Paris, 1884), I, pp. 66-67, cited by Curtin, Image of Africa, p. 422.

Freyre, Masters , p. 328.

In his recent analysis of Brazil (reviewed elsewhere in this issue—Editor) Charles Wagley (the first social anthropologist to use the lucid term 'social race'), writes that in addition to 'obvious' colour, 'other criteria, such as income, education, family connections, and even personal charm and special abilities or aptitudes come into play when placing a person in terms of the prestige hierarchy or even of social class'. Religion is not a criterion, yet on the following page Wagley writes, 'It seems that all the participants in a candomblê ceremony in Bahia are Negroes ... There is in Brazil an Association of Men of Colour, and St. Benedict is the patron saint of many religious brotherhoods whose members are black or nearly so. However, if one looks closely at the members of these associations, it becomes apparent that there are different shades of darkness, and even a few very light-skinned people. But that is not the point. The essential point is that these are people of the same social class and incidentally of similar skin colour'. (Italics added.) Does this passage mean that these 'participants' and 'members' are of the 'same social class' because of their religious ways, or the other way round ? It is hard to say. There is no other reference to religion in the section, 'Race and Social Class', except 'Negro doesn't hear Mass, he spies on it', one of seven traditional derogatory sayings recorded by Marvin Harris as stereotyping the Negro in a small community of Bahia. Charles Wagley, An Introduction to Brazil (New York and London, 1963), pp. 132-147.