Ambiguities in the Brazilian religious imagination

In this paper I present some background to the current practice of Candomblé in Salvador da Bahia and its surrounds, and field observations concerning the relations between Candomblé and Catholicism in a traditionalist Ketu terreiro where I lived for some months in 1987 and 1988. The terreiro is situated in Lauro de Freitas, a small town to the north of the city of Salvador, between the airport and the ocean. The observations in this paper are not put forward to support one or other position in the debate over the African character of Candomblé or the possible bias toward one strand of ritual and belief; they serve rather to illustrate what may be called the creative ambiguity of the Brazilian religious imagination, a feature that has both preserved and transformed elements of each religion.

A system of correspondences with popular Catholicism is a time-honoured feature of African-derived religions in Brazil, though identifications between particular saints and orixás vary between different parts of the country. In Bahia, images of saints are found in most terreiros, including the most traditionalist houses, alongside symbols of the orixás: St Lazarus corresponding to Omolu, the smallpox divinity; St George to Oxóssi, the patron of huntsmen; St Anthony to Ogum, god of war and iron; and the Virgin Mary (in her manifestation as Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception of the Beach) to Iemanjá, goddess of the sea and mother of the other orixás. (In other locations in Brazil there are different sets of correspondences.)

This old equation of individual orixás with Catholic saints is reflected in the basic terminology of Nagô terreiros, where initiates are known as filhos-de-santo, literally “children of saint”, and priests and priestesses as pais-de-santo or mães-de-santo, “fathers” or “mothers” of saint. (There are Yoruba synonyms for the last two terms, transcribed in Portuguese as babalorixá and ialorixá, and one for the daughter of saint, iaô, but they are used less frequently). In Bahia, Oxalá, the most revered deity of the Candomble pantheon, is popularly identified with a local manifestation of the Catholic Jesus, Nosso Senhor do Bomfin, Our Lord of Bomfim, and the church of this name is the site of devotions by cult-followers each Friday—Friday being the day of Oxalá in the Candomblé calendar. Another feature of the cult of saints in popular Catholicism, the practice of promessas—offerings in return for favours received—has a parallel, though not an exact one, in the offerings made by filhos-de-santo to their orixá.

This cross-mapping of mythology and ritual between Candomblé and Catholicism, which was documented in detail for various Afro-Brazilian religions by Roger Bastide, has its historical origin, Bastide argued, in a stratagem adopted by slaves in the face of prohibitions on African religions—a way to worship African gods under a Christian guise. The legal persecution of Afro-Brazilian cults, which continued until the 196os, prolonged the use of this stratagem, but it did not, in Bastide’s opinion, affect the fundamentally African metaphysic of Candomblé. His principle of compartmentalization, whereby the devotee of Candomblé could move between a hermetic world of African religion and the wider context of Brazilian urban life without a blurring of categories, encouraged a view of Candomblé among scholars as pure and unchanging, dwelling in a kind of perpetual ethnographic present. This was in contrast to other cults—particularly those of more recent formation such as Umbanda, the most widespread and eclectic Afro-Brazilian religion, incorporating elements of Kardecist spiritism, which was introduced to Brazil from Europe in the nineteenth century—as well as popular Catholicism. Umbanda tended to be seen by the first generation of researchers as degraded and culturally compromised.

In recent years both Umbanda and Candomblé have been the subject of more sustained attention on the part of researchers. Their work has encouraged a recognition that the common features of historically distinct religions may also form a metaphysical system, a lingua franca of the spirit. The complexity of religious practice in Brazil and the ambiguity of belief, where practitioners move fluently between one set of religious symbols and another, can make the workings of this system hard to discern. But it is arguable, in the case of popular Catholicism, spiritism and Afro-Brazilian beliefs, that there are key features all three religions have in common.

One shared religious dynamic is the principle of mediation, or intercession, a belief in the control or modification of events in this world by transactions with supernatural entities (saints, spirits or orixás), through prayers and offerings. Although there are important differences in the kinds of religious experience offered by these traditions—the role of prayer in Catholicism is eclipsed by the centrality of trance in spiritism and Afro-Brazilian religions—this common principle of mediation enables adherents to translate more easily between belief systems, to change their allegiance or subsume their experience of one religion under the precepts of another.

In the case of Candomblé, the stress that the first generation of researchers put on Africanity was not factitious. African features are preserved in a more striking form in the Ketu and Jeje rites than in other Afro-Brazilian religions. There remain questions as to what extent this means that Ketu-Nagô and Jeje terreiros still enshrine a sensibility (or world-view or metaphysical system) that is usefully categorized as African (or West African, or Yoruba), and to what extent the outward African forms are animated by a religious experience that remains distinct from Christianity or Spiritism. Such questions that are most appropriately examined at the level of particular terreiros and in the experience of individual devotees of the religion. The answers are thus likely to vary.

One reason for this is that there is, effectively, no central spiritual authority in Candomblé. Despite the existence of a Federation of Afro-Brazilian Cults (Federação dos Cultos Afro-Brasileiros) and the creation of a new central council (the Conselho Religioso do Candomblé, or Religious Council of Candomblé), Candomble has not developed a collectivity with significant executive power or doctrinal influence; its sacred texts are orally transmitted, and ritual orthodoxy in the various strains of Candomblé is maintained only by the lengthy initiation necessary to become a mãe or pai-de-santo. The legitimation of a new Candomblé house is derived from the prestige of the terreiro where the mãe or pai-de-santo was initiated, but even within these lineages each terreiro remains autonomous.

As with the pastors of pentecostalist churches—which are fast-growing rivals to Afro-Brazilian religions for the spiritual allegiance of poor, black Brazilians—the force of character of the founding priest or priestess is an important factor in the success of a new terreiro. Unlike Protestant pastors, however, mães and pais-de-santo are not tied to a single sacred text (nor are they committed, as Protestants are—in theory at least—to reject other religions as snares and delusions). The reputation—and popularity—of particular terreiros waxes and wanes from generation to generation, although a small number have managed to maintain their influence since the nineteenth century. This institutional fluidity and the variety within the Afro-Brazilian traditions means, for instance, that not every pai or mãe-de-santo claiming to practise the Ketu-Nagô rite would be recognized as actually doing so by a ritual specialist from one of the well-known Ketu-Nagô houses.

The Ketu-Nagô orthodoxy itself has been modified within living memory. On the one hand, there has been an almost universal incorporation into the religion of the orixás of caboclos, spirits who represent the indigenous inhabitants of the new world. On the other hand there has been a conscious “re-Africanization” of the formal organization of some of the traditionalist terreiros and increasing interchanges with practitioners of indigenous religions in West Africa. For social scientists the maintenance of orthodoxy, the internal transformations of Afro-Brazilian cults, the resistance they offer to assimilation by the culture at large and, conversely, their influence on the wider field of Brazilian religious experience, are all questions of considerable theoretical interest. For those who live within the pale of faith these are questions of practical choice. Some of these choices are analysed in the remainder of this article.

A Candomblé community

In Brazil, a person with an interest in Candomblé will inevitably also have attended services in Catholic churches, and very likely Protestant ones also. He or she will typically frequent a number of different terreiros before making a commitment to one in particular, or taking the further step of preparing for initiation as a filho or filha-de-santo. Brazilian religious culture is dense and populous, a forest of belief. Syncretism can be seen as a response to this plenitude (as, in opposite fashion, can Protestantism, with its exclusionary principle). In individual lives, faiths may be intertwined; thus the variation between cults is complicated by variations in the closeness of the relation that individual adherents have to the beliefs and practices of Candomblé, and to the world outside the terreiro.

Despite its elaborate preservation of old-established ritual, the Candomblé terreiro is by no means a closed community. One of its sources of its social importance and local political strength is its incorporation of individuals of different sorts and conditions into the life of the terreiro. The core personnel are the mãe or pai-de-santo and his or her filhos-de-santo, that is, those whom the mãe or pai-de-santo has initiated into the religion. Some of these are resident in the terreiro, in the larger terreiros at least. Most visit at weekends, for festas of Candomblé.

Among both residents and visitors there will be initiates who have the capacity to enter trance, becoming possessed by orixás, and those who do not. The drummers in a terreiro, for instance, though they orchestrate the trance, do not themselves become possessed. There are also the ogãs (ogans) and mogbas, the patrons of the terreiro, and the padrinhos, or sponsors, of individual filhos-de-santo. Some of the patrons and sponsors will be chosen with their comparative wealth or influence in mind. They may therefore come from different social milieu than the filhos-de-santo. All these individuals participate in a communal rite. Only some of them live permanently in the terreiro, but it is principally there that they meet their fellow adherents.

Offering to Iemanja, divinity of the sea, at Lauro de Freitas in 1972, the year of the founding of Ilê Axé Opô Aganjú. Photograph by Pierre Verger.

Further towards the periphery of Candomblé, but crucial to its economic survival, are the walk-in clients of the pai or mãe-de-santo. Such people, from all classes and conditions of life, aficionados of Candomblé or not, seek consultations for purposes of divination or magical intervention in their own lives or the lives of others. They may know very little of the religion and probably do not attend the festivals of the orixás, even though these are open to all comers. Candomblé has a different meaning for each of these categories of person, and plays a different part in their lives.

The relation between Christianity and Afro-Brazilian religions—and the wider significance of the African cultural heritage in Brazil—are matters of discussion beyond the terreiro (and beyond the seminar room). In Bahia, where Brazilians of largely African descent make up the greater part of the population, Afro-Brazilian religions have now become explicit symbols of ethnic affirmation. In the current era of democratization in Brazil, this has given a new, specifically electoral dimension to the political importance they have always had, even in times of persecution. The current folklorização of Bahian Candomblé—the promotion of its picturesque elements in order to encourage tourism, the staging of sacred dances for commercial interest—is routinely criticised by adherents of the religion as an act of cultural appropriation, though they also may participate in some aspects of its appropriation as a public relations exercise.

At the same time, representations of the orixás are incorporated more openly into secular culture, in carnival floats or blocos and in the rhythms and lyrics of popular music. Sometimes this is in a spirit of popular devotion, sometimes as part of a rhetoric of liberation from economic and cultural domination by white Brazilians. Among Catholic clergy, the influence of liberation theology and the renewal of commitment to pastoral activity among the poor has led to greater interest in the values of folk religion, both popular Catholicism and Afro-Brazilian cults. The presence of Candomblé has therefore become more visible, its prestige greater. This is a source of strength, but it may also be seen as a new kind of appropriation, a subtle transformation in the tenor of life in the terreiros and their relation to the wider world.

Outside the barracão at Ilê Axé Opô Aganjú, in Lauro de Freitas. A double-headed axe of Xangó hangs above the door. The pai-de-Santo, Balbino Daniel de Paula, is at the centre of the picture wearing a red and yellow cloth and a string of blue beads.

At Ilê Axé Opô Aganjú

My own experience of Candomblé—the principal source of the observations above and those that follow—is based on sporadic participatory fieldwork during two periods of residence in Salvador, in 1986 and 1987. Although I came to Bahia with a background of research in Africa, my enquiries were shaped by a wider project of ethnographically-informed reportage, which included accounts of different kinds of communities in various parts of Brazil, thus relations between Candomblé and other religious systems were of primary interest to me. I attended festas-de-santo and other rituals at various terreiros, but particularly Ilê Axé Opô Aganjú (or Ilé Àșę Òpó Aganju)—the House of the Power of Xangó—a Ketu-Nagô terreiro, where I also lived for a time in 1986, in Lauro de Freitas, outside Salvador.

The pai-de-santo and founder of the terreiro in Lauro de Freitas, Balbino Daniel de Paula, is a filho-de-santo—an initiate—of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, one of the longest-established Candomblé houses in Salvador. The similarity with the name of his own terreiro—Ilê Axé Opô Aganjú—is a reminder of this institutional lineage. Balbino represents, therefore, at least as far as ritual practice goes, traditional Candomblé, that is to say, the least syncretic, and in Roger Bastide’s sense, the most “African” kind.

Balbino was born in 1940, in Ponta de Areia on the island of Itaparica. In 1959, in Salvador, at Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, he became a filho de santo of the late Mãe Senhora (Dona Maria Bibiana do Espirito Santo, better known as Mãe Senhora Iyá Nassô). He was, by his own account, the first male initiate at Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, and from there he holds the title Obaràyí de Xangô. Balbino has had little formal education, but he enjoys, more than most pais-de-santo, extensive contact with Bahian intellectuals who interest themselves in Afro-Brazilian culture: writers, artists, musicians and researchers. Balbino has also visited West Africa twice, a fact that gives him additional authority in the world of Candomblé.

His terreiro, in Rua Sakete, in Vila Praiana, a neighbourhood of Lauro de Freitas, was established in 1972. It is situated in a spacious enclave of trees, with numerous shrines dedicated to individual orixás, and lies in the shadow of a high, white sand-dune. The terreiro is secluded but populous, with some half-dozen families and as many individuals in permanent residence. Though twenty kilometres distant from Salvador, it is regularly visited by people from the city. The latter included, during the period of my stay, local politicans, well-known popular musicians, a Catholic priest, the members of a Dahomean cultural delegation, and a desembargador or appellate judge, from Bauru, in Brazil’s far south-west. Also, of course, ogãs, mogbas, clients and non-resident filhos-de-santo. Ilê Axé Opô Aganjú was thus a suitable vantage-point for monitoring the everyday life of Candomblé, the gossip world of a terreiro, and the sporadic discourse concerning its relation to other religions.

There is nothing visibly syncretic about Balbino’s terreiro. A hut by the gate conceals the phallic emblem of Exú, the trickiest of Yoruba divinities, guardian of paths and crossroads. Exú is a mercenary figure, often invoked in rituals of magical vengeance and self-aggrandisement that are a significant part of most pais-de-santos’ day-to-day business. For this reason Exú was long identified by Christian missionaries in Brazil as Satan (in the iconography of Umbanda, Exús are represented as red homunculi with horns and tails). These days, it tends to be pentecostalists who make an explicit identification of Exú with the Devil: in this extreme view, all Afro-Brazilian spirits are demons of one kind or another.

But the figure of Exú does reveal a crucial lack of fit between the moral systems of Candomblé and all forms of Christianity, one that no system of correspondences can bridge. The Candomblé vision of the world is permeated by magical practice; it does not make the same dichotomy between good and evil as the Christian tradition; its deities are not paragons, but have both good and bad characteristics in the manner of the gods of ancient Greece and Rome. Its public rituals deal not with guilt and the forgiveness of sins, but with the ecstatic transcendence of jealousy and competition through trance-based dance performance.

In Balbino’s terreiro, the main public celebrations, the festas-de-santo, took place in the barracão, a large building opposite the main gate. The ceremonies in the barracão involve trance-possession—on the part of those devotees susceptible to trance—by one or other of these gods. (They exclude Exú, who is not normally among the spirits that a devotee becomes possessed by, though Balbino did have one filho-de-santo who became, exceptionally, a filho-de-santo of Exú). The orixá is summoned by drums to take over (pegar) the body of his or her filho-de-santo or filha-de-santo. A possessed person dancing is regarded as the embodiment of the god: in the trance, the devotee’s comportment changes, often dramatically, to correspond to the characteristics of the orixá—who may well be of a different age and/or gender. The filha-de-santo or filho-de-santo often has little subsequent recollection of her or his trance, even though this can last several hours and involve violent exertion.

In many terreiros, though not in Balbino’s, these ceremonies occur under the gaze of Catholic saints, as described above. At Ilê Axé Opô Aganjú the saints were present, but confined to the reception-room in Balbino’s house, along with secular memorabilia.) Participants in festas-de-santo, which usually occur on Saturday nights, see no contradiction in attending mass in church the following day, though my impression was that few did so. If asked they will almost invariably describe themselves as Catholics.

Thus in the most recent census for Lauro de Freitas, the municipality where Balbino’s terreiro was situated, 32,741 out of a population of 35,431 declared themselves Catholics and only 68 as adherents of an Afro-Brazilian religion. The figure was clearly misleading: more than this number of filhos-de-santo came to any given festa at Ilê Axé Opô Aganjú alone—and there were half-a-dozen other terreiros in the near vicinity. The reasons for the underestimate are both historical and conceptual. Until a generation ago discretion was advisable in revealing a connection with Afro-Brazilian religions—hence the correspondence between saints and orixás—and even today Catholicism is associated with the apparatus of the state, including census-takers. The census also records only one religious affiliation, whereas frequenters of the Candomblé may have more than one. When I asked Balbino about this, he explained to me, fingering the gold crucifix he wore around his neck, that for the purposes of the census, he was a Catholic himself.

“Everyone is a Catholic,” he said. “We are born Catholics. We are Catholics first, before we become filhos-de-santo. It is our birthright (direito de nascimento). It is like citizenship (cidadania).”

In this instance Balbino spoke of Catholicism as though it were a secular power rather than a rival religion, as though it were the religious manifestation of the state. For him, acknowledging its claims on the inhabitants of the terreiro was not so much a religious observance as it was a rendering unto Caesar.

Catholicism can also function in a significant way, however, as a ritual supplement to Candomblé. Despite the elaborate ceremonials of Afro-Brazilian cults, there is an absence of formal rites of passage for two important life events: birth and marriage. The second of these is of lesser importance: weddings are costly; most filhos-de-santo are poor and few of them are formally married. (Terreiros, though, do offer a metaphorical family for those who fall outside conventional kinship units; for this reason and others they attract a high proportion of single mothers and gay people of both sexes).

Baptism, however, is considered a necessity. I asked the mother of a new-born child, who was herself a filha-de-santo of Iansã, one of the most assertive of the female orixás, why she wanted her child baptized.

She replied, puzzled and amused, “Because I don’t want him to grow up pagan (pagão).”

She did not mean, of course, that she did not want her child to participate in the religion of the orixás. He would doubtless be initiated when his orixá manifested itself. Rather, she wanted him to have the best of the two worlds, since he had to live in both. Baptism was a mark of citizenship, of status in the world outside the terreiro.

At death, a filho-de-santo may be subject to Catholic and Candomblé rituals at the same time. An extended Candomblé ceremony, the axexê, coincides with the Christian burial, but it does not supplant it. In 1986, when Mãe Menininha of Gantois, the most celebrated of all mães-de-santo in Brazil, died, she was interred with some pomp in a Catholic cemetery; and a mass was sung over her grave at the same time that the axexê —the Candomblé death ritual—began in her terreiro. Such ritual simultaneity, it should be stressed, is an example not so much of syncretism but of complementarity, or, to use Peter Fry’s term, symbiosis. Only at a single point in the funerary ceremonies do the two religions come together.

Carlinhos, a young man who was a mogba of Ilê Axé Opô Aganjú, died an untimely death of AIDS in 1987. His axexê lasted a week. The lengthy ritual concluded with a silent prayer, eyes closed and hands together in the Christian manner. Afterwards, I asked Balbino who we had been praying to.

“Deus,” he said. “God,”

“But which god?” I asked.

“The god who is up there”, said Balbino, laughing at me and pointing skywards.

Catholicism is to Candomblé as water is to dendê oil

In a commentary on the second World Orixá Conference, an international meeting of practitioners and analysts of Yoruba-derived religions held in Salvador in 1983, where Balbino was among the participants, one of the attendees, Peter Fry, discerned two strains of thought concerning the Catholic Church among the Candomblézeiros (a term for the adherents of Candomblé).

On one side were leading figures of the religion such as Mãe Stela, of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá. Mãe Stela would have no truck with syncretism. Slaves had needed syncretism, she said, for disguise, for survival; but that was history, it was no longer necessary. She wished to abolish the correspondences between orixás and figures of Christian mythology—St Lazarus with Omolu, St George with Oxóssi and so on. She also opposed the assimilation of the orixás to secular rituals, notably their appearance in carnival processions.

Mãe Stela was supported by four other leading Bahian mães-de-santo who were present at the meeting, including the most celebrated surviving figure in Candomblé, Mãe Menininha of Gantois. But a number of the pais-de-santo disagreed. Balbino Daniel de Paula was among them. Syncretism, Balbino argued, only exists in a few external aspects of the Yoruba cult. It makes no difference if you dethrone the images of Catholic saints in the terreiros. Candomblé and Catholicism are like water and oil: you can put them in the same glass but they won’t mix.

Balbino frequently used this image when asked about syncretism. Sometimes he would shake drops of dendê oil into a bowl of water to make the analogy visible. The viscous, red oil of the dendê palm (Elaeis guineensis), which is of African origin, is an important ingredient in offerings to the orixás, so the contrast with water—with holy water—has a special appositeness. But the image Balbino used is not unambiguous: purification by water is also an important feature of Candomblé. The annual festa for Oxalá is called the aguas de Oxalá, the waters of Oxalá, and each week at the Church of Bomfim in Salvador, a celebrated syncretic ceremony takes place that centres on the ritual washing—with water—of the church steps.

Luis da Muricoça, a pai-de-santo who supported Balbino’s position on syncretism, said this to the candomblezeiros at the World Orixá Conference:

I know very well that Our Lord of Bomfim is not Oxalá, but nobody is going to take his statue away from my peji [the altar of an orixá]. I have been to mass on Fridays at Bomfim since I was a boy. Our grandparents taught us to do this.

In his notes on the 1983 Conference, Fry also recorded a difference of opinion within the Catholic hierarchy. The then Cardinal-Archbishop of Salvador, Dom Avelar Brandão, was reported as remarking, in response to Mãe Stela’s anti-syncretic plea, that if the adherents of Candomblé rejected syncretism they would be renouncing Christianity. This, he opined, would be bad both for the Church and for Candomblé communities. The auxiliary Catholic Bishop, Dom Boaventura, on the other hand, while doubting that there was any real likelihood of an end to syncretism, argued for the elimination of what he called its “absurd” aspects.

“The two religions”, Dom Bonaventura was reported as saying,

are intimately linked, at least in Bahia, but we must put an end to this. Syncretism is illogical, contradictory, absurd. Nowadays, on the feast of Our Lady, people don’t know whether they are paying homage to her or to Iemanjá.

So the ambiguous coexistence of the two religions has critics and apologists, both among the Catholic clergy and among the pais and mães-de-santo. Furthermore, the progressista wing of the Catholic Church—the leftist grassroots movement growing in strength in much of Latin America—has a yet more radical critique of syncretism. Neither Dom Avelar nor Dom Boaventura belonged to this radical strain within Catholicism, but other padres inspired by liberation theology visited Ilê Axé Opô Aganjú from time to time to study Candomblé and offer their services as, in effect, auxiliary ritual specialists.

Padre Heitor, a young Italian priest, performed the baptism of the child referred to above in the reception-room of Balbino’s house. The symbols of the orixás had been politely covered with a sheet for the duration of the event, leaving only the saints on show. This concealment of the African gods was a gesture that harked back to the era of police persecution of the terreiros, but today the relation between padre and pai-de-santo was very different. Padre Heitor’s predecessor, a Frenchman named François de l’Epinay, had even been initiated as a mogba of the terreiro.

“If you ask if I believe in the orixás,” he told his colleague Heitor, “I would say, “Yes, I believe in the orixás! And I believe in Jesus Christ! I believe in both!’”

There was an historical irony in Padre François’s and Padre Heitor’s rapprochement with Candomblé. Having discarded the high rituals and ancient liturgical language of his own Church as obstacles to achieving rapport with the people, Padre François had immersed himself—and Padre Heitor was now following suit—in the arcana, the mysteries, of a tradition that was, for all the popular participation it enjoys, as esoteric and elaborately ritualized as traditional Catholicism.

Progressista padres like Padre François and Padre Heitor spoke favourably of religious pluralism and the presence of God—meaning the Christian God—in Candomblé. They spoke of the intensity of faith shown by its devotees and of the historical errors of the Church in the forcible baptism of slaves. It was a heartfelt discourse, without a doubt, yet it could also be shown to conform to the newly-redefined interests of the missionary Church, which thereby drew closer to the source of the religion with which it was forced to share the allegiance of the people. It was an inversion of the old relationship between the two religions: the padres found their God in the orixás in a manner not dissimilar to that in which candomblezeiros had once clandestinely worshipped the orixás in the guise of Catholic saints. The progressista padres were, likewise, sincere dissemblers, immersing their acquired faith in another religious culture for the greater glory of Christianity.

Candomblé altar in the house of Mai Filinha of the Irmandade da Boa Morte (Sisterhood of the Good Death), in Cachoeira, Bahia. Photograph by Alfredo d’Amato.

Creedal or performative?

In fact Padre François’s exclamation—“I believe in both!”—may be beside the point. In Candomblé it is rare to hear the question, “What do you believe?” It is, in the main, a religion not of creeds but of performance, In this sense Candomblé is the opposite of Western Christianity, or at least of Protestantism. (It’s noteworthy that in Brazil the demotic term for a Protestant is simply crente, “believer”). At the heart of Candomblé is a dance, a visible leap of faith, a wordless submission to possession by the deity. This is a religious experience so spectacular that the question of belief may be otiose. It would be true to say, in fact, that Candomblé does not demand a profession of belief, though it can induce a change of life.

It may also be that the symbiosis of Candomblé and Catholicism owes something to the different emphasis that Candomblé gives to key aspects of religious experience. Candomblé celebrates the quality and intensity of such experience rather than consistency of belief. Crucially, it privileges discontinuity of personal identity, the irruption of divinity into the body of the devotee. Such ecstatic episodes, distinct from anything found in mainstream Christianity, or even in most of its mystical strains, also offer a clue to the easy integration of aspects of the two religions in a single life. That is to say: if the filho-de-santo can cease to be his or her everyday self and become an African god, there is no reason why he or she cannot sometimes also be a Catholic.

Such discontinuities in personal identity make sense as responses to the demands of life in a culturally hybrid urban society, where everyday life is fluid and uncertain, but they constitute a problem for most versions of Christian moral theology, where the continuity of personhood is critical. It is a problem which the progressista padres tend to gloss over. Similarly, the emphasis on magical manipulation of the world in Afro-Brazilian religions is hard to reconcile with Christian doctrine. The Catholic progressista position on Candomblé, which rejects syncretism but aspires to bring the two religions together in a single embrace of faith, can be maintained only by passing over these theological divergences. To use Pai Balbino’s metaphor, holy water and dendê oil can be shaken together, but they will not stay mixed. The present tendency in Brazilian cultural politics, a democratic tendency, one that is encouraged by people of goodwill on both sides, is to elevate Candomblé to a place alongside Catholicism. This may be encouraging in terms of cultural politics and social and political equality in Brazil. But speaking of the two religions as though they were compatible in all respects may obscure the very differences that enable them to co-exist.