Spirit Possession in São Paulo
Spirit Possession in São Paulo
June 1, 2019
“My son…,” Seu José whispered in a gentle yet strong voice, “Your heart is heavy.” Then gently smiling, “Tell José what troubles you.” Like a wise guru, he sat calmly before me and waited. His soothing voice helping me relax, I began to unpack the problems and worries that weighed on my soul. Seu José nodded understandingly, pausing every once in a while to puff a cigar.
Seu José was an Indio from the hinterland of Southern Brazil, and his anachronistic Portuguese, formal and folksy, belied his old age and his upbringing in a bygone era. He delivered his words with great care and had the air of an old soldier—weary yet resilient. As I gazed through the thick smoke shrouding him, I examined his face. What I saw was not the weathered leather mask of an old Indian, but instead that of a young Brazilian woman, pretty and in her early twenties. Her eyes were rolled back in her skull, revealing the whites. This girl was a priestess of the Umbanda religion, and Seu José, speaking through her as a medium, had in fact died over a century ago.
Spirit possession rituals arrived in the New World with enslaved Africans in the 16th century. In Protestant North America, the English obsessively forbade such rituals, along with any form of the drumming which traditionally accompanied them, under the penalty of death. However, in Latin America, Catholicism was able to absorb—albeit disguised and transformed—such West African spirit possession traditions. The adoration of Yoruba and Congolese deities, known as orixás, survived behind a façade of Catholic saint veneration. As in the case of Catholic saints, specific orixás are adored for specific purposes—for example, health, love, money, or any other need or wish. However, unlike traditional Catholicism, these syncretic New World religions—known as Voodoo in Louisiana, Santeria in Cuba, Umbanda in Brazil—hold that saints and orixás can be contacted directly and can speak to the living through the possession of those who have the gift of mediumship, or the capacity to become possessed.
I finished talking with Seu José, and he asked me to stand up. He began to slowly circle me, blowing smoke all around my body, cleansing my energy and washing away evil. After he rinsed me with cigar smoke, he told me to close my eyes and think of God. I heard him mutter a prayer under his breath as he placed his hands around my forehead and temples. We sat back down, and he gestured towards the pen and pad of paper that I had brought. He asked me to write down my own name and the names of my loved ones. When I handed him back the paper, he carefully looked at each name and methodically blew smoke around them. He smiled and informed me that he had sent them blessings of safety and peace.
He then inquired if I knew the name of the person who had recently inflicted damages on a family member. I responded that I did, and he told me to write down the name on another piece of paper. As he examined the name, he silently placed the lit end of his cigar on the paper, burning a hole through it. He then smudged the name with the ash, defacing it completely. Understanding what had just been performed, I tensed up. I was hoping for eventual justice, but a curse was not what I expected. But it was done.
He informed me that his services were finished, and he directed me to obtain a bottle of a botanical infusion from another part of the terreiro. I was to pour the liquid, a rank-smelling tea made from herbs, over my body before I went to sleep, thus removing any residual negative energy. There was one last task I was to complete apart from the vegetable bath: in order to open up new paths in my life, I had to make an offering to Exu, the deity of roads and doors. Following his instructions, around midnight I walked to a nearly deserted intersection in a working-class neighborhood in São Paulo with a bottle of cachaça in hand. In the darkness, imagining myself as Robert Johnson, I slowly poured the liquor out onto the asphalt, forming a cross at the center of the crossroads. I then prayed for new paths to present themselves.
Spirit possession may seem exotic, but it is in fact acknowledged in Abrahamic religions as well. For example in 1 Samuel 28:7, Saul visits the Witch of Endor to know his future, and she summons the spirit of the deceased Samuel to tell it to him. The Gospels further mention spirit possession numerous times, although always as demonic possession (e.g. the Gerasene Demoniac who contains a full ‘legion’ of demons that Christ casts out of him and into a herd of pigs). I have heard that the Catholic Church has a special protocol for dealing with demonic possession and that Church-sanctioned exorcisms have been performed by special priests within the last few decades in the Americas. While necromancy (contacting the spirits of the deceased) is condemned in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, African-derived traditions in the New World view the practice as neither wholly evil nor wholly good. While they recognize the risk of possession by dark entities and demons, they also recognize that angels and the benevolent dead can possess and aid human beings.
In the case of religious claims, I remind myself that my intellectual framework cannot explain everything. I am comfortable admitting that I will never know if what I experienced in that terreiro in São Paulo was legitimate or a sham. I entered the sanctuary curious but agnostic as to whether spirit possession was actually taking place, and to this day I remain ambivalent. That being said, something strange happened after my meeting with Seu José. After the encounter, I followed his instructions to wash myself with a blessed herbal infusion before sleep that was intended to propitiate the orixá Exu, the god responsible for opening new pathways in human lives. I had bizarre—yet beautiful—dreams that night and undeniable positive energy in the weeks and months that followed.
