by @LygiaCabus
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Brazil is the largest Spiritist nation at the world. Is the country of the world with the major number of adepts of this religion in its numerous strands of thought and different practices.
Imported from France, the spiritist school of Alan Kardec grew quickly at brazilian lands and minds incorporating elements of the local culture.
In this country, always conducive to different aspects of the process of mixing of ethnicities and customs, the Spiritualism is divided in two conceptions of the Beyond's World: the popular and scholarly.
They differ among them in theology e liturgies. These two ways can be distinguished considering their culture, their aesthetic, folklore, and even their ethical aspects.
There's the Orthodox Spiritism, a classical conception, based, essentially, in the teachings of Alan Kardec.
The other is a syncretic conception. It is compound of africans, European, indigenous elements and the more exotic ideas, of most recent origin. It's a tipical Brazil conception but, has its similars, among religions of Mexico and Caribe.
This last configuration, regarded as a syncretic solution, instructs the religous thinking of the afro-brazilian cults. They are: the Candomblé, the Umbanda and the Quimbanda. At this universe inhabit saints, angels, spirits, africans gods. A pantheon of entities.
SOCIOLOGY
AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF BRAZILIAN SPIRITS
The Preto Velho, a social archetype, became an entity, a kind of spirit model or spiritual manifestation. It is independent of the ethnicity of the person incorporated: the person who receives the spirit, also called "horse".
Just as there is the Human Geography, exists a Spiritist Geography, too. The Spiritual World also have its archetypes. These archetypes are configured, according its cultural enviroment. They represent human types which are inspired in the real life.
By this way, afro-brazilian local cults are visited for popular entities that have their behavior, their manner of to be, defined in a folk personage.
Personages that are related to a complex whole of social factors. However, all of them, the human types, are portraits of the economic dynamic of the place, the region.
The "Terreiros" are the spaces where the rituals adepts make their practices of afro-brasilians religious ceremonies.
These places are, generally, large sheds or large squares but, can be small poor houses, too, or an apartment in middle of a metropolis.
These squares and instalations, are frequented by the spirits of mestizos known as "The Caboclo", "The Cabocla", "Preto Velho", "Maria Mulambo" (Rags's Mary) etc..
This human type is understood as the result of miscegenation between the natives of Brazil, amerabas, with white Europeans, portugueses, frenchs, spanishs, dutchs and black Africans.
So, are common too, especially in Umbanda and Quimbanda, figures like the "Caciques" [leaders], "Pajés" ─ shamans, healers and indigenous warriors.
At the squares and sheds of the Umbanda and the Kimbanda (Quimbanda) also appear the traditionals "Black oldmen" and "black Moms". These, many times, preent themselves as spirits of former slaves.
The archetypes quoted above belong to the historical period of Brazil-Cologne and to the first decades of the Brazil-Empire, when the land left to be cologne and obtained the political condition of Portugal United-Kingdom, (1815).
THE TRICKSTER
(Zé Pelintra)
In the Spiritist sessions, reunions, of the afro-Brazilians cults, with the evolution of customs, appeared other entities profiles, reflections of the emergence of new social roles. They are urban types because they are inhabitants the urban landscape.
The trickster knows all about the more suspect zone of the city but is also a friend of the sofisticated ambients where the money changes quickly between the handbags. He has much pessoal charm and many surprises into his hat. Often, he plays a guitar and sings with a good voice.
THE POMBA-GIRA
[something like crazy dove or,
more appropriately crazy chicken]
Some of tipical entities are female spirits, souls of those that have been women. The most famous these female archetypals are the Pomba-gira and M aria Mulambo (Rags's Mary).
These entities were young women that suffered a tragic death.The Pomba-gira profile is, generaly, scandalous.
They were women that missed the way on the life. She is the woman seduced and abandonned that lost her honor.
She was left alone, often, in pregnant state. The society rejects these women. Their place is the streets, where they search a man to pay their bread of each day.
For the lost women, the unique place are the alleys of bad fame, where it can drown consciousness in the bottom of the glasses, in the poor's drinks, in drugs, in the frenetic dance and without none sense. In still others cases, the Pomba-gira were a young women who had an unhappy a life in a suffocating marriage.
All of them died in a state of inconformism.Many women were abandoned by their families. Many women succumbed to poverty, hunger, weakness. Many women were dead by weak lungs: tuberculosis.
PENITENT SOULS
For all we know about tormented souls, these women and men, had suffering lives as slaves in a dead past, the painfull memory of the humiliated native on his land, from Africa to colonies, even still inAfrica, beggining by Africa, all of these spirits have motivation to remain in this planet haunting the esoteric reunions.
They are trapped and irresistibly attracted by their affections and disaffected cultivated in this world.
The supposed powers of the Pombas-giras are searched for men and women to who don't know how to process and to control their emotions, even as like the disembodied entities that claim the right to remain at this world because they suffered here.
Their goals are:
1. They generaly want hold the loved one. Want forcing situations by use from witchcraft,
2. vengeance, when they feel their pride wounded. They were rejected persons who never forget bad things or persons of yheir past lifes.
They are always wanting something or the own life of others persons. Invariably, the clients of the Pombas-Giras are individuals dissatisfied who has much revolt without any utility, without any reasons.
The same process, of attachment to persons and earthly experiencies of a life, occurs with the other popular types, too.
The Trickster, ever envolved with shady dealings. He is an out of the law, immersed in drinks, cheats, lies and lust. Even the "Blacks old" and "black Moms" are adicted: they drink and smoke during their demonstrations, when displaying the wisdom forged in the fires of suffering of past lives.
In the context of Spiritism these social and behavioral characteristics are important because they are clear signs of the kind of mind-spirit related to each one of the african-brazilian religions.
These folk characters, these spirits, are archetypical of ordinary people, of certain historical epoch. They were slaves, workers, foremen, cowboys, seduced women, indigenous, mestizos and, over all, they are ghosts, haunts like any ghost.
These entities are the masters and guides of the sheds [Terreiros], house or tent [Tenda] of Umbanda and Kimbanda. In these cults, the Africa mythology emerges without force, with its identity distorced by European and indigenous influences and by their peculiar circunstances of their doctrines formation.
ESHUS (EXÚ/EXÚS)
The African most important legate, to Kimbanda and Umbanda religious thinking, is the Eshu. In the Pantheon of Africa, Eshu is a prominent deity. It is a kind of African correlative of greek Hermes.
Eshu is the messenger, intermediary between men and gods; in Umbanda and Kimbanda, intermediary, between the livings and the deads.
But, while in the Candomble, eshu is a son of a god, in the context od the umbanda and the Kimbanda, there are many Eshus. All of them, messengers that serve to the proposes of the priests and of the adepts of the cults.
CANDOMBLE
The Africans religious thinking at Brazil is found more preserved in Candomblee. In the doctrine and liturgies of the Candomble, the forces of the entities remain still transcendentals.
They are gods, because they are the forces of the Creation and transformation of All things. In Candomble, the entities are not, simple spirits. They are great Spirits! Some, are representations or incarnations of Nature powers.
Others, are noble and legendary ancestrals. They are patriarchs, matriarchs, kings, queens, warriors, heroes. They represent the better and the worst of the human being.
Their virtues and their vices. They are the Orishas. Thus, the Candomble stays itself far from the Kardecist Spiritism and most near of animism and ancestral cults.
The typical Theology and Cosmogony that always appears among the majority of the primitive people of this planet.
THE KARDECISM
The western modern Spiritism of 1800s, found a place in Brazilian society through the Kardecist doctrine. The systematization, of the ideas in a correct language, consistent with Christianity, opened the doors of all social classes, to the public acceptance of reincarnation belief.
At Brazil, the kardecists Spiritist sessions, are not so often visited for folkloric or popular archetypes, not! There, appear ghosts of the History! Spirits of notable personages, of many epochs, of many places of the world.
The Kardecists receive spirits of celebrities. It's wonderful! They are philosophers, writters, priests and popes, nuns, saints, angels. Spirits of people like Plato, Socrates.
Recently, spiritists mediums have made contact with the spirit of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. It's almost a fashion. Singers, actors, actressesm are speaking, from Beyond to the world, using their spiritual medium-horses in the internet. Things of The Now... of Post-modernity. Let's meditate.
Since that the religion, the Kardecist Spiritism arrived at Brazil with its french origin, a part of the intellectual christians became adepts to the ideia.
This opened field to the advent and growth of the Brazilian spiritist literature in its most curious genre: the psychography ,also called Automatic Written.
In the ocurrence of Automatic Written the authors of the books are disembodied. They are spirits that use the body of a medium to speak or write.
The titles of this type of literature are very numerous in Brazil. Just Chico Xavier [1910-2002], the most famous medium of the country, wrote hundreds of these books.
