![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeThis is a very brief selection from a much larger 1988 book I found in a free box, Brazilian Women Speak: Contemporary Life Stories. It is a life story from a woman involved with Brazilian spiritualism (more specifically, umbanda). The book is still miraculously in print, and there is a screen-readable version for the print-disabled on archive.org.
Citation: Patai, Daphne. “ÂNGELA: ‘In Spiritualism There’s Real Equality.’” In Brazilian Women Speak: Contemporary Life Stories, 109-110, 120-125, 364-365. New Brunswick: Rutgers,1988.
Citation: Patai, Daphne. “ÂNGELA: ‘In Spiritualism There’s Real Equality.’” In Brazilian Women Speak: Contemporary Life Stories, 109-110, 120-125, 364-365. New Brunswick: Rutgers,1988.
Ângela, a tall and wiry twenty-seven-year-old with a very earnest manners, is the eldest child of working-class White parents who have some Indian and Black antecedents. Ângela lives in her parents’ house with four of her six siblings. She has worked for many years as an optometrist’s assistant and is now also studying public relations at a university in Rio de Janeiro in the evenings. Her father works in an automobile factory, and her mothers works as a seamstress at home. Ângela considers herself a socialist and is eager to travel to Cuba and the USSR. The interview was conducted in 1981, at a time when Ângela was intensely involved in spiritualism.
Brazil is the world’s largest and most populous Roman Catholic country. According to the 1980 census, 89 percent of Brazil’s population of 119 million considered itself at least nominally Roman Catholic. Nonetheless, many Brazilians take part in some form of the syncretic Afro-Brazilian religious practices that were introduced into the different areas of Brazil toward the end of the sixteenth century. Interestingly, the 1980 census, which was the first to ask specifically about Afro-Brazilian religious participation (as opposed to the earlier more general designation of “spiritualist”), indicates that less than 0.6 percent of the population so declared itself—a gross under-representation. The census further reveals that in urban areas many more women than men declared adherence to Brazil’s important minority religions (Protestantism and spiritualist sects), as compared to the relatively equal numbers of men and women who declared themselves to be Roman Catholic.1
From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century (when the slave trade was effectively abolished), a continuing supply of fresh slaves from Africa maintained and strengthened African religious practices in Brazil. As time passed, the individual identities of these practices, based on separate ethnic groups with their distinctive tribal characteristics, were lost. White slaveholders forbade African cults as part of an effort to convert the slaves to Christianity and separate them from their group and their past, but Catholicism and its saints instead came to be used by Blacks as a protective screen for their own beliefs. Thus, different religious elements blended and coexisted in the Afro-Catholic rituals, which became new religions existing in different forms and under different names in the various regions of Brazil. With the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the proclamation of the Republic in 1889, the Afro-Brazilian cults experienced a wave of severe repression that altered but did not succeed in extinguishing them.2
Candomblé, sometimes used as a generic name for the Afro-Christian cults, is the oldest and most traditional of these practices and has the strongest ties to African ritual. Initially a means of maintaining and expressing group solidarity among uprooted Africans who had become slaves in Brazil, it also provided a way for Africans to retain their collective memory and, by commanding cosmic forces through the rituals, to overcome White domination. Candomblé is characterized by a variety of rituals focused on the worship of saints or divinities, called orixás, who are amalgams of African gods and Catholic saints. These orixás descend and take possession of initiates. Healing and problemsolving [sic] slowly became a major focus of many of the Afro-Brazilian religions. According to one interpretation, these religious practices are attempts by poor and marginalized people to resolve their problems—problems left unaddressed because of Brazil’s economic and social inequalities and inadequate social services.3
In macumba, the form of candomblé developed in Rio de Janeiro during the early nineteenth century, ethnic identity seem not to have been a factor, and non-Africans could enter the priestly hierarchy and help their adherents resolve personal problems. Social or spiritual communion was no longer the main feature.
Umbanda, the spiritualist practice in which Ângela was engaged, is a newer form of Afro-Brazilian religion. It developed in the great urban centers of Rio and São Paulo in the 1920s and is an amalgam of macumba and the spiritualism of Allan Kardec (1804-1869), a French intellectual and investigator of occult phenomena whose 1857 Book of the Spirits set forth the basic tenets of spiritualism. Umbanda also unites the old solidarity of candomblé with the magic aspect of macumba. The progressive “whitening” already evident in macumba is even more apparent in umbanda, as is the hope of socioeconomic ascension. Umbanda quickly achieved great popularity throughout Brazil and, in the late 1970s, was estimated to have nearly 20 million adherents.
Initiation into umbanda is far more rapid than into candomblé—weeks rather than months—although its doctrines and rituals are more complex. The contradictory concepts of good and evil that imbue Christianity appear in umbanda, but evil can be domesticated and can even be made to serve the initiate’s own purposes, although this is not without risk to future incarnations. A sense of ultimate moral purpose is thus aroused in the believer. Umbanda has been called “a rallying symbol for all races and all social classes.”4
...
I’m a spiritualist. It’s a kind of religion we have here in Rio; it’s also called macumba or umbanda. I go once a month. The rest of the family are all Catholic, and I am too. I mean, when I feel like going to a Catholic church, I go, without reservations, but I don’t go regularly like with the spiritualism. I don’t have the same kind of commitment to Catholicism.
There’s a session once a month, and several orixás come to us. I usually go in the morning and stay all day. We clean the center, then at night there’s an herbal bath, which is to cleanse the body, and each month we commemorate one orixá, one saint. Each month we put on a skirt of a special color in honor of that saint. And then we go through the ritual of macumba, when the orixás come down, one at a time, and then there are songs and the whole spiritualist ritual. It usually begins at 10:30 at night and ends the next morning. It lasts six or seven hours; there’s no fixed time for it to end. It’s always the same ritual. Now, spiritualism has some divisions: for example, candomblé, things like that. Ours is more oriented towards umbanda, toward the orixás. Candomblé is a ritual that involves more singings. Ours isn’t; it’s more a ritual of work, of spirits, to assist people. People go there needing help, and the orixás work to help them. Candomblé has more singing, dancing; it’s more a kind of a festival. Umbanda, no; it’s more to help people.
It’s more effective than Catholicism in the sense of helping people, although I think the Catholic Church is good. But it’s more distant from people. I always thought the priest was very distant from me, whereas at the [umbanda] center, no. You go there, you talk to the orixá. He tries to comfort you, he tells you what’s happening, he tries to help you. And also it’s much more like a family, because not many people go and so the people in the community are more like a family, a second family. I like the Catholic Church, but in terms of helping people I think it’s rather distant.
No, you don’t speak to the orixá through someone. It’s the orixá himself, because he takes possession of a person; he comes and incorporates in that person, and then he talks to you normally, just like you and I are talking now. And, when you don’t understand what he says, usually someone stays at your side who does know and who explains to you what he’s saying. But generally he talks to you alone; he listens to you and tells you everything you ought to do. You can talk to him yourself; you don’t need a third person.
I started going about five years ago [~1976]. One Sunday I got sick, and on Monday my mother went there—but I didn’t know about it. She hid it from me because she knew I wouldn’t like it. It’s like when you know there’s something you need to do, a commitment you have to take on, and you look the other way. That’s the way it was for me, because at that time I liked going to parties and things like that, and if you make a commitment, then you’re obligated, just like with school, with a job, and I was afraid of making this kind of commitment. So my mother went, and when she got there this orixá spoke to her. My mother hadn’t said a word, and he turned to her and said, “Your daughter’s sick, isn’t she?” And my mother said, “Yes, she got sick yesterday,” and he said, “I know she’s sick.” Then he told my mother to take me to a center, so I could have some baths and the people there could work on me. Because something had been done against me. They said it was a boyfriend of mine who’d put a spell on me so I’d get sick, and they undid it. I never tried to find out who it was, or how he’d done it. Because, for example, that’s one thing about our religion, it can work both good and evil, and lots of people do things out of vengeance. They get someone to put a spell on someone else, and that’s exactly what happened in my case. Someone wanted to make me sick or something like that, to get even with me.
That’s what this orixá told my mother—he said, “It was an old boyfriend of hers who did this to her.” And I’d gotten all swollen. I had welts all over my body. It looked like I’d been whipped, re welts; and I felt faint, I couldn’t stand up. It happened overnight. I went to my grandmother’s birthday party on Sunday, I had lunch at her house, I left there at about 3:00 o’clock and went to another house, and when I got home at 5:00 o’clock and went to the bathroom to take a shower, I noticed these streaks on my body. But I felt fine. I went, “What’s this? Could it be something I ate at my grandmother’s house?” Because I’d had lunch there; I’d eaten fish. I said, “Maybe it didn’t agree with me, maybe it upset my liver or something like that.” And I went to sleep. The next day, Monday, I got up to go to work, and I had completely swelled up. But nothing hurt; it was just the swelling. So my mother took me to the doctor, and he gave me a shot which had no effect. The doctors were puzzled; they had no idea what it was. So then my mother went to see this woman, and [afterward] my mother said to me, “Let’s go to the center, let’s go?” and so I did. It just came and went, without leaving any scars, without my feeling anything, just like that. Then I looked for a center I especially liked, where I felt comfortable, with friendly people. And I’ve gone there ever since. In my center it’s about evenly divided between men and women. Usually the women go more, but right now there are a lot of men taking part in umbanda.
That was five years ago, and they’ve helped me with things since then. I feel good spiritually. I feel at peace, I’m not someone who rebels against things. I accept things as they are. I try to solve my problems without getting desperate. That’s something I think they’ve helped me with. I go there, but I’m not a religious fanatic. I have responsibilities, I do the things I’m supposed to do—though sometimes not all that well; I don’t always do them all. But I feel very good, and if a lot of times passes without my going there, I start to miss it. It’s already a part of me, you see.
Before that, I used to go to a Catholic church, but not often. I mean, when I was a child, until I was fourteen, I used to go to church every day. Then I started rejecting it, because of my age and because my mother always used to take me. My mother is Catholic. Sometimes she goes to the center as a visitor, but not regularly, and she doesn’t have any responsibilities there. She’s more involved with the Catholic church, not that she goes there every Sunday either. She usually goes maybe once a month, or twice. Now my father no, my father almost never goes to church, but he calls himself a Catholic. Here in Brazil there are lots of people who are spiritualists and don’t admit it: “I’m Catholic,” because that’s the religion of the Brazilian family, right? That’s the religion with the most followers. In my house they all say they’re Catholic, but none of them goes to church regularly.
In spiritualism there’s real equality, equal participation, because, for example, when another entity incorporates in you, you’re not yourself, you’re something else; and I can receive a male orixá, just as a man can receive a female orixá, so everyone’s on an equal footing, much more than in the Catholic Church. I don’t know how the choice is made of which orixá will choose which person to work with. A woman can have various orixás, so I could have male and female orixás. From the moment the orixá incorporates, you’re no longer yourself. You don’t know what he’s saying, you don’t remember anything; and if there’s something he has to say to you, other people will tell you afterward. It doesn’t depend on your own will at all. For example, I still haven’t received an orixá, but I go to the center and, if and when I do begin to, I’ll always receive that same orixá, from then on. Now, I could have five different orixás and I could work with them for several years, and then a time might come when a certain orixá won’t come to that person anymore. It usually depends a lot on your spiritual state. If you’re very troubled or nervous or have some problems, it’s more difficult because you can’t concentrate. But when you can concentrate, then they usually come, they do what they’ve come to do and they leave, and you’re back to normal. Whatever they drink or smoke you don’t feel.
I feel good after these sessions. I feel kinda of as if I’d come out of a bath, really clean, really good. It’s hard to compare with the Church, because when I used to go to church it was more out of obligation to my mother: “You have to go to Mass.” Nowadays, for example, I can go to church and I even feel good when I leave. Because, you see, umbanda and Catholicism, there are differences, but they have almost the same saints, just with different names; so I can go into a Catholic church and talk to the saints there just as I do at the center. I can pray and talk to them and say what I feel, and I feel good when I leave there, too. But I rarely go to church now.
The saints come down to us in umbanda but not in the Church because the Catholic Church has a different tradition. I think the Catholic Church doesn’t believe in spiritual evolution. They don’t believe in reincarnation after you die. And since they don’t believe in reincarnation, they can’t believe that spirits can come to us. But I believe they do. For example, the orixás we call “Old Blacks” were slaves many years ago and today they incorporate in us.
I think we’ve all had other lives, but we don’t remember them. I believe that when we die our spirits pass over to another kind of life, to another evolution where they can learn things. It’s a kind of education, and then they come back, not as an orixá, but, for example, I could be reincarnated in a newborn child, but more evolved. But no one will know that it’s me. I believe in reincarnation. No, of course I’m not afraid to die. I’m afraid of getting sick unto death, of suffering and moral illness, but not of death itself.
In the Catholic church [sic] we never took the time to talk about these things. It was more a matter of coming and going without any contact with anyone inside. We never discussed these things, and only after I got acquainted with spiritualism did I begin to think, to sit down and talk and learn about these things. I never had the opportunity in the Catholic church. I think the church is very cold, very one-sided. You’re here and the priest is over there. He celebrates the Mass and you participate, but that’s it. Then you leave, you go home. It’s all very one-sided, not like at the center. Also, since the center is so much smaller—at least the one I go to—it’s more on the basis of friendship. There must be only about twenty people there. Black and White, no discrimination, just like a family. In my center the people are all different. The economic level is more or less average, although there are some seamstresses who are having a hard time just surviving. There are a few teenagers, there’s a young woman who’s a ballet dancer, there’s a dentist, there are some boys who live in Copacabana, there are all kinds of people.
We don’t believe there’s a hell, at least not in my conception of hell. I think that whatever you do here, you pay for it right here. Our own lives, our own suffering, already are a kind of payment for the things we do. For example, a person’s who’s very bad here, I think that this person’s spirit will need a great deal of work. I don’t think you can die today and incarnate in another person tomorrow. No, you die, and your spirit will go through a period of training. A person who’s very evil here, I think it’s their spirit that’s evil, and it will have to start at that point and learn, because there are evil spirits, just as there are good spirits. That has to exist; it’s a kind of balance. I can’t imagine how it would be if everyone were good or if everyone were evil.
No, I don’t know anybody else at the university who’s a spiritualist. We almost never talk about religion at school, so there could be some. There must be, actually, but I don’t know any. My friends know that I am; and some of them don’t think it’s right, but they accept it. I’ve suggested to people to go to a center, when I know it could help that person, but that varies a lot, too. First of all, I try to find out if the person believes or not. Because if you don’t believe… I think it depends a lot on having faith; you can accomplish a lot through faith. If people don’t believe, it’s unlikely they’ll do what they’re advised to do. When I first went, I didn’t believe, but I also didn’t go thinking it was worthless. I said, “I’ll go, but I don’t intend to stay too long.” I never went there and said, “This I don’t believe.” I always respected it, and I think that respect is actually a form of belief.
I’ve become a much more secure person. Not totally secure, but more than some time back. To make my own decisions, to decide about my life, to take responsibility for what I do, and to know what I want and don’t want. Even to fight for what I want. And to say openly, “I don’t like that. I don’t want to be a part of that.” I think it’s very much a matter of… of confidence, I became more confident. I used to have very little confidence and a great deal of fear. Though I think we’re all afraid of certain things, and then we get used to them. It’s all a matter of education, of experience of things. As time passes we get to know more. Our life is really a school, isn’t it? And we go on learning constantly. We get to know one person today, another one tomorrow, and all of that is a school. Each experience gives you strength to go on to the next.
…
A year later, in a beautiful ceremony involving white robes and masses of flowers, Ângela got married at her umbanda center. With her new husband she moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in a building in the Copacabana section of Rio. By the time I saw her again in 1983 she was already separated from her husband but had managed to hang on to the apartment, which she was sharing with a woman friend. Ângela says that her parents believe marriage gives a woman freedom, so they didn’t ask her to come back home after her separation. She had also left her job at the optometrist’s and was working in a fashionably travel agency in Copacabana, not far from her apartment. Umbanda continued to play a major role in her life.
Brazil is the world’s largest and most populous Roman Catholic country. According to the 1980 census, 89 percent of Brazil’s population of 119 million considered itself at least nominally Roman Catholic. Nonetheless, many Brazilians take part in some form of the syncretic Afro-Brazilian religious practices that were introduced into the different areas of Brazil toward the end of the sixteenth century. Interestingly, the 1980 census, which was the first to ask specifically about Afro-Brazilian religious participation (as opposed to the earlier more general designation of “spiritualist”), indicates that less than 0.6 percent of the population so declared itself—a gross under-representation. The census further reveals that in urban areas many more women than men declared adherence to Brazil’s important minority religions (Protestantism and spiritualist sects), as compared to the relatively equal numbers of men and women who declared themselves to be Roman Catholic.1
From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century (when the slave trade was effectively abolished), a continuing supply of fresh slaves from Africa maintained and strengthened African religious practices in Brazil. As time passed, the individual identities of these practices, based on separate ethnic groups with their distinctive tribal characteristics, were lost. White slaveholders forbade African cults as part of an effort to convert the slaves to Christianity and separate them from their group and their past, but Catholicism and its saints instead came to be used by Blacks as a protective screen for their own beliefs. Thus, different religious elements blended and coexisted in the Afro-Catholic rituals, which became new religions existing in different forms and under different names in the various regions of Brazil. With the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the proclamation of the Republic in 1889, the Afro-Brazilian cults experienced a wave of severe repression that altered but did not succeed in extinguishing them.2
Candomblé, sometimes used as a generic name for the Afro-Christian cults, is the oldest and most traditional of these practices and has the strongest ties to African ritual. Initially a means of maintaining and expressing group solidarity among uprooted Africans who had become slaves in Brazil, it also provided a way for Africans to retain their collective memory and, by commanding cosmic forces through the rituals, to overcome White domination. Candomblé is characterized by a variety of rituals focused on the worship of saints or divinities, called orixás, who are amalgams of African gods and Catholic saints. These orixás descend and take possession of initiates. Healing and problemsolving [sic] slowly became a major focus of many of the Afro-Brazilian religions. According to one interpretation, these religious practices are attempts by poor and marginalized people to resolve their problems—problems left unaddressed because of Brazil’s economic and social inequalities and inadequate social services.3
In macumba, the form of candomblé developed in Rio de Janeiro during the early nineteenth century, ethnic identity seem not to have been a factor, and non-Africans could enter the priestly hierarchy and help their adherents resolve personal problems. Social or spiritual communion was no longer the main feature.
Umbanda, the spiritualist practice in which Ângela was engaged, is a newer form of Afro-Brazilian religion. It developed in the great urban centers of Rio and São Paulo in the 1920s and is an amalgam of macumba and the spiritualism of Allan Kardec (1804-1869), a French intellectual and investigator of occult phenomena whose 1857 Book of the Spirits set forth the basic tenets of spiritualism. Umbanda also unites the old solidarity of candomblé with the magic aspect of macumba. The progressive “whitening” already evident in macumba is even more apparent in umbanda, as is the hope of socioeconomic ascension. Umbanda quickly achieved great popularity throughout Brazil and, in the late 1970s, was estimated to have nearly 20 million adherents.
Initiation into umbanda is far more rapid than into candomblé—weeks rather than months—although its doctrines and rituals are more complex. The contradictory concepts of good and evil that imbue Christianity appear in umbanda, but evil can be domesticated and can even be made to serve the initiate’s own purposes, although this is not without risk to future incarnations. A sense of ultimate moral purpose is thus aroused in the believer. Umbanda has been called “a rallying symbol for all races and all social classes.”4
...
I’m a spiritualist. It’s a kind of religion we have here in Rio; it’s also called macumba or umbanda. I go once a month. The rest of the family are all Catholic, and I am too. I mean, when I feel like going to a Catholic church, I go, without reservations, but I don’t go regularly like with the spiritualism. I don’t have the same kind of commitment to Catholicism.
There’s a session once a month, and several orixás come to us. I usually go in the morning and stay all day. We clean the center, then at night there’s an herbal bath, which is to cleanse the body, and each month we commemorate one orixá, one saint. Each month we put on a skirt of a special color in honor of that saint. And then we go through the ritual of macumba, when the orixás come down, one at a time, and then there are songs and the whole spiritualist ritual. It usually begins at 10:30 at night and ends the next morning. It lasts six or seven hours; there’s no fixed time for it to end. It’s always the same ritual. Now, spiritualism has some divisions: for example, candomblé, things like that. Ours is more oriented towards umbanda, toward the orixás. Candomblé is a ritual that involves more singings. Ours isn’t; it’s more a ritual of work, of spirits, to assist people. People go there needing help, and the orixás work to help them. Candomblé has more singing, dancing; it’s more a kind of a festival. Umbanda, no; it’s more to help people.
It’s more effective than Catholicism in the sense of helping people, although I think the Catholic Church is good. But it’s more distant from people. I always thought the priest was very distant from me, whereas at the [umbanda] center, no. You go there, you talk to the orixá. He tries to comfort you, he tells you what’s happening, he tries to help you. And also it’s much more like a family, because not many people go and so the people in the community are more like a family, a second family. I like the Catholic Church, but in terms of helping people I think it’s rather distant.
No, you don’t speak to the orixá through someone. It’s the orixá himself, because he takes possession of a person; he comes and incorporates in that person, and then he talks to you normally, just like you and I are talking now. And, when you don’t understand what he says, usually someone stays at your side who does know and who explains to you what he’s saying. But generally he talks to you alone; he listens to you and tells you everything you ought to do. You can talk to him yourself; you don’t need a third person.
I started going about five years ago [~1976]. One Sunday I got sick, and on Monday my mother went there—but I didn’t know about it. She hid it from me because she knew I wouldn’t like it. It’s like when you know there’s something you need to do, a commitment you have to take on, and you look the other way. That’s the way it was for me, because at that time I liked going to parties and things like that, and if you make a commitment, then you’re obligated, just like with school, with a job, and I was afraid of making this kind of commitment. So my mother went, and when she got there this orixá spoke to her. My mother hadn’t said a word, and he turned to her and said, “Your daughter’s sick, isn’t she?” And my mother said, “Yes, she got sick yesterday,” and he said, “I know she’s sick.” Then he told my mother to take me to a center, so I could have some baths and the people there could work on me. Because something had been done against me. They said it was a boyfriend of mine who’d put a spell on me so I’d get sick, and they undid it. I never tried to find out who it was, or how he’d done it. Because, for example, that’s one thing about our religion, it can work both good and evil, and lots of people do things out of vengeance. They get someone to put a spell on someone else, and that’s exactly what happened in my case. Someone wanted to make me sick or something like that, to get even with me.
That’s what this orixá told my mother—he said, “It was an old boyfriend of hers who did this to her.” And I’d gotten all swollen. I had welts all over my body. It looked like I’d been whipped, re welts; and I felt faint, I couldn’t stand up. It happened overnight. I went to my grandmother’s birthday party on Sunday, I had lunch at her house, I left there at about 3:00 o’clock and went to another house, and when I got home at 5:00 o’clock and went to the bathroom to take a shower, I noticed these streaks on my body. But I felt fine. I went, “What’s this? Could it be something I ate at my grandmother’s house?” Because I’d had lunch there; I’d eaten fish. I said, “Maybe it didn’t agree with me, maybe it upset my liver or something like that.” And I went to sleep. The next day, Monday, I got up to go to work, and I had completely swelled up. But nothing hurt; it was just the swelling. So my mother took me to the doctor, and he gave me a shot which had no effect. The doctors were puzzled; they had no idea what it was. So then my mother went to see this woman, and [afterward] my mother said to me, “Let’s go to the center, let’s go?” and so I did. It just came and went, without leaving any scars, without my feeling anything, just like that. Then I looked for a center I especially liked, where I felt comfortable, with friendly people. And I’ve gone there ever since. In my center it’s about evenly divided between men and women. Usually the women go more, but right now there are a lot of men taking part in umbanda.
That was five years ago, and they’ve helped me with things since then. I feel good spiritually. I feel at peace, I’m not someone who rebels against things. I accept things as they are. I try to solve my problems without getting desperate. That’s something I think they’ve helped me with. I go there, but I’m not a religious fanatic. I have responsibilities, I do the things I’m supposed to do—though sometimes not all that well; I don’t always do them all. But I feel very good, and if a lot of times passes without my going there, I start to miss it. It’s already a part of me, you see.
Before that, I used to go to a Catholic church, but not often. I mean, when I was a child, until I was fourteen, I used to go to church every day. Then I started rejecting it, because of my age and because my mother always used to take me. My mother is Catholic. Sometimes she goes to the center as a visitor, but not regularly, and she doesn’t have any responsibilities there. She’s more involved with the Catholic church, not that she goes there every Sunday either. She usually goes maybe once a month, or twice. Now my father no, my father almost never goes to church, but he calls himself a Catholic. Here in Brazil there are lots of people who are spiritualists and don’t admit it: “I’m Catholic,” because that’s the religion of the Brazilian family, right? That’s the religion with the most followers. In my house they all say they’re Catholic, but none of them goes to church regularly.
In spiritualism there’s real equality, equal participation, because, for example, when another entity incorporates in you, you’re not yourself, you’re something else; and I can receive a male orixá, just as a man can receive a female orixá, so everyone’s on an equal footing, much more than in the Catholic Church. I don’t know how the choice is made of which orixá will choose which person to work with. A woman can have various orixás, so I could have male and female orixás. From the moment the orixá incorporates, you’re no longer yourself. You don’t know what he’s saying, you don’t remember anything; and if there’s something he has to say to you, other people will tell you afterward. It doesn’t depend on your own will at all. For example, I still haven’t received an orixá, but I go to the center and, if and when I do begin to, I’ll always receive that same orixá, from then on. Now, I could have five different orixás and I could work with them for several years, and then a time might come when a certain orixá won’t come to that person anymore. It usually depends a lot on your spiritual state. If you’re very troubled or nervous or have some problems, it’s more difficult because you can’t concentrate. But when you can concentrate, then they usually come, they do what they’ve come to do and they leave, and you’re back to normal. Whatever they drink or smoke you don’t feel.
I feel good after these sessions. I feel kinda of as if I’d come out of a bath, really clean, really good. It’s hard to compare with the Church, because when I used to go to church it was more out of obligation to my mother: “You have to go to Mass.” Nowadays, for example, I can go to church and I even feel good when I leave. Because, you see, umbanda and Catholicism, there are differences, but they have almost the same saints, just with different names; so I can go into a Catholic church and talk to the saints there just as I do at the center. I can pray and talk to them and say what I feel, and I feel good when I leave there, too. But I rarely go to church now.
The saints come down to us in umbanda but not in the Church because the Catholic Church has a different tradition. I think the Catholic Church doesn’t believe in spiritual evolution. They don’t believe in reincarnation after you die. And since they don’t believe in reincarnation, they can’t believe that spirits can come to us. But I believe they do. For example, the orixás we call “Old Blacks” were slaves many years ago and today they incorporate in us.
I think we’ve all had other lives, but we don’t remember them. I believe that when we die our spirits pass over to another kind of life, to another evolution where they can learn things. It’s a kind of education, and then they come back, not as an orixá, but, for example, I could be reincarnated in a newborn child, but more evolved. But no one will know that it’s me. I believe in reincarnation. No, of course I’m not afraid to die. I’m afraid of getting sick unto death, of suffering and moral illness, but not of death itself.
In the Catholic church [sic] we never took the time to talk about these things. It was more a matter of coming and going without any contact with anyone inside. We never discussed these things, and only after I got acquainted with spiritualism did I begin to think, to sit down and talk and learn about these things. I never had the opportunity in the Catholic church. I think the church is very cold, very one-sided. You’re here and the priest is over there. He celebrates the Mass and you participate, but that’s it. Then you leave, you go home. It’s all very one-sided, not like at the center. Also, since the center is so much smaller—at least the one I go to—it’s more on the basis of friendship. There must be only about twenty people there. Black and White, no discrimination, just like a family. In my center the people are all different. The economic level is more or less average, although there are some seamstresses who are having a hard time just surviving. There are a few teenagers, there’s a young woman who’s a ballet dancer, there’s a dentist, there are some boys who live in Copacabana, there are all kinds of people.
We don’t believe there’s a hell, at least not in my conception of hell. I think that whatever you do here, you pay for it right here. Our own lives, our own suffering, already are a kind of payment for the things we do. For example, a person’s who’s very bad here, I think that this person’s spirit will need a great deal of work. I don’t think you can die today and incarnate in another person tomorrow. No, you die, and your spirit will go through a period of training. A person who’s very evil here, I think it’s their spirit that’s evil, and it will have to start at that point and learn, because there are evil spirits, just as there are good spirits. That has to exist; it’s a kind of balance. I can’t imagine how it would be if everyone were good or if everyone were evil.
No, I don’t know anybody else at the university who’s a spiritualist. We almost never talk about religion at school, so there could be some. There must be, actually, but I don’t know any. My friends know that I am; and some of them don’t think it’s right, but they accept it. I’ve suggested to people to go to a center, when I know it could help that person, but that varies a lot, too. First of all, I try to find out if the person believes or not. Because if you don’t believe… I think it depends a lot on having faith; you can accomplish a lot through faith. If people don’t believe, it’s unlikely they’ll do what they’re advised to do. When I first went, I didn’t believe, but I also didn’t go thinking it was worthless. I said, “I’ll go, but I don’t intend to stay too long.” I never went there and said, “This I don’t believe.” I always respected it, and I think that respect is actually a form of belief.
I’ve become a much more secure person. Not totally secure, but more than some time back. To make my own decisions, to decide about my life, to take responsibility for what I do, and to know what I want and don’t want. Even to fight for what I want. And to say openly, “I don’t like that. I don’t want to be a part of that.” I think it’s very much a matter of… of confidence, I became more confident. I used to have very little confidence and a great deal of fear. Though I think we’re all afraid of certain things, and then we get used to them. It’s all a matter of education, of experience of things. As time passes we get to know more. Our life is really a school, isn’t it? And we go on learning constantly. We get to know one person today, another one tomorrow, and all of that is a school. Each experience gives you strength to go on to the next.
…
A year later, in a beautiful ceremony involving white robes and masses of flowers, Ângela got married at her umbanda center. With her new husband she moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in a building in the Copacabana section of Rio. By the time I saw her again in 1983 she was already separated from her husband but had managed to hang on to the apartment, which she was sharing with a woman friend. Ângela says that her parents believe marriage gives a woman freedom, so they didn’t ask her to come back home after her separation. She had also left her job at the optometrist’s and was working in a fashionably travel agency in Copacabana, not far from her apartment. Umbanda continued to play a major role in her life.
