The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross

This important study of the intersection of sorcery, magic, and popular religiosity in colonial Brazil began as Laura de Mello e Souza's doctoral dissertation, earned in 1986 at the Universidade de São Paulo and published in Brazil as O diabo e a terra de Santa Cruz: Feitiçaria e religiosidade popular no Brasil colonial. She does not make any substantive changes in this translation, although she does provide a statement of historiographical developments since the mid-1980s that formed the intellectual underpinning for her 1993 work, Inferno Atlântico: Demonologia e colonização. The work under review draws on a remarkably broad reading of the secondary literature available through the mid-1980s and a close reading of the appropriate primary sources, especially Inquisition records.The book focuses on the meaning of sorcery in a world constructed of traditions drawn from Europe, Africa, and indigenous America and uses sorcery as a window into colonial society. In her interpretation of this weaving of traditions, European sorcery and popular religiosity play fundamental roles in dynamic and syncretic relationship with African and Native American elements. Viewed through the prism of colonialism, she describes this syncretic process as a means of social control. This is an important interpretation when read against more recent historiography (most notably James Sweet's Recreating Africa) that has emphasized African contributions and moved away from syncretism.Mello e Souza constructs a complex vision of Brazilian culture, which she understands as the superimposition of "African quasi-syncreticism" on an "Afro-Catholic syncreticism" (p. 50). These were layered over a Portuguese Catholicism that was itself already a syncretic faith. Her use of syncretism as a shaping concept implies a macro perspective on the historical problem: it is the culture that is syncretic. A perspective that started from the point of view of the individual might see those individuals as embodying multiple value and culture sets.In the first of the book's three sections, the author describes Brazil as a type of Eden due to its natural beauty, as a hell due to its residents, and as a purgatory due to its colonial relationship to Portugal. This section also explores the demonization of the people within a context in which nature was Edenized and people demonized. The medieval European fascination with monsters was transplanted to the Americas, mixed with demonic imagery, and increasingly applied to Indians and Africans.The second section explores the nature of sorcery itself during the colonial period. The author distinguishes between sorcery and magic: sorcery is an individual act reflecting a relationship with or an accommodation to the surroundings, while magic is a more associative act. Mello e Souza sees the intermixture of both as a function of the colonial experience, leading to a unified body of beliefs. In this regard, the mandinga pouches worn to ward off evil represent a fusion of the European amulets, Native American fetishism, and African traditions. Magic marked the nature of community relations, both between neighbors and between masters and slaves. Belief in the efficacy of magic was widespread and integrated all segments of society.In the final section, Souza places these practices into the context of elite and popular cultures and explores the circular nature of colonial culture: elite culture helped shape popular culture but was shaped by it as well. The first of this section's two chapters deals with the culture of magic from the top down, focusing on the Inquisition, while the other looks at the same issues through the stories of individuals prosecuted by that court. In a sense, the structure of the final section reflects the idea of reciprocity that Mello e Souza uses throughout the book. She deftly uses the stories of the voiceless as a microcosm to explore the whole social stratum.Throughout this work, Mello e Souza provides a useful history of the Inquisition and of the church's battle against sorcery. Her understanding of the Inquisition trial as a unique space where elite and popular discourses met and crossed paths is a useful conceptualization. She uses this framework to argue that in the mid - eighteenth century, the Inquisition finally came to see popular religion, paternalistically, as the faith of ignorant rustics. In this transition, Mello e Souza argues, Portugal followed in the trail of changes taking place throughout Europe. Witchcraft went from dangerous Satanism to object of ridicule. While reconciling some of the contradictions found in the earlier dichotomization, this ridiculing functioned to maintain Brazil's colonial and subservient status.The author's treatment of Brazilian Catholicism as unique and shaped by the colonial environment is an important part of her analysis. This Christianity was divided into the faith of the theologians and that of their flocks - a division not easily breached by the Council of Trent. Her description of the religiosity of common laypeople - its irreverence toward clerical authority, its humanization and even sensualization of the saints, its affective relationship with the spiritual, and its focus on immediate matters - is amply supported by a wide range of examples drawn largely from the processes of the Inquisition.Mello e Souza's broad vision produces an excellent study of popular religiosity and should serve as a stimulus to more localized work

Historiography · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History of Colonial Brazil

• Paper, Ink, Vodun, and the Inquisition

  Open Access•Cécile Fromont•Journal of the American Academy…•2020

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