“In other words, those who maintain that the Rosicrucians are eternal—”
“Are scientific fools, because they seek to prove that which must be known without proof. Do you think the worshipers we will see tomorrow night are capable of proving all the things that Kardec told them? Not at all. They simply know, because they are willing to know. If we had all retained this receptivity to secret knowledge, we would be dazzled by revelations. There is no need to wish; it’s enough to be willing.”
“But look—and forgive my banality—do the Rosicrucians exist or not?”
“What do you mean by exist?”
“You tell me.”
“The Great White Fraternity—whether you call them Rosicrucians or the spiritual knighthood of which the Templars are a temporary incarnation—is a cohort of a few, a very few, elect wise men who journey through human history in order to preserve a core of eternal knowledge. History does not happen randomly. It is the work of the Masters of the World, whom nothing escapes. Naturally, the Masters of the World protect themselves through secrecy. And that is why anyone who says he is a master, a Rosicrucian, a Templar is lying. They must be sought elsewhere.”
“Then the story goes on endlessly.”
“Exactly. And it demonstrates the shrewdness of the Masters.”
“But what do they want people to know?”
“Only that there’s a secret. Otherwise, if everything is as it appears to be, why go on living?”
“And what is the secret?”
“What the revealed religions have been unable to reveal. The secret lies beyond.”
The visions are white, blue, white, pale red. In the end they mingle and are all pale, the color of the flame of a white candle; you will see sparks, you will feel gooseflesh all over your body. This announces the beginning of the attraction exerted on the one who fulfills the mission.
—Papus, Martines de Pasqually, Paris, Chamuel, 1895, p. 92
The promised evening arrived. Agliè picked us up just as he had in Salvador. The tenda where the session, or gira, was to take place was in a fairly central district, if you can speak of a center in a city whose tongues of land stretch through hills and lick the sea. Seen from above, illuminated in the evening, the city looks like a head with patches of alopecia areata.
“Remember, this is an umbanda tonight, not a candomblé. The participants will be possessed not by orixás, but by the eguns, spirits of the departed.
And by Exu, the African Hermes you saw in Bahia, and his companion, Pompa Gira. Exu is a Yoruba divinity, a demon inclined to mischief and joking, but there was a trickster god in Amerind mythology, too.”
“And who are the departed?”
“Pretos velhos and caboclos. The pretos velhos are old African wise men who guided their people at the time of deportation, like Rei Congo and Pai Agostinho….They are the memory of a milder phase of slavery, when the blacks, no longer animals, became family friends, uncles, grandfathers. The caboclos, on the other hand, are Indian spirits, virgin forces representing the purity of original nature.
In the umbanda the African orixás stay in the background, completely syncretized with Catholic saints, and these beings alone intervene. They are the ones who produce the trance. At a certain point in the dance, the medium, the cavalo, is penetrated by a higher being and loses all awareness of self. He continues to dance until the divine being has left him, and he emerges feeling better. Clean, purified.”
“Lucky mediums,” Amparo said.
“Lucky indeed,” Agliè said. “They attain contact with Mother Earth. These worshipers have been uprooted, flung into the horrible melting pot of the city, and, as Spengler said, at a time of crisis the mercantile West turns once more to the world of the earth.”
We arrived. The tenda looked like an ordinary building from the outside. Here, too, you entered through a little garden, more modest than the one in Bahia, and at the door of the barracão, a kind of storehouse, was a little statue of Exu, already surrounded by propitiatory offerings.
Amparo drew me aside as we went in. “I’ve figured it out,” she said. “That tapir at the lecture talked about the Aryan age, remember? And this one talks about the decline of the West. Blut und Boden, blood and earth. It’s pure Nazism.”
“It’s not that simple, darling. This is a different continent.”
“Thanks for the news. The Great White Fraternity! You eat your God for dinner.”
“It’s the Catholics who do that. It’s not the same thing.”
“It is too. Weren’t you listening? Pythagoras, Dante, the Virgin Mary, and the Masons. Always out to screw us. Make umbanda, not love.”
“You’re the one who’s syncretized. Come on, let’s have a look. This, too, is culture.”
“There’s only one culture: strangle the last priest with the entrails of the last Rosicrucian.”
Agliè signaled us to go in. If the outside was seedy, the inside was a blaze of violent colors. It was a quadrangular hall, with one area set aside for the dancing of the cavalos. The altar was at the far end, protected by a railing, against which stood the platform for the drums, the atabaques. The ritual space was still empty, but on our side of the railing a heterogeneous crowd was already stirring: believers and the merely curious, blacks and whites, all mixed, some barefoot, others wearing tennis shoes.
I was immediately struck by the figures around the altar: pretos velhos, caboclos in multicolored feathers, saints who would have seemed to be marzipan were it not for their Pantagruelian dimensions, Saint George in a shining breastplate and scarlet cloak, saints Cosmas and Damian, a Virgin pierced by swords, and a shamelessly hyperrealist Christ, his arms outstretched like the redeemer of Corcovado, but in color. There were no orixás, but you could sense their presence in the faces of the crowd and in the sweetish odor of cane and cooked foods, in the stench of sweat caused by the heat and by the excitement of the imminent gira.
The pai-de-santo went forward and took a seat near the altar, where he received the faithful, scenting them with dense exhalations of his cigar, blessing them, and offering them a cup of liquor as if in a rapid Eucharistic rite. I knelt and drank with my companions, noticing, as I watched a cambone pour the liquid from a bottle, that it was Dubonnet. No matter.
I savored it as if it were an elixir from the Fountain of Youth. On the platform the atabaques were already beating, to brisk blows, as the initiates chanted a propitiatory song to Exu and to Pompa Gira: Seu Tranca Ruas é Mojuba! É Mojuba, é Mojuba! Sete Encruzilhadas é Mojuba! É Mojuba, é Mojuba! Seu Marabõe é Mojuba! Seu Tiriri é Mojuba! Exu Veludo, é Mojuba! A Pompa Gira é Mojuba!
The pai-de-santo began to swing his thurible, releasing a heavy odor of Indian incense, and to chant special orations to Oxalá and Nossa Senhora.
The atabaques beat faster, and the cavalos invaded the space before the altar, beginning to fall under the spell of the pontos. Most were women, and Amparo made sarcastic asides about the sensitivity of her sex.
Among the women were some Europeans. Agliè pointed out a blonde, a German psychologist who had been participating in the rites for years. She had tried everything, but if you are not chosen, it’s hopeless: for her, the trance never came, was beyond achieving. Her eyes seemed lost in the void as she danced, and the atabaques gave neither her nerves nor ours any relief. Pungent fumes filled the hall and dazed both worshipers and observers, somehow hitting everybody—me included—in the stomach. But the same thing had happened to me at the escolas de samba in Rio.
I knew the psychological power of music and noise, the way they produced Saturday night fevers in discos. The German woman’s eyes were wide, and every movement of her hysterical limbs begged for oblivion. The other daughters of the saint went into ecstasy, flung their heads back, wriggled fluidly, navigating a sea of forgetfulness. The German tensed, distraught and almost in tears, like someone desperately struggling to reach orgasm, wriggling and straining, but finding no release. However much she tried to lose control, she constantly regained it. Poor Teuton, sick from too many well-tempered clavichords.
The elect, meanwhile, were making their leap into the vacuum, their gaze dulled, their limbs stiffened. Their movements became more and more automatic, but not haphazard, because they revealed the nature of the beings taking possession of them: some of the elect seemed soft, their hands moving sideways, palms down, in a swimming motion; others were bent over and moved slowly, and the cambones used white linen cloths to shield them from the crowd’s view, for these had been touched by an excellent spirit.
Some of the cavalos shook violently, and those possessed by pretos velhos emitted hollow sounds—hum hum hum—as they moved with their bodies tilted forward, like old men leaning on canes, jaws jutting out in haggard, toothless faces. But those possessed by the caboclos let out shrill warrior cries—hiahou!—and the cambones rushed to assist the ones unable to bear the violence of the gift.
The drums beat, the pontos rose in the air thick with fumes. I was holding Amparo’s arm when all of a sudden her hands were sweating, her body trembled, and her
