Epilogue: witches in Brazil

Epilogue: witches in Brazil
1978. «Las Ayabas de Xangô», Carybé, Hector Bernabó, Bahía (Brasil). Xilografía en color, 68cm x 48cm © Museo de Arte de Bahía (IPAC)

Epilogue: witches in Brazil

Witchcraft arrived in Brazil with the European colonizers, and the local witches were mainly those who practiced rituals from African and indigenous cultures. The Church promptly linked them to the devil and malevolent practices. In Aluísio Azevedo’s O Cortiço (1890), the witch Paula is described as «an old half-caste, half-idiot, respected for her supposed abilities to cure diseases through prayers and spells», which could well have been written by a Latin author. The representation of these women as bearers of evil and their practices linked to hell was common in the literature of the time, written mostly by white men who perpetuated the imaginary inherited from the European tradition. Unlike classical sorceresses such as Medea and Circe, they were figures associated with evil and portrayed as imperfect, deformed and always ugly women. Ugliness, deformity, marginality in short, in addition to being a woman, were almost obligatory requirements to be a witch in the Brazilian imaginary, to which is added the color of the skin, a new stigma factor.

The identification of these women with evil and the obligation to eradicate witchcraft were recurring themes in the authors’ descriptions. The sorceress in A fome (Teófilo, 1890) generated distrust by supposedly having a pact with the devil «with whom she spoke every year, on the eve of St. John’s Eve, at a crossroads, at midnight», as if she were a representative of the Greco-Roman goddess Hecate. Joaquim Manoel de Macedo (A Nebulosa, 1857) portrayed the sorceress as a hirsute and ugly old woman, a connoisseur of dark arts and necromancy inspired by the devil, like the sorceresses portrayed by Horace. Thus, these literary representations contributed to the stigmatization of women who defied social norms, perpetuating the connection between witchcraft and evil in the society of the time, as was the case two and a half thousand years earlier. 

 

Lydia Barbosa