Macumba is a widely disseminated religious cult in Brazil, a spiritist movement with Afro-Indian roots mixed with Catholicism and even Islamic elements. It is hard to imagine a Macumba without having heard the wild, hours-long, stimulating yet monotone drumming through the night, and without having seen the participants falling into convulsive ecstasy as though shaken by a powerful invisible hand. It is questionable whether the word human can be used to describe these volitionless, wildly dancing creatures. They seem rather to be vessels into which a god or a spirit has been poured, who acts and romps and uses the mouth of an earthly being as his instrument, giving advice and answering questions which are asked via the medium. To be human means to be able to say "I", to use your head. But the overwhelming impression one gets at a Macumba is: away with the head, away with thinking and consciousness. The I is extinguished in order to make room for a supernatural being.

Macumba has a hierarchy, as do all religions. A head priest or priestess (macumbeiro, mae de santo) is at the top. At her side is an assistant priestess and the circle of initiates (filhas de santo) surrounds them. The word medium is appropriate. What is meant is that the spirit descends from heaven, called down by the atabaque drums and the rhythmic, repetitive cult-songs of the filhas de santo. The filhas are the instruments, so to speak, that call down the spirit from heaven and create the connection between heaven and earth.

No sooner have the drums, the singing and rhythmic hand-clapping ceased than the macumbeiro is possessed with the spirit. It is called Pegar espiritu, receive the spirit. "Possessed" should be understood literally. When I asked Dona Jacinta, the Londrina favela's Macumba priestess, what she felt and saw at that moment, she said: "The spirit sits on my back, on the spine" (she showed me the exact spot)"and speaks through me." It is not a redeeming experience, rather a burden. The face is contorted with pain. Cramped and twitching, the possessed one lays the backs of her hands on her spine as though she felt pain there. At the moment when her own consciousness has been completely overcome through the penetration of the spirit into the volitionless human sheath, the filha de santo hands the priestess a cigar or a pipe and a glass of pinga, from which she drinks first and then passes to the other participants. Now is the time to ask her - or rather her spirit - for advice and help. It is also the moment when she cures illnesses.

A real macumbeira unites the qualities of priest, teacher and healer. They have a different understanding of the nature of illness. It is not caused by bacteria or viruses, but has spiritual origins. Pegar o mau espiritu, to be occupied by a bad spirit, is the same as being sick. To exorcise the bad spirit is to heal. Surely truth lies behind this view, if only a half-truth, just as the extreme materialistic view of the nature of illness and its healing by the use of chemical-based drugs is only a half-truth.

It is very easy for such truths to degenerate into superstition however. For example, when the macumbeiro transfers the illness to a fetish which he lays at a crossroads, hoping that someone will step on it and absorb the illness. This magical technique belongs in the realm of black Macumba. Where you see the remains of a slaughtered black hen and a burnt candle, you can be sure that black Macumba was at work. The favela is full of stories about magically acquired sickness, people suddenly dying and unexpected loss of work. These stories are told with such conviction that I believe them myself.

A Macumba priestess's community-building power in a favela should not be ignored. To be a favelado means to be uprooted, torn out of the old tribal or clan relationships, alienated from the traditional mythology and religion. Not yet accepted in modern civilization and culture, most favelados swim between two worlds and lead meager lives, inwardly and outwardly. Only those who gather around Dona Jacinta -- a tranquil base in a dissolving world -- carry within them the pale reflection of a world-view which orders their lives and gives them support.

What can Macumba give to a European? If we resist the temptation to see it as nothing more than a folkloristic element in Brazilian life, and try to see through the confusing details to the world which determines these people's lives, we can understand something of human historical development. It raises somewhat the veil which divides the present from past human cultures. We begin to understand that human consciousness has undergone an evolution from the more intuitive, community oriented human being and leads to the discovery of the I, the individual, and to conscious thinking. Christianity, combined with the cultural forces of Europe, led to modern intellectual consciousness, whose egoistic will is so firmly anchored in the body that practically the only things that can separate this wakeful I-consciousness from the physical are drugs and other synthetic means.

On the other hand, a macumbeira still lives on the other side of this I-development. Her spiritual experience is not expressed in such an abstract form as body vs. spirit. Body and spirit still form a unity, so that the spiritual-religious can be physically experienced, and, with the help of the body and certain materials taken from nature (honey, blood, oils), the spiritual world can be brought down to the human level.

This connection with the spiritual world is purchased with the loss of individual consciousness, however, and doesn't allow for a rational penetration of the supernatural. Therefore, Macumba for a European is a regression to a method for obtaining super-sensory experiences which is no longer in accordance with the times. One stumbles effortlessly into a spiritual world which, because of the capacity for logical thinking and the discovery of the Self, should have been achieved through the training of thought.