“EVERYBODY IS A MAGUS”

              That’s what Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist, The Pilgrimage, etc.) says. Many of us who have grown up in the English-speaking world would react thinking “Speak for yourself, mate” or “Well, he would say that if it helps to sell his books.”

We’ve been taught to see spirituality as either the property of the church – handed down from the Queen via the Archbishop of Canterbury if you live in the UK – or as a backward-looking fantasy belonging to a pre-scientific age. (By the way, it’s quite amusing to reflect, when you think of the vehemence with which people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens attack the established Church, that these views are actually mirror images – two warring versions of the one true Faith.)

But of course Coelho wasn’t brought up either in Cambridge (Mass.) or Cambridge (UK), and what he says carries a quite different force in the context of Brazil, where a kind of spiritual pluralism reigns without parallel anywhere in the so-called ‘advanced’ world. Like the United States, Brazil is a complex multi-ethnic society with a very large minority descended from former African slaves: over 3 million were sent to work in the sugar cane plantations; far more than went to the United States. However, and even though slavery was only abolished in Brazil in 1888, the culture and spiritual practices that they brought with them have become part of the Brazilian mainstream in a way which absolutely never happened in the USA – and they have merged with 19^th-century European reincarnation-based traditions which have largely died out in their countries of origin. 

To simplify greatly, Brazilian ‘non-orthodox’ spirituality – i.e. apart from the various branches of the Christian Church – falls into three main streams: Spiritism, Umbanda and Candomblé.

Spiritism is practiced mostly by white Brazilians of European origin, and is largely based on the ideas of the French writer Allan Kardec (Hippolyte Léon Rivail) – much better known today in Brazil than in his homeland. It differs from the spiritualism practiced in Europe in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries in that it incorporates notions of Karma and of personal development. The quotation in the picture is a fair summary: “To be born, to die, to be reborn and to evolve throughout: that is the law.”

The other two traditions bring us back to the African inheritance, and in the case of Umbanda, also to indigenous (‘Indian’) practices. The picture at the head of this post represents a group of deities or entities from the Yoruba pantheon called orixâ, or Orisha, with whom almost any Brazilian would be thoroughly familiar. You could see them as  representing a number of what Jung called ‘archetypes’: characteristic forces which play a part in mythology and fiction across cultures.

Yemanja

For instance, there’s Ogun the Warrior, similar to Mars or Thor, Exú the Trickster, and perhaps most interesting of all, Yemanja, the Divine Mother.

Another aspect of the left-brain-dominant, one-size-fits-all approach to spirituality which characterizes ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture is its extreme male-centeredness. It’s hardly an accident that the attacks on religion which I mentioned earlier all come from men, nor is the characteristically male combativeness with which they’re conducted. Meanwhile, the heads of the various established churches are also – of course – all male.  

While the Catholic Church, for all the appalling crimes against women’s sexuality and their bodies which it’s sanctioned, does at least incorporate a kind of Mother cult along with the worship of many female saints, Protestantism swept this all away as idolatry and superstition, so as to bestow upon us the benefits of modern capitalism. We’re left, if we believe in anything at all, with God as Father and Son only.

Now, you’d hardly expect the Christian Church, in Brazil or anywhere else, to cheerfully accept these African deities as part of the pantheon, and they certainly didn’t. At various times in Brazil’s history Candomblé and Umbanda (the latter is a kind of hybrid of European and African practices) have been persecuted, denigrated, or even proscribed by law. However, Brazil, unlike most other predominately Catholic countries, has been a secular state for well over a century, and the orixâ were able to survive periods of persecution by being ‘disguised’ as Christian saints, in a phenomenon known as syncretism. (This actually only emphasises the extent to which they’re cross-cultural archetypes.)

Yemanja

So that’s why Brazil today, besides having a thriving and rapidly growing economy (the B in BRICS, of course) has also the most diverse spiritual landscape of any major country: a place where a medical doctor might also be a spiritist medium, or where a doctoral thesis on past-life memories would be accepted without qualms by a major university. This is the matrix which formed Paulo Coelho, and where he had the experiences which led him to write the books which have made him world-famous. Meanwhile, we have produced … Harry Potter – CGI sorcery, magic as commodity or spectacle (even if the success of the books reflects a similar yearning for the numinous, the transcendent.)

So is Paulo Coelho right, or J.K.Rowling? – whose first post-H.P. book is an explosion of disgust and despair at a hypocritical and heartless world, by the way.  Is ‘magic’ the privilege of a Hogwarts-attending élite – interesting, isn’t it, how similar Hogwarts is to the public schools which our actual rulers went to? – or is it a property which we all have latent within us?

There’s no doubt how a Brazilian would answer this question.