“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.

It is a beautiful game

In June 1969 a second hotly contested World Cup qualifying match between Honduras and El Salvador was played in near riot conditions, with violence between fans and players spilling on to the pitch. Shortly afterwards the Salvadorian armed forces started to strike targets within Honduras, and what’s often described as “The Football War” broke out.

This incident, which took place over 40 years ago, is often quoted as a counter-example when anyone argues that international football promotes peace and harmony among the nations – yet what’s striking about it is that it’s pretty much a one-off. While there have been innumerable near-riots and many ugly incidents of racial intolerance in club-level football, international games – especially those played between national teams – have been amazingly free of such incidents.

This fact is especially surprising when you consider that the purpose of these matches is to establish rankings among countries – and what is potentially more inflammatory for a thin-skinned patriot than to discover that his father/motherland has been eliminated by a traditional rival or hated neighbour? But that isn’t generally what happens, and the current World Cup provides many examples.

Walking past a bar in Paris yesterday during the France-South Africa match (in which les Bleus were playing for a last slim chance to stay in the competition) I heard a great cheer of triumph from the assembled TV-watchers. Assuming that France had at last taken the lead, I looked in at the screen to check my supposition, and was amazed to see that the goal they had been cheering was actually South Africa’s – the first of the match. This morning’s newspapers offered the explanation that the France team had been behaving so disgracefully and playing so poorly that the fans were hoping rather for a South African triumph which at least would have enabled the host nation to qualify for the next round.

In fact, the World Cup offers a chance for nations to experience themselves, and each other, in quite a different way from the usual economic and productivist perspective of the media. Tiny Slovenia suddenly becomes the equal of the United States, while South Africa sends France back home to lick their wounds. Even semi-pariah nations enjoy their moments of respect and glory: Serbia, the scars of the ruinous conflicts of the 1990s still far from healed, overcomes Germany, and North Korea is able for a moment at least to challenge mighty Brazil.

And for the first time in many years the rest of the world sees North Koreans as footballers like any others, with their families at home cheering them on and their hopes and fears, their challenges and disappointments – rather than as the figures of fun or horror which are usually presented.

The Ivory Coast, normally associated with an ongoing civil war and massive official corruption, meets Portugal, ten times more affluent even in the midst of its debt crisis, and they play a good-humored game which leaves them equal (0-0) in a way which in the “real world” they perhaps never will be.

Isn’t there a glimpse here of a world which might be but which we rarely experience, where people are valued for themselves, not for their material assets or their economic potential, and where passion, skill, teamwork and creativity are enough to extricate oneself from the most hopeless situation? If football is a metaphor for life it’s a very optimistic one, and everyone, winners and losers alike, will go home from South Africa with a little more faith in humanity.