Staging transformation: Spiritist liturgies as theatres of conversion in Afro-Cuban religious practice

Abstract

Of the religious formations to have crystallised during the transatlantic slave trade, Espiritismo continues to be among the most popular. While most previous studies of its Cuban and Puerto Rican-style ceremonies have approached them as either a type of health care or field of cultural resistance, this article analyses Spiritist services as theatres of conversion for those not already interpellated by Kardecist discourse and persuaded of mediums' authority. Drawing on research among African-American practitioners of Lucumí, often called Santería, it argues that Spiritist ceremonies have instructed participants in the reality of superhuman entities; the normative conditions of access to them; and the benefits of proper intercourse with the divine in both Yorùbá- and Kongo-inspired initiatory traditions. In contrast to scholarship that treats ritual as drama, this article distinguishes Spiritist liturgies from plays in crucial respects and asserts that they more closely resemble modern operating theatres and theatres of war. It aims thereby to furnish scholars from a range of disciplines with an ethnographically informed perspective on the potential of ritual to configure sensori-motor dispositions and affective states and thus to transform religious subjectivity.

Keywords:

• diaspora religions
• Black Atlantic initiatory traditions
• Espiritismo
• ritual practice
• subjectivity
• conversion

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the members of community I call Ilé Laroye in this article, especially those given the pseudonyms Nilaja Campbell and Arlene Stevens, for their time, enormous material assistance and tremendous generosity. I am also indebted to Bruce Lincoln, Stephan Palmié and Martin Riesebrodt for their commentary on an earlier version of this paper. My very sincere thanks are due to the Dartmouth College Religion Department, Loïc Wacquant, William Elison, Jon Varese and the two anonymous reviewers whose critiques improved this article immeasurably. Funding for the research and writing of this article was provided by the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, the Ford Foundation, and the University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Notes

 1. Spirit guides are regarded as ontologically distinct from orishas; spirit guides are thought to have once lived on earth as human persons, while orishas are, for the most part, considered to be transcendent beings whose sacred energies were present at the beginning of time, and contributed in some way to the creation of the phenomenal world. The protocols, languages and metaphors for misas blancas and most Lucumí rituals are quite different – the latter largely operating according to the idiom of ‘feeding’ and misas, that of ‘cleansing’. The discourse of ritual purity in Espiritismo could fruitfully be compared with that of Brazilian Candomblé; see Matory (2001). During the period of my ethnographic research in Ilé Laroye, between 2005 and 2009, personal ancestors, called égun, were sometimes thought to convey their wishes to descendants during misas, but most were propitiated separately, in rituals that were of a more pronounced ocha-centric character. These rites involved singing in the liturgical language of Lucumí (derived in part from Yorùbá, and almost entirely absent from misas); displays, or plazas, of traditional Afro-Cuban dishes (including Cuba's national stew, ajiaco), and Yorùbá foods in multiples of nine, indexing the orisha Oyá's relationship with the dead; and the performance of sacrificial offerings.

 2. Until very recently, Espiritismo has been given short shrift in the social sciences, apart from a spate of articles and volumes in the late 1970s and 1980s, evaluating the potential of attendance at Puerto Rican Spiritist centres as a therapeutic alternative to Western biomedicine. Representative works include Morales-Dorta (1976) and Harwood (1977). Texts focused on female mediumship include Nuñez Molina (1987), Koss-Chioino (1992), Prorok (2000), Romberg (2003), Singer and Garcia (1989), Pérez y Mena (1991), and Schmidt (2009). In the literature on Lucumí, Spiritist practice has remained a peripheral concern, partly because it has appeared to promise little in the way of African ‘retentions’ or ‘survivals’, and research on Afro-Diasporic religions has tended to be conducted with a view towards substantiating the ‘authentic pasts’ of practitioners (Scott 1991).

 3. All ethnographic references to Ilé Laroye are based on four years of IRB-approved fieldwork, 2005–2009. I have changed the name of this community and of all my interlocutors in it for reasons of confidentiality.

 4. As Foucault (1985, 28) writes, ‘there can be no specific moral action that does not refer to a unified moral conduct; no moral conduct that does not call for the forming of oneself as an ethical subject; and no forming of the ethical subject without “modes of subjectivation” and an “ascetics” or “practices of the self” that support them’.

 5. For uses of this concept, see Hodder (1993) and Edgerton and Pérez de Lara (2001). An overview of the pedagogical impact of religious theatre may be found in Filippi (2005). On the cultural conventions that govern operating theatres, see Goffman (1961). For the influence of religious architecture and pageantry on local populations, see Lara (2004).

 6. Critiques of this approach are diverse; among the most cogent may be found in Asad (1996), Bado-Fralick (2005), Denzin (2003), and Taylor (2003). For more fully fleshed out distinctions between ritual and theatre, see Schechner (1994). On the concept of drama, see Geertz (1983) and Leiris (1958).

 7. A corrective may partly be found in Romberg (2009), which may be distinguished from the present work by noting that Romberg does not dwell on the pedagogical aspects of ritual practice, the relationship between Spirtism and Lucumí, theatrical spaces that are not of a dramatic nature, or religious transformation as such.

 8. Optical perception is the form of visuality implicated in both the scopophilic male gaze and mechanisms of panoptical surveillance outside and within the self. See Mulvey (1975) and Foucault (1977).

 9. Since religious subjects are not constituted solely through language, however, I present conversion with reference to Foucauldian ‘modes of subjectivation’ and the ‘techniques of the self that undergird them.

10. Although, according to the elders of Ilé Laroye, everyone has spirits to guide them, not everyone is meant to ‘work with’ them, or contact them for the purpose of developing mediumistic faculties; sometimes initiates are forbidden from attending misas and practicing Spiritism in their itás. These people seemed to be in the minority, however.

11. The man who changed his name to that of a previous incarnation could not have envisioned the significance his rituals would come to have for devotees of Lucumí, particularly in conjunction with spirit possession. Kardec did not view the trances experienced by mediums in white masses as spirit possession per se (Hess 1991, 79). To denote the removal of a disruptive spirit from an individual, Kardec employed the term ‘disobsession’ rather than ‘exorcism’, because he viewed the problem in terms of ‘spirit obsession, or the ability of certain perturbing or earthbound spirits to influence the thoughts and health of the incarnate “obsessed”’ (Hess 1991, 21). This notion of obsession articulates well with the Yorùbá concept of wayward, mischievous spirits, rather than the Christian one of Satan and devils.

12. Mediums locate spirit guides’ desire to assist the living in the past lives of the guides themselves; by rendering a service to those for whom they feel sympathy, spirit guides are thought to achieve ‘enlightenment’ and peace. They are often perceived as having left some matters unresolved at their deaths, and motivated by a need to make up for some episode in their checkered pasts.

13. Academic references to Brazilian Spiritism are too numerous to cite here.

14. It was covered by The Chicago Tribune on 6 November, 2005.

15. The size of the Lucumí social scene is such, however, that if one has left a religious house in bad odour, it is difficult to avoid running into former godparents and godsiblings at ceremonies around the city.

16. Passing, or incorporating the spirits, was described by the mediums as a cleansing in itself.

17. This was the same pose to be assumed when undergoing a rogation of the head, an orisha-centred ceremony intended to impart the coolness and clarity associated with Obatalá through the application of ‘white’ substances to the crown – where the orishas are ritually ‘seated’ in initiation – and cardinal points: throat, nape, palms, inner elbows, feet between the first and second toes. Rogations usually lasted less than twenty minutes, however, while misas could go on for two hours, and the length of the exercise made a discipline of it, since most participants sat on hard folding chairs and benches.

18. Personal communication, 12 May, 2006. For the concept of ‘God-consciousness’, see Schleiermacher (1999).

19. See Albanese (2007).

20. See Roberts (1972).

21. It was not uncommon, after this song, for participants to pray a round of Our Father's and Hail Mary's.

22. 22 January, 2006.

23. The definition of sympathetic magic as operating by means of imitation, on the one hand, and contact, on the other, is apposite here.

24. This would include dancing alone or singing to oneself within one's home.

25. The association of West African spirit possession with inauthentic performance can be traced to one of the first accounts of it. See Bosman (1705) and Johnson (2011).

26. Her familiarity with cinematic conventions, particularly in musicals, informed her sense of the fantastic, and provided a vivid contrast with the ‘authenticity’ and ‘realness’ of ritual practice.

27. For the use of ‘hexis’ in this context, see Bourdieu (1984, 192–93).

28. Personal communication, 18 December, 2005. See Agnew (2012) for a brief comparison of the psychoanalytic consultation to both a theatre of battle and operating theatre.

29. While, as I will go on to elaborate, all misas are ‘investigative’, a misa designated as such is conducted mainly for the benefit of one individual in particular. In Ilé Laroye, the person to whom a misa was dedicated sat on a chair in the middle of the circle with a lit candle on the floor under her chair. Before the misa, she was urged to list as many ancestors as she could recall on a piece of paper so that they could be called out at the beginning of the ceremony, and participants were instructed to focus their mediumship on the individual in their midst. Most of the messages were viewed as somehow relating to her.

30. Mediums approached the spirits' symbols as idiosyncratic, asserting that the basis for deciphering them was not familiarity with symbolism in general, but with the signs favoured by certain spirits in manifesting themselves to practitioners. Nilaja's favourite example of a symbol widely used yet without a universal meaning was that of the serpent: for someone with a mortal fear of snakes, dreaming of a snake shedding its skin could portend danger, while a person with pleasant memories of a childhood pet boa constrictor might interpret the same dream as a sign of renewal and regeneration.

31. By contrast, in drum rituals, those mounted by spirits stared out from wide-open eyes that seemed lit from within. Nilaja has said that her more dominant spirit is male, but that he poses greater difficulty for her to let him ‘come through’.

32. For more on verbal registers, see Wirtz (2005) and Kearney (1977).

33. The aftereffects of ‘passing’ seemed to me to be almost identical, if less severe, than those shown after possession by an nfumbi or an orisha.

34. Espirito Santo (2010b) approaches the objects used in Spiritist rituals from a different theoretical angle.

35. The use and placement of this basin has intriguing parallels to the use of water-filled bowls and barrels in the antebellum period by North American slaves during worship services in their cabins, to ‘catch’ the sound of singing and dancing. This practice was reported in the recollections of the formerly enslaved.

36. These ablutions shared some similarities with ebó, or sacrifices for the orishas, with common ingredients, including eggs and efún, that contributed to the association of everyday substances with religious qualities, transforming them into artifacts that were ‘agentive and constitutive of relationships' (Kendall 2008, 165). Nodal and Ramos (2005) provide a taxonomy of ebó.

37. Most practitioners are advised to put seven glasses on a bóveda, unless the person is a child of Oyá, whose relationship to the dead and the number nine will usually indicate the placement of nine glasses of water.

38. 22 September, 2006. Illumination of a bóveda could be accomplished by candles or lamps, and the water in these glasses was to be clear, in order to encourage the presence of elevated spirits. As Nilaja once said, regarding the use of artificial light on bóvedas, ‘We are training the spirits to work with Edison's discovery’.

39. In Cuba, dolls commemorating deceased family members and cherished spirit guides have been passed down through the generations, offered food and beverages, and had their clothing changed regularly.

40. 23 September, 2006.

41. 28 October, 2005. This anecdote also illustrates that a substance viewed as sacred in one context – tobacco – can be a source of illness if used in another. The same could be said for liquor.

42. This is not to say that mediums did not offer up remedies intended to alleviate pain and promote well-being; indeed, the elders of Ilé Laroye prided themselves on being conversant with the properties of many herbs and other natural extracts shown in recent medical studies to be efficacious. Mediums often hewed to conventional wisdom in determining the basis for a condition, as when abdominal pain was cited as the somaticisation of stress, and issued directives that appeared straightforward, practical, and mundane.

43. Just as saying ‘permission to the mesa’ was the convention that everyone except incorporated spirits used – ‘the mesa’ serving as a synecdoche for those spirit guides present on it – ‘peace and light to your spirits’ was said to anyone recognised as having received a message from their guides for someone else. Although even those who had never attended a misa were encouraged to speak, it was more common for initiated elders regarded as mediums to do so.

44. Romberg (2009, 10) records a similar formulation: ‘“It's not me”, [mediums] often clarify “It's the spirits telling me to tell you”’.

45. I served as amanuensis for over a dozen misas.

46. Visiting mediums were seated as close to the table as possible without displacing regular senior attendees.

47. See Brown McCarthy (1987).

48. Avila (1999) examines the colonial Spanish debt to contemporary concepts of the evil eye, hexes, and illness due to sinful behaviour that are prevalent in the Americas.

49. Personal communication, 13 August, 2007.

50. While there are accounts of oracular pronouncements not coming true as it were, their failure to predict the future seldom calls the truth value of the divinatory operation itself into question.

51. In characterising the ‘pruebas’, or confirmations, that Lucumí initiates understand themselves to receive, Holbraad (2008, 104) writes, ‘[They] exist by virtue of being implicated in further acts of transformation, and that is what makes pruebas not only logically sensible but also pragmatically necessary’. Holbraad calls these types of ‘inventive definitions’, or ontological redefinitions of phenomena, ‘infinitions’.

52. She said that everything in the reading happened within four days. Personal communication, 15–16 April, 2005.

53. I have been unable to find the origin of this phrase; influential in its use appear to be Kahaner (1997) and Iwicki (2004).

54. In the type of investigative misa called a coronation, a person about to be initiated into Lucumí was ‘crowned’ with his or her main spirit guide. During this sort of misa, a glass of water was placed at the same spot on the head that was to be ‘sealed’ with the aché of her titular orisha during initiation.

55. Personal communication, 13 August, 2007.

56. As Matory (2007, 407) writes, ‘The Congo spirits are usually imagined or depicted as petroleum-black slaves – whether as raggedly dressed and muscular field hands or as elderly, white-clad and whitehaired house servants’.