Calundu's Winds of Divination: Music and Black Religiosity in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Volume 3 | Number 2 Article 3

2017 Calundu's Winds of Divination: Music and Black Religiosity in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil Jonathon Grasse California State University, Dominguez Hills

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Recommended Citation Grasse, Jonathon (2017) "Calundu's Winds of Divination: Music and Black Religiosity in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil," Yale Journal of Music & Religion: Vol. 3: No. 2, Article 3. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1080

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Music & Religion by an authorized editor of EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Calundu’s “Winds of Divination” Music and Black Religiosity in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil

Jonathon Grasse

The drum-laden music of calundu religious In addition to its very religiosity running practice punctuated life in cities, mining counter to Christian beliefs, calundu’s Af- towns, and farms (fazendas) in eighteenth- and rican-derived liturgical music and language nineteenth-century Minas Gerais, Brazil. This help distinguish it from creolization, syn- article seeks to more clearly understand cretism, or hybridization.2 Drumming—both calundu historically, its religiosity’s links to figuratively doctrinal as sacred commu- music, and its meaningfulness as a vital yet nication and imagistic in its sensual timbre and seemingly lost sacred music tradition from an attractive musical patterns that induce dance understudied region of the African diaspora. and trance possession—is a primary conduit Discussion of its oppression, subsequent for ancestor worship and spirit com- fragmentation, and transformation leads to a munication. A key to religious parallelism, brief examination of notional scenarios of drumming here remains “uncompromisingly cultural redirection and absorption of calun- African.” 3 Likewise speaking to parallelism du’s music among other black religious music was calundu’s equally uncompromising chant, genres in Minas Gerais. These include the calling forth spirits and ancestors in African syncretic Afro-Brazilian religions of macumba languages including a “dialect of the mines” and Umbanda, the black Catholic congado, and (falar Africano or calunga) specific to Minas the quasisacred remnants of the otherwise Gerais and southeastern Brazil, which de- secular batuque circle dance. Examining eigh- creased in prevalence, like calundu itself, in teenth- and nineteenth-century music and isolated parts of Minas.4 black religiosity, and calundu’s fate, offers insight both into links between music and religious belief, and into these identities in 2 See Kalle Kananoja, Central African Identities and Minas Gerais as a unique cultural territory. Religiosity in Colonial Minas Gerais (Åbo, Finland: Åbo Akademi University, 2012), 17–22. Using Afro-mineiro Another role calundu music plays arguably religiosity as a focal point, this author effectively rests in its appeal to the “parallelism” summarizes divergent views on distinguishing creo- approach found in scholarship on Atlantic lization from among other theories. 3 José Jorge de Carvalho, “Black Music of All creole religious belief. For instance, James Colors: The Construction of Black Ethnicity in Ritual Sweet maintains that early eighteenth-century and Popular Genres of Afro-Brazilian Music,” in Music and Black Ethnicity: The Caribbean and South America, ed. African religions in Brazil were often less Gerard Behague (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, syncretic or creolized than “independent 1992), 188. systems of thought” paralleling Catholicism.1 4 Steven Eric Byrd, “Calunga, an Afro-Brazilian Speech of the Triangulo Mineiro: Its Grammar and History” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1 James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa (Chapel Hill: 2005). Regarding the cultural and religious power of University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 7 and 115. secretive, African-derived language in Brazil, see also

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 43 From Africa to Brazil Bengo, Angola, describes quilundu (calundu) Calundu’s dynamic social spaces define a and maconza, a scraper idiophone known in chapter of Minas Gerais’s history, helping Brazil as reco-reco and canzala: illustrate the unique cultural territory of this They also had a pot placed over a fire. In the interior highland state also referred to as pot [were] blood, wild honey, red feathers, and bones of animals. Three men danced Minas, whose inhabitants are known as around the fire, accompanied by musicians mineiros (miners). A cross-section of colonial playing maconzas. The purpose of the mineiro society dominated by a Catholic ceremony was to cure a sick black woman. Portuguese minority sought out secretive Paulo, the master of the ceremony, invoked a calundu healers who maintained trance- spirit named Angola, clearly a reference to the title ngola.5 possession customs within a hidden world that contrasted with the public soundscapes Slaves and their descendants formed of other Afro-mineiro religious music. Some ethnically diverse generations of Afro- calundu sessions attracted paying clients mineiros who acknowledged the liturgical seeking remedies, spiritual protection, and music upon which calundu’s efficacy rested, good fortune in matters of love and finance. contributing to the transformed traditions of Directors of calundu ritual (calundeiros/as) an increasingly pan-Bantu culture, dominated relied upon music, chant, and dance for trance as it was by Congolese and Angolan possession, inviting ancestral spirits (some- influences. Liturgical chant and dance were times known as zumbi) to prescribe treatments likely accompanied by combinations of and advice. Enslaved nganga priests and membranophones of various shapes and sizes priestesses from Angola likely contributed to played by hands or sticks: frame drum (adufe, calundu’s presence in Minas, as did perhaps later pandeiro), friction drum (cuíca or puíta), the slavery-shattered remnants of secretive wooden or bamboo notched scrapers (reco-reco, Congolese kimpasi religious societies. The or canzala), shakers metallic or otherwise Bacongo people, for instance, placed nganga (generic term: chocalho), bead or shell net- practice alongside the work of itomi, advisors covered gourds (chekere), basket rattles (caxixi), in supernatural communication who encoura- struck metallophonic bells (agogó), and shaken ged fertility and resolved family disputes, and bells with clappers (adjá). While no of ndoki fortunetellers practiced in divination. transcriptions of calundu music exist, we can Two centuries before the decades-long surmise that these sacred timbral textures mineiro gold rush began in the mid-1690s, the were combined with syncopated, polyrhyth- Portuguese and missionaries spread Catho- mic patterns similar to those heard in known licism in Africa while interpreting these rituals African and Afro-Brazilian percussion music. as creolized concepts of fetish (feitiço) and Arguing for timbres and generic style as sorcery (feitiçaria), with practitioners known as primary contexts for religiosity allows us fetishists (feitiçeiros). Early eighteenth-century through conjecture to establish historical con- Portuguese Inquisition testimony given by tinuity of some musical traits with other Afro- Matheos, a Jesuit College estate slave in Brazilian religious practices. We ascribe to

Carlos Vogt and Peter Fry, Cafundó: A África no Brasil 5 Cited in Kananoja, Central African Identities and (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996). Religiosity, 202.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 44 calundu’s musical import not just this process of urbanization, and the local pro- commonality, but also a heightened sense of duction of gold.7 what Suzel Reily posits in her ethnography of Though of great historical value, sources such southeastern Brazil as the “sensual stimulation as observations published by nineteenth- and loosely qualified affective experiences . . . century European travelers—who were in the construction of religious conscious- sometimes unaware of the sacred-music ness,” as she navigates between dichotomous functions they witnessed in Afro-mineiro notions of “doctrinal” and “imagistic” modes communities—were prone to racist cha- of religiosity.6 racterizations. 8 Some misidentification likely Diverse Central African ethnicities in went both ways: secular entertainment may Minas likely shared to varying degrees music’s have been conveyed as sorcery, with sacred role in articulating religious beliefs concerning rituals described as simple dance music. everyday social roles, relationships, fluidity “Feast” and “dance” labeled what could have between the worlds of the living and the dead, been calundu. Some whites and mulattos and beliefs in the eternal force of human participated in calundu healing rituals, while souls. The relatability with spirit pantheons some blacks did not, adding to potentially and ancestral heritage through music confusing socially heterogeneous musical remained a cornerstone. Other shared features meanings. Ladinos, acculturated Africans who likely included communal vocabularies of turned away from their ancestral traditions performative gestures engaging the explana- such as calundu, more readily looked toward tion, prediction, and control of life experience beliefs that Luso-Brazilian colonial society through spirit forces. Fortune and misfortune accepted.9 Catholicism had made inroads into arose from a universe of conditions, ranging sixteenth-century Africa long before slave from a healthy and harmonic balance to shipments to Minas began: some slaves had illness and bad luck brought about by spiritual already been converted to, or deeply in- imbalances. Mediating these forces were fluenced by, Catholicism. In subscribing to calundeiros possessed by the “winds of divination and healing rituals, certain whites in divination,” with drumming, chant, and dance authority tacitly allowed blacks and slaves to enabling embodiment of spirits grounded continue calundu as a vehicle of broader anew in transformed social spaces of Minas Gerais, where the practice flourished more 7 Daniela Buono Calainho, Metrôpole das Mandingas (Toronto: Garamond, 2008), 90. Unless otherwise than in other Brazilian regions. noted, translations are by the author. Although common in Bahia [in northeastern 8 See Ilka Boaventura Leite, Antropologia da viagem: Brazil], it was in the region of Minas where Escravos e libertos em Minas Gerais no século XIX (Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 1996). The author cata- references [to calundu] more consistently logues and details observations on mineiro slaves and appeared in documentation, generalized during freed persons published by European visitors during the eighteenth century as a social function of the nineteenth century. the region’s large contingent of slaves, the 9 Blacks and mulattos formed an integral community of professionally trained Western-instrument musicians during the barroco mineiro, the Baroque-era flourishing of sacred Catholic church music. The Minas School of mulatto composers refers to a nativist group 6 Suzel Ana Reily, Voices of the Magi: Enchanted of locally trained composers who created a good Journeys in Southeast Brazil (Chicago: University of Chi- portion of Brazil’s música colonial repertoire of liturgical cago Press, 2002), 212–14. music, for which Minas is highly regarded.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 45 religious and cultural presence. It was made erroneous connections between calundu calundu’s healing and divination practices, and the Christian concept of the devil. In propelled by economic gain, that attracted denouncing calundu’s religious and perfor- whites and thus generated a preponderance of mative components while criminalizing its documented Inquisition and other ecclesias- medical practices, the Inquisition promoted its tical testimony. These witnesses, as cultural associations with satanic worship. During the outsiders, were far less compelled to parse the generation preceding the Minas Gerais gold negative satanic witchcraft context from discovery, Brazil’s celebrated Baroque-era calundu cosmology’s otherwise more tho- poet Gregório de Matos Guerra (1636–96) roughly marginalized religiosity. Of course, depicted calundu as satanic witchcraft in music and language served all of calundu’s descriptive verse completed during his stay in purposes, as primary examples of “parallel” Bahia (1679–94): religious practice. I know of quilombos / with superlative masters Yet calundu struggled to find safe haven, In which they teach at night / calundus and being driven into secrecy and fragmentation witchcraft . . . . by secular and church law, the latter enforced What I know is that in such dances / Satan is via the repressive apparatus of the Portuguese engaged . . . . 10 There is no scorned lady / or disfavored gallant Inquisition. Portugal’s Tribunal of the Holy Who misses going to the quilombo / to dance his Office of Inquisition operated between 1536 little bit.12 and 1821. As Goa, India, was its only outpost Inquisition activities in Brazil were most in the colonies, Brazil answered directly to frequent and broadest in scope in Minas Lisbon. Proceedings in Salvador, Bahia, began Gerais, occurring there between the 1720s and in 1646, seeking primarily to punish Jews and the early nineteenth century. The Holy Muslims. Calundu constituted aids to sorcery, Office’s familiars closely observed colonial enchantment, and magic rather than mani- populations, documenting offenses that could festations of holy worship to a singular deity be prosecuted by the Lisbon Tribunal. 13 standing contrary to Christian belief. 11 Tes- Separate from the Inquisition, ecclesiastic timony was further shaped to portray African inquiries (devassas eclisiásticas) were investigative religious practice, including music and dance, church hearings examining the lives of select as demonic. Popular literature of the time also mineiro citizenry, at which individuals testified as to religious behavior, suspect activities, and 10 Papal agreements granted the royal court of sexual conduct. Devassas were first carried Portugal patronage over the church (padroado real), effectively making the Inquisition an agency of the out in Minas by an ecclesiastical unit in 1721. Portuguese state. (In 1745 it would become the office of the 11 Anita Novinsky, Inquisição: Prisioneiros do Brasil, archbishop of Mariana.) As with the Holy seculos VVI–XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Expressão e Cultura, 2002), 23–24. Practitioners of what was seen by See’s Inquisition records, devassas offer Western authority as “magical” African-derived religious rites were persecuted, but less rigorously than 12 Cited in Rogério Budasz, A música no tempo de heretics and the followers of organized religions Gregório de Mattos (Curitiba: DeArtes/UFPR, 2004), 12. constituting idolatry. Despite calundu’s religious Here, quilombo refers not to a runaway-slave settlement import, the Inquisition declared that it amounted to but rather to a forest clearing. deception and trickery, a repertoire of lesser evils and 13 Laura de Mello e Souza, The Devil and the Land of nonheretical strategies for solving everyday problems the Holy Cross, trans. Diane Grosklaus Whitty (Austin: and for healing. University of Texas Press, 2003), 184–86.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 46 valuable descriptions of calundu manifest among diverse agents, forming an uneasy through music, dance, chant, and language. regional identity that However, these views were filtered through can be seen as a way in which the slave complex authoritarian means tainted by racist protected and redefined his culture in the face bigotry and by potentially spurious witnesses of hierarchical cultural values imposed by reporting malicious hearsay. Some witnesses Luso-Brazilian authorities, while at the same may have libeled their fellow citizens or time creating links of friendship and fraternity with elements of the dominant society. This misled investigators in an attempt to conceal popular culture, uniting currents arising from their own involvement in calundus. For Africa and from popular Portuguese culture, instance, slave owners were known to have impeded the full imposition of Portuguese received percentages of receipts from their hierarchical culture.16 slaves’ professional rituals. They and other whites risked exposure in having profited A Group of Calundeiras in Colonial Minas from, participated in, or formed a willing Black freedwoman (liberta) Rosa Gomes was a audience to calundu. store owner and highly regarded official in her In Minas, calundeiros and curandeiros (the Catholic brotherhood (irmandade) in Conceição latter term, “healers,” can also be used in do Mato Dentro, a town in the Serra do Cipó contexts unrelated to calundu) entered even region 40 kilometers from the Afro-mineiro the lives of Catholic clerics. During his 1819 communities of Açude and Mata Tição. (Both expedition from Rio de Janeiro to southwest towns are renowned in the twenty-first century Minas, the French naturalist Auguste de Saint- for maintaining Afro-mineiro musical tra- Hilaire noted in the city of São João del Rei ditions.) Rosa represented a significant mineiro that the local parish priest recommended a demographic: the free person of color who black slave curandeiro who had treated his either owned or operated a bar or general store. 14 father. In a not atypical case from the early Her weekly practices constituted creolized eighteenth century, military officer Silvestre Catholic worship masking African-derived reli- Marques da Cunha paid higher than market gious practices. In 1764, Rosa was denounced value for four African slaves sold by mineiro by the Portuguese Inquisition for hosting “cele- merchant Pedro Nunes de Miranda: each was brations that were clearly African in origin,” a highly skilled curandeiro specializing in including batuque dances on feast days and remedies and treatments for illnesses. Sixteen Sundays. 17 The case language conflates an kilometers east of Queluz (today Conselheiro otherwise secular batuque drum circle with Lafaiete), farmer (fazendeiro) Antonio Gomes unspecified religious practice described as “Af- da Cruz rented out his healer and diviner slave rican in origin,” likely calundu. Though the 15 Matheus Monjolo throughout the region. simultaneity of Catholicism and “parallel” ritual Criminalized yet commodified, calundu settled is apparent, the details of Rosa’s celebrations into this mountainous Brazilian interior

16 D. Ramos, “A influência africana e a cultura popular em Minas Gerais: Um comentário sobre a 14 Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, Viagem às nascentes do interpretação da escravidão,” in Brasil: Colonização e Rio São Francisco (Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 2004), 64. escravidão, ed. Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva (Rio de 15 Júnia Ferreira Furtado, “Ensaio barbeiros, Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 2000), 142. cirurgiões e médicos na Minas colonial,” Revista do 17 Kananoja, Central African Identities and Religiosity, Arquivo Público Mineiro 41 (2005): 99. 189 and 197–98.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 47 remain a mystery. Four generations of Africans played music “of their land.” The preferred and their descendants had been making Minas instruments were drums also “of their land,” [and] speaking in languages “of their land.”19 their home by the time of her trial. Rosa was either a calundeira or one whose community In the 1740s, a fifty-year-old Angolan leadership position empowered her to simply healer in Sabará who had purchased her own host ceremonies. freedom, directed drumming, dance, and A Central African slave named Gracia chant to bring about calundu’s “winds of hosted racially mixed Saturday evening divination.” As described by Luzia Pinta’s gatherings in the small mineiro town of accusers, drums called forth the trans- Rodeiro, near Ubá, in the Zona da Mata formative, cosmological healing power of the region. Lisbon Tribunal testimony from 1721 spirit world of apparitions. According to the details three African dancers performing a official letter sent with her to the Lisbon ritual aimed at, among other spiritual and Tribunal, this “feitiçeira” was known for divinational goals, locating runaway slaves and invoking the devil by means of dances called curing blindness. The witnessing Catholic calundus. One of her accusers was a Por- priest testified that during spirit possession, tuguese-born white landowner and head of Gracia channeled a venerated ancestor the local militia who had testified in 1739 identified as Dom Felipe, likely referencing concerning Pinta’s calundus, in which he had the king of Ndongo (1626–64) known as participated. Diogo Sousa de Carvalho stated to Dom Felipe. 18 Gracia’s clients knelt before the tribunal that her, offering great reverence and addressing singing were two negresses, also Angolans, her as Dom Felipe. and an African male playing a tabaque, which is Also telling is the case of Rita, a slave a small tambourine; and they say that the from Africa’s Mina coast living near Mariana, negresses and the black male are her slaves; and playing and singing for a space of one to home to 11,000 slaves by 1718, and an two hours she became as if out of her mind, important Roman Catholic diocese by 1745. speaking things that no one understood; and Her cures were made “in the presence of the people who were to be cured lay down on various blacks who had found the sound of the floor [and] she passed over them various drumming from their land. . . . [A]s she times; on these occasions, it was said that she 20 danced, the more they wanted the sound of had the winds of divination. the drum to be played according to the Such testimonies describe the practice of custom of their land.” During her ceremonies, calundu as one sought out by elites as well as she spoke “at the same time using her Mina language,” . . . accompanied by African commoners. The most prestigious of Luzia’s instruments, and she “prayed and made those clients was Dr. Bathesar de Morais Sarmento, watching pray on their knees in front of a graduate of Portugal’s esteemed University of small altar with lovely images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and other saints.” The cures made by Rita used divination, natural 19 D. Ramos, “A influência africana e a cultura products such as herbs and powdered roots, popular em Minas Gerais.” 144–45. African music and elements of the Catholic 20 Inquisition of Lisbon, Arquivo Nacional Torre religion, [and] are a window into a popular do Tombo, Lisbon, trans. D.R. Tabaque is a corruption culture in formation. . . . [T]he participants of atabaque, a tall cylindrical drum, and is erroneously identified as a “small tambourine.” Cited from http:// academic.csuohio.edu/as227/Lectures/Brazil/pinta_tr 18 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 151. anslation.htm (accessed April 2013).

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 48 Coimbra and a prominent judge (ouvidor) of A dearth of effective Western medicine the colonial unit of Minas Gerais (capitania), encouraged social elites to seek black healers, who visited her for pain relief.21 Luzia was who were seen by authorities as criminals shipped to Lisbon and coerced into con- engaging in Cabalistic pacts. In Mariana in fessing that her spiritual practice was an 1790, Joaquina Maria de Conceicão attended illness. Tortured for alleged satanic pacts, she “calundu dances” directed by the “Benguelas” was exiled and ordered never to return to (after the Angolan slave port of Benguela) Sabará. Maria and Thereza. These dances were The Vila Sabará of Luzia Pinta’s day was attended by slaves, the fazendeiro’s daughter, one of the most important mineiro cities. and three other white women. Joaquina later Luzia’s calundus flourished in a bustling, testified, in what was likely malicious hearsay, wealthy urban center that was demogra- that “the blacks pretended that they died and phically dominated by Africans and their started to speak in delicate voices, saying that descendants. Less than 15 percent of Sabará’s it was the Devil speaking.”23 Rural mineiros, population was white, a number almost including fazenda owners, also relied on doubled by free women of color such as African-derived medicinal practice. In his Luzia. 22 Children of mixed racial parentage, study of coffee fazenda culture in the county many the result of sexual abuse, would of Vassouras, in Rio de Janeiro’s Paraiba sometimes be granted manumission if the Valley, Stanley Stein comments on what could mother was a slave. The population of free most likely have been said about nineteenth- mulattos swelled throughout Minas by the century coffee fazendas in southern Minas: middle of the eighteenth century. Those of Where fazendeiros knew little home medicine, mixed parentage likely strayed more readily their wives and their slaves exchanged views or from strongly parallel religious practice like finally called in the curandeiro, a figure of long calundu toward syncretic belief and Catho- standing in African cultures. Known among licism. Religious hybridism occurred, with Vassouras slaves as curandeiros, quimban- deiros, and cangiristas, and to Portuguese as some calundu practitioners baptized as Chris- feiticeiros, curandeiros employed a variety of tians and molding Catholic beliefs into their remedies including herbs and other substances daily lives. prescribed in accordance with set rituals.24 The case of Rosa Courana (ca. 1719–ca. 21 Laird W. Bergad, Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720–1888 1761), later known as Rosa Maria Egipcíaca da (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 151. Vera Cruz, offers insight into the calundu- 22 Ibid., 230–31. Sabará’s gold mines attracted influenced society of eighteenth-century Minas outsiders well into the late eighteenth century, and by 1776 over 5,000 free blacks called the city home. Gerais. Of the Coura people, Rosa was sold Because of the low ratio of white women available for into slavery at age six in Whydah (today in white men, colonial Minas witnessed widespread Nigeria), and thus was too young to have concubinage among rich, poor, slave, and free. While fining citizens for violations of religious doctrine, the church could not stop widespread interracial sexual 23 Kannanoja, Central African Identities and Religiosity, encounters; nor could it prevent white men from living 237. The author cites the Tribunal do Santo unmarried, public lives with black and mulatto women. Ofícial/Inquisição de Lisboa in the Instituto dos Years later, the 1808 Sabará county (comarca) census Arquivos Nacionais, Lisbon. would count 64,927 people of color in the total 24 Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee population of 76,215: 21,980 black slaves, 8,884 free County, 1850–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University blacks, 32,465 free mulattos, and 786 mulatto slaves. Press, 1985), 189, 205.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 49 received religious training while still living in Jesus Christ, and of hearing divine orders Africa. Sold again in 1725 at Rio de Janeiro’s directly from God won admirers and sparked infamous Valongo slave market, she was raped a movement to have her canonized. Rosa at fourteen by her owner. Rosa was sold a third Maria produced the earliest known auto- time, to Ana Garces de Morais of Inficcionado, biographical work of any black woman in Minas Gerais, a small town of 500 residents a history, Sagrada teologia do amor divino das almas few kilometers from Mariana, where she lived peregrinas (Sacred Theology of Divine Love of as a prostitute until the age of thirty-one. A the Pilgrims’ Souls). “public woman,” one of many “women of the A saint who prayed in Latin, who knew how fandango in Minas Gerais” during the height of to touchingly sing liturgical hymns, but who, the gold rush, she befriended Leandra, a crioula as a good African from the Mina coast, never (creole) from Pernambuco believed to have dispensed with the cachimbo drum from which been an initiate (ekédi) of the Xangô religion she was inseparable; who in her mystical rapture could be convincingly compared to centered in the city of Recife. Another the prophets canonized by Rome, but who acquaintance was Padre Francisco Goncalves could not occasionally resist the temptation to Lopes, a traveling exorcist who diagnosed worship Jesus Christ by dancing frenetically to Rosa’s epilepsy as satanic possession, and the rhythm of batuque.25 whose friendship led to her gradual conversion to Catholicism and acquisition of literacy. Calundu Drumming: Brazilian Transfor- Rosa’s painful journey, including her mation of the Powerful Ngoma eventual transformation into a popular saint, While the celebratory rhythms of Afro-mineiro is characterized by forms of cultural and drumming brought certain freedoms from, and religious syncretism manifested in Minas created resistance to, slavery’s brutality and Gerais, and arguably reflected the viciousness injustice, the functional sonic worlds and with which authorities punished an innocent rhythmic patterns of calundu coaxed the pre- victim whose behavior was linked to calundu’s sence of ancestors and healing spirits, forming possession-based trance. She crossed paths sacred alliances with incantations, dance, ritua- with church authorities in 1749 when she lized objects, and medicinal treatments. Trance suffered a severe epileptic seizure in Nossa possession signaled the stage in which the Senhora do Pilar Church in São João del Rey. healer appeased the spiritual entity, channeling Following her immediate arrest and sub- its diagnosis and treatment of illness, revealing sequent jailing, she was mercilessly whipped remedies and instructions for their application. for the heretical crime of satanic possession at In Central Africa, drumming engendered suc- the pillory in Mariana’s main square on orders cessful ancestral healing overseen by specia- issued by the recently installed bishop of lized communities: Mariana, Dom Frei Manuel da Cruz. Carrying In some circles these communities are called scars for the remainder of her life, and “drums of affliction,” reflecting the signi- partially paralyzed by her public torture, Rosa ficance of their use of drumming and was adopted and freed from slavery by her rhythmic song-dancing, and the colloquial exorcist priest. She left Minas Gerais in 1751.

In Rio de Janeiro, her written accounts of 25 Luiz Mott, Rosa Egipcíaca: Uma santa africana no visions, of having a direct relationship with Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Bertrand Brasil, 1993), 10. Facts about this case are cited from Mott, passim.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 50 designation in many societies of the region of Arabic tabl. Tambor (tambu is a common Afro- the whole gamut of expressive dimensions by Brazilian corruption) and caixa (box) are the term ngoma (drum). The drumming is common Portuguese terms for drums considered to be the voice or influence of the ancestral shades or other spirits that visit the throughout Minas, the latter resonating with sufferer and offer the treatment.26 cachá (drum), the Congolese root for the drum In Brazil the word ngoma, transformed into known in Brazil as caxambú. On the Brazilian ingoma, angona, and similar corruptions, is still coast, African-derived ritual found its fullest used in reference to drums and musical voice in the trio of cylindrical, single-head functions, as well as in extramusical contexts. drums common to Candomblé, Xangô In Minas, its meanings have broadened to (primarily in Recife), and Tambor de Mina indicate the people, event, and social space (São Luís) religious practices, whereby drum associated with festive drumming. Brazilian patterns call forth the pantheon of spirits ethnomusicologist Glaura Lucas locates known as orixás, or voduns in the case of contemporary uses of the term ingoma, noting Tambor de Mina. Here, trance-possession designations for a group of congado dancers rituals rely on the drum’s call for the desired (a genre discussed below) and an adjectival spirit to descend into the initiated. expression for a “very good” performance.27 Lodging overnight in a mineira fazenda Her ethnography of the Os Arturos commu- during the 1720s, the Portuguese priest and nity documents African-derived music culture writer Nuno Marquez Pereira was kept awake in Contagem, a city in the Belo Horizonte by drumming and slave festivities. The metropolitan region. In another study of the fazendeiro later explained that the calundu Os Arturos community, Pereira de Magalhães Pereira had heard was either entertainment or Gomes and Almeida Pereira write of their divination brought from Africa. The fazendei- spiritual connection with ancestors of the ro described the varied divinational functions Afro-mineiro past, specifically the commu- of calundu dance and music: “They were used nity’s nineteenth-century founder and “father for discovering various things, such as the of the drum” (dono de ingoma), Arthur Camilo cause of illnesses and the location of lost things, and also for having good luck in Silverio. They state that “the ingoma is the 29 group of people, the instruments, the ceremo- hunting and agriculture.” In Inquisition ny, the party, and the sacred cultural space.”28 testimony, calundu practitioners wearing Some accounts of calundu refer to tabaques ritualistic costumes danced “to the sound of (atabaque drums), its root term dating to the drums or cymbals” performed by an en- ancient Akkadian tabalu and shared by the circling group. Shakers, rattles, bells, or Indian tabla, later entering Iberia through the scraper instruments added meaningful color to calundu’s sacred sound world. These idiophonic timbres, from bright metallo- 26 John M. Janzen, Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in phonic tones to various wooden-instrument Central and Southern Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). punctuations, find significant roles in other 27 Glaura Lucas, Os sons do Rosário: O congado mineiro Afro-Brazilian religious and secular traditions, dos Arturos e Jatobá (Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, past and present, offering discrete roles in 2002), 87. 28 Pereira de Magalhães Gomes and Almeida Pereira, Os Arturos: Negras raizes mineiras, 2nd ed. (Belo 29 Kananoja, Central African Identities and Religiosity, Horizonte: Maza Edições, 2000), 287. 219.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 51 repetitive, interlocking patterns in ritual music taining brass relics were used while “doing his otherwise dominated by drumming and chant. dances called calundus,” and in creating magic 31 The calundeiros also opened up culturally spells against informers. A widely respected resonant moments of “freedom” for their leader in the mineiro War of Emboabas enslaved brethren. Every calundu ceremony (1707–09), Manoel Nunes traveled through- included a small entourage of helpers who out Minas offering for sale the magical healing aided the calundeiro in his or her and fortunetelling calundu powers wrought by invocations—dancers, musicians, and so on. By including other slaves in the proceedings, his slave, a “black mandingeiro” of the 32 the calundeiro ingratiated himself or herself to African tradition. That a prominent citizen others in the community, reinforcing not only of the colony overtly supported, and profited the religious importance of calundu, but also from, the distribution of African “fetish” the social “freedoms”—music, dance, and practice speaks to the needs of the population food—that came along with it.30 as much as to the popular defiance of social norms and authority: the sick and dying had The Sound of Medicine few other hopes for cures. The St. John’s Day Music brought about the efficacy of sacred practices of Pedro Teixera, a colonial-era objects associated with calundu. Use by some resident of São Sebastião, near Mariana, relied calundeiros of figurines and drawings of St. on a ritually imbued three-legged doll. His Anthony, the symbolic healer and finder of annual ceremony included this spirit- lost things, offers transformative links be- channeling doll and “divination, healing, and tween Christian and African cosmologies. fortunetelling,” followed by “a specially pre- Embodiment of the ritual object by the divine pared dish . . . sordid evening dances and is a shared tenet across beliefs of Atlantic abominations called calundus,” realized by creole Christianity. Wooden sculptures of “black men and women of his spiritual men, women, and anthropomorphized figures community.” According to Pedro Teixera’s imbued with spiritual power were known in wife, who had been forced to give Inquisition Bantu-speaking Africa as nkisi. Joining nkisi, testimony against her husband, the sacred dish the Christian crucifix, ritual puppets and dolls, included cut-up images of Jesus Christ and and other empowered, syncretic materials was saints mixed with herbs in a mortar.33 the Mandinga pouch (bolsa de Mandinga), a Devassa eclisiástica witnesses testified to protective amulet designed to “close the music rounding out ritualized applications of body” (fechar o corpo) against misfortune. Often herbs and foliage, ceremonial uses of chicken occurring in conjunction with calundu, the feathers and eggs, dolls, and applications of possession, manufacture, and distribution of colorful skin paint derived from clay and soil Mandinga pouches were crimes prosecuted by pigments. In Vila Rica, property owner Miguel the Inquisition in Minas Gerais, and Man- dinga cases offer rare descriptions of calundu 31 Kananoja, Central African Identities and Religiosity, music. In Vila Rica (later Ouro Preto) during 232–37. The author cites the Tribunal do Santo Ofícial/ 1791, the Angola-born liberto Pai Caetano da Inquisição de Lisboa in the Instituto dos Arquivos Costa’s lizard-skin bolsas de Mandinga con- Nacionais, Lisbon. 32 Ferreira Furtado, “Ensaio barbeiros, cirurgiões e médicos na Minas colonial,” 99. 33 D. Ramos, “A influência africana e a cultura 30 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 154. popular em Minas Gerais,” 147.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 52 Rosario claims to have been visiting a house- cially register in Vila Rica, then a city of hold to collect a debt payment when he 20,000. Exotic medicinal treatments drawing witnessed a calundu ritual. In 1791, as one of from the spice trade formed a basis for ten eyewitnesses testifying against an Ango- innovative European practices, reflecting lan-born calundeiro named Caetano da Costa, Portuguese maritime access to Indian pepper, Rosario helped convict the man to a sentence myrrh, dates, cinnamon, musk, sandalwood, of public flogging and three years of forced ginger, and nutmeg. Pharmacy inventories in labor: mineiro cities featured medical panaceas of We know that we saw a puppet they called Islamic origin, as well as African products and Dona Crentina . . . . When doing their calundu ancient Eastern remedies, like red coral dances, there entered a biola [viola, a ten-string dissolved into a warm liquid and ingested to Brazilian guitar]. And the sound of such decrease the blood’s acidity. Eighteenth- playing made the puppet dance, and also in century barber-surgeons, many of whom were such calundus there were images of St. Anthony, crucifixes, and candles.34 Afro-mineiros joining untrained Portuguese immigrants, were neither doctors nor apo- Luiz Mott interprets further Inquisition testi- thecaries; nonetheless, they inherited Europe’s mony regarding a calundeiro’s uses of sacred premodern medicine, prescribing and manu- objects and substances in Minas: facturing drugs. 36 Later in the eighteenth Also, the black Antonio Barbosa, resident of century, mineiros Luís Gomes Ferreira, José Queluz [now Conselheiro Lafayette], was Antonio Mendes, and João Cardoso de reported in 1799 for "doing their dances they Miranda self-published local handbooks on called calundu” in his home full of blacks, creoles, and mulattos, and using smoke and medicine, incorporating new herbs, medicines, rubbing unguents on their hands and feet, and bloodletting and purging strategies for calling on them to kiss a crucifix to remove illnesses encountered mostly among the slave spells, and passing a crucifix and the image of population. St. Anthony through the legs of those who were to see their fortune.35 Communities in Early Minas Gerais Bolstering the demand for calundu, colonial authorities barred from Minas Gerais the Before the mid-1690s gold discoveries, the Sacred House of Mercy brotherhood (Santa Portuguese had been enslaving Africans for Casa de Misericórdia), a social institution 250 years. Commercial relations among Brazi- responsible for public hospitals and burial lian ports, European markets, and Atlantic services. Not until 1734 did the first slave traders defined the shifting African professional, European-trained doctor offi- ethnicities that were brought to Minas by force. During the early gold rush, Portugal’s West African slave trade east of São Jorge da 34 Roger Sansi-Roca, “The Fetish in the Lusophone Atlantic,” in Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic, ed. Mina (St. George of the Mine fort, Ghana) Nancy Priscilla Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca, and David H. centered on Bight of Benin ports along what Treece (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 8. became known as the Mina coast. “Mina” 35 Luiz Mott, “Santo Antonio, o Divino Capitão- do-Mato,” in Liberdade por um fio: História dos quilombos no slaves in Minas Gerais became legendary in Brasil, ed. João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996), 131. Mott cites the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, 36 Ferreira Furtado, “Ensaio barbeiros, cirurgiões e Inquisição de Lisboa, processo no. 134. médicos na Minas colonial.”

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 53 Luso-Brazilian history. Entering the mineiro At the hinterland edge of the Black interior through Salvador, Bahia, they were Atlantic in Portuguese America, Minas Gerais marched straight to the gold and diamond became a cultural outpost of African mines of the Serra Espinhaço mountain range cosmology, and though calundu had by the and its subregions, Serro Frio and Serro do start of the eighteenth century became Cipó, and the wealthy cities of Vila Rica, familiar throughout the colony, it flourished Diamantina, Mariana, and São João del Rey. in the mineiro interior. African-derived Others went to their forced labor in cotton cosmological concerns with social spaces, and fields and cattle fazendas. The numbers of the actions required to maintain the goodwill these West Africans waned in the mid- of territorial spirits, spoke to a regionally eighteenth century, and they remained a specific power of place for Afro-mineiro majority in the region only until roughly 1750. culture and its localities. The formation and Bahia’s powerful merchants faced Salvador’s bordering of Afro-mineiro communities loss of status when the colonial capital was helped define their spiritual links to a past moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1763, partly owing articulated by ritualized behavior aimed to the latter’s proximity to the gold mines. toward ancestors, memory, and ancient, lost Central Africans bound for Minas from ports territory. Calundu space became sacred space: in Loango, Cabinda, Benguela, and Quilimane slave quarters (senzalas), forest clearings, and entering Rio de Janeiro quickly began to private homes, and runaway-slave quilombos. outnumber West Africans in the mineiro In his study of Central African religion in interior during the second half of the eighteenth-century Minas, Kalle Kananoja eighteenth century. The southeast’s coffee invokes notions of borders and territory when boom beginning in the 1830s would see a he states that “many slaves from varied truly massive increase in slave importation origins in Central Africa would have held into Minas. The Minas Gerais of the colonial shared beliefs in the strong association of and imperial eras, a socially and racially territorial spirits and water, and the need to complex mosaic of urban and rural elements, propitiate those spirits for the well-being of became the most prominent region for Afro- the community.” 38 It was, however, in the Brazilian religious practices. burgeoning colonial-era urban areas enriched Placing Minas ahead of Bahia in this context, with mining wealth that accomplished calun- where the slave population was even greater, deiros/as were able to find paying clients for is attributable to the fact that [Minas] healing and divination rituals: constituted a more complex slave system and They flourished in Minas more than anywhere was more intensely urbanized. In Minas, else in the colony during the eighteenth conflicts erupted at any moment, disrupting century; at least available references to Minas the mining towns. Probably occurring there calundus are more numerous – even more so also was the greatest concentration of than references to calundus in Bahia, now the quilombos [runaway-slave settlements] during land of Candomblé. Here again it must be the colonial period. It was also in Minas that remembered that Afro-Brazilian religious the African cultural complex was better preserved.37 38 Kananoja, Central African Identities and Religiosity, 234. See also Marina de Mello e Souza, Reis negros no 37 Laura de Mello e Souza, O diabo e a Terra de Santa Brasil escravista (Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2002), 65; and Cruz (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1986), 37. Sweet, Recreating Africa, 144.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 54 syncretism, religious persecution, and slavery limitations, better situated to lead and were traveling companions in colonial participate in calundu. African-born practi- territories, so Minas stands out; after all, in tioners may have been perceived as more 1733 Simão Ferreira Machado called Vila Rica, “for the circumstances of its nature, the authentic and spiritually powerful, and newly head of all America; for the abundance of its arrived slaves integrated into an oppressive wealth, the precious pearl of Brazil.”39 system. Meanwhile, mulatto cultural direc- Vestiges of calundu also remained in the tions, and syncretism with Catholic and isolated quilombos, which contrasted sharply indigenous beliefs, offered increasing chal- with the wealth, stability, and political power lenges to notions of “authentic” African of colonial-era cities before their post–gold- religiosity. For instance, healers from the rural rush decay. Free to a great extent from the San Francisco River district of Manga (today terrors of the Inquisition and crown authori- the river-port city of São Romão) earned ties, runaway slaves likely practiced increa- renown throughout northern Minas for an singly fragmented forms of calundu in the indigenous-derived divination and healing many quilombos found throughout Minas, tradition that lasted into the twentieth century. though few details are known. Noted in these These “mixed-race sorcerers” (caboclo feitiçeiros) rural mineiro locations are pan-Bantu qualities of São Romão were common references in of religious ceremonies known as canjeré, a regional popular culture. dance and sacred gathering (from the Authorities doubled down on the Kimbundu kanzare, to spin, shake, or whirl): destruction of calundu social networks in a sort of religious and cultural genocide. The Although the term calundu is as common in Minas as elsewhere in Brazil, African religious secrecy surrounding this destruction speaks to ceremonies were commonly known in that the terror that enveloped calundu, to the province as canjeré. Little remains of them danger calundeiros/as faced in maintaining today. Aires da Mata Machado Filho dis- traditions, and to the risks that white covered what may be the last moribund participants took in seeking healing cures. survivals of these old Bantu religions in the area of Minas, where the quilombos were most Accounts of those condemned in Minas numerous, and the vocabulary he recorded Gerais are found in the Inquisition records in does indeed show that there were priests Lisbon’s Torre do Tombo National Archives, known as ngangas or ugangas as well as witch where a long list of crimes offers proof that 40 doctors called caquis. calundu flourished within a brutal slave By the 1780s, one in three mineiros was a system.41 Identified in 1742 as a black calun- free person of color. Though slaves practiced deira living on the Antonio Pugas fazenda calundu, blacks and mulattos born free (forros) near San António da Rio Acima, Isabel’s and those who had purchased their freedom singing and dancing of calundu with feitiçeiro through manumission (libertos) were, in Manoel Lobo Franco formed a ritual aimed at comparison to the slave’s severe social

41 Maria Leônia Chaves de Resende, “Minas Gerais sub examine: Inventário das denúncias nos Cadernos 39 De Mello e Souza, The Devil and the Land of the do Promotor da Inquisição de Lisboa (século XVIII),” Holy Cross, 171–72. in Travessia inquisitorias das Minas Gerais aos cárceres do 40 Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil Santo Oficio, ed. Júnia Ferreira Furtado and Maria (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), Leônia Chaves de Resende (Belo Horizonte: Fino 202. Traço, 2013), 415–75.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 55 “closing the body” from harm. That same de Jesus, for forming a procession that year in Sabará, the creole slave Violante was included calundu (near Sabará, 1775); slaves accused of ritualistic dancing. In 1744, the Roque Angola, Brizida Maria de Araujo, and black slave Francisco Axé faced the other accomplices, for calundu dance and Inquisition for rituals including the use of a rituals against Catholicism (Pitangui, 1777); chocalho idiophone shaker. In Congonhas do Domingos, a freed black man, for calundu Campo during 1745, Joana Jaguatinga, Manoel and dancing (São Bras do Suaçui, 1779); the da Silva (both black), and mulatta Antónia da white slave owner Antonio Pereira and the Silva were all denounced to the Inquisition for slave Manuel, for healing Pereira’s slaves with performing calundu, drinking chicken’s blood, calundu (Mariana, 1782); Francisco, for his and acting out other feitiço. Others included circle dance designed to heal another black Felix, a black calundeiro who danced for man (Mariana, 1782); and the black man divination (Catas Altas, 1755);42 an unnamed António Barbosa and the freed crioula Maria freed black woman, denounced for dancing in Lopes, for calundus (Queluz, 1792). ceremonies (Nossa Senhora da Conceição dos This institutionalized religious violence Prados, 1759); and freed black woman Angela arguably appears as a historical arc beginning Maria Gomes, accused of dancing calundus with the 1446 Ordinances of King Afonso and batuques with the devil (Itabara, 1760). (Ordenações Afonsinas), crown legislation Punishments for simply using curandeiro governing black cultural expression in medications could be brutal, with additional Portugal five years after the first African exorcism or chronic mistreatment awaiting. slaves arrived in Lisbon. The very need for The slave Bernardo Pereira Brasil, found these promulgations suggests that musical guilty of medicating himself with healing expression of black religiosity was common, compounds taken from bones, received 60 and threatening, enough to warrant a legal lashes delivered by his owner.43 The list of framework of punitive social control.45 The calundu infractions in Minas Gerais goes on. legal language of human trafficking, and of The calundeira Luzia Lopes, a free, Brazilian- religious and cultural restrictions, is far born black woman (liberta crioula), was severely removed from the poetry of Gregório de whipped in the public square of the Serro Frio Matos quoted above. Spared the fatal town of Conceição do Mato Dentro sentencing meted out to countless Jews and sometime after 1767. 44 In 1774, Ana Maria Muslims, calundeiros nonetheless risked fines, Mercês of Piedade de Paraopeba was de- physical torture, and banishment, with the nounced to the Inquisition for operating a terror driving rituals further underground, calundu house (casa de calundu) where various into a secrecy leading to generational loss and acts of superstition and demonic pacts were religious displacement. The fate of calundu, it practiced. Ana Maria Mercês and Grácia, both has been stated, resulted from a combination blacks, were denounced for dancing with the devil (Piedade de Paraopeba, 1774); João Coelho, Antónia Angola, and Mónica Maria 45 The Ordinances of King Manuel I (Ordenações Manuelinas, 1514) revised the 1446 laws. The 1603 Ordenações Filipinas of King Philip II of Spain (known 42 Ibid. as King Philip I when referring to his simultaneous 43 Calainho, Metrôpole das Mandingas, 82. reign over Portugal) outlawed gatherings involving 44 Mott, Rosa Egipcíaca, 112. black music and dance.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 56 of brutal oppression and more popular, descendants, new musical and religious syncretic forms of religious observance: practices may have absorbed or masked In the realm of magic and religion, syncretism calundu as it succumbed to persecution. What would ultimately prove itself uncontainable became of this legacy of music? Did calundu and ineradicable; it would forever bear the music carry a cultural inertia that influenced ambiguous mark of popular culture, which or joined with subsequent practices? Three mixed the sacred and profane. Leaving behind genres of Afro-mineiro sacred drumming in it a trail of death, and horrific suffering, the long process of acculturation eventually Minas Gerais rise as likely candidates in this merged sabbats, masses, and calundus.46 transformation: the syncretic religions of macumba and Umbanda, the candombe of the The Demise of Calundu in Relation to black Catholic congado tradition (not to be Umbanda, Candombe, Batuque, and Lundu confused with the religious practice known as Candomblé), and the vestiges of spirituality in Calundu’s disappearance from the historical the otherwise secular galaxy of the batuque record as a specific, named practice in Minas circle dance. Additionally, the popular Gerais corresponded with deep social and colonial-era couples dance known as lundu and political shifts in nineteenth-century Brazil. its latter transformation as a sophisticated African religiosity continued in Minas but was salon dance, lundu song, were likely secular no longer documented by the Inquisition, offshoots of calundu dance practice. which was challenged and reformed by 47 The elements of “parallelism” that once Pombal, ultimately closing its Brazilian shop characterized a strongly African religion in the 1820s. In addition to the Inquisition’s defined by its independence from Christian violent repression and the hardships visited practices, and was once suppressed by autho- on black populations, both free and slave, the rities, survived as components of outwardly forces of change that scattered the calundu Catholic syncretic practices. These notional legacy include Brazil’s emergence as an transformations went undocumented. Primary independent empire in 1822, urbanization, examples of creolized, syncretized, or hybri- and the social convulsions associated with the dized practices that continue to flourish today collapse of the monarchy, the formation of include “macumba in Rio, jurema in Recife, the Brazilian Republic in 1888, and the pajelança in Sao Luís do Maranhão, candomblé de abolition of slavery that same year. The caboclo in Salvador, or, in more general terms, decline of calundu occurred alongside the rise umbanda.” 48 However, criticism of the very of hybrid, syncretic religious practices that nature of syncretism runs deep, as argued by also featured African-derived music and Brazilian anthropologists examining black drumming. Given calundu’s historical impor- music and religion in Minas and the social tance to a large inland population of African conditions faced by cultural practitioners. Gomez and Pereira observe that “discourse

46 De Mello e Souza, The Devil and the Land of the on Brazilian religious syncretism must address Holy Cross, 255. 47 Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, first marquis of Pombal, the de facto head of the Portuguese state 48 Carvalho, “Black Music of All Colors,” 192. during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Since the 1990s, Evangelical Church membership has “Pombaline reforms” refer to his Enlightenment era made significant inroads on both Catholicism and influences on the empire. syncretic cults.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 57 the socio-historic conditions that enveloped marginalized city dwellers modified and this alleged symbiosis. In the specific case of maintained traditions caught up in urbani- blacks in Minas, this notion of syncretism did zation on a massive scale, a world ready for not, and still does not, correspond to an Afro-Brazilian cults such as Umbanda. ontologically complete symbiosis.”49 Nationwide, the twentieth century witnessed It is probable that in mineiro cities and the rapid growth of Umbanda, which soon countryside the earliest vestiges of syncretic became Brazil’s most popular syncretic Afro-Brazilian religion such as macumba religion, with millions of followers, black, gradually merged with and supplanted white, and brown. In 2010, more than 350 calundu’s fragmented remnants, in a society Umbanda centers existed throughout Belo slowly changing from Portuguese colony to Horizonte’s metropolitan area.51 In examining imperial Brazil. Other syncretic cults from the Os Arturos community’s congado tradi- Afro-mineiro history include canjeré and tions of black Catholicism in the Belo pemba, the latter described as a religious Horizonte metropolitan-area city of Conta- practice in Minas Gerais “which is exactly gem, Gomes and Pereira characterize the area’s midway between a congada and a modern tradition of Afro-mineiro religiosity, focusing umbanda possession cult.”50 on Umbanda as an indicator of the survival of The predominance of drum and per- an African community of belief: “In the past, cussion accompaniment to call-and-response Contagem’s many slaves engendered the chant structures in religions such as macumba survival of diverse black African communities and other syncretic cults likely represents a of belief. Efforts by the church and slave stylistic connection to previous Afro-Brazilian owners failed to hinder their development, a religious practice. These cults also somehow fact currently reflected in the area’s significant absorbed musical and cosmological African- number of Umbanda and Quimbanda houses isms of newly arriving slaves once calundu of worship.”52 was driven underground and out of existence. A connection with calundu’s legacy of The sometimes derisive term macumba is sacred drums also likely exists, with candombe found in references to Afro-mineiro religions ritual drums still found in the region’s black variously syncretized with Catholicism and Catholic congado tradition. This popular practiced in early twentieth-century Belo Catholicism, or what has been termed a Horizonte, the state’s capital, which was “mythical Afro-descendent religion in Brazil,”53 planned and constructed in the 1890s. This is musically defined by drumming, chant, and was a period of unusually intense regional processional group dance. Candombe’s highly urbanization invol-ving the first post- regarded sacred drums, often stationary and emancipation generation of Afro-mineiros. hidden from the general public, are firmly In mineiro author João Alphonsus’s 1938 modernist novel Rola-Moça, macumba, pover- 51Associação Filmes de Quintal website: http:// ty, and blackness are defining themes of social www.mapeandoaxe.org.br/terreiros/belohorizonte difference in depicting Belo Horizonte’s turn- (accessed Aug. 15, 2013). of-the-century slums (favelas). These new, 52 Gomes and Pereira, Os Arturos, 245. 53 Vânia Noronha, “Reinado de Nossa Senhora do Rosário: A constituição de uma religiosidade mítica 49 Gomes and Pereira, Os Arturos, 139. afrodescendente no Brasil,” Horizonte 9/21 (April–June 50 Carvalho, “Black Music of All Colors,” 191. 2011): 268.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 58 associated with congado’s otherwise very never promoted class consciousness or public processional music and open worship, change in social structure: “The permission which defines much of Brazilian popular and encouragement to initiate the creation of Catholicism. The transformation of a violently confraternities was not a measure of liberality oppressed calundu into an underground, or contradiction on the part of the Portuguese increasingly secretive sacred ritual occurred rulers.”55 Forms of class consciousness grew within an ever-broadening cultural milieu of nonetheless from the social strains created by pan-Bantu ethnic roots, mulatto offspring, slavery and the social injustices faced by and the general social and cultural mixing that forros and libertos. What resulted was a characterized nineteenth-century Brazil. Can- significant sociocultural milieu fostered by dombe is clothed in both the myths of oral brotherhoods for blacks that developed tradition, rich in symbolic legacies, and the within the brutality of the slave system yet in social fabric of the highly documented some ways remained beyond the control of presence of Catholic lay brotherhoods. slaveholders, crown, and church. Congado--its Congado stems from what might be performative Africanisms, its brotherhood- termed an Africanization of Catholic practice, based arena for absorbing pan-African some of which had begun three centuries cosmologies, and its communal nature— earlier in the Portuguese missions in the symbolizes the resistance and survival of kingdom of the Congo and elsewhere.54 To a Afro-mineiros within this historical frame- further degree tolerated and fostered by a work. Maintaining African-derived perfor- broad base of regional elites, congado and mance practices in congado ritual, Afro- other festivities of the Catholic religious mineiro brotherhoods, over many genera- calendar flourished in many respects, even as tions, created and defended their Atlantic religious vehicles strongly associated with creole Christian manner of celebrating the African-derived music, chant, language, and Virgin Mary, and in doing so could easily have dance. Eclectic pan-Bantu cultural practices in absorbed the remnants of calundu. Minas were further absorbed by an Atlantic creole Christianity and transformed into Drumming and Regional Religious Identity cosmologies, rituals, and worship of the Oral traditions in contemporary congado popularized saints of black Catholicism. mineiro communities locate the origins of the Caio César Boschi emphasizes that in the practice in three competing sources. All three eyes of crown and church, the racially conflict with documented historical records, segregated Catholic lay brotherhoods that and two claim that the genre emerged in served the marginalized and slave population Minas Gerais. The Chico Rei myth posits that of Minas Gerais were intended to foster an enslaved African king of that name in Christian religiosity and preserve social Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, purchased his own domination and submission. This analysis is and many others’ freedom, thus becoming supported by the fact that these associations founder and “king” of the congado. Suzel Reily documents the widespread belief among 54 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 210. Sixteenth-century Congolese Catholicism is vastly predated by north and east African Christianity. See also De Mello e Souza, 55 Caio César Boschi, Os Leigos e o poder (São Paulo: Reis negros no Brasil escravista. Editora Ática, 1986), 156.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 59 congadeiros in Campanha, Minas Gerais, that form a hierarchy of spiritual efficacy that congado was born from the successful ultimately valorizes candombe, the most struggle against slavery and symbolizes the secretive guarda, and the most closely end of slavery in Brazil.56 Congado musical associated with African musical heritage. The groups (guardas) can be seen as representing notion of drum patterns calling to the Virgin colonial-era social groups integral to a third, Mary echoes the pan-African belief in drum almost universal mythopoesis subscribed to and percussion timbres calling to the spirit by congadeiros. This tradition binds Our Lady world. Likewise, the West African spirit (orixá) of the Rosary (Nossa Senhora do Rosário) to Yemanjá, widely worshipped in Brazil, is blacks, linking this venerated manifestation of associated with the sea, rising from the waters the Virgin Mary to the suffering of slaves and (as the Virgin Mary does in the congado their descendants while simultaneously estab- origin myth) to join in the possession trances lishing African-derived performance practice of Afro-Brazilian Xangô and Candomblé and affective participatory worship as essential sects. In congado mineiro, the candombe drum’s to these rituals. The marujos guarda in their legendary communicative powers with the naval regalia represent Portuguese sailors and Virgin Mary act similarly to Xangô and white elites who, like the “Indian” caboclos Candomblé drumming’s position in calling dressed in feathery, native-inspired costumes forth the orixás with sacred rhythms—or at with bows and arrows, were unable to call the least as similarly as popular Catholicism and Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus to safety mineiro society historically allowed. Drums as from the ocean waters. As the legend visual and sound icons emerge for prac- continues, the saint emerged safely to shore titioners as symbols of religiosity bridging only upon hearing the candombe drumming diverse African origins and valorizing per- and praise songs calling her. formance aesthetics. The myth emblematizes congado’s de Gomes and Pereira’s ethnographic study facto cultural elevation of percussion music of the Os Arturos community in the 1980s and call-and-response chants: Our Lady of the considers the historical roots of candombe in Rosary’s celestial presence as patron of blacks Brazil, locating a microregion of candombe emerges only through the now liturgical culture roughly 100 kilometers north of Belo drum-based music and performance aes- Horizonte. 57 Subsequent scholars have rein- thetics. By way of this foundational legend, forced their work in these regards. not only is the veneration of this saint The candombe, perhaps the most Bantu of ensconced in Africanisms, but the guardas the congado, is a type of closed society for blacks of the Our Lady of the Rosary brotherhood who desire to be Christians 56 Suzel Ana Reily, “To Remember Captivity: The without having to stop being Bantus. Congados of Southern Minas Gerais,” Latin American Music Review 22/1 (Spring/Summer 2001): 4–30. In Ancestors are remembered to the rhythms of publications by Brazilian scholars concerning the old, sacred drums . . . . Zambi (the God origins of congado mineiro, both the Chico Rei myth Creator) is with them. In many cases, and the Virgin-in-the-waves mythopoesis are cited as candombe appears as jongo or caxambú widely subscribed-to, complementary beliefs among (nonliturgical circle dances associated with congadeiros. See Lucas, Os sons do Rosário; Leda Maria blacks in the southeast). Unfortunately, Martins, Afrografias da Memória (Belo Horizonte: Maza Edições, 1997); Gomes and Pereira, Os Arturos; and De Mello e Souza, Reis negros no Brasil escravista. 57 Gomes and Pereira, Os Arturos, 283.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 60 various candombes have stopped playing. In protagonists in this local legend that also Minas Gerais, candombe is observed in the references batuque: region north of Belo Horizonte up to Serra do Cipó.58 The main story related to the candombe in the Serra do Cipó says that the slave batuques Brazilian anthropologist José Jorge de Car- always took place in the early evening. The valho points to the same Serra do Cipó blacks of the Cipó Velho fazenda gathered to “candombe musical area” in his discussion of dance to the tambus, even though it was not Mata Tição (also Matição) as an isolated to the liking of the white owner. One day, irritated by the noise coming from the slave microcosm of Afro-mineiro sacred tradition, quarters, the master ordered the foreman to tellingly associated here with the longstanding end the party, burning the tambus. But the musical heritage of what was in all likelihood smoke released by the drums penetrated calundu: inside the big house, bothering the owner for hours. Almost suffocated, he imagined that it As a cultural form, the candombe is a was a curse commissioned by blacks. Startled, spectacular case of socially constructed he ordered the slaves to build new drums, remoteness within a framework of deep believing that only in this way would the spell musical interrelationship. Matição is a village be annulled. This was done and the mandinga quite protected from the outside world, faded.60 especially from the central institutions of the state: very poor formal education, no Here, batuque, tambu drums, and candombe television, a minimum access to radios, are placed within a sacred arena protected from inaccessible dirt roads, very few economic the overlord by Mandinga. Batuque blurred activities apart from subsistence agriculture Western polarities of sacred and secular. and some handicrafts. Yet . . . Matição shows a high degree of integration and contact, Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers probably over hundreds of years, with other dismissing the potential of sacredness in black Afro-Brazilian traditions of the area.59 expression could relegate all of it to a willfully It is highly probable that sacred drumming undiscerned, subaltern music that they freely fronted calundu’s fragmented cultural inertia, termed batuque. surviving in, or resonating with, macumba, Today, the communities of Mato-Tição, Umbanda, and candombe. Yet another black Açude, and Os Arturos are known for batuque settlement in the Serra do Cipó’s candombe drumming traditions. In Os Arturos, batuque is musical area, Açude famously hosts candom- performed during wed-dings and birthday be sessions on tambu drums dating to the celebrations, typically late in the festivities nineteenth century. Contemporary community following samba, forró, and other popular, residents are descendants of slaves belonging entertaining dances. In these instan-ces, the to the Cipó Velho fazenda, the featured batuque’s African heritage marks a more serious celebratory atmosphere, requiring what community members call “bringing the 58 Maria Gontijo dos Santos and Pablo Matos feeling” (por sentido).61 In the southern Brazilian Camargo, Comunidades quilombolas de Minas Gerais no século XXI (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica/Centro de Documentação Eloy Ferreira da Silva, 2008), 69. 60 Afonso Capelas, Jr., “As Donas da História,” in 59 José Jorge de Carvalho, “Afro-Brazilian Music Raiz, 2nd ed., 2005. http://revistaraiz.uol.com.br/por- and Rituals. Part 1: From Traditional Genres to the tal/index.php?Itemid=96&id=82&option=com_conte Beginnings of Samba” (Duke University of North nt&task=view (accessed Jan. 4, 2013). Carolina Program in Latin American Studies, Working 61 Author interview with Glaura Lucas in Belo Paper Series), 14–15. Horizonte, Aug. 16, 2013.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 61 state of Rio Grande do Sul, however, batuque melodic instrumentation, namely, the viola and is a ritualized Afro-Brazilian religion with guitar. Formalized as an urban genre, lundu noticeable West African in-fluences. Far to the developed into a gentrified salon dance and north, in Belém, Pará, the term refers to houses poetic song form entertaining Brazil’s nine- of worship associated with syncretic religious teenth-century coastal aristocracy.64 sects derived from West African beliefs and Amerindian caboclo practices.62 In Minas Gerais, Music engendered calundu’s efficacy in the hardships of slavery and the ethnic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Minas complexity of pan-Bantu mineiro society led Gerais. Drumming, invoking spiritual posses- batuque dance toward secularization and sion and accompanying chants in various cultural fragmentation, and in the process African languages and dialects, was a could have played a role in absorbing calundu performative element that bound together cultural inertia. As Gomes and Pereira suggest, religious beliefs shared by slaves, freed the dance in Minas historically retained a persons, and their descendants. The distinct simultaneous aura of serious, sacred, or cultural traits of music and language may be quasisacred presence while influencing secular said to have exhibited an intellectual practice offshoots: “There is a distinction between running parallel to the dominant religion of sacred batuque and profane batuque . . . the Catholicism. Music was highly incriminating batuque transformed itself from the sacred evidence in testimony against calundeiros eli- dance that it was, to a profane dance. The cited in church hearings, testimony that was alteration of the function suggests that the responsible for brutal punishments and for batuque, formerly a fertility rite, has been calundu’s inevitable demise. Much testimony transformed into a recreational dance.”63 came from whites, some of high standing, Lundu developed as a truncated term for proving that healing practices infused with calundu used by Brazilians in the late trance possession included broad sectors of seventeenth century, though its earliest written Minas society. mention in 1780 refers to a secular dance by Some of calundu’s cosmological tenets whites and mulattos (also known as pardos), and performative characteristics may have distinguishing it from the fully African calundu. been transformed or absorbed by syncretic Through a process never to be fully cults, the candombe or congado, and the understood, and perhaps similar to the increasingly secular batuque dance tradition. batuque’s transformation from its spiritual These notional transformations went undocu- focus, lundu came to define a secular couple’s mented. A plausible historical interpretation dance with origins in hinterland Afro-Brazilian suggests that brutal oppression created an culture. Secular and gentrified offshoots in- impetus for hybridization of calundu practices cluded a lessening of drumming’s primary role, deemed “too African.” A complementary and inclusion of Western harmonic and analysis adds that communities of African descendants, with traditions further chal- 62 See Reginaldo Gil Braga, Batuque jeje-ijexa em lenged by poverty and isolation, more easily Porto Alegre (Porto Alegre: FRUMPROARTE, 1998); engaged in syncretic religions and popular and Morton Marks, CD liner notes for Amazônia: Festival Cult Music of Northern Brazil (Lyrichord LYRCD 7300, n.d.; recordings made in 1975). 64 Carlos Sandroni, Feitiço decente (Rio de Janeiro: 63 Gomes and Pereira, Os Arturos, 449. Jorge Zahar, 2001), 39–61.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017) 62 Catholicism accommodated by Brazilian society. From the fall of calundu, celebratory music and dance arose in the form of secular lundu.

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