Bahia is the Brazilian setting where Casaubon’s intellectual distance from Afro-Brazilian religion gives way to a formative encounter with its practices and histories. From the coastal offerings to Yemanja to Salvador’s churches and an Umbanda gira, the place unsettles his European categories; later, he recognizes that the sense of universal connection he first indulged in there became the beginning of a more dangerous way of thinking.

First Encounters and Religious Crosscurrents

Casaubon’s interest in Bahia follows a morning drive along the coast with Amparo, after a seminar on the class structure of the lumpen-proletariat. On the beach, they see small candles and white garlands offered to Yemanja, goddess of the waters. Amparo angrily rejects the suggestion that she herself believes in the goddess, but explains that her grandmother had brought her to that beach to pray for her to grow up beautiful, good, and happy. She recalls the Italian philosopher’s remark, “It’s not true, but I believe in it,” then inverts it: “I don’t believe in it, but it’s true.” The encounter moves Casaubon to save money for a journey to Bahia, turning a disagreement about belief into a reason to go.

The decision grows out of Casaubon’s exposure to Amparo’s comrades and their arguments about Afro-Brazilian religions. Their Marxist discussions repeatedly veer from class struggle toward Brazilian cannibalism and religious cults, whose meaning they dispute: some see a return to roots and resistance to whiteness, some an opiate that contains revolutionary energy, and others a cultural mixture whose political purpose remains unclear. Amparo declares religion an opiate, yet Casaubon sees that she remains physically and emotionally attached to the world of samba and its rhythms. Bahia promises a closer encounter with precisely the contradictions that a purely ideological account cannot settle.

Salvador: Churches, Syncretism, and the City

Casaubon recalls Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos as the “black Rome,” a city of three hundred and sixty-five churches set along hills and the bay, where African gods are honored. He and Amparo are guided by a painter whose large wooden panels crowd Biblical and apocalyptic imagery together in a manner reminiscent of medieval miniatures, while he himself spends his days dreaming in the sacristies of the sanctuary of Nosso Senhor do Bomfim. He is a Marxist who speaks of revolution, but his work and devotional surroundings place political commitment beside religious imagination rather than neatly separating them.

In another church sacristy, Amparo asks whether a painting depicts Saint George. The sacristan says that people call the figure Saint George because the pastor would be angry otherwise, but that the figure is Oxossi. The exchange gives a specific form to the religious blending Casaubon encounters: Catholic naming and African divinity inhabit the same image, under unequal conditions of public recognition. The churches around them are richly layered with silver, gold, pewter, ex-votos, bleeding saints, and Christs depicted in pain; their decorative world also holds visual traces that Casaubon describes as Etruscan, Romanesque, and Oriental.

The city’s beauty and religious richness exist alongside visible hardship. Casaubon and Amparo walk old streets with musical names while an incomplete municipal effort to renew the old city is closing brothels. Deserted churches stand beside foul-smelling alleys; young Black prostitutes, elderly women selling African sweets, and pimps occupy streets marked by trickles of sewage and transistor music. Former palaces of Portuguese settlers, their coats of arms no longer legible, have become houses of ill repute. Bahia is thus not presented as an untouched repository of tradition: its religious and architectural inheritance is entangled with poverty, sex work, and an uneven attempt at urban renewal.

Aglie and the Encounter with Umbanda

During the Salvador visit, the painter takes Casaubon and Amparo to a hotel bar in the renovated upper city to meet an Italian gentleman interested in buying one of his immense paintings of angels battling opposing forces. The man, Signor Aglie, is impeccably dressed despite the heat and speaks Portuguese with an accent that suggests Lisbon. He is curious about Amparo’s family history and has already guessed that its main branch comes from Recife, while remaining vague about his own origins. He says that curiosity brought him to Brazil and that all forms of tradition fascinate him.

When the conversation turns to the figure called both Saint George and Oxossi, Aglie urges them to attend a candomblé ceremony—not a performance charging admission, but a genuine ceremony where visitors may observe respectfully without being believers. Amparo accepts eagerly, recalling a previous visit to an Umbanda tent that she remembers only as great turmoil. Aglie then describes a distinction between the traditions: in candomblé, initiates are possessed by the orixás; in Umbanda, the beings are spirits of the departed. His explanation positions him as a guide to practices that Casaubon and Amparo do not yet understand, while leaving room for their own observations and judgments.

The later Umbanda gira takes place in a tent in Rio, not in Bahia itself, but Aglie explicitly connects it to the earlier encounter. He explains that the participants will be possessed by eguns rather than orixás, and identifies Exu and Pompa Gira among the beings associated with the rite. He describes the pretos velhos as old African wise men who guided their people during deportation, and the caboclos as Indian spirits representing the forces of original nature. In Umbanda, he says, the African orixás remain in the background, syncretized with Catholic saints, while the spirits intervene through mediums who lose awareness of self in trance. The ceremony extends the religious questions first opened in Bahia into a scene where Casaubon can watch bodies, music, ritual roles, and explanations interact.

From Observation to a Theory of Connection

Aglie’s account does not make the gira a simple confirmation of supernatural claims. During the ceremony, Casaubon watches a German psychologist who has attended for years but has never entered a trance, despite her evident struggle to surrender control. Other participants do enter states of possession; their movements differ, and the attendants use white linen cloths to shield some from view. The scene emphasizes the difference between those whom the community regards as chosen and the woman for whom the trance remains unattainable, while Casaubon also recognizes the physical force of music, noise, fumes, and heat.

Amparo herself becomes unwell during the ceremony: her hands sweat, her body trembles, and she says she wants to leave. Outside, she insists that she is all right and attributes her condition to food, smells, and heat. The pai-de-santo instead tells her that she has the qualities of a medium and that she reacted strongly to the pontos. Amparo rejects his interpretation and asks to be left alone. Her response preserves a tension between bodily experience and the meaning others assign to it; Casaubon does not receive a single explanation that dissolves the disagreement.

Afterward, Aglie tells Casaubon that race or culture forms part of the unconscious, and that the ceremony had lulled the vigilance of everyone present. He interprets Amparo’s reaction as evidence that the orixás she had rejected intellectually still lived within her. He also distinguishes the mystic, who becomes a conspicuous site of possession, from the initiate, whose transformation is private, disciplined, and lucid. This is Aglie’s theory, not a neutral verdict on the ceremony. Its hierarchy gives him a way to explain both the visible trance and the supposed hidden knowledge of initiates, and helps establish the language through which he later influences Casaubon and others.

Casaubon’s own retrospective account identifies Bahia as a threshold in his thinking. He says that he gradually stopped trying to distinguish the races, locate progress and revolution, or read capitalism’s plot by European standards. The city’s mixture of religious forms and social contradictions made him receptive to resemblances across traditions. He describes beginning there to be lulled by the notion that everything might be mysteriously related to everything else; after returning to Europe, he converted that metaphysical intuition into mechanics and fell into the trap in which he finds himself. Bahia therefore matters not simply as an exotic setting or a storehouse of religious symbols, but as the place where Casaubon’s openness to complexity first becomes vulnerable to an all-encompassing interpretive system.