Rio de Janeiro is where Casaubon encounters Afro-Brazilian religious practice as lived culture rather than as a remote subject of research. The city’s ceremonies, political arguments, and crowded urban life unsettle the line he had trusted between skepticism and belief; later, the habits of interpretation he develops there recur in his reading of the Templars and the Plan. Rio is therefore more than a Brazilian setting: it is an early testing ground for the novel’s central tension between experiencing a mystery and constructing one.

Religious life and contested interpretations

In Rio, Casaubon listens to Amparo’s comrades debate the religious traditions taking shape amid migration and urban displacement. They describe people moving repeatedly from the impoverished north toward the industrial south, where many become subproletarians, and then returning north before beginning the journey again. In the cities, some are absorbed into Indigenous churches that worship spirits and invoke African divinities. The comrades disagree over what these cults mean: a return to cultural roots and opposition to white society, a religious diversion that contains revolutionary potential, or a mixing of white, Indigenous, and Black traditions whose purpose remains unclear. Their disagreement makes the religions part of a political argument, but does not reduce them to one agreed political explanation.

Amparo herself calls religion the opiate of the people and condemns pseudo-tribal cults. Yet Casaubon sees that she is also deeply attached to the world she criticizes. At samba schools, she joins the processions and rhythms; afterward, she denounces carnival devotion and compares it to the rituals around soccer, which she believes direct popular anger away from political action. Her case embodies the tension between ideological judgment and inherited or embodied attachment. In Rio, a declared belief does not neatly determine what a person feels or participates in.

The Rosy Cross and Umbanda

An illustrated magazine leads Casaubon to suggest that he and Amparo visit a local Order of the Ancient and Accepted Rosy Cross. Its office, on a side street, displays plaster figures of Cheops, Nefertiti, and the Sphinx; the meeting they attend is advertised as a discussion of the Rosy Cross and Umbanda. The pairing brings European esoteric language into contact with Brazilian religious practice, an encounter that also intensifies the couple’s disagreements about how the material should be interpreted.

Later, Aglie takes them to an Umbanda gathering in Rio. Before they enter, he explains that the participants may be possessed by Eguns, spirits of the departed, and by Exu and Pompa Gira. The meeting takes place in a modest religious house reached through a small garden; a statue of Exu stands at the entrance to the barracão, or storehouse, among offerings. These details establish a specific ritual setting rather than an abstract catalogue of symbols. The city appears at once as an ordinary urban environment and as the location of a carefully organized religious gathering.

Inside, drumming and singing accompany the participants’ movements. Casaubon notices that a German psychologist who has attended for years does not enter a trance, despite her evident effort, while other participants do. The contrast prevents the scene from becoming a simple claim that everyone present undergoes the same experience. The ritual’s effects are uneven, and the difference between an observer, an unsuccessful aspirant, and a participant understood to be possessed remains important to what Casaubon sees.

Amparo begins to feel unwell and asks to leave. Outside, the pai-de-santo tells her that she has the qualities of a medium and that he had watched her respond to the songs. She rejects his interpretation, insisting that she is merely sick and wants to be alone. Her reaction leaves the meaning of the episode unresolved: the ritual leader reads her response as evidence of a capacity, while Amparo refuses that account. Aglie later offers his own explanation, arguing that cultural inheritance and archetypal figures belong to different dimensions of the unconscious and that possession is not the same as initiation. His distinction frames the ceremony through his esoteric hierarchy, not as an unquestioned conclusion about Amparo’s experience.

Ritual, spectacle, and observation

Rio’s religious encounters become a point of comparison when Casaubon later visits an esoteric gathering in Paris. He recognizes a resemblance between the European display and the Umbanda altar he saw in Rio, even though the images and setting differ. The comparison belongs to the observer: it shows how his experience in Brazil supplies a lens for interpreting another ceremony, rather than proving that the two practices are identical. In the novel, resemblance can illuminate a response, but it can also tempt the observer to treat likeness as evidence of a deeper connection.

Aglie makes this interpretive problem explicit after the Umbanda gathering. He says that Amparo has discovered that the Orixás she had rejected still live within her, and distinguishes the initiate, who undergoes a slow inward transformation, from the mystic, who experiences contact outwardly and visibly. He treats the possessed participant as a medium through whom signs can be observed, likening that role to a telephone or a chemical indicator. This is Aglie’s account of the ritual and of who can claim knowledge from it. The distinction also places the participants in an unequal relation to interpretation: the mystic undergoes an experience, while the self-described initiate claims the authority to explain and use it.

Casaubon’s own response is less settled. He has entered the ceremony as a visitor and observer, but the music and surroundings affect him too. His previous experience at samba schools makes the ritual’s force seem psychologically intelligible, while his encounter with Amparo’s response and Aglie’s explanation leaves open what such intelligibility can establish. Rio thus supplies neither a definitive supernatural proof nor a detached debunking. It gives Casaubon an experience that can be described, disputed, and subsequently turned into a pattern.

After Rio: resemblance and the Plan

The consequences of Casaubon’s Brazilian experiences persist after he returns to work. While organizing illustrations for a book about metals, he begins to see likenesses between a cylindrical stove, an egg incubator, and an alchemical furnace. These comparisons make the museum objects seem to belong to a hidden continuity between technology and occult practice. He also finds historical accounts that place figures associated with mathematical and physical learning in contact with cabala, laboratory work, and occult interests. Rather than strengthening his confidence in skepticism, this accumulation makes him distrust the teachers who had taught him to doubt.

Casaubon recognizes a kinship between his response and Amparo’s: he does not believe, yet finds himself surrendering to the attraction of the connections. He becomes willing to entertain striking numerical and mythological parallels, and begins to ask ordinary things around him—houses, shop signs, clouds, and engravings—to disclose a deeper story. His wish to discover what the world is hiding turns resemblance from an occasional observation into a method of searching. Lia temporarily helps bring him back to ordinary life, but the Rio experience remains part of the pattern through which he reads later evidence.

That pattern eventually feeds the construction of the Plan. After visiting Tomar, Casaubon rereads the Provins message and treats a real Templar castle as a possible clue to the supposed sequence of secret meetings. Yet he also states the decisive qualification: the aim is not to discover the Templars’ secret, but to construct it. In Rio, religious traditions had first appeared through distinct communities, disagreements, and individual responses. In the Plan, by contrast, the same appetite for relation begins to join scattered texts and events into one explanatory design. The city’s lasting significance lies in that progression: it gives Casaubon a concrete encounter with forms of belief that resist a single explanation, while also foreshadowing how readily he will turn ambiguity into a system.