The man who knows and the man who undergoes

“The man who knows and the man who undergoes” is a distinction between knowledge held at a distance and experience entered through the body. It first takes shape for Casaubon when he plays an agogô during an Umbanda rite: joining the rhythm changes his relation to the ritual from that of an unsettled observer to a participant who can feel and, in some measure, control what surrounds him. Aglie later turns the distinction into a theory of initiation and mysticism, assigning knowledge and command to the initiate and conspicuous, involuntary experience to the mystic.

The phrase in the ritual

At the Umbanda ceremony, music, fumes, heat, and the movements of those possessed press upon Casaubon as bodily sensations rather than as a system he can simply interpret. He takes up a small gilded agogô, a bell instrument played with a little bar, and tries to match the drums. The act gradually makes him part of the event. Moving his legs and feet brings relief: by entering the rhythm, he ceases merely to be surrounded by it and finds a way to respond to it. The episode gives the phrase its immediate meaning. Knowing is not the same as undergoing; yet participation can alter the position from which experience is met.

The scene sets Casaubon’s response against the German psychologist who has attended the rites for years but cannot enter trance. Her eyes, limbs, and strained efforts register an inability to surrender control, while other participants pass into ecstasy and display movements associated with the beings believed to possess them. The contrast does not make Casaubon an initiate or establish a supernatural explanation. It distinguishes forms of participation: watching, trying unsuccessfully to undergo the rite, and joining its music in a way that lets the body find a place within it.

Aglie’s theory of knowing and undergoing

After the ceremony, Aglie gives Casaubon an account of the distinction that reaches beyond the immediate scene. He describes race and culture as part of the unconscious and speaks of archetypes as figures common to humanity across centuries. In his interpretation, Amparo’s bodily response has brought back the Orixás she had rejected in her conscious convictions: they remain, he says, in her womb. His claim makes the body a bearer of inherited or submerged experience, not simply an instrument governed by explicit ideology.

Aglie separates the mystic from the initiate. The mystic undergoes possession or ecstasy and becomes an outwardly visible site where the numinous manifests itself. The initiate, by contrast, is formed through a slow transformation of mind and body and claims an intuitive understanding of what reason cannot explain. Aglie describes this knowledge as secret, intimate, lucid, and detached, and says that initiates control forces that mystics undergo. In his analogy, the mystic serves as a conspicuous instrument of detection, while the initiate interprets and directs what the mystic experiences. He treats the ecstatic states of Umbanda participants and Christian mystics as comparable instances of undergoing, but places initiation above them as disciplined mastery.

Meaning and limits

The phrase thus moves from Casaubon’s practical discovery to Aglie’s more ambitious hierarchy. In the ritual, participation offers Casaubon a way to inhabit an overwhelming environment without claiming that he has decoded it. In Aglie’s explanation, the same contrast becomes a theory of spiritual authority: experience alone is not knowledge, and the person who undergoes a force is not necessarily the person who understands or controls it.

That distinction also exposes a tension in Aglie’s account. His language elevates detachment and control, while the scene’s knowledge arrives through rhythm, movement, and bodily response. Casaubon’s relief is neither detached mastery nor passive surrender; it comes from joining the event. The phrase therefore holds open a difference between interpreting an experience from outside and discovering, through participation, how one can respond to it.