Umbanda

Umbanda is presented as an Afro-Brazilian religious practice organized around ritual possession, music, dance, and contact with spirits of the departed. In Brazil, it is not merely an object of ideological debate or occult speculation: it belongs to the lives and memories of people uprooted by migration, and it becomes a bodily experience that unsettles Casaubon and Amparo. The novel’s account keeps the ritual’s social setting and participants in view even as characters try to explain it through competing theories of religion, history, and secret knowledge.

Religious and Social Setting

The discussions around Amparo’s comrades place Umbanda among the indigenous churches that draw people arriving in the great cities during cycles of migration from the north to the industrial south and back again. These migrants, many of them disinherited, may become stranded in the cities and enter religious communities that evoke spirits and African divinities. Amparo’s Marxist comrades cannot agree on what such cults mean. Some regard them as a return to cultural roots and resistance to the white world; others see them as an opiate that suppresses revolutionary potential; still others describe them as a mixture of white, Indigenous, and Black cultures without agreeing on what that mixture is for.

Amparo takes the most categorical position: religion is an opiate, and pseudo-tribal cults are worse still. Yet her own relation to Brazilian cultural life complicates that judgment. She participates in the samba schools, moving with the drumming and the dancers, while also condemning carnival and soccer devotion as forms of ecstatic distraction. Her body’s attachment to the world she criticizes makes it impossible to reduce her position to a settled ideological account. Umbanda and related practices therefore enter the novel within a broader tension between political explanation and forms of belonging that remain powerful even to those who reject them intellectually.

Spirits and the Work of the Gira

Aglie distinguishes an Umbanda gira from a candomblé rite. In the account he gives Casaubon and Amparo, candomblé initiates are possessed by the Orixás, whereas Umbanda participants are possessed by Eguns, the spirits of the departed, and by Exu and his companion Pompa Gira. He describes Exu as a Yoruba divinity associated with mischief and joking, while also comparing him with a trickster figure in Amerindian mythology. The comparison makes cross-cultural resemblance part of Aglie’s explanation, but the rite is not presented as a simple merger of identical beings.

Aglie names Pretos velhos and Caboclos as the departed spirits who intervene. Pretos velhos are described as old African wise men who guided their people during deportation; figures such as Rei Congo and Pai Agostinho embody a remembered phase of slavery in which Black people were treated as family members. Caboclos, by contrast, are Indian spirits associated with the purity of original nature. In Aglie’s account, the African Orixás remain in the background, syncretized with Catholic saints, while the spirits that intervene bring on the trance. The medium, or cavalo, loses self-awareness as the higher being enters, continues dancing until the being departs, and then emerges feeling cleansed and purified.

The gira’s setting gives these explanations a material and social form. The hall has a dance area for the cavalos, an altar behind a railing, and a platform for the drums, the atabaques. Believers and curious visitors, Black and white, gather together; around the altar stand figures of Pretos velhos and Caboclos alongside Catholic saints. There are no visible Orixás, yet Casaubon senses their presence in the crowd and in the setting. The pai-de-santo receives worshippers, perfumes them with cigar smoke, blesses them, and offers liquor; Casaubon kneels and drinks what he discovers is Dubonnet. Drumming and chants addressed to Exu and Pompa Gira accompany the ritual, while the pai-de-santo swings a thurible and chants prayers to OxaM and Nossa Senhora. The ceremonial scene thus joins African-derived spirits and practices with Catholic forms and modern urban participants without erasing their differences.

Trance, Participation, and Amparo

As the drums accelerate, the cavalos enter the space before the altar and begin to respond to the pontos. Casaubon observes both the variety and the limits of the experience. A German psychologist who has attended the rites for years dances without entering a trance; she has tried, but has not been chosen. Other participants become absorbed in movements that appear to disclose the character of the beings possessing them: some move their hands sideways as if swimming, while others bend and proceed slowly, shielded from the crowd by cambones using white linen cloths. The account records the psychologist’s frustrated effort alongside the different states of the participants who do enter ecstasy, rather than treating the gathering as a single uniform response.

Amparo’s own reaction changes the scene from observation to personal crisis. Holding her arm, Casaubon feels her hands sweat and her body tremble; she says she feels unwell and wants to leave. Outside, she attributes her condition to food, smells, and heat. The pai-de-santo follows and tells her that she has the qualities of a medium and had responded well to the pontos. Amparo sharply rejects his interpretation, insists that she was merely sick, and asks to be left alone. Her response does not settle whether she has undergone a religious experience: it shows instead the conflict between the ritual authority’s claim, her own refusal, and the physical episode witnessed by Casaubon.

Afterward, Aglie offers a further interpretation. He tells Casaubon that race or culture forms part of the unconscious, and that Amparo has discovered that the Orixás she has rejected in her heart still live in her womb. He explicitly says he does not regard that discovery as positive, nor does he endorse possession practices. For him, the episode demonstrates the force of cultural inheritance and the way the atmosphere of the rite can lower the participants’ vigilance. His interpretation is a character’s theory, not an authoritative explanation supplied by the narrative; it sits beside Amparo’s denial and Casaubon’s observation of what happened.

Umbanda and the Limits of Secret Knowledge

Aglie distinguishes possession from initiation. He portrays the mystic as a conspicuous medium through whom the numinous manifests, while the initiate’s supposed understanding is inward, gradual, and disciplined. He compares the possessed cavalo to a telephone or a chemist’s test paper: useful to an initiate as a means of detecting or receiving a signal, but not itself the master of the forces at work. The distinction lets Aglie incorporate Umbanda into his own hierarchy of secret knowledge, in which initiates control what mystics undergo. The novel makes clear that this is his framework, rather than an uncontested account of the ritual or its participants.

The practice also enters the novel’s wider pattern of interpretation through a séance-like performance in Milan. A woman in a trance speaks of a temple, a door, a vortex of power, six seals, a wait of one hundred and twenty years, and thirty-six invisibles. Casaubon connects these phrases to the message associated with Colonel Ardenti. Inspector De Angelis, who has been investigating Ardenti’s disappearance, challenges Casaubon over the details he now remembers and explains that police had traced Ardenti to the Picatrix offices in the company of the psychic woman. This episode shows how a possessed speaker can become, for observers, a channel through which supposed historical clues are recognized. It does not establish that the trance verifies those clues.

That distinction matters because Casaubon later recognizes how the three men’s Plan was made: disparate concepts and events were linked by analogy, and earlier repetitions made the links seem convincing. Umbanda’s rich ritual world can be observed on its own terms, but the characters’ drive to connect it with other traditions and secret histories risks turning difference into another clue in an all-encompassing scheme. The novel’s attention to drumming, roles, ritual objects, cultural memory, and conflicting interpretations resists that flattening. Umbanda is at once a lived religious practice within the story and a test of whether its observers can distinguish an experience from the theories they build around it.