Umbanda possession trance

Umbanda possession trance is the ritual condition in which a medium, or cavalo, is understood to be entered by a spirit of the departed, lose ordinary awareness of self, and dance until the possessing being departs. In the novel, the gira makes this account visible through music, fumes, movement, and involuntary bodily change; its decisive instance is Amparo’s brief possession by Pomba Gira, which unsettles her professed disbelief and exposes competing ways of interpreting religious experience.

Ritual Setting and Religious Framework

Aglie distinguishes the evening’s Umbanda gira from candomblé: the mediums are not to be possessed by the Orixás, but by Eguns, the spirits of the departed, as well as Exu and his companion Pomba Gira. He describes the Pretos velhos as wise old African spirits associated with the time of deportation, and the Caboclos as Indian spirits representing the forces of original nature. In Umbanda, he explains, the Orixás remain in the background, syncretized with Catholic saints, while the departed beings intervene directly and produce the trance.

In Aglie’s account, the medium loses awareness while the possessing presence acts through the body; the dancing continues until the being leaves, after which the medium emerges feeling cleansed and purified. He links this religious practice to the uprooting of worshipers and their arrival in the city, where the traditions of African and Indigenous communities persist within a hybrid religious world. His explanation gives the ritual a social as well as spiritual setting, though it remains his interpretation rather than a neutral account of its meaning to every participant.

The account also contrasts with the narrator’s earlier observation of ideological arguments in Brazil. Amparo’s Marxist comrades disagree over whether Afro-Brazilian religions express a return to cultural roots, function as an opiate that diverts revolutionary energy, or form a cultural mixture whose political purpose remains unclear. Amparo herself argues that religion is always an opiate, yet the narrator observes that she remains physically and emotionally attached to the world of carnival. The later gira turns that unresolved contradiction into an event: a religion she has rejected as an idea acts upon her body.

The Gira and the Mediums

The ritual unfolds through coordinated roles and sensory pressure. The pai-de-santo swings a thurible and chants; the atabaques quicken, and the cavalos enter the space before the altar as the pontos rise. Incense and heat fill the hall. Some participants move softly with their palms turned down, while others bend forward and advance slowly; cambones screen certain mediums with white linen. Those associated with Pretos velhos make hollow sounds and move like old people leaning on canes, whereas those associated with Caboclos give shrill warrior cries. The varied gestures distinguish the presences the participants believe have taken hold, rather than depicting trance as a single uniform performance.

A German psychologist who has taken part in the rites for years provides a pointed contrast. She is not chosen and cannot enter a trance: as she dances, she appears to struggle to surrender control, repeatedly regaining it. Around her, other women enter ecstasy, their movements becoming fluid and their faces and limbs seeming to give way to oblivion. The narrator recognizes the force of music and noise from his experience at Rio’s samba schools, but the scene does not reduce every participant’s response to that comparison. The German woman’s frustrated effort, the mediums’ changing movements, and the narrator’s own physical reaction make the difference between witnessing the rite and undergoing it central to the episode.

The narrator, holding Amparo’s arm, feels her hands grow sweaty and her body begin to tremble. She says she does not feel well and wants to leave. Outside, she attributes the reaction to food, smells, and heat; the pai-de-santo instead tells her she has the qualities of a medium and that he has watched her respond to the pontos. When he presses the interpretation, Amparo cries out and speaks a few words in a language the narrator does not know. The pai-de-santo turns pale. Amparo insists that she is merely unwell, asks to be left alone, and rejects the treatment of her as an invalid. The exchange establishes that the trance is not simply an identity Amparo accepts: the ritual authority names a capacity she refuses to acknowledge.

Amparo’s Possession

After the narrator returns to the hall, he sees Amparo back among the dancers. He understands that she has re-entered at least ten minutes earlier and is no longer trying to maintain her defenses. Without an agogô to occupy her attention as it occupies his, she appears to have yielded to the music and the voices around her. The scene marks a reversal: the woman who had denounced the cults and tried to leave is now participating in the ritual, while the narrator remains close enough to witness her but does not intervene.

Amparo suddenly throws herself into the dance, stops with her tense face raised and her neck rigid, then performs a lewd saraband, her hands miming an offering of her body. Participants identify the presence as Pomba Gira and respond with delight, treating the arrival of a previously absent spirit as a marvel. The narrator, startled and unwilling to act, continues striking the small instrument. His account records both his intimate proximity to Amparo and his inability to distinguish, in the moment, where her action ends and the possessing presence begins.

The cambones put ritual vestments on Amparo and support her as she comes out of the short but intense trance. She is drenched in sweat and breathing with difficulty. Rather than receive the worshipers who approach seeking oracles, she begins to cry. At the end of the gira, Aglie gently massages her temples. Amparo calls the episode embarrassing and says she neither believes in possession nor wanted it, asking how she could have done what she did. Her response leaves the event unresolved: the body has enacted what her conscious convictions rejected, but her distress is not presented as proof that the ritual’s supernatural explanation is true.

Interpretations and Significance

Aglie interprets the episode through the distinction between mysticism and initiation. He argues that race or culture inhabits the unconscious, alongside archetypes shared across people and centuries, and says that the setting and atmosphere lowered everyone’s vigilance. In his account, the Orixás Amparo had rejected remain within her, not as a doctrine she consciously endorses but as an embodied inheritance. This reading connects her personal contradiction to the novel’s earlier account of cultural and religious mixture, while also making Aglie an interpreter whose confident framework should not be confused with the ritual participants’ own explanations.

For Aglie, possession is a form of mystical contact: conspicuous, bodily, and undergone by the medium. Initiation, by contrast, is a gradual discipline of mind and body, secret and inward, which he associates with control of forces rather than submission to them. He likens the mystic to a telephone or a chemical indicator, a visible medium through which signs can be detected, and describes mysticism as democratic, even demagogic, while initiation is aristocratic. His hierarchy sharply complicates the apparent wonder of the gira. The mediums may be treated as sources of spiritual signs, but in Aglie’s scheme they are instruments for those who claim a more controlled and privileged knowledge.

The episode therefore holds several explanations in tension: religious possession as understood by Umbanda practitioners; Amparo’s denial and shame; the narrator’s sensory exposure to music and bodily change; and Aglie’s theory of cultural memory and mystical contact. None fully cancels the others. The trance matters not because it settles whether a spirit literally entered Amparo, but because it makes the limits of conscious belief visible: her political and intellectual rejection of the cult does not prevent her body from responding within its ritual world. At the same time, the scene distinguishes undergoing an experience from possessing an authoritative explanation of it.