Salvador

Salvador is the setting for a formative Brazilian episode in which Casaubon and Amparo encounter the city’s religious and cultural mixtures not as an abstract theory but as a lived landscape. Its churches and popular devotional objects, its crowded streets and port market, and its candomblé community bring together Catholic forms, African traditions, and competing explanations of religion. The city also gives Aglie a stage on which to present his theory of a universal Tradition, while the experience unsettles Amparo’s confidence that she has left her inherited religious world behind.

A City of Churches and Contradictions

Casaubon first evokes Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos as the “black Rome”: a city of three hundred and sixty-five churches, set against the hills or gathered along the bay, where gods of the African pantheon are honored. The image captures a city whose religious life cannot be reduced to a single institution or tradition. Catholic buildings and African divinities occupy the same cultural landscape, and the scale of the churches makes that coexistence visible across the city.

Amparo introduces Casaubon to a local painter whose work is crowded with Biblical and apocalyptic visions, rendered with the brilliance of a medieval miniature and incorporating Coptic and Byzantine elements. He speaks as a Marxist about revolution, yet spends his days dreaming in the sacristies of the sanctuary of Nosso Senhor do Bomfim. There, ex-votos fill the space: silver hearts, wooden limbs, and images of rescues from storms and whirlpools crowd the ceiling and walls. The painter’s life and work resist any clean division between political materialism and devotional imagination.

In another church, the sacristan clarifies the layered identity of a figure called Saint George: the image is Oxossi, though the priest would object if visitors refused to call him by the Catholic name. For two days the painter guides Casaubon and Amparo through naves and cloisters behind façades blackened with age. Their interiors are heavy with gold, pewter, chests, and precious frames; life-size saints bleed behind glass, while angels with Etruscan faces, Romanesque griffins, and Oriental sirens emerge from the capitals. The setting presents religious mixture as something embedded in images, objects, and habits of naming, rather than as a doctrine held at a distance.

Streets, Markets, and Social Conditions

The old streets enchant Casaubon through their names, including Rua da Agonia, Avenida dos Amores, and Travessa de Chico Diabo. But the picturesque sound of those names stands beside a severe social reality. During the visit, the local government, or an authority acting in its name, is attempting to renew the old city and close its thousands of brothels; the project is only halfway complete. In alleys beside deserted, decaying churches, young Black prostitutes remain at work, elderly women sell African sweets from steaming pots, and pimps dance amid trickles of sewage to transistor radios playing in nearby bars. Former palaces of Portuguese settlers, still marked by coats of arms too worn to read, have become brothels. The contrast makes the city’s past and present inseparable: colonial prestige survives as a façade, while the buildings and streets disclose the precarious lives unfolding around it.

On the third day, the painter takes his visitors to a hotel bar in a renovated upper-city district, on a street lined with luxury antique shops. There he meets Aglie, an impeccably dressed Italian gentleman who has come to buy a large painting of angelic hosts fighting their opponents. Aglie’s arrival sets the religious landscape of Salvador in conversation with the book’s wider world of esoteric claims. He speaks Portuguese with an accent that sounds as if he learned the language in Lisbon, asks about Amparo’s family history, and is vague about his own origins. The polished meeting place, the expensive art transaction, and the surrounding antique shops contrast with the streets and churches the visitors have just seen.

The next morning, the group meets Aglie in a covered market by the port. The market is at once a fish market, an Arab souk, and a proliferating fair of devotional and occult merchandise. Among its wares are prayer pouches, stone hands, coral horns, crucifixes, Stars of David, sexual symbols, hammocks, rugs, sphinxes, sacred hearts, Bororo quivers, and shell necklaces. For Aglie, this crowded assortment exemplifies Brazilian syncretism: he argues that a single Tradition runs through religions, learning, and philosophy, and that wisdom consists in gathering fragments of light without discriminating among their origins. The market makes his claim visually persuasive, though his confident interpretation remains his own rather than a neutral account of the objects or their users.

Political Argument and Religious Life

Salvador also belongs to the broader political landscape that Casaubon encounters in Brazil. Amparo’s comrades are Marxists, but their discussions do not follow a merely European pattern. Arguments about class struggle turn toward Brazilian cannibalism and the revolutionary role of Afro-Brazilian religions. Their disagreement reflects the difficulty of deciding what popular religious practice means politically. Some see it as a return to cultural roots and opposition to the white world; others regard it as an opiate that contains revolutionary potential; still others imagine it as a mixture of white, Indigenous, and Black traditions without agreeing on what that mixture accomplishes.

Amparo takes a firm position: religion is an opiate, and pseudo-tribal cults are worse still. Yet Casaubon sees that her relation to the culture around her is more complicated than her political judgment allows. At the escolas de samba she joins the winding dance lines to the drums, physically attached to the world she later condemns. She also mocks religious devotion and carnival as forms of tribal witchcraft that divert the disinherited into ecstatic unreality. Salvador gives this contradiction a social setting: religious practice is not only an object of ideological debate but part of the bodily and communal life Amparo cannot simply disown.

Candomblé and the City’s Religious Authorities

Aglie later arranges a visit to a terreiro de candomblé. The visitors will not attend the rite itself, because the ialorixá is suspicious of tourists, but she agrees to receive them and show them around beforehand. Aglie drives them through the favelas to a humble building resembling a large garage. At the threshold, an older Black man purifies them with fumigant; beyond him lies a small bare garden where palm fronds shelter the comidas de santo. Inside, benches are reserved for the uninitiated, a small dais holds the instruments, and chairs are set aside for the Oga, people of standing who may be respectful of the cult without necessarily being believers.

When Casaubon asks whether the orixas are people or forces, the mae-de-santo answers that they are forces—water, wind, leaves, rainbows. She also explains why ordinary worshippers may understand them through the figures of warriors, women, or Catholic saints: the form of a force must fit the capacity of each person to comprehend it. Her account differs from Aglie’s broad theory of a single Tradition because it comes from the authority of the terreiro itself and addresses how its practitioners understand religious images. The meeting is calm and cordial, but it reveals Salvador’s religious life as organized and interpreted by local authorities, not merely collected by outsiders as folklore.

The visitors are also told how possession differs across Afro-Brazilian practices: in candomblé, initiates are possessed by the orixas; in umbanda, by spirits of the departed. That distinction becomes important when Aglie later takes Casaubon and Amparo to an umbanda gira elsewhere in Brazil. The contrast helps keep the Salvador episode specific: the city’s candomblé encounter introduces the orixas and the terreiro’s own explanations, while the later possession scene belongs to another ritual setting and another practice.

Narrative Significance

Salvador gathers into one place the book’s recurring conflict between political explanation, religious inheritance, and esoteric interpretation. Its images and devotional objects invite comparison across traditions, but the episode also insists on the concrete differences among them: the painter’s Marxism, Amparo’s criticism of religion, Aglie’s universalizing claims, and the mae-de-santo’s account of the orixas do not amount to the same position. The city’s market can look like proof of Aglie’s theory to a visitor eager to find correspondences; the terreiro, by contrast, offers an encounter with a practice whose meanings are not exhausted by an outsider’s synthesis.

The city’s social contrasts further complicate any easy celebration of mixture. Churches rich with gold and votive offerings stand near foul alleys and brothels, while antique shops and a renovated hotel district coexist with the material hardship visible in the old streets. Salvador is therefore neither a picturesque backdrop nor a simple emblem of harmonious syncretism. It is the setting in which cultural convergence, class conflict, historical injury, religious authority, and individual ambivalence press against one another, leaving Amparo’s inherited attachments unresolved and making the limits of abstract interpretation newly visible.