Make um-banda, not love

“Make um-banda, not love” is a deliberately incongruous slogan that joins the Brazilian religion Umbanda to a parody of a familiar political injunction. Its humor comes from the sudden shift between spiritual syncretism and romantic love; its wider significance lies in the novel’s recurring suspicion that apparently meaningful combinations can be manufactured by joining ideas through resemblance rather than evidence.

The Slogan in Conversation

The phrase occurs during an exchange about the Great White Fraternity and the relation between Catholic practice and other traditions. One speaker insists that the Catholics’ ritual consumption of God is not the same thing; the reply sweeps together Pythagoras, Dante, the Virgin Mary, and the Masons as forces supposedly aligned against the speaker, then concludes, “Make um-banda, not love.” The line is not a sober definition of Umbanda. It is a comic, polemical interruption that treats religious mixture and romantic attachment as competing alternatives.

The exchange immediately turns to whether the other speaker is the one who has become syncretic, and then to the declaration that culture is what they are about to inspect. The slogan thus sits between religious argument and cultural performance: it sounds like a program, but its setting makes it part of banter, not a rule or an instruction. The following threat to strangle the last priest with the entrails of the last Rosicrucian sharpens the scene’s irreverent, combative tone.

Umbanda and the Novel’s Play with Combination

The wording invokes Umbanda, a Brazilian religious tradition, in a book where Brazil and its religious syncretism form part of the characters’ experience and vocabulary. Here, however, the phrase uses the name less to explain a doctrine than to make a surprising verbal conjunction. The comic force depends on the gap between a religious practice and the slogan’s mock imperative, “not love.”

That gap echoes the novel’s broader concern with how combinations acquire the appearance of truth. In its account of the invented Plan, concepts are connected by analogy: a sequence may move from potato to apple, snake, doughnut, and ultimately back to potato. The apparent coherence of the circuit does not prove that its links disclose a hidden design. Read beside that method, the slogan is a compact instance of the book’s verbal play with conjunction: two unlike subjects are made to meet, and the resulting phrase is memorable without thereby becoming evidence of a deeper system.

Irony and Significance

The slogan’s mock seriousness is part of its effect. It borrows the shape of a public injunction but offers no developed program; instead, it punctures a conversation in which religious traditions, historical names, and cultural identities are being rapidly brought together. The joke can therefore register both the pleasure of syncretic play and the risk of treating juxtaposition as explanation.

Elsewhere, the novel makes that risk explicit. Casaubon eventually recognizes that the Provins message was only a laundry list, and that he and his companions had supplied connections by analogy, by insisting that the chain come full circle, and by favoring links already made by others. Against that background, “Make um-banda, not love” works as more than an incidental quip: it offers a small, comic model of the novel’s central tension between creative association and the credulous belief that association reveals a concealed truth.