Violence and chaos in the religious experience. The Dionysian dimension of Afro-Brazilian cults

Abstract

This essay offers a general theoretical discussion on the place of violence, obscenity and chaos in religious practices. Toe main ethnographic data are drawn from the symbolic world of Afro-Brazilian possession cults, especially those known as jurema and macumba whose rituals are marked by an atmosphere of crude eroticism, dramatized violence and anarchic behaviour. Toe core of the argument is to explore conceptually a chaotic dimension of reality that transcends the confinements of anti-structural arrangements, symbolic inversion, transgression or carnivalization of the world as theorized by Lévi Strauss, Victor Turner, Georges Bataille and Mikbail Bakhtin, among others. lt is argued that this pre-representational, creative state of chaos, capable of generating new symbolic orderings and, even literal violence, can be expressed with greater intensity and fullness in the religious sphere than in other spheres of symbolic expression. The issue of human sacrifice is also discussed, in connection with some of the deities of the Afro-Brazilian pantheon. In order to expand the understanding of this rather complex argument, analogies are drawn from various religious traditions, literary texts (such as Goethe's Faust and Homer's Batracomiomachia), and recent European artistic movements. Finally, a detailed contrast, or cross-reading, is offered between the world of jurema spirits and the dyonisiac world, such as expressed in Euripides' outstanding tragedy, the Bacchae.