Spirits with Scalpels

The Cultural Biology of Religious Healing in Brazil

Sidney M Greenfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781598743678
• eBook ISBN: 9781315419831
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

"The first time I witnessed a Spiritist surgery, a young man named Jose Carlos Ribeiro inserted a used scalpel taken from a tray that I was holding, and plunged it into the eye of an elderly man. The patient did not move…." Decades of fieldwork later, Sidney Greenfield presents a riveting ethnography of the complex world of religious healing in Brazil that challenges readers to grapple with the most fundamental concepts of anthropology and cross-cultural experience. In a major contribution to cultural biology, he analyses the complex social, economic, and political landscape of Brazil to understand dramatic healing practices that seem to defy medical explanation. This engrossing and provocative book will put students and scholars alike on the edge of their seats.

21PART I

SURGERIES AND OTHER HEALING IN KARDECIST-SPIRITISM

22

23CHAPTER 1

JOSÉ CARLOS RIBEIRO

AN INTRODUCTION TO SPIRITIST THERAPY

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder at that which one would not have been able to guess.

Margaret Mead

The middle-aged man who had guided us through the mob on the street, into the big old house, and up a flight of stairs to a tiny bedroom, into which were crowded some two dozen people, pointed to a smiling, attractive, slender young man, probably in his late twenties, and announced, grinning broadly, “This is our healer.” Like so many Brazilians, he was of mixed African and European descent. Wearing an open sport shirt and dark trousers, José Carlos Ribeiro needed only a guitar to look like an entertainer. Not the image I’d anticipated for a Spiritist healer who had already attained some notoriety in this bustling seaside city of Fortaleza on the north coast of Brazil. This man was reputed to do surgery without using any anesthesia or antisepsis.

After I was introduced and presented my wife, Eleanor, and teenage daughter, Suzanne, I told him that I was a scholar and researcher, adding a few sentences about my previous studies in Brazil and elsewhere. 24My Portuguese was quite good, as I had been coming to Brazil for more than two decades to conduct research and teach. When I asked if we could observe him at work, José Carlos’s smile faded momentarily.

“Do you work for a newspaper or magazine?”

“No. If I write anything, it will be for an academic or professional publication. I have no interest in sensationalism.”

Apparently reassured, he smiled warmly. “I’ll be delighted for you to watch. We have nothing to hide.”

On the table he would later use for surgery there was a large tray with scalpels, several scissors, a few tweezers, a syringe, some cotton, gauze, adhesive tape, a glass of water, and a small pad of paper. He faced me again and placed the tray in my hands, adding, “Better than just watching, you can assist me.”

Eleanor and Suzanne stared wide-eyed. I grasped the tray, realizing that my years of anthropological training and experience could not help to suppress my uncertainty and apprehension about what was to happen next.

José Carlos turned to a waiting patient, a simply dressed, dark-skinned, elderly man who was accompanied by his wife. As she started to explain her husband’s vision problem, the healer shifted his eyes away from her toward the ceiling. Although I was unable to understand what he said next, I saw him begin to shake almost violently. Later, he told me that this happens when a spirit possesses his body.

Large numbers of Brazilians are convinced that spirits may take over the bodies of special individuals who are referred to as mediums. Initiates of African-derived religions, for example, enter trances, often while chanting or dancing, to embody supernatural beings believed to be from Africa or a mixture of African deities and Roman Catholic saints. Once possessed, they offer help with material as well as spiritual problems to fellow adherents or visitors.

But José Carlos was a follower of the Christian-oriented Kardecist tradition. Its conviction that spirits of the dead can communicate with the living has American and French origins (See Weisberg 2004; Greenfield 1987a; Cavalcanti 1983). Kardecist mediums become possessed without songs, dances, or sacrificial rituals. Being chosen by a spirit to serve as its medium often requires only the medium’s own inner readiness; although, as we shall see, more often training programs are provided.

25José Carlos interrupted the woman’s account of her husband’s symptoms: “Do you believe in God?” The soft tone of his previous speech was replaced by a sharp accent that sounded almost like a native speaker of Spanish trying to communicate in Portuguese. I did not yet know that the spirit believed to possess him was St. Ignatius of Loyola, the sixteenth-century founder of the Society of Jesus.⁴ Before either of them could answer, he commanded: “Think of God! Think of God!”

Even as he issued this order, he picked up a scalpel from the tray I held and plunged it up under the lid of the upper rim of the man’s left eye. Some of the onlookers gasped. One woman screamed. With a series of jabbing and twisting movements he slid the instrument down under the eye. Substituting the back of a tweezers taken from the tray with his left hand for the scalpel, he eased the eye forward, tilting it out of its socket. Using the scalpel still held in his right hand, he scraped what seemed to be the cornea of the protruding eye.

I was standing beside José Carlos, Suzanne behind me and Eleanor shoulder to shoulder with other onlookers behind the healer. I was struggling just to keep the tray in my hand from shaking or tilting. I allowed myself a momentary glance at my wife. Her face had turned pale, her mouth was hanging open, and her eyes were blinking rapidly. I feared she might faint. What could I do to help her? My mind seemed frozen.

José Carlos, without shifting his gaze from the old man in front of him, left the tweezers and eye dangling momentarily and moved his left hand over his shoulder. He barely touched Eleanor’s face as he mumbled something I couldn’t hear. Her complexion and expression almost instantly returned to normal. He once again gripped the tweezers.

He scraped the eye a few more times with the scalpel, then slid the tweezers to the top of the eye under the lid where the scalpel had first been thrust. He pulled the tweezers out. Back went the eyeball. All this happened in just a minute or two.

José Carlos covered the eye with some gauze and adhesive tape. “Did that hurt?” he asked. “Did you feel any pain?”

“No. I know what you did but I couldn’t feel it.”

The healer took a pen from his shirt pocket and the pad of paper from the tray and looked off into space as he wrote a prescription that seemingly flowed from the writing tool. He handed it to the 26old man’s startled wife and rattled off a list of foods to be eaten or avoided, plus other orders about what her husband must and must not do.

“Go,” he added, gesturing the couple away. “You will be well.”

During the momentary pause between patients I looked at Eleanor. We both turned to our daughter: “You okay?”

She nodded, and with an uncertain smile, asked, “What have we gotten into?”

Still holding the tray, I shrugged, thinking about the happenstance that had brought us here. The previous morning I was relaxing on the balcony of our second-story apartment, enjoying the ocean breeze, browsing through the local newspaper, hearing the voices of my wife and daughters inside finishing their breakfasts. I wouldn’t start teaching at the university until some weeks later.

I turned the page and changed my life.

The words “José Carlos Ribeiro” in a headline gripped my attention because that’s the name of one of our Brazilian godsons. He had been born in our apartment in Rio de Janeiro during a research sojourn more than fifteen years previously. His mother was Maria, whom we had hired to assist Eleanor with toddler Suzanne and our two other children while I was off doing interviews and collecting data. After a few weeks with us, she had revealed her pregnancy. Months later we attended José Carlos’s baptism, serving as his godparents in a rural village church.

“Ellie!” I shouted, almost as a reflex. “Look at this!”

She appeared on the balcony in moments, shadowed by slim, adolescent Suzanne. By then I had read the first paragraphs below the headline. Not our godson, but a Spiritist medium with the identical name. The coincidence seized my curiosity and led me to recall my reading about a man named Zé Arigó (see Fuller 1974), credited with doing spectacular surgeries without the use of anesthesia and antisepsis while in trance in the 1960s. The address where this José Carlos Ribeiro would be doing healing was in the paper.

“Let’s see if we can meet him.”

So early the next morning, we started our walk into downtown Fortaleza in search of this other José Carlos Ribeiro. Fortaleza, capital of the northeastern state of Ceará, is less than a hundred miles south of the equator. The temperature was already escalating. Still, 27we walked rapidly, both eager and anxious.

We turned a corner. Ahead of us, a couple hundred people stood in line in front of a large house, across from what we later learned were the offices of the National Health Services. Young and old, well to do and poor, a mix of racial identities—they were all seeking the healer I hoped to see in action.

The man facing the head of the line was ordinary looking, a typical northern Brazilian mixture of European and Indian. He was handing out numbers and tickets after a few words with each person. Trying to sound far more self-assured than I felt, I handed him my card identifying me as both an American professor and a visiting faculty member at the Federal University of Ceará’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology for the semester beginning in August 1981.

“Would it be possible for me to meet the healer?” I asked.

He went to the doorway and talked with another gatekeeper. Then he motioned to us: “Come with me.”

In a few minutes we were inside the house. No breezes reached the already steamy interior of the building. People crowded every available space. The murmur of their voices and odor of their bodies in the heat followed us up the flight of stairs to the room where we now stood.

Throughout the morning, the healer alternated between men and women, between those on whom he performed surgeries and those for whom he only wrote prescriptions. He removed cysts and tumors, repeated the popping out and scraping of eyeballs, and repaired what we thought was a detached retina. No one was given any anesthetic. The instruments on the tray were used repeatedly without being cleaned. In each case, diagnosis, surgery, bandaging, writing of a prescription for postoperative medication, and dictation of a list of behavioral restrictions and a special diet were all completed in a few minutes. Nonsurgery patients required even less time. José Carlos provided prescriptions for cures or to prepare patients for return visits and possible future surgeries.

Each time he wrote a prescription, he looked away from his hand and the pad of paper. Some of the medications were available at a regular pharmacy or in the market. Others could be found at an “Umbanda shop,” where herbs, teas, baths, candles, and incenses are sold. A few were very obscure and difficult to obtain because they 28were so old in their formulations or so new that they were available only in the metropolitan centers of southern Brazil where the large, multinational drug companies had laboratories and outlets.

José Carlos, a high school graduate, had no further formal education. He did not charge fees for his consultations, diagnoses, prescriptions, surgeries, or other treatments. All were provided as charity. Brazilian Kardecist-Spiritists believe that healer-mediums receive spirits who in a previous lifetime were trained and practiced as doctors, surgeons, and other health care specialists. These spirits desire to perform the highly valued charitable act of helping the sick but do not need or wish to reincarnate (Greenfield 1987a).

Mediums possessed by such spirits provide various types of treatment. Passes may be administered, transmitting healing energy to the patient from the spirit world. Prescriptions are written, often for allopathic or homeopathic remedies. As we shall see, disobsessions—in which low-level spirits believed to be causing mental or physical illnesses are exorcised—are performed. Only a very small number of mediums perform surgeries.

José Carlos gave several patients prescriptions for a medicine obtainable only on the premises from his cousin or from a companion who travels with José Carlos as an assistant and confidant. Patients were charged the equivalent of four or five dollars to defray the cost of preparation, bottling, and shipping. Because of this payment, some in the Spiritist movement were to question José Carlos’s integrity.

Late in the afternoon, the healer was approached by several people who came as a group on behalf of their brother, bedridden with a cancer diagnosed by his physician as terminal. Even as one of them was explaining why the stricken man was unable to come to this location, José Carlos was staring past them and writing a prescription.

“Give this to him. He can be cured. I will operate on him next week. But tomorrow morning I’ll come see him.”

It was evening before he finished with his last patient. Although the experience had left Eleanor, Suzanne, and me exhilarated but exhausted, he seemed full of energy. We’d been told that José Carlos would be back again in the morning.

“May I return and continue to observe your work?” I asked.

“Of course, of course.” He smiled. “You were a fine assistant.”

29I laughed. After the fifth patient I had been relieved of my tray-holding duties.

Eleanor, Suzanne, and I headed for dinner and home in the warm night darkness. Our minds and conversation were whirlpools of questions without answers. How could we have seen what we saw? Who would ever believe us? Why had we not heard much more about Spiritist healers? How about casualties from the cutting without sterilizing instruments or using antiseptics on the wounds? Why would that large and very diverse crowd of patients choose to risk even prescriptions from this unlicensed and essentially untrained practitioner, to say nothing of being cut into by him without the slightest anesthesia? Were they somehow hypnotized? What about afterward? Had anyone ever checked to see if the people who submit themselves to this treatment actually get well? Or return for more treatments?

Our questions were very American. But the gentle breeze with its faint patina of garden perfumes reminded us that any answers would have to be Brazilian. This culture has elements from colonial Portugal, from the indigenous Indians whom the Portuguese conquered and impressed into plantation peonage, and from Africans imported as slaves. These elements have coalesced into a milieu that must be comprehended in its own terms.

We arrived the next morning as another crowd was gathering. Approaching the door at the same time were the brothers of the man José Carlos had promised to visit that day. They wanted to thank him for saving the man’s life, invite him to lunch, and drive him and any assistants to where their brother lived.

“Last night,” said the thin, intense one who did the talking the day before, “his whole body swelled up. We thought his veins would burst! Suddenly, he fell off his chair and we saw him bleeding. Our doctor came right away and told us to prepare for the end, probably before the night was over. He gave us a prescription for a shot of morphine to ease the pain and left. But we’d already gotten the medicine you prescribed just before the doctor came, and that’s what we used.”

The medicine had arrived by airline from Recife, capital of the neighboring state of Pernambuco, several hundred miles distant. This family of means and education, having searched Fortaleza’s 30pharmacies in vain, prevailed on a friend with a ham radio to solicit help from contacts in other cities. It’s difficult for most outside the Spiritist community to make sense of such effort and expense to carry out the instructions, not of a licensed, professional physician, but of an alleged healer with no training in modern biomedicine.

Adherents of Brazilian Spiritism, loosely organized by the Spiritist Federation, include practicing medical doctors, lawyers, university professors, engineers, architects, pharmacists, and other professionals who hold positions of prestige and importance in Brazilian society. Some are members of elite families who have traveled to and studied in North America and Europe. Many are well versed in Western, rationalist knowledge. Yet at times they choose to be operated on by healer-mediums lacking in medical training and credentials. Later we were to work with Spiritist healers even less educated than José Carlos.

As promised, José Carlos, his cousin, and several volunteer helpers arrived for an early lunch. The recipient of his prescription, apparently so close to death the night before, had already eaten but was still seated at the dining room table waiting to greet the healer. José Carlos sympathized with his patient’s desire to walk to a nearby store to get a pack of cigarettes but sent him upstairs to his bedroom.

The healer ate the ample meal rapidly and engaged in good-humored conversation with family members and his own group. Afterward, he was accompanied upstairs by at least twenty onlookers. Once again he mumbled to himself, shook convulsively while looking at the ceiling, and spoke authoritatively with the same stilted accent: “I will operate on you next Thursday. Soon you will be well. Your cancer will be cured. Meanwhile, rest. Rest and take your medici...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• Map
• An Invitation and Introduction
• Part I. Surgeries and Other Healing in Kardecist-Spiritism
• Part II. Healing by the Spirits in Other Brazilian Popular Religions
• Part III. Spirits, Healing, and a New Paradigm
• Postscript
• Notes
• References
• Index