Brazil – Feminism and Religion

This article was originally published by The Beltane Papers issue #30 February 1998. FAR is republishing it with permission from the author in order to digitally archive this important work. Part 1 is available here.

The indigenous Brazilian tribes worshiped all Mothers and believed they created life without the male presence. All Goddesses were virgins, but their virginity was only a symbol of independence and self-sufficiency, without any physical meaning. In some myths, the virgins are impregnated by numinous energies, manifested as animals (snake, birds, porpoise), forces of Nature (rain, thunderbolts, rays of light), ancestors or Deities. As other native people, they weren’t aware of the male participation in the conception and respected and revered the menstrual blood as something sacred, filled with magical powers, because after the “supernatural” ceasing of the monthly flow, life was created. Only after the interference of the white settlers and the massive Catholic indoctrination that the native cosmology was distorted, the Father assumed the main place, the Son became the second one in the divine hierarchy and the Mother was transformed in a suffering and silent virgin. Even so, many native traditions survived in the legends, folk beliefs, shamanic healing and magical practices as the Pajelança and Encantaria.

Besides the “Good Mother”, some of the native legends also mention the “Terrible Mother”, Boiuna, the Giant Snake of the Amazon River. The bottom of the river was her habitat and she appeared only at night, destroying boats and devouring people. Her terrifying aspect and her connection with the darkness, death and night are, as a matter of fact, features of the Dark Goddess, the Reaper, who controls the eternal cycle of birth, life, death and transformation.

Another manifestation of the Dark mother is Caamanha, “Mother of the Woods”, protector of the wild life who punished all intruders and violators of her domain. In other myths, she was transformed either in the Curupira or the Caapora, strange male beings, with twisted feet, who walked backwards, thus acting as guardians by misleading hunters or even attacking them.

In some Guarani myths we find mentions to the “Mother of Gold”, described as a beautiful woman or a brilliant globe, which seduced the gold prospectors and took them deep in the mountains, far away from the gold mines. Considered a Guardian of Mother Earth’s treasures, she sometimes manifested herself as Boitatá, who could appear as a phantasmagorical snake, with a luminous body and huge eyes, or only as a giant head, floating over hidden treasures, frightening or punishing those who destroyed Nature in search of fortune. Continue reading “The Brazilian Great Mother by Mirella Faur (Part 2)”

This article was originally published by The Beltane Papers issue #30 February 1998. FAR is republishing it with permission from the author in order to digitally archive this important work.

Brazil is traditionally known as a Roman Catholic country, with a great influence of African cults and a growing number of various Protestant sects and different spiritualist, new age and esoteric groups. One of these, Wicca, has been catching up the public attention, appearing lately on the media and making us ask ourselves many questions such as – with so many myths and legends in our origins, why do we have to import from abroad, through books and especially virtual information, other cultures’ traditions and practices?

There are not, yet, reliable written records or academic research, except a few private studies, proving the existence of an ancient cult of a Brazilian Great Mother. On taking possession of Brazil’s primitive land, European conquerors discarded and destroyed the ancient universe of the native people. Modern archaeological discoveries prove that the rock art, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines and the ceramic objects left by the people that inhabited Brazil 15.000 years ago, have magical and religious attributes, similar to those found in Europe. There are also plenty of native myths and legends left, some of them disguised in folklore or children’s stories, that can be, in the future, used to translate the country’s pre-history, shedding more light on the lost past and recovering the vestiges of an Ancestral Mother. For the time being, we must count upon the Afro-Brazilian cults and the hidden meaning of legends to discover images of a Mother Goddess, as the ones below.

Despite of its fundamentalist official religion and patriarchal society, Brazil concentrates, with the exception of India, the greatest amount of worshipers of one of the manifestations of the Divine Mother, which is Yemayá, the ancestral Goddess of Water, and Lady of the Ocean.

Every year, on New Year’s Eve and on February second, millions of Brazilians, dressed in white, take their offerings and prayers to the sea shore or sail in boat processions. These processions, similar to the Egyptian and Roman ceremonies called Navigium Isidi, dedicated to Isis, the protectress of the seafarers, who, like Yemayá, is also called “The Lady of the Navigators”. Although this huge Brazilian devotion to Yemayá, her cult is not an indigenous one, being brought to Brazil by the Yoruba slaves, in the XVIII century. Continue reading “The Brazilian Great Mother by Mirella Faur (Part 1)”