Ceremonial Drinking in an Afro‐Brazilian Cult 1

Abstract

HE present study concerns the use of alcohol by the members of an T urban religious cult in northern Brazil. A striking feature of the ideology of this cult is the fiction that it is not the members who drink during the cere-monies, but the deities who possess them. As might be inferred from this belief, there is considerable ambivalence within the cult about drinking, due both to pressures from the larger society and to an awareness that excessive drinking is sometimes disruptive. The purpose of the present paper is to consider the role of drinking in cult activities, and to suggest some of the reasons why drinking continues as a prominent feature of the ceremonies. This will involve the consideration of the functions which drinking serves, not only in cult inte-gration, but especially in possession. THE BATUQUE The religious group to be considered is one of the so-called " Afro-Brazilian " cults, and is located in the city of BelCm. This cult, the Batuque,* is similar in many respects to the other African-derived cults which are found in other parts of Brazil and in other areas of the New World, and the basic ideas and rituals seem clearly to have been brought to the New World by African slaves. The principal ceremony is a public performance during which the members of the cult dance to the rhythms of drums, sing songs designed to call down the gods, and enter trance states which are interpreted as possession by the deities. The Batuque, however, has been greatly modified by the addition of ideas of American Indian and spiritualist origin, and many of the members of the Bel6m cults are completely unaware that their religion is of African origin. The members are also extremely variable as far as their physical characteris-tics are concerned, and only a minority are clearly descendants of slaves. It is not just in the presence of new deities, however, or in the broadened membership that the Batuque is different from the Afro-Brazilian cults which are described in the literature. One of the most striking differences is the ex-tent to which the Batuque is individualistic when compared with the Candom-bl6 of Bahia, for example. The typical Batuque cult center is very loosely organized, initiation is not of great importance, and the behavior of the deities when manifested in cult membersis little standardized. I t would be a mistake, however, to assume that because the Batuque is different from the cults de-scribed in the literature, it is therefore unusual. Since most of the scholars who have studied these cults have been interested in African survivals, they have tended to ignore cults like the Batuque, which have relatively few African traits. There are many hints in the literature, however, which suggest that 344