The Casa das Minas of São Luís do Maranhão and the saga of Nã Agontimé

Abstract

The Casa das Minas of São Luís do Maranhão is considered the oldest religious centre of African origin that is known in Maranhão. Probably founded in the first decades of the nineteenth century, it served as a model for other centres in northern Brazil. Setting out from Sérgio Ferretti's writings on the Casa das Minas, the paper presents the research findings that established the singularity of its Dahomean origin in the 1940s and examines the different narratives, especially the one formulated by Pierre Verger in 1953, which sought to establish its foundation and which I refer to as the saga of Nã Agontimé. More recent works on the Atlantic slave trade allow us to contextualize such narratives more clearly, situating them at the confluence between myth and history, revealing how they express in remarkable fashion the symbolic force of the idea of origin in the socioanthropological studies of Afro-Brazilian religions.