iii

Visions, Prophecies and

Divinations
Early Modern Messianism and Millenarianism in
Iberian America, Spain and Portugal

Edited by

Luís Filipe Silvério Lima

Ana Paula Torres Megiani

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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 Contents
Contents v

Contents

Acknowledgments vii
List of Abbreviations ix
List of Contributors x

An Introduction to the Messianisms and Millenarianisms of Early-

Modern Iberian America, Spain, and Portugal 1
Luís Filipe Silvério Lima and Ana Paula Torres Megiani

Part 1
The Americas: Between Missionary Projects and Native
Prophecies

1 Amerindian Cosmologies and Histories in New Spain and Peru:

Appropriations and Redimensioning of Christian Concepts by the
Nahua, Maya, and Andean Elites 43
Eduardo Natalino dos Santos

2 Mozas Criollas and New Government: Francis Borgia, Prophetism, and

the Spiritual Exercises in Spain and Peru 59
Stefania Pastore

3 The Missionary Roots of Rural Messianic Movements: Seventeenth to

Nineteenth Centuries 74
Cristina Pompa

Part 2
Prophetical Trajectories and Inquisition Trials

4 The Wizard of the Five-Color Rosary: Occurrence and Astrology,

History, and Politics in the Cause of Juan Serrada, Arrested by the
Inquisition in Zaragoza (1648) 93
Marcos Antonio Lopes Veiga

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vi Contents

5 Between Prophecy and Politics: The Return to Portugal of Dom

Antônio, Prior of Crato, and the Early Years of the Iberian Union 112
Jacqueline Hermann

6 The Devil in the Court of the King: Popular Prophecy and the
Inquisition in Seventeenth-Century Portugal 136
Mark Cooper Emerson

part 3
Between Sebastianism and Fifth Empire: Lettered Culture and the
Portuguese Empire

7 A Portuguese Jewish Agent of the Philips and a Sebastianist:

The Strange Case of Rosales/Manuel Bocarro 161
Francisco Moreno-Carvalho

8 From Politics to Prophecies: Portuguese Resistance and the Prophetic

Arsenal at the Time of King Philip of Spain 179
João Carlos Gonçalves Serafim

9 In Defense of Prophecy: The Inquisitorial Proceeding of Father

Antônio Vieira 195
Marcus De Martini

10 Vieira between History of the Future and Clavis Prophetarum 215

Ana T. Valdez

Bibliography 231
Index 250

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74 Pompa

Chapter 3

The Missionary Roots of Rural Messianic

Movements: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries
Cristina Pompa*

Rural Messianic Movements in Brazil

Starting in the beginning of the nineteenth century up to the middle of the

twentieth century, religious movements sprang up throughout the sertão, the
semi-arid northeast region of the country. These “rural messianic movements”,
featuring penitential and apocalyptic elements, were spread widely by wan-
dering preachers – the “beatos” and “conselheros” – who heralded the coming
of the end of the world and hence the need for salvation. Thus, through reli-
gion, peasants voiced their willingness to destroy an unjust world and rebuild
it in a different manner. The social utopia of the sertão, thus, referred to an
eschatological future and the transformation of power relations, embodied at
the time in “holy villages” where followers lived according to their religious and
social ideals of brotherhood under the guidance of one or more messianic
leaders. These communities, often shaped by the Sebastianist prophecy, were
frequently viewed as a threat to the establishment and attacked by the army.
The historiography of these movements has followed nation-building in
Brazil, and the peasant utopias acquired visibility exactly at the moment of
their repression. In times of great change in Brazilian society and politics, the
state engaged in crushing the “deviant behavior” of a significant part of the
population, while building the myth of national unity: independence in the
case of the communities of Serra do Rodeador (1817–20) and Pedra Bonita
(1836–38), the Republic at the time of Canudos (1893–97), and the “New State”
in the case of Caldeirão (1936) and Pau de Colher (1938). Due to the Canudos
campaign, this “fierce religion” abandoned the caatinga1 to fill the pages of the
newspapers and fuel the debate amongst the intellectual elite on the subject of
the place of masses in the public life of the country. The increased visibility of
populations mostly ignored until then brought about the need to acknowledge
their difference – their “otherness” – and to understand it “scientifically”. With

* I am grateful to FAPESP for financial support. I am also grateful to Dr. Paola Franciosi for her
critical reading of this paper.
1 Type of desert vegetation common in northeastern Brazil.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004316454_005

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The Missionary Roots of Rural Messianic Movements 75

the publication of Os Sertões, by Euclydes da Cunha,2 the movement of the

Conselheiristas3 provided the pattern for later studies on all socio-religious
movements of northeastern Brazil and the country as a whole. This is why for
a long time these movements were “explained” from a biological and environ-
mental perspective, as was typical of the initial phase of social sciences in
Brazil.4
In addition to medicine, physical anthropology, and human geography,
other sciences were deployed to analyze the phenomenon, trying to explain it
“scientifically”, like sociology and anthropology, more or less influenced by
Marxist or Durkheimian theories. The movements could thus be categorized
as pre-political forms of social struggle,5 or the result of anomie in “rural”6
so­cieties, and so on. Apparently, the religious, the symbolic, did not have the
same status as the political, the social, and the economic with regard to expla-
nations. From the clinical to the sociological approach, from the authoritarian
to the liberal-paternalist, until the Marxist, the terminology as well as the
resulting explanations only defined the “other” as barbarian and incompre-
hensible, sertanejo and underdeveloped, unable to adopt the language of
reason and bound to “alienated” expressions that were not acknowledged as a
proper system for interpreting the world. Starting in the 1970s and 80s, the
interest in folk Catholicism awakened among anthropologists and sociologists
of religion – politically engaged in the fight for democratization – led them to
criticize the conclusions of previous works and changed the direction of stud-
ies to focus instead on understanding social issues from the point of view of
the actors. This pointed out the need for a closer study of “Catolicismo popular”
in its expressive and symbolic aspects, with the aim of understanding peasant

2 Euclydes da Cunha, Os sertões (Campanha de Canudos) (Rio de Janeiro: Laemmert, 1902).

3 Followers of Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, commonly known as Antônio Conselheiro
(1828–1897), who led the Revolta de Canudos.
4 Still in 1963, for example, Waldemar Valente, Misticismo e Região. Aspectos do Sebastianismo
nordestino (Recife: ASA Pernambuco, 1986 [1963]) ascribed the psychological inclination to
mysticism to the prevalence of the “schizothymic type”. In his famous essay from 1946, Josué
de Castro linked the phenomenon of “fanaticism” to the lack of B complex affecting the bio-
chemistry of the brain and inducing “serious nervous disorders”. Josué de Castro, Geografia
da fome (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1967 [1946]).
5 This line of thought, inaugurated by Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms
of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester: 1959), was resumed
in Brazil by Rui Facó, Cangaceiros e Fanáticos (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1965).
6 Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz, O Messianismo no Brasil e no Mundo (São Paulo: Dominus
Editora, 1965).

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76 Pompa

“religious ideology” as a semantic universe through which the material world

got its meaning.7
From this perspective, the “messianic” manifestations in the northeast of
Brazil can only be understood through the symbolic system of folk sertanejo
Catholicism, which is not just a component of these religious movements, but
its logical basis and its meaningful language. In this “Culture of the End of the
World”, apocalyptic and penitential religious practice is a way of “reading” the
world. The chance of changing history and inaugurating a new world is aligned
precisely with this vision. From a historical perspective, then, the key issue is
understanding the genesis and the cultural development of this Catholicism:
After all, the religion of the Brazilian sertão is, in the words of Bastide, “so
tragic, so wounded, in a land where drought portrays images of the Final
Judgment, and the ruddy baroque black or white angels give way to the angels
of extermination”.8
Why do messianic expectations motivate pilgrimages, and penances in the
northeast of the country even today? Studies of Brazilian rural religious move-
ments often underline the “Sebastianist” trait of messianism. This observation,
however, does not go beyond the simple acknowledgement of the presence, to
a greater or lesser extent, of the myth regarding the return of King Sebastian
[Dom Sebastião] brought by the Portuguese colonizers; the symbolic horizon of
Sebastianism becomes just another element of a typological definition – and
particularly tautological: Portuguese Sebastianism inspires rural messia­nism
in Brazil; thus, it is Sebastianist. This explanation is probably based on what
Walnice Nogueira Galvão defines as the irresistible bias of Brazilian intellec-
tual culture to represent the sertão as a feudal universe.9
There is no answer (or rather, the question is not raised) to questions about
the historical reasons for the persistence of this myth, powerful enough to
mobilize multitudes of peasants in the Brazilian sertão so many centuries after
the battle of Ksar el-Kebir.
Social sciences have long since abandoned the idea of cultural contact in
terms of “acculturation”, i.e., a clash between monolithic and impermeable
blocks where the weakest, or “archaic”, side ends up losing elements of its tra-
dition and incorporating foreign elements. Cultural contact is a continuous
flow of changes and readjustments in the symbolic systems on both sides so

7 The most significant works from this approach are Alba Zaluar, “Os movimentos messiânicos
brasileiros: uma leitura”, BIB 6 (1979): 9–21; Duglas Teixeira Monteiro, Os errantes do novo sé-
culo (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1974).
8 Roger Bastide, Brésil, terre de contrastes (Paris: Hachette, 1957), 110–111.
9 Walnice Nogueira Galvão, As formas do falso (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1986), 12.

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The Missionary Roots of Rural Messianic Movements 77

that they can continue to make sense of a world which is never the same as it
was when the systems were formed. If it is true that the Sebastianist myth
shapes most of these movements, we cannot be content with this mere consid-
eration: We need to retrace the possible course of the social and symbolic
mediations that allowed the penetration of this symbolism – as an aspect of a
much broader set – and its reproduction and autonomous re-elaboration in
the Brazilian rural setting.
In other words, if it is understood that messianism, millenarianism, and
Judeo-Christian apocalyptic beliefs penetrated colonial Brazil, it is necessary
to investigate how and why these beliefs did so and acquired their specific
nature in the northeast sertão, which shape peasant religious practices to this
day.

The New World and the End of the World

A vast historical and anthropological literature investigates the prophetic

yearnings that inspired the Age of Discovery: from the mighty salvific sugges-
tions that moved Columbus himself, to the millenarian vocation of the
Franciscans in New Spain.10
These millenarian instances deeply affected interpretation of the indige-
nous anthropological alterity as genus angelicum, the virgin people with which
a church free of sins would be rebuilt, and the Kingdom of God would be estab-
lished on earth on the eve of the end of time. The religious circles of the
sixteenth century, mainly the Franciscans, saw in the discovery of other peo-
ples (for many, the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel) the signs of the
fullness of time and the coming of the “eleventh hour” (Matthew 20:1). In his
Historia Eclesiástica Indiana, for example, Jerônimo de Mendieta wrote that
the Church would regenerate itself with the indigenous people of the Antilles,
living without sin in earthly paradise,11 and Toribio Motolinía,12 one of the first
twelve Franciscan “apostles” sent to New Spain, preached the urgency of con-

10 Marcel Bataillon, “Nouveau Monde et fin du Monde”, L’Education nationale 32 (1952): 3–6;
John L. Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: 1956); Alain Milhou, Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica en el ambiente francis-
canista español (Valladolid, 1983), Cuadernos Colombistas XI.
11 Jerónimo de Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana (Madrid: BAE: 1973 [1596]), 103 pas-
sim.
12 Toribio de Benavente Motolínia, Historia de los indios de la Nueva España, ed. Georges
Baudot (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1985).

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78 Pompa

verting the gentiles in the imminence of the end. Perhaps this is why there
were unprecedented episodes of mass baptism in Mexico.13
Before Mendieta’s Historia (1596), De temporibus novissimis, by José de
Acosta (1590), was published in Rome. In this work, the Jesuit reformulated the
relationship between America and the Apocalypse, showing that the end of
the world was not imminent, as still several were the lands “in quibus non est
fides christiana proposita” (where the Christian faith is not widespread).14
On the other hand, it was impossible and dangerous to try to calculate the
date of the Apocalypse (as Columbus himself had done in his letter to the
Catholic kings in 1501, declaring that no more than 155 years were left before
the end of time and of the world), because the preaching of the Gospel among
all the peoples on earth did not mean a real “Spiritual conquest”. This review of
the scriptures in the light of American reality, which challenged all the most
radical eschatological hopes, is linked to the Inquisition trial of the “millenar-
ian” Dominican Francisco de la Cruz, burnt at the stake in 1578, which Acosta
had followed as advisor for the Inquisition. Francisco de la Cruz, imbued with
the ideas of Joachim of Fiore, prophesied the destruction of the Western
Church due to its sins and its relocation to Lima, New Jerusalem, where he
would reign as pope and king.15
Acosta’s criticism is to be viewed within the framework of the theological
debate internal to the counter-reformist Church, and even to the Society of
Jesus itself, a debate stemming precisely from the experience of evangelization
in the Americas in the nearly a century since their discovery. In 1585, for exam-
ple, the Jesuit Lope Delgado sent to Superior General Claudio Acquaviva a
work on Revelation. Following the advice of Acosta, the text was burned and
all that survives is a short summary and Acosta’s own censorship (“… e siento
que podría resultar mucho perjuicio de semejantes escritos e opiniones”).16
The destruction of Delgado’s work clearly shows the theological and politi-
cal choice made by the Jesuits. In political terms, opposing millenarian ideas
was definitely a reaffirmation of the strength of the Church, which did not
need to be shifted to the New World, nor did it want to see its long-term project
shattered by any apocalyptic vocation. This is why the messianic prophecies

13 Carmen Bernand, Serge Gruzinski, Histoire du Nouveau Monde, t. 2 (Paris: Fayard, 1993).

14 Apud Adriano Prosperi, America e apocalisse e altri saggi (Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligra-
fici internazionali, 1999), 17.
15 Jean Delumeau, Mille ans de bonheur. Une histoire du Paradis (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 243–
245. Here we find the notion of “emperor of the last days”, also typical of Sebastianism,
and of pastor angelicus, that will inspire Savonarola.
16 Apud Prosperi, America e apocalisse, 58

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The Missionary Roots of Rural Messianic Movements 79

began to attract the interest of the Inquisition (and continued to do so in the

following century).
Acosta is crucial to understand the reformulation and the success of the
missionary project of the Church in the New World. Therefore, De temporibus
novissimis must be read taking into account the whole of his work, which even
in its titles reveals all the concerns of the Society, of the Church, and of the
times: De promulgando Evangelio apud barbaros, sive de procuranda indorum
salute (“Promulgating the Gospel among barbarians, or the search for salvation
of the indigenous people”), from 1589, and the Historia Natural y Moral de las
Indias, from 1590. This is a global rethinking of the role of religion after a hun-
dred years of evangelization: a translation of the missionary experience in
anthropological terms, where evangelization becomes a comprehensive cul-
tural project for the religious and civil re-conquering of humankind. The
contemplation of the Jesuits on the subject of evangelization and its results in
the Americas led to a rethinking of missionary practice within the broader
framework of the new philosophy of history of the counter-reformist Church.
Time could not be over, because God’s design was not complete; the Council of
Trent reacted against the apocalyptic fears aroused by Luther as the Antichrist
by systematizing the orthodoxy and by developing a detailed plan for external
and internal catechesis, of which the main pillar was no longer baptism, but
confession. Therefore, the mass baptisms practiced by the Franciscans in
Mexico were of no use, according to Acosta, “before they know the Christian
doctrine moderately, and without them showing repentance for their criminal
and superstitious life”.17
In these words, we can recognize the Jesuitical concerns all over the world,
from Japan to Brazil. The experience of the missions, along with the post-con-
ciliar position of the Church, less tolerant of all kinds of non-orthodox
interpretation of the scriptures, led to the reformulation of the missionary
project. In Brazil, the “inconstancy of the savage soul”18 of the tupinambá
indigenous people, so often deplored by the fathers of the Society, showed the
uselessness of mass baptisms and the need for intensive and systematic work
with the natives. And from the doctrinal point of view, baptism administered
without the necessary preparation was dangerous, in addition to being useless,
because the “return to paganism” of a baptized native meant the definite loss
of his soul.

17 José de Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute… apud Prosperi, 55.

18 See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “O mármore e a murta: sobre a inconstância da alma sel-
vagem”, Revista de Antropologia 35 (1993): 21–74.

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80 Pompa

The theological debate about catechesis had its origin in this reformulation
of the missionary project in relation to the native peoples, leading to a new
religious anthropology in which prophetic elements were not ruled out, but
rather brought into the construction and consolidation of a theology (and tele-
ology) of a providential history, into a “history of the future”, according to the
powerful definition by Antônio Vieira. This was not incompatible with the dic-
tate of the Council of Trent; on the contrary, it fulfilled it completely, fighting
heresy and implementing catechesis in a systematic way. The experience of
the missionary villages, the aldeias, was the greatest expression of this hope.

Natives and Jesuits in the Sertão

The Jesuitical penetration of the sertão with the goal of Christianization of the
natives and ministering to their souls and bodies started between the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. The Jesuits founded several missionary
aldeias in the sertão to care for the souls of the natives: the pagi tapuyarum, or
aldeias of the Tapuia,19 mostly clustered in the lower-middle region of the São
Francisco river (several of them close to the Capuchins), in the Itapicuru river
basin, and the sertão of Jacobinas. The concurrence with the period of worst
recrudescence of the “Barbarians’ War”20 is evident: The Jesuits were a key fac-
tor in the government strategy that envisaged, on one hand, setting up a
“barrier” of aldeias with “tame natives”, and, on the other hand, the control of
the pacified “Tapuia”. In fact, aldeias were founded also in the more faraway
sertões of Açu, Apodi (Rio Grande do Norte), and in Serra de Ibiapaba (Ceará).
The names of these aldeias – Massacará, Natuba, Jeremoabo, Itapicuru,
Jacobina, and others – are the same “remote locations” carefully listed by

19 The term ‘tapuia’ is not an ethnonym, but rather a colonial category. The ‘tapuia’ world
was conceived since the beginning of the colony as opposed to the Tupi world: a fierce
inhabitant of the sertão, the ‘Tapuia’ is the radical human alterity in all the literature of
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In the chronicles, the remarkable cultural homo-
geneity of the Tupis in the coast, is opposed to the remarkable cultural and linguistic
diversity of the peoples of the sertão: the Tapuias are people “whose language is impeded”
(“de lingua travada”), according to the famous Jesuitical expression.
20 In the second half of the seventeenth century, the “tapuia” indians Janduí, Kariri, Ariú,
Icó, Payayá, Paiacú, among others, were the main actors of the so-called “Barbarians’ War”,
a war of extermination meant to allow the advance of the livestock frontier in the vast
semiarid region between the east of Maranhão and the north of Bahia, including part of
Ceará, Piauí, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, and Pernambuco. See Pedro Puntoni, A Guerra
dos Bárbaros (São Paulo: Hucitec, 2002).

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The Missionary Roots of Rural Messianic Movements 81

Euclydes da Cunha from which, two centuries later, pilgrimages departed

towards Canudos, never to return. This experience is recorded mainly in the
letters and reports sent by the missionaries from the faraway sertões to Bahia
and Rome, which reveal the presence of some significant elements of cateche-
sis in the construction of the penitential-apocalyptic horizon of the sertão,
through a continuous and complex process of interpretations and mediations.
The most significant factors in the construction of sertanejo penitentialism
pertain to the mythical-ritual missionary symbolism, i.e., the preaching and
the liturgies of catechetical practice. The priests “recognized” in some native
rituals the evidence of the presence of God and seized on them: confession (or
at least what was seen as a native form of confession by the missionaries), heal-
ing, and rejection of the “devil” (funeral rituals replaced by exorcism). Above
all, the missionaries took up the key prerogatives of “sorcerers”, the “major
antagonists” of the priests, in the words of Nóbrega:21 prophecy and the power
to summon rain.
With regard to prophecy, just as shamans predicted fortune in hunting and
prosperity in the harvest and health, missionaries become prophets of death
for those who did not submit to Christ. The following letter is part of the narra-
tives related to the Jesuitical fight against an indigenous celebration that had
been forbidden in the missionary villages but was performed in secret:

A short while later, they rebuilt the chapel hidden in the jungle and
secretly organized a celebration to heal a girl. Late in the evening, they
called those who sang of vain things [the shamans]. Having caught them
in the act at night and suspecting vain ceremonies, I did predict the death
of the girl if they would not stop. They insisted on carry on the celebration.
And she, once purified at the holy fountain [baptized], went to heaven
two days later.22

21 Manuel da Nóbrega, Informações das terras do Brasil, in Cartas dos Primeiros Jesuítas no
Brasil (1538–1553) ed. Serafim Leite (São Paulo: Comissão do IV centenário da Cidade de
São Paulo, 1954–57) I Vol., 150.
22 “Nam aliquanto post de integro aediculam nemoribus occultam readificarunt, festumque
pro restituenda puellae valitudine clam indixerunto. Nocte cantores vanissimos periclitanti
adhibuere. Hos noctu cum deprehendissem, vanas quoque ceremonias suspicatus. Hos noctu
cum deprehendissem, vanas quoque ceremonias suspicatus, ni cessarenr, puellae mortem
praedixi. Festum illi peragere nitebantur. At illa lustrali fonte expiata post biduum in coela
abiit” (“Annuae Litterae provinciae brasiliensis ab anno 1670 usque ad 1679”, Arquivum
Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Bras. 9, f. 241, my emphasis).

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82 Pompa

But it was in summoning the rain, another feature of shamanic activity cru-
cial to the people of the sertão, that the priests really extended their power.
Several letters relate stories of miraculous rains blessing the villages of the
sertão after prayers and penitence, from the time of the first entradas [surveys]
of Father Francisco Pinto – whom the Potiguar Indians addressed as “Lord of
the Rain” – until the last years of the missions in the sertão. The main concern
of the people of the sertão – drought – was soon integrated into the Christian
liturgy, in which the priest was the mediator between the natives and God in
the quest for salvation. Self-flagellation – “penitencia de disciplina” – had an
important role in these rituals; the priests themselves practiced it, and it was
fervently adopted in the aldeias.
The letters of the missionaries relate how eagerly natives underwent self-
flagellation during Holy Week:

Throughout the year, quite a few, purified through the confession of their
sins and renewed through Communion, practice Christian piety; for the
sky without rain, for the upsurge of smallpox, in the chapel they implore
the divine intervention, carry out public supplications and during Holy
Week flagellate themselves with hard whips for Christ the Lord.23

Another important element of this “crossbred” religious practice created in the

aldeias of the sertão was confession. Documents show that the latter was
administered to the indigenous people with great profusion, often in place of
the baptisms they were asking for. From the theological perspective, the inad-
equacy of baptism was clear: Sin among the Indians was not just the result of
original sin or of the battle between good and bad angels; as men, the natives
could exert free will (and this is why they frequently “went back to their former
superstitions”). Therefore, access to full Christianity could only happen
through confession, the deep examination of the conscience, which Jesuits
were great partisans of, as seen in their own Spiritual Exercises. One of the
reasons for this specificity is definitely the strengthening of the confession sac-
rament in the midst of the theological counter-reformist debate about the
mission and the need of what Adriano Prosperi called the “court of conscience”,24

23 “Per anni tempora non pauci, suorum confessione peccatorum expiati et sacra comunione
refecti, christianam pietatem tentantur; impluvio coelo, variolisque saevientibus, in sacella
divina opem (aferri) implorant; publicas suplicationes instituunt; et per hebdomadam maio-
rem divis in verberibus Christi Domini Cruciatibus indolent” (“Annuae Litterae ex Brasilia
anno 1693”, ARSI, Bras.9, f. 384).
24 Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, Confessori, Missionari (Torino: Ein-
audi, 1995).

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The Missionary Roots of Rural Messianic Movements 83

i.e., the construction of the notion of sin through precise doctrinal options
such as the strengthening of the confession sacrament and the elaboration of
confessionals as catechesis instruments. The Jesuits were unrivaled in this, in
Europe as well as in the New World. If in the Catholic pre-Tridentine tradition
“general confession”, used mainly by the Franciscans, was a synonym of an easy
and brief confession, “generic” by definition, in the Jesuit practice it was a com-
prehensive examination of conscience that included a person’s whole life,
without any limitation to the times of the liturgical year.
The theological justification encountered, in the case of confession, a sym-
bolic indigenous justification, generating once again a switch between different
systems of meaning. In fact, some documents show that among the Tapuia
there was traditionally something similar to confession. For example, in a let-
ter describing the “superstitions” of the Tapuia and the deunculi [little gods]
they believed in, a missionary adds: “… they make some incomprehensible
prayers and confess their small faults (sua parca confitentur) with confused
cries”.25
Another reason for the emphasis on “general confession” can be found in
that apocalyptic-millenarian view which characterized, as we have seen, the
spiritual conquest of the New World: To rebuild the world in accordance with
God’s plan, a genus angelicum, or virgin population, was necessary. This idea,
never abandoned by the missionaries, fostered their struggle against the devil
and his agents, the sorcerers among Tupi and Tapuia Indians.
Hence, possibly, the constant and theatrically baroque repetition of the sac-
rifice of Christ, a symbol of atonement and purification, and the self-flagellations,
mass confessions, and miraculous repentances in articulo mortis of inveterate
sinners, which the missionaries liked so much. All of this in an “apocalyptic”
scenario of wars, epidemics, famine, enslavement, and forced relocations,
where the end of the world happened every day.
This is why, in several missionary documents, we can find extracts similar to
the following:

On Holy Thursday, to increase their enthusiasm even more, they all clean
the blemishes of sins through confession, and are reborn in heavenly
nourishment. In the morning, they are taught about the ineffable love of
Christ for all people, afterwards the sacred host is exposed in a very sump-
tuous manner, to which they all contributed spontaneously with their
money. Not a small number stand guard during the night before the holy
Sacrament. During the whole night, the Lord’s passion is revisited in tears

25 Letter from P. Jacob Roland to P. Geral Oliva (ARSI, Bras. 3(2), f. 72).

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84 Pompa

and people listen carefully to everything, explained in the Brazilian lan-

guage. The piety of some women should also be mentioned, who just like
the men, run around the village scourging themselves until they bleed.26

All these elements remain and are reinforced, as we will see, under the
Capuchin catechesis in the following centuries, until the symbolic nucleus of
the sertanejo apocalypse is constituted. In all the so-called “rural” messianic
movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we find prolonged
drought as a sign of the end of the world. The preaching is marked by the idea of
punishment for the sins of mankind in the search for atonement through self-
flagellation, the capacity of summoning rain as a characteristic of the leader, or
of the expectations formed around him, and finally, mass confessions.
Capuchin preaching, which happened in parallel to that in the Jesuitical
aldeias of São Francisco, replaced the latter after the expulsion of the Jesuits in
1759. Even after the end of the experience of the missionary villages in the
sertão, the legacy of this religious horizon was maintained, in the construction
of the caboclo culture, born of the project of integrating indigenous people
into the rural population, which had been established by the so-called
“Diretório dos Índios”, Directorate of Indians, of 1757.
The decline of indigenous people’s catechesis corresponded to the intensifi-
cation of mobile catechesis by the Italian Capuchins, who, at the end of the
eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, revisited the paths
traveled by the Jesuits in their itinerant preaching amidst the sertanejo
populations.

“Caboclo” Catechesis

Starting in the mid-eighteenth century, the Capuchin sources shift the focus of
attention from the indigenous aldeias to another modality of missions among
the sertanejo populations, whose most complete expression is represented by

26 “In quinta feria hebdomadae sanctiori maior ad augetur fervor omnes noxarum maculas
confessione abstergunt, et coelesti gabulo reoriantur. Mane habetur (?) in enarrabili Christi
erga homines amore, postea exponitur sacra hostia in more pereleganti, ad cuius fabricam
omnes suos sponte nummos (sic) impenderant. Non pauci ante augustissimum sacramen-
tum armas pernactant in custiodiam. Noctu tota Domini passio interlacrymandum ruolitur,
quae omnia, cum brasilico idiomate explicentur, auditores auscultant perattentius. Non est
merito reticenda aliquarum foeminarum pietas, quae se virili more induentes, ac per pagum
discurrentes, usque ad sanguinem terga lacerant verberibus”. (“Annuae Litterae provinciae
brasiliae ab anno 1665 usque ad 1670”, ARSI, Bras. 9, f. 204).

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The Missionary Roots of Rural Messianic Movements 85

the “Holy Missions” that were at their peak in the nineteenth century. These
were local adaptations of a model practiced in Italy under the dictates of the
Council of Trent, which consisted of spectacular and theatrical missions
among the grassroots classes. In its basic structure, the holy mission lasted
eight to ten days. On the night of the arrival the “strong sermon” was preached,
and it was supposed to “show the severity of sin, the essence of offending God
and its consequences in the social plan, and the exact picture of eternal
punishments”;27 later, confessions were carried out throughout the night while
the people sang holy chants. The outline of this structure is found in a regula-
tion from 1864 attributed to the missionaries of Nossa Senhora da Penha, in
Pernambuco, who systematize the practices of the holy missions. There are
indications such as “build churches and cemeteries”, “sing about some who are
blessed”, “take the staff in your hand”, and leave right after the apostolic bless-
ing on the last day of the mission.28 A remarkable outgrowth of the devotional
missions spearheaded by Capuchins – such as those of Apollonio da Todi, act-
ing in the region in the last decades of the eighteenth century to the first of the
nineteenth century – was the construction or reconstruction of churches,
cemeteries, dams, walls, etc. The effort of the “apostle of the sertão”, but also of
all other Capuchins, in this sense, resulted in a population inflow around the
arraiais (villages) and, consequently, in the creation of new settlements.
Among others, this is exactly the case of Monte Santo, which originated from
the construction, starting in 1785, of a sanctuary on a hill “similar to the Calvary
of Jerusalem”. A letter from the friar29 dated around 1820 contains a chronicle
of the mission, surrounded from the beginning by a miraculous atmosphere:
an extraordinary tempest, which is only appeased after several invocations to
Christ; a rainbow appearing above the sanctuary, the curing of diseases. In the
midst of a state of “effervescence” of the devout, the key role of penitence is
highlighted as well as that of the whole symbolic set of Passion; in addition
divine justice is reported – a vicar dies suddenly because he stole alms.
The climax of the mission was the penitence procession, where missionar-
ies and their followers made long journeys accompanied by preaching centered
on the ideas of punishment, hell, and the apocalypse, along with many confes-
sions (on the basis of which, as in the time of the Jesuits, the assessment of the

27 Modesto R. Taubaté, OFM. Como pregaremos as Santas Missões (São Paulo: Convento da
Imaculada Conceição, 1937), 10–11.
28 Regulamento que se tem observado e se deve observar dos missionários deste Hospício de
Nossa Senhora da Penha de Pernambuco, em o tempo de suas missões. Manuscript.
29 Published in Balthazar da Silva Lisboa, Anais do Rio de Janeiro, Vol. 6 (1837), 233–239.

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86 Pompa

mission was carried out). Any circumstance – not only Holy Week – consti-
tuted an occasion for such processions, very common still today in the sertão.
These same elements are found later in the pilgrimages of António
Conselheiro, Severino Tavares, the beato Lourenço, and so many other miracle-
workers and prophets from the sertão, who took missionaries as archetypal
figures with their itinerant and penitential preaching: a few of them raised
chapels and cemeteries, wore the garment, walked with a staff in their hand,
preached, confessed.30 Just like the travels of the mobile missions and the holy
missions constitute the model for the wandering sermons of the prophets of
the end of the world, the building of “cities of God”, implicit in the foundation
of the Jesuitical missions and the Capuchin sanctuaries also converged in the
practices of construction of the “holy villages” of peasant utopias. In the same
manner, the particular characteristics of sertanejo Catholicism, based on the
dichotomy of heaven and hell, along with the fear of punishment and yearning
for salvation – as well as the terrible prophecies about the end of the world –
also have in Capuchin preaching – and Jesuitical previously – their referential
horizon, if not their matrix. We must remember the prophecy, repeated count-
less times by the hagiography of Friar Clemente de Andorno, who dying in the
pulpit poisoned by the altar wine predicted the sinking of Mount Tremedal,
which would be transformed into a lake.31 Here we can find the matrix of
prophesies about the “sertão that will become the sea”.
The holy missions appear as a true “civilization landmark”, the way the “first
mass” was in colonial times. These missionaries resumed the system of
Jesuitical “entries” and their tradition of penitential rituals and apocalyptic
sermons.
The practice of self-flagellation reappears, for example, in the case of Friar
João de Romano, a missionary in Congo who, in his passage through Bahia,
inflamed the faithful by presenting himself with a rope around his neck and
concluding the preaching with self-flagellation. The sermons of the Holy
Missions, on the other hand, have as a central pillar the concept of sin and hell
and the dichotomy of damnation and salvation. This is what we find for

30 It is worth recalling another prototypical character of rural Catholicism in the sertão hav-
ing not a monastic but a secular origin: Father Mestre Ibiapina, founder of the famous
“Charity House” widespread around the northeast in the mid-nineteenth century. See
Eduardo Hoornaert, Crônica das Casas de Caridade fundadas pelo Padre Ibiapina (São
Paulo: Loyola, 1981); Celso Mariz, Ibiapina, um Apóstolo do Nordeste (João Pessoa: União
Editora, 1942); Georgette Desrochers and Eduardo Hoornaert (eds.), Pe. Ibiapina e a Igreja
dos Pobres (São Paulo: CEHILA – Edições Paulinas, 1984)
31 Fidelis M. Primiero, OFM, Capuchinhos em terra de Santa Cruz (São Paulo: Livraria Mar-
tins, 1942), 155.

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The Missionary Roots of Rural Messianic Movements 87

instance in a “Sermon that can be used before starting the Holy Mission”, by
Friar João Baptista de Cingoli, whose manuscript is in the Piedade Convent in
Salvador. The regulation suggested that among the sermons there should be “a
pause with singing holy chants”. These chants, deeply marked by penitential
character and a yearning for salvation, were published in 1923 by the Capuchins
of Bahia to be used by the missionaries, and even today are known and sung
during celebrations, mainly in the Passion rituals, such as the “nourishing of
souls” or the processions of penitents that I personally recorded when research-
ing the Pau de Colher movement.32
Another extraordinary document, which also belongs to the collection at
the Piedade convent, is the registration of the Missões volantes [short missions]
performed by the Capuchins in different places between 1890 and 1933,
accounting for their activities in the field. There are many interesting elements
in this huge text, however, what deserves to be highlighted for our purposes is
the issue of “fanaticism”, in an unprecedented version dated 1891. An extract of
the records tells the story of a “mad and malicious vicar” who had “seduced”
the “provincial people” with a “false doctrine” which consisted in preaching
about the imminence of the end of the world and the need for re-baptizing
children. We have no further record of the development of what was clearly a
religious movement. However, we know about the end of the vicar, Father
Felizmino da Costa Fontes, according to a note in the margin of the manu-
script): He was locked up in a mental hospital because of his “fanaticism and
foolishness”.33 The first element of interest is the fact that an apocalyptic ambi-
ence, encouraged by the missionaries since the time of the Jesuits, ends up
permeating the northeastern Catholic horizon, in symbolic circularity, in
which the tensions and struggles for power are very clear. There is a religious
movement around the vicar, several years before Canudos, which shows that
folk religion in the sertão was not necessarily always managed in an autono-
mous manner by the lay agents, as can be seen very clearly indeed in the
phenomenon of Juazeiro do “Padre Cícero”.34 On the other hand, the compilers
(missionaries) of the records of the missions defined as “mad” the vicar (secu-

32 See Cristina Pompa, “Memória do Fim do Mundo”, Revista USP 82 (2009): 69–87.
33 Registro das Missões 1890–1933. Manuscript. Arquivo Provincial de Nossa Senhora da Pie-
dade. Cx. E/A3. The reference is to cataloging in 2002, when the research was carried out;
at the time, the cataloguing was being reorganized.
34 Studies on Father Cícero are countless; here it is sufficient to quote the most interesting
in our opinion, from the historical and anthropological point of view: Ralph Della Cava,
Miracle at Joazeiro (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970); Antônio Mendes da
Costa Braga, Padre Cícero: sociologia de um Padre, antropologia de um Santo (Bauru, SP:
EDUSC, 2008); Duglas Teixeira Monteiro, “Um Confronto entre Juazeiro, Canudos e Con-

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88 Pompa

lar) who had appropriated their own language. This is clearly the same
circumstance that would be established later (1895) in Canudos, when the
Capuchin Friar Evangelista de Monte Marciano, sent to undertake a Holy
Mission with the followers of the movement of António Conselheiro, accused
them of “fanaticism” and was expelled from the area with cries of “republican!”
and “mason!” The conclusion of the episode was the report in which the mis-
sionary denounced the movement to the political and ecclesiastical authorities,
a report considered by many the main cause of the strong military reaction
against the arraial.35 Going back to the episode involving the vicar registered
in the record of the missions, the second significant element is the language
used by the author of the document: He defines the vicar as a “false sanctity”.
The echoes of missionary action in colonial times are clear here, when the
Jesuits and shamans fought the “battle for the monopoly of sanctity”, and the
missionary paradigm was constituted by the opposition of truth and false-
hood.36 On the other hand, the “false sanctity” of the vicar leads to “re-baptism”,
as attested in the “indigenous heresy” of the “Sanctity of Jaguaripe”.37

Conclusions

The apocalyptic-penitential horizon is the particular characteristic of the reli-

gious practice of the Brazilian northeast in which the socio-religious
movements known as “rural messianic movements” of the northeast were
born. This horizon, however, is not due to the “nature” of the people of the
sertão, as most of the studies seem to show, but is the result of a complex his-
torical process, which has missionary preaching as its central pillar.
At its origin, in the background of the civilization project, the mission consti-
tuted a theologically oriented practice, and suffered continuous readjustments
and changes due to the results of catechesis, culminating in the institution of
the Indian missions, an original product of the colony in Portuguese America.
The Jesuitical principles of “adapting the rules” and “tolerance towards

testado”, in História Geral da Civilização Brasileira, ed. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (Rio de

Janeiro/São Paulo: DIFEL, 1977), Tome III, Vol. 2.
35 João Evangelista de Monte Marciano, OFM, Relatório ao Arcebispo da Bahia sobre Antônio
Conselheiro e seu Séquito no Arraial de Canudos (Bahia: Typographia do Correio de Notí-
cias, 1895).
36 See Cristina Pompa, “Profetas e Santidades selvagens. Missionários e Caraíbas no Brasil
Colonial”, Revista Brasileira de História 21.40 (2001): 177–195.
37 See Ronaldo Vainfas, A heresia dos índios. Catolicismo e rebeldia no Brasil colonial (São
Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995).

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The Missionary Roots of Rural Messianic Movements 89

violations” were among the key axes, having great consequences on the forma-
tion of a “hybrid culture” in the aldeias, where they created Catholic rituals
“interpreted” by indigenous people through the translation of Christian prin-
ciples into native codes.
In practice, the missionaries gave preference to exacerbated penitentialism,
within a historical context in which death was a constant presence in daily life.
It was based on this view that the indigenous people reread their myths and
rituals and transformed them, incorporating and translating the new reality
into an unprecedented religious horizon, which they carried with them when
mixing with the rest of the population and when building, along with the lat-
ter, “cabocla culture”.
This Catholicism continued to develop autonomously after the end of the
Jesuitical missions in the middle of the eighteenth century, being periodically
reinforced by the visits of Capuchins, who mostly dedicated themselves to
indigenous peoples’ catechesis as well as to the rural missions, with a clear
preference for the latter. Capuchin preaching among the sertanejo population
was also characterized by strong penitentialism, which had its peak in the Holy
Missions.
The Holy Missions are the mirror of the sertanejo worldview, where the cru-
cial moment of Christian culture, the resurrection of Christ, does not exist. The
Holy Week preached and experienced in the sertão, from the time of the
Jesuitical missions to the “rural” movements, only reminds us of the Passion,
i.e., the death, and not Easter, in other words, the exemplary return to life,
which redeemed death and human sins once and for all. Thus, sins without
redemption accumulate until they provoke natural “ends of the world” in the
northeast: droughts and floods. The conception of life as a sin leads to the trig-
gering of a process that foresees the end of the world (as a punishment) and
then builds it (as redemption). In the encounter between missionary preach-
ing and the “cabocla” elaboration of a view of history as a permanent death
threat, to be exorcized through penitence rituals, is the cultural root of that
story without rescue, continually exposed to apocalyptic risk, which perme-
ates folk sertanejo religious practice, in which salvation is not something given
a priori by the sacrifice of Christ, but something to be built.

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