Millenarian Slaves? The Santidade de Jaguaripe and Slave Resistance in the Americas

Abstract

RUMORS OF A NEW RELIGION SPREAD through the forests, parishes, and sugar plantations of the Bay of All Saints in the hinterland of Salvador da Bahia, capital of the Portuguese colony of Brazil, in the 1580s. By 1585, scores of Indians, many Africans, and virtually all of the mixed race Mamelucos (the offspring of Portuguese men and Indian women) had heard of a congregation in the wilderness where participants had constructed their own temple, practicing rituals through which they achieved a state of holiness known as santidade. Mamelucos who joined the sect later described baptisms, prayers, speaking in tongues, drinking the sacred smoke of tobacco, and falling into trances verging on delirium. Believers proclaimed that on earth their crops would grow of their own accord, their vegetables would be bigger than of others, and they would not want for food or drink. Furthermore, they proclaimed that God was coming now to free them from their captivity and to make them lords of the white people and that they would fly to the sky, while those who did not believe ... would be converted into birds and animals of the forest. When some of the believers came from the wilderness and built a village and a temple on a sugar plantation in Jaguaripe, on the southern fringes of the bay, Indians, Africans, and Mamelucos from all over the bay came to be baptized by its female leader, known as Mother of God. From its center in Jaguaripe, the religious frenzy spread to other parishes along the bay where believers embraced the sect and created their own congregations. Faced with a labor crisis on the sugar plantations and a conversion crisis in the missions, the governor of Bahia, the Jesuits, the bishop, and the city council of Salvador joined forces to destroy the sect.'

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