Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Developing
the Dead
Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo
Diana Espírito Santo
University Press of Florida
Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton
Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers · Sarasota
Copyright 2015 by Diana Espírito Santo
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
20 19 18 17 16 15 6 5 4 3 2 1
The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the
State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University,
Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida
International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida,
University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North
Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida.
The data described and analyzed in this book derive from ethnographic
fieldwork carried out for the duration of twenty months between 2005
and 2013, with the bulk executed consecutively between August 2005
and December 2006, followed by month-long trips in 2008, 2009,
2011, and 2013. Having carried out neither a pilot project nor a field
reconnaissance trip prior to my arrival, I was relatively “green” on the
ground from the outset. Most of the sparse existing literature on Cu-
ban espiritismo was in Spanish—and archived in Cuba, which made
preparing the project a difficult, even speculative, affair. As a result
of this gap, I read extensively on Brazilian and Puerto Rican spiritism
and any literature I could find on Afro-Cuban religious practices and
their history, searching for clues in this fascinating body of work that
pointed to the role of espiritistas in Cuba’s religious complex. While
I had initially applied to the doctoral program at University College
London with a proposal to research Portuguese spiritist societies, a
task I had already informally begun prior to my application, I had a
change of heart early on, in great part due to my exposure to the en-
grossing ethnographic descriptions and analytical insights of my co-
supervisor, Martin Holbraad, on the Afro-Cuban divination cult of
Ifá. Intriguingly, Martin insisted that espiritismo was everywhere in
Cuba, that the muerto, the spirit of the dead, was an essential “grease”
in the Afro-Cuban religious machinery, and that espiritistas wielded
enormous, under-recognized influence, yet he could tell me very little
further. However, the ethnographic vagueness which surrounded con-
temporary espiritismo suggested that a challenge was at hand.
I had read about Afro-Brazilian cults to the dead and had a good
working knowledge of Candomblé, Brazil’s version of Santería, having
spent some time in Bahia in my early twenties. In comparison to Brazil,
x · Preface
This book is based partly on data collected and analyzed while in Lon-
don at University College and partly on further research conducted
and written up in Lisbon, first, at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais
(ICS-UL) and later at the Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antro-
pologia (CRIA, FSCH-UNL). As such I have two sets of funders whose
support I acknowledge and thank as being absolutely fundamental to
the writing of this book. In the first set are the Economic and Social
Research Council, the Royal Anthropological Institute, and UCL´s
Graduate School Research Fund. On the Lisbon end, I am grateful to
the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, who have funded my re-
search, both in Cuba and in Brazil, for the last five years. I would not
have had the opportunity to write this book had it not been for the rare
luxury of the large amounts of time and resources afforded by the FCT
and its research schemes. I know that I am truly lucky for having this
time, and I´ve tried to make the most of it. As such, I also thank the
ICS and CRIA for hosting me during this process.
I have people in three countries to thank for being a part of my
work, in one way or another. For simplicity’s sake, I will follow the ge-
ography of the order of events leading up to this book. And they start
in London at UCL. I am very indebted first and foremost to the two
very different people with whom I worked: Prof. Roland Littlewood
and Dr. Martin Holbraad. I thank Roland for believing in my work and
for generously sharing his experience and lucidity as an anthropologist
and theoretician with me, and I thank Martin for his brilliant guidance
and insight into my own material from the very beginning. Like many
others, I have been contaminated by his enthusiasm for a new kind of
anthropology, and I continue to be inspired by his great work on Cuba.
And Martin, it was also through you that I met Leonardo and Dorka in
xvi · Acknowledgments
1
“Do you believe in espiritismo?” I was asked the day after I arrived in
Havana. Joaquin, a taxi driver with a university degree in cybernetics
and an interest in the esoteric, hardly allowed me to answer before
adding, rhetorically, “But you do know that espiritismo is real, don’t
you, that it exists?” Making a passing reference to St. Augustine and
Plato on the limits of knowledge as he dropped me off at my casa par-
ticular [bed and breakfast] in Havana’s quiet Vedado neighborhood,
Joaquin gave me a final warning: “Not everything is real espiritismo.”
I was to hear this call for authenticity countless other times in Cuba,
one that seemed to place the burden of both scientific and spiritual
discernment on the researcher.
A few days later, as I lugged my bags into another cab en route to
my residence for the next fifteen months, a Soviet-bloc-type building
in the neighborhood of El Cerro, I encountered another inquisitive
driver. This one laughed when I told him I was in Cuba to “investi-
gate espiritismo.” “How can you investigate that?” he asked. I muttered
something about interviews and getting invited to rituals, and he sur-
prised me by responding that his own mother was an espiritista and
that he had often seen her possessed by spirits, illustrating by shaking
2 · Developing the Dead
in his seat. “How does that work, the spirits thing?” he asked, peering
intently at me in the rearview mirror. “What do you think actually
happens?” Shifting between belief, curiosity, and nervous parody, this
driver presented a vignette of the Cuban tendency to respect the intan-
gible, even among those who do not consider themselves fully fledged
creyentes [believers]: “No creo en nada, pero lo respeto” [I don’t believe
in anything, but I respect it (which in some cases can be read as “fear
it”)].
Encounters like these were daily staples of my stay in Havana. Ordi-
nary and to all appearances nonreligious Cubans were routinely atten-
tive to the unpredictable world of the dead and to its spokespersons in
the realm of the everyday—spirit mediums, known simply as espiritis-
tas. Many Cubans with whom I casually struck up conversations were
rich sources of stories of ghostly encounters: “I-met-an-espiritista-
once”-type narratives of spiritual salvation and renewed faith in the
existence el más allá, stories that reveal the intensity of “peripheral”
forms of knowledge well beyond the confines of the religious “house.”
Some had even won substantial sums in Havana’s underground lottery
system [the bolita] as a result of acting on messages from the dead,
received through visions, gut feelings, or dreams. Others warned of
the perils of ignoring such metaphysical contacts, invoking images of
sickness and bad luck. Indeed, moments of revelation seemed to play
a key role in generating a peculiar kind of consciousness of the dead
to which I was privy in my encounters. As one of my interviewees told
me, “Until that moment I always knew something existed, but I didn’t
believe.” According to my friend Dorka, in crisis (“cuando el zapato
aprieta”), everyone believes, including an old atheist Marxist uncle of
hers who pledged his devotion to the spirits and saints after his cancer
was cured.
But not all was drama. Among religious skeptics, experts, and be-
lievers alike, all manner of relatives, friends, and acquaintances were
mentioned during quotidian conversations about my research plans in
the city. “My aunt Blanca from Las Tunas is a tremendous espiritista,” I
was told after my arrival in El Cerro by Lourdes, a longstanding friend
of the family with whom I lived. “You should speak to her.” Lourdes
explained that spirit guides had urged Blanca to work as a medium,
despite the trying circumstances that were to follow her decision to
Spirits at the Crossroads of Belief and Pragmatism · 3
levels of existence: matter and spirit, living and dead beings. These
do not simply conflate in embodied experience; in other words, this
“self ” does not disappear into itself. It becomes an object to the person
inasmuch as bodily experience is not unified but often fragmented,
disjunctured, evidenced as being both of persons and spirits (cf. Will-
erslev 2007 for a similar reading). This also implies that phenomenolo-
gist Schutz’s notion of the self as “undivided” and “total” (1962, 216), as
ultimate author of its experience, has limits in its application to Cuban
espiritismo. The person becomes conscious of herself as the locus of
her spirits, therefore, precisely through the divisions and distinctions
she must make to tell herself from her spirits. The question then be-
comes: what are the rules for self-knowledge? Spirits may emerge as
selves in their own right via the person’s interaction with social others.
But is this all they are—bits of the “social self ”?
My contention in this book is that espiritistas are not just made via
sensorial, social, or material cues; rather, these cues reveal worlds of
spirits that are nurtured and instantiated through people but do not
reduce to them. Cuban espiritismo seems to be at the crossroads of a
number of cosmologies of the person, including nineteenth-century
European, Asian, Christian, and West African. On the one hand, es-
piritismo articulates a dualism of mind/spirit and body coherent with
early European spiritualist movements for which, with their Asiatic and
Indic influences, the material body was ultimately expendable, a gross
tool with which to progress infinitely in the real spiritual world. On the
other, espiritismo has absorbed the language of Afro-Cuban religion
and its vital forces that reveal the permeable nature and properties of
material things, as well as the agency of the body and its substances.
It dialogues with Afro-Cuban concepts of destiny, path, camino, and
character, as given by tutelary deities and oracular signs (see Panagi-
otopoulos 2011), and with classic Kardecist notions of free will, which
tally with Afro-Cuban beliefs that one’s fate is not determined but can
be helped. Further, it articulates Christian concerns with morality and
a supreme God, and with salvation, which is also a pervasive theme in
other Afro-Cuban religious milieus. There is also the possibility that
espiritismo’s concepts of self were influenced by the rise of Protestant-
ism in Cuba, indexing the country’s strong ties with the United States,
and with the new forms of moral self-awareness that these entailed (cf.
Pérez Jr. 1999).
Spirits at the Crossroads of Belief and Pragmatism · 15
One of the arguments I make (in a specific way in the next chapter
and more generally throughout the book) is that espiritismo allows for
the person or selfhood to be understood as having both horizontal and
vertical axes. On the one hand, it expresses a cosmology of ascension
and liberation, Kardecist-style: spirits “receive light” in order to elevate
themselves and get closer to the divine, even if it is unachievable. This is
a hierarchical cosmos. On the other, espiritismo thoroughly embraces
a horizontalization of selves through a multiplication of their “bits” in
worldly things: spirit-representation dolls, for instance, or Palo Mon-
te’s ritual recipients. It is a polytheistic cosmos, and thus self, “held
together from the inside,” as Handelman would put it (2008), tolerant
of uncertainty, transgression, porosity, and integration. In this juxta-
position there is a deep “psyche” or “self ” as well as a process-oriented
one, both needing to be framed within a single movement. A Freudian
psychoanalytic perspective would do less justice here than a transper-
sonal Jungian one (cf. Nuñez Molina 2006), for instance, where the
individuation process of the unconscious could be compared to the
development of individual spirits (as potentials). Another analogy is
biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of a “morphic” or “morphoge-
netic field” (1981, 1988), defined as a “probability structure” for de-
velopment, emerging historically, as patterns of formative causation
over time. Arguably similar to espiritismo’s sets of protective muertos,
morphic fields are essentially blueprints for becoming, invisible fields
of information that guide an organism in its development and yet do
not overdetermine it. The discipline of psychology itself provides in-
numerable other comparative and analogical sources, such as systems
psychology, or psychosynthesis, whereby selves are regarded as or-
ganic, evolving “systems” of relations. By positing these comparisons I
do not wish to discount the myriad historical, social, and philosophi-
cal influences on “self ” in Cuba but rather to provide an essentially
heuristic and multiple-conceptual frame with which to more faithfully
elucidate espiritismo’s “psychology” without merely reducing it to this.
16 · Developing the Dead
nels and otherwise. By 1993, smothered by helpless debt and hard cur-
rency deficit, Fidel Castro depenalized it. Other liberalizing measures
included allowing for limited private enterprise, seen, for example, in
the establishment of the casas particulares, whereby people could now
apply for licenses to rent out one or two rooms in their own homes;
the paladares, home-run restaurants with a small number of tables
catering to Cubans and later foreigners; and the agromercados, open-
air markets where farmers could now sell their surplus at a limited
margin of profit. Most significantly, Castro opened up his country to
tourism, including international joint ventures and partnerships, som-
berly informing citizens that he had been left with no other choice.
Capitalism was about to enter through the back door, as Rosendahl
has put it (1997, 162), opening a new can of worms for both Cuba’s
leadership and its inhabitants: “Any remaining residues of ‘Che’ Gue-
vara’s utopian vision of the ‘new man,’ who worked for the good of
society, not individual gain, were relegated to the dustbin of history,”
says Eckstein (2003, 235). Cuba became a society of two worlds: the
dollar (the Cuban peso convertible after 2004) and the national peso
cubano, and the ideals that these would generate. Cubans were not, in
principle, meant to mix with foreigners; the coexistence on the island
of socialists and capitalists was seen as a necessary but temporary ill,
to be attenuated by measures clearly demarking respective space. Until
the 2000s, Cubans were barred from hotels, tourist-only beaches, and
foreigner-designated pharmacies and shops (such as the diplotiendas,
shops once reserved for diplomats). Those Cubans who mingled were
regularly harassed and even jailed. But this separation was ultimately
hard to maintain. To the millions of visitors to Cuba every year were
added those of exchange programs, cultural and academic ventures,
and religious and initiatory tourism. Open to the world for the first
time since 1959, the Revolution’s austere segregation measures, and its
authority, began to crack.
Access to dollars and to foreigners became socially divisive and
often racially determined questions. White communities were gen-
erally better off during the crisis than black ones, and they still are,
due to historical immigration patterns and concomitant access to re-
mittances. Racial and social tensions ignited, placing the Revolution’s
myth of a raceless utopia under the spotlight. Gender biases in the
20 · Developing the Dead
level CDRs [Committees for the Defense of the Revolution], that the
state wielded its most psychologically and socially corrosive power.
The people became the watchdogs of the new state, the patrollers of
their own morality, with some disturbing results still visible today.
During most of their existence, the CDRs filtered crucial information
regarding religious and sexual orientations, illicit dealings, social con-
tacts, particularly foreign ones, and level of political participation. For
decades this information was employed by the state to bar individuals
from political, educational, and professional placements, to keep an
eye on potential subversives, and, in some cases, to mount campaigns
of persecution. It was a practice that contributed to a permanent state
of doble moral [double morality], or division between an individual’s
socially performative and “official” persona and his or her more per-
sonal endeavors and opinions.
Most religiosos, particularly those in the Afro-Cuban religious do-
main, were subjected to the most extreme forms of doble moral into
the 1990s due to the condescension and hostility with which they were
treated by both officialdom and some sectors of the populace. Johan
Wedel cites a number of authors in this regard: Susan Segal notes that
“restrictions were placed on their functioning; their leaders were often
arrested and sometimes imprisoned; their adherents encountered dis-
crimination in employment” (quoted in Wedel 2004, 33); many experts
and believers were accused of antirevolutionary sentiment and activ-
ity, and their meetings were subject to restrictions or banned, notes
Miguel Barnet (1988), an avid revolutionary himself; while Rhonda
P. Rabkin (1991, 189, quoted in Wedel ibid.) points out that religious
affiliation could hinder workplace opportunities or advancements.
Indeed, Afro-Cuban spiritual biographies are pregnant with tales of
interrupted initiations and the arrests of godmothers and fathers, of
the implementation of governmental public health strategies perceived
by many to be designed to invade and monitor household religious
activities—arguably echoing colonial and neocolonial associations be-
tween African-derived religions and health and sanitation malaises (cf.
Bronfman 2004; Wirtz 2009)—and of the experience of years of care-
ful religious occultation. When, in 1991, the Communist Party made
the milestone decision to accept religious believers, followed by a new
constitution in 1992, it encompassed the tacit recognition that religio-
sos had increased despite the Revolution’s having portrayed syncretic
Spirits at the Crossroads of Belief and Pragmatism · 23
The shift toward effective religious freedom in the 1990s owed much
to the Revolution’s relationship to Catholicism and the Church more
generally, which was seen by the leaders of the Revolution in the light
of its collusion with both the Spanish colonial regime and the neo-
colonial dictators that followed. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961,
Castro accused the Church of conspiring outright, and with reason.
Among other activities, in the first few years of the Revolution the
Cuban Catholic Church had arranged for the flight of thousands of Cu-
ban children to the United States, away from the evils of communism
and what it declared to be the regime’s plan to brainwash its young
in Soviet camps. In response, Castro suspended seminary schools
and invalidated Catholic university titles, expatriating and imprison-
ing priests. In 1959 there was one priest per 8,810 people in Cuba; in
1998, one per 39,145, whereas the inverse trend is noted for doctors
(Bolívar and Orozco 1998, 459). Afro-Cuban religious expression was
restricted by imposing limitations on nonstate associations and gath-
erings of any kind, subjecting ceremonies and drum festivities to forc-
ible disruptions and dissolving most formerly institutionalized spiritist
centers. While relations with the church thawed in the 1980s (Sarduy
and Stubbs 1993), an unprecedented visit by Pope John Paul II to Cuba
in 1998 was seen as the consolidation of the arrival of a new era. The
Pope expressed disdain for the U.S. embargo, pleasing Castro, but also
24 · Developing the Dead
asked for greater religious tolerance for Christians and others, which
Castro was now willing to concede. This acknowledgment was to have
repercussions well beyond the Church; indeed, it was seen widely as a
victory for Afro-Cuban religious practitioners and spiritists, most of
whom also professed a Catholic belief-basis. Those creyentes who had
simultaneously been Marxist could also finally “come out,” although
this created some embarrassment.
Hernandez-Reguant argues that Castro’s 1990s reformulation of
Cuban “internationalism” required a unified national identity, predi-
cated on a negation of internal differences of both race and cosmology,
and led to a reclaiming of a discursive ideology of mestizaje (2005,
287). Cuba as an “Afro-Latin” country was thus rhetorically born, as
Fernando Ortiz’s famous concept of the ajiaco, the Cuban creole stew,
became a political as well as cultural metaphor: As Ayorinde has ar-
gued, “the principle of national unity now required the party to ac-
knowledge different perspectives and find a way to make them work
together” (2004, 138).
Accounts of contemporary religiosity based on notions of immu-
table credence or on self-declared affiliatory patterns (cf. Calzadilla
1997) fail to appreciate the particular logics of practice that obtain
between and among Afro-Cuban religious communities themselves.
Argyriadis (1999, 2005b) and Jorge and Isabel Castellanos (1992) have
described one of these logics as consisting of a premise of instrumen-
talist ritual accumulation. Havana’s religious networks are primarily
composed of independent-minded persons whose loyalty to one or an-
other house does not exclude the construction of a highly pragmatic
approach to religiosity, as well as to godmothers and fathers. Religion
has to “work,” and this “work” is largely achieved as paths carved in
and through ritual spheres, remedies, spirit advice, and, if necessary,
certain initiations. The religioso in Havana is the material and spiritual
embodiment of these multiple, heterogeneous alleys of efficacy, pur-
sued throughout the course of a life, but he or she is often uncontained
by them; the cumulative enterprise must be seen through the lens of
each person’s quest to achieve a sort of equilibrium—a self that is both
given and made, and similarly, a destiny that must be both accepted
and sought. These social facts point irreversibly to the need to rela-
tivize questions of belief, as a total, encompassing cognitive state (cf.
Spirits at the Crossroads of Belief and Pragmatism · 25
Figure 1. A stand in a market of religious items in Central Havana. Photo by Ana Stela
Cunha.
Figure 2. A male
iyawó in Central
Havana. Photo by
the author.
It seems fair to ask, in the light of the social, political, moral, and eco-
nomic context described above, how we should regard the self-making
efforts of espiritistas and other religiosos in relation to their impact on
wider realities. By asking this I am not suggesting that there is direct,
causal link between the two or that we should suppose that the answer
is simple. Indeed, it would be a round mistake to divorce these same
“wider” realities from their personal, individual dimensions. One of
my arguments in this book is exactly that religious “knowledge,” or
self-knowing, does not precede its encounter, or generation, in and as
the lived-in world. Religious experience is in no form “explainable” as a
reaction or response to conditions, say, those of a post-Soviet Cuba. In
my view, espiritismo does not substitute state-failed areas of wellbeing
for Cubans, nor is it a space of resistance against an all-powerful state,
as much as it inevitably participates, like other informal religious prac-
tices, in the creation of both old and new forms of subjectivity in Cuba.
These forms do not overtly compete with the state in a traditional
sense, or at least until they are forced to (such as through measures
of repression or confrontation). And neither are they experienced as
somehow “complementary.” Rather, it is better to say that they coexist.
In a recent paper, Anastasios Panagiotopoulos and I argue that this
coexistence is arguably made viable by what we could say is a pervasive
ethos of pragmatic individualism embedded within the cosmo-logics
of the main Afro-Cuban religious practices, including espiritismo.
Thus, these religions propose “paths” (caminos), destinies, and solu-
tions that are person-centered, not collectivity- or nation-centered,
effectively destabilizing the notion that they must relate in some spe-
cial way to Revolutionary politics, i.e. “context” (Panagiotopoulos and
Espírito Santo 2014). We argue that this ethos is well represented in the
popular phrase referring to the prestigious oracle of Ifá and its scope,
“En Ifá está todo” [Everything is contained in Ifá], and that it is also
obvious in the highly personalized nature of an espiritista’s muertos or
in the client-centered moralities of Palo Monte’s nfumbes, the spirits
of the dead they work with. The Revolution’s own motto, “¡Dentro de
la Revolución, todo, fuera de la Revolución, nada!” [Inside the Revolu-
tion, everything; outside of it, nothing!], is the corollary of the opposite
Spirits at the Crossroads of Belief and Pragmatism · 29
side of the coin. But both statements vie for absolute, albeit ultimately
unattainable, forms of “encompassment,” namely, of the person. The
question is less one of how these two “projects” coexist or come into
conflict with each other than of observing that these very differences
in their ontological assumptions may render this competition moot.
Most importantly, the argument here is that the hyperindividualism
(note: not equivalent to selfishness or greed), so to speak, that anthro-
pologists have been so keen to document in the popular religious field
since the 1990s is more accurately seen as a more evident manifesta-
tion of what is an arguably inherent logic of self-making in the wider
Afro-Cuban religious sphere.
Following on from this, it becomes more feasible to forward some
thoughts on espiritismo’s wider impact in light of this “exacerbation”
of individualism from the 1990s. In his ethnography of contemporary
Cubans’ health-seeking behavior, P. Sean Brotherton suggests that Cu-
bans regularly engage in practices that imply the massive but necessary
development of informal strategies of survival and resolution, particu-
larly since the country’s economic crisis (2012). These strategies are
part and parcel of new forms of subjectivity that reflect the fact that
people have largely taken the production of their own wellbeing into
their own hands. This does not imply a rejection of state-sponsored
mainstream or alternative medicine, but a pragmatic reliance on in-
formal economies and complex networks of friends, family, and socios
to ensure a better chance at achieving health. These behaviors are not
antigovernment but instead crosscut myriad personal, institutional,
familial, state-sponsored, and private spheres (2012, 33). In my view,
many people who avail themselves of espiritista ritual masses, con-
sultations, and solutions follow a similar logic of the pursuit health
and wellbeing. Espiritismo is not simply about physical health, as I
will show, but in its popular spheres it is overwhelmingly about the
betterment of one’s life and one’s future possibilities, achieved more
often through a combination of forms of diagnosis and action than
by investing in that of a single domain. Espiritismo’s person-centered
cosmology makes this arrangement of solution-pluralism a more than
comfortable one, given that it is often a person’s own muertos that de-
mand that she see a doctor or a santero or that one or another moment
is a better time to change jobs, houses, countries.
30 · Developing the Dead
According to Natalia Bolívar and Román Orozco (1998), the 1970s can
be characterized as a dark period for Cuban religiosity. At the end of
the 1960s, the authors claim, the Party published a few copies of a
book called Sectas religiosas [Religious sects, n.d.], to be printed and
circulated within the militia and among Party members. The book was
essentially a combat manual designed for the younger cadre with the
intention of providing basic guidelines by which to frame and deal with
all manner of religious manifestation. Its tone was notably deprecia-
tive, casting religious phenomena as retrograde and unscientific and,
most damningly, as antirevolutionary.
Revolutionary officialdom modified its stance over the years, at-
tempting to discern a basis on which to politically assimilate the
population of religiosos who had been an active component of the
pro-Revolutionary vanguard. A case was thus made to chart “scien-
tifically” and to conserve the aesthetic elements, material culture, and
mythology of Afro-Cuban cults while meanwhile discouraging their
practice, beliefs, and so-called degenerate ways of life. This effort was
to be a project of museology and artifact collection as much as one
based on ethnographic and sociological survey. Hernandez-Reguant
(2005, 292–93) tells us that “cultural policy sustained the separation
between high European culture (alta cultura) and popular culture (un-
derstood as traditional)”—and widely associated with Afro-Creole
religious practices—which required research in order to retain it in
authentic form for educated urban audiences removed from its mi-
lieu. The author notes that the “evaluation of folklore’s authenticity and
revolutionary relevance was a scientific task, and it fell on the growing
body of folklorists and musicologists who, as traditional anthropolo-
gists elsewhere, became the guardians of the nation’s purity” (ibid.,
293). Anthropology was to become ethnology proper, modeled on So-
viet ethnography and geared toward the classification of the nation’s
panoply of folkloric traits, an understanding of their previous function,
and their incorporation into Cuba’s new Revolutionary identity.
This change was to be achieved through a process of secularization.
According to Ayorinde, the first Party Congress in 1975 agreed that the
Spirits at the Crossroads of Belief and Pragmatism · 31
Efforts had already been made in this direction, but as Ayorinde ar-
gues, “folklorists and cultural theorists were engaged in a delicate bal-
ancing act: the enchantment and wisdom of Afro-Cuban mythology
was to be extolled while at the same time the negative and alienating
aspects of Afro-Cuban religious beliefs were to be revealed” (ibid., 110).
According to Guanche, while the term afrocubano was once necessary
to defend the presence of African cultural elements in the formation
of Cuban nationhood against its critics, it had subsequently become
“inappropriate and anachronic” vocabulary since Cuba recognized it-
self in “the essentially Hispano-African transculturation process that
led to a new cultural formation distinct from its antecedent elements”
(1983, 462, my translation).
Guanche’s observation is ironic in light of the fact that, as most
scholars of “Afro-Cuban” religions know, the Revolution’s project of
“folklorization” sees continuity with a process of nation-building that
had begun well before 1959, arguably with Fernando Ortiz’s call for the
study of the “Afro-Cuban” element of his country’s cultural complex.
“Without the Negro, Cuba would not be Cuba,” he says in an address
to the elite Afro-Cuban Club Atenas in 1942, wherein he glances ret-
rospectively at his career motivations (reproduced in article format in
1944): “He could not therefore be ignored. It was imperative then to
study this integral element of Cuban life; but no one had studied him,
and indeed, it appeared that no one cared for him” (Ortiz 1944, 16).
While he had not invented the term “Afro-Cuban,” Ortiz’s early works
gave it massive popular currency, as well as opened the door to move-
ments outside academia that aimed to reintegrate African-derived
traditions into the consciousness of the nation but did so largely by
purifying them into more “respectable” forms (Ayorinde 2004, 66).
While these movements constituted “compromises” (ibid., 66), one
32 · Developing the Dead
As Palmié points out, the qualifiers “Cuban” and “African” “ought not
to be seen, here, as unambiguously referring to racial constructions.
Rather, they circumscribe historically volatile and synchronistically
fluctuating collectivities within which individuals come to be posi-
tioned” (2002, 196).
The approach taken here is that popular forms of espiritismo are
“Afro-Cuban.” This is not just because spiritist mediumistic technol-
ogies permeate the ritual spaces of Afro-Cuban cults—in particular
Santería and Palo Monte—endowing their priests and priestesses with
critical sanction and guidance from the world of the dead but, more
importantly, because they participate unambiguously, even constitu-
tively, in the cosmo-politics of their wider spiritual spheres. Far from
static, the assumptions behind categories such as “Afro-Cuban,” “Afri-
can,” or “Africa”—or for that matter, “modern,” “scientific,” “evolved,”
“primitive,” “witchcraft”—may be seen to be in a process of permanent
negotiation, redefinition, and reconstruction, as well as validation.
While some of the espiritistas científicos that I worked with would no
doubt wince at the idea of labeling their craft “Afro-Cuban,” as wielders
of a particular elite image of spirit mediumship, they too transform the
ideological and language regimes of their surrounding religious envi-
ronment, as well its conditions of efficacy and legitimacy.
In this book I explore Palmié’s (2002) hypothesis concerning the
critical contribution of spiritism’s evolutionary taxonomy to a broader
ontology of beings in Cuba. But I also examine the possibility that,
in its Cuban version, spiritism contributed an ontological model of
the person, as well as spiritdom, well beyond its practice borders. At
the basis of this model, as I suggested above, are the components of
the cordón espiritual: Kardec’s protective spirit guides “creolized” and
integrated into the conscious functioning of the entire individual. The
central relationship between espiritismo and its sister cults, Santería
and Palo Monte, is not merely one of ritual and social interdepen-
dence, but a more essential one of selfhood. Paying homage to the dead
in Afro-Cuban religion is not just a religious obligation but a way of
constructing selves, persons whose paths are forged in a systematic
and dialectical relationship between the minutiae of life and its even-
tualities, and the advice, counsel, actions, and influences of the realm
of variously inclined spirits, thereby cross-cutting not just espiritismo
categories but Afro-Cuban religious boundaries as well.
Spirits at the Crossroads of Belief and Pragmatism · 39
her spirits are also made via material markers in the world, as well as
by the behaviors and posture of those the spirits protect. Ultimately,
my argument is that espiritismo’s concepts of “self ”—its ontology of
being—are not simply to be seen by the anthropologist as a theoretical
background to experience or a post facto way to contextualize psycho-
physiological processes such as states of possession. We should take
the specifics of this ontology seriously because through the mechanics
of its particular logic, persons, spirits, and material entities and pos-
sibilities come into being.
2
A curious mix
products were made suddenly aware of their own resources, and this
began to mark a shift away from a God-centered belief system (1990).
Man was now to be at the core of religious/spiritual experience, to be
its agent, and often its subject. Mesmerism and Swedenborgism, for
instance, were movements that, according to the historian Lisa Abend,
“clearly paved the way for the reception of spiritism on the continent”
(2004, 509). As Peter Washington argues in his account of the col-
orful and contested founding of the Theosophical Society, Madame
Blavatsky’s Baboon, all of these trends sought a key that would unlock
the mysteries of the universe, of the occult: an ultimate source. Chris-
tianity no longer fit the role. Knowledge was to be had outside the
normative formats, where these could only be seen as part of the larger
story, or as transcendent narratives that were, at best, symbols for an
individual’s own spiritual journey, rather than truths in themselves; it
was not spirituality that was in question in the end, then, but authority
(Washington 1995, 8–9). However, as Riskin (2009) has argued, these
new narratives did not so much break with contemporary scientism
as extend it by converting the epoch’s materialist methodologies into
machineries of spiritual discovery, thereby disproving the very materi-
alism they were meant to defend. In the second half of the nineteenth
century, and in the early twentieth, science was constantly developing
techniques and instruments that brought objective reality to beings,
materials, and forces that had previously been either ignored or re-
garded as imponderable marvels by humankind (Vasconcelos 2008,
18). Spiritism was to re-enchant the world with spirits by expanding
on similar imaginaries of transmission and technology and their pos-
sibilities for an understanding of the realms of the invisible.
What Kardec’s spiritism offered, in contrast with its relatively un-
theologized Anglo-Saxon counterpart, spiritualism, was an elaborate,
even bureaucratic ontological map of the spiritual and material worlds,
two basic levels of existence whose interaction was necessary, albeit
often imperceptible from the latter end. The idea that was fundamental
to spiritism’s vision was that a person’s spirit survives after his or her
physical demise; what made this notion novel was the myriad ways in
which the spirit could continue to influence the material realm, shap-
ing the actions and decisions of the living. Furthermore, unlike spiritu-
alism, Kardec’s doctrine posited a carefully crafted theory of repeated
reincarnation reminiscent of Buddhist, Indic, and other Eastern reli-
Spiritism and the Place of the Dead in Afro-Cuban Religion · 45
1999), since much of the moral structure of the latter was retained.
Spiritism also catered to both “the positivistic refusal to believe with-
out proof and the religious impulse to know that the soul continues
on after death” (Sharp 2009, 59). Science, evolution, spirits, faith, and
morality: this combination proved an explosive mixture for the up-
and-coming liberal, urban populations of Latin America.
the most part obscure to the general population and a perceived im-
provement on superstitious “African” religious practices. Espiritismo’s
concern with the spiritual as a matter for empirical investigation argu-
ably generated the first kind of antifanaticism discourse, still operative
today. These early espiritistas rejected the allure of immediate forms
of healing and quotidian problem resolution in favor of a studious and
rigorous posture toward the beyond.
By the start of what would become Cuba’s final independence strug-
gle in 1895, Cuban espiritistas had their own publications, federations,
and centers. In 1879, a significant collection of poetry, Arpas amigas
[Friendly harps] was published, including poems by spiritist Francisco
Sellén such as “Preexistencia” [Preexistence] and “Ultratumba” [Be-
yond the grave]; in 1883, the first issue of the spiritist journal Reden-
ción appeared in Santiago de Cuba and was immediately suspended by
the authorities; by 1885, in Havana, believers had published the sixth
and seventh issues of La Luz del Evangelio, a spiritist journal claiming
to be the official organ of the spiritist movement; and in the province
of Camaguey, by 1889, spiritist magazines such as La Investigación and
Paz del Alma had begun to circulate (Bermúdez 1967, 11–12). In 1888
Cuba sent three delegates to the first International Congress of Spirit-
ists in Barcelona; 1889 saw the publication in Havana of El Espiritismo
en su más simple expresión, a summary of Kardec’s teachings for the
Cuban market. Bermúdez also points to a marked increase in docu-
ments referring to the regulation of spiritist centers, many of which
called themselves societies for estudios psicológicos, followed by Chris-
tian-sounding names like Paz y Amor. In 1920, Cuba hosted its first
International Spiritist Congress. In 1936, the National Spiritist Federa-
tion was born, serving as an umbrella for all Cuban spiritist societies
wishing to institutionalize. In 1940, the Consejo Supremo Nacional
Espiritista emerged with the specific aim of doing justice to Kardec’s
spiritual philosophies. It exists to this day.
small country [patria chica] of the most prestigious mediums and heal-
ers” (2000, 48)—which supported largely illiterate populations who
maintained Catholic traditions but did not practice them faithfully
(ibid., 50), became the geographical crux of this process. The Oriente,
they say, was characterized by a patriarchal form of slavery; the mar-
ginality and scarce presence of Spanish “elements” allowed for a grow-
ing rebel spirit that facilitated the independence fight and the propaga-
tion of anticolonial sentiment and ideology (ibid.). Córdova Martínez
and Sablón regard Cuba’s eastern provinces as a perfect melting pot
for the emergence of creolized spiritism, in particular espiritismo de
cordón, as well as its more “Afro-Cuban” versions. The guerilla officials
themselves played a part in the generation and dissemination of these
creolized forms of espiritismo. The authors refer to the work of José
Sánchez Lussón, a scholar from Granma, who notes that in 1895, 56.13
percent of the rebel army’s lower ranks, and 28 percent of its higher,
practiced espiritismo, some even directing spiritist centers (Lussón
quoted in ibid., 47). Meanwhile, between the start of Cuba’s struggle
for independence in 1865 and its end in 1895, the colonial government
and the church closed ranks against their opponents, and the spiritist
movement was as suspect in this regard as political parties, workers’
organizations, ethnic associations, and Afro-Cuban religious group-
ings (Brandon 1997, 88).
Understanding colonial-era espiritismo thus requires taking into
account its complicity with political and religious subversives, includ-
ing its alliance with the African cabildos (Brandon 1997, 98), African
ethnic associations that functioned as mutual-aid societies. However,
there were important social, political, and legislative factors in both
the colony and its aftermath that may lead to a better contextualization
of how espiritismo came to be regarded in the twentieth century and its
discursive relationship with the Afro-Cuban religions. Reinaldo Román
notes, for example, that while in the 1880s the media “decried Cubans’
putative tendency to seek deliverance through ‘fantasies’ rather than
‘politics,’ there was little to be done about wayward spiritists,” such as
the man-gods he describes (2007, 25). This ineffectiveness towards
spiritists was partly due to the passage of a liberal law of association in
1888 that allowed for the registration of spiritist groups and may have
protected them.
The political climate changed during the Republican era, however:
Spiritism and the Place of the Dead in Afro-Cuban Religion · 49
of spiritual evolution, what they call the divine or natural law, which is
none other than a natural right applied to all cosmic life, including, as
is logically deducible, the lives of men” (1924, 21, my translation). These
are admissions, he argues, that lead us to observe in espiritismo an ac-
ceptance of a “positivist theory of the causes of delinquency” (ibid.,
40). As a prominent exponent of the particular brand of social science
of his time, Ortiz admired a version of his own analytical positivism
in a “scientific” espiritismo that rebutted from the outset any associa-
tion with Afro-Cuban religions and that sought instead a credible ap-
proximation of a secular rationale. Ortiz’s brief excursion into spiritist
phenomena concerned itself mostly with doctrinal forms of spiritism
and then later with espiritismo de cordón in the Oriente, and there is
little evidence that he examined the more popular forms of practice
that had become entrenched among practitioners of the Afro-Cuban
religions in Havana at the time of his writing. When Ortiz wrote Los
factores humanos de la cubanidad (1940), signaling a theoretical path
toward a more integrated analysis of Cuban religious “culture” as being
intrinsically and legitimately dynamic and creative, no mention was
made of the critical positioning that spiritist practices had assumed in
the broader religious ecology that he himself studied.
Ortiz’s protégé and contemporary, Lydia Cabrera, picked up on
this gap in her seminal work El Monte (1954) and dedicated several
commentaries to detailing the role of the dead in Santería and Palo
Monte ceremonies, as well as alluding to the fundamental spiritist
hybrid ritual of the misa espiritual, of which her informants spoke.
Through her analysis, the importance of paying homage to one’s ances-
tors comes to the fore, perhaps for the first time in academic writing:
“el muerto, en todas las reglas, pare al santo” [the dead, in all the Reglas,
give birth to the santo], says one of her interlocutors (1993 [1954],
64)—and Cabrera’s carefully crafted ethnographic portrayals leave no
doubt that a deep symbiosis between spiritism and other religiosos is
at stake. George Brandon quotes her extensively in the last chapter of
his Santería from Africa to the New World (1993), arguing that neither
Cabrera nor her devotee informants were surprised by the comple-
mentarity between espiritismo, Palo Monte and Santería. For Cabrera,
oricha possession was little different to the trance sessions of spiritist
mediums. “Ocha or Palo. Doesn’t it come to the same thing? Spirit, no
more! Doesn’t one fall into trance with the saint as well as the dead? In
Spiritism and the Place of the Dead in Afro-Cuban Religion · 51
religion everything is the thing of the dead. The dead become saints,” a
santera tells Cabrera. “Espiritismo! Bah! In Africa, the same, the dead
spoke” (Cabrera quoted in Brandon 1997 [1993], 175).
In contemporary Cuba, the idea that the santo is a different kind
of muerto is still common. “All of these Afro-Cuban religions are at
the end of the day espiritismo,” Lázaro, a santero, once told me. “The
orichas themselves are spirits, they are ancestors” (Lázaro 2006). Al-
though this view is not shared by all practitioners in Cuba, it suggests
that Ortiz may have seriously underestimated spiritism’s pervasiveness
in domains other than the Kardecist or Cordonero centers he visited.
Cabrera’s thick ethnographic descriptions also highlight another con-
sequential feature in this regard: the creative and idiosyncratic charac-
ter of the construction of the individual’s spiritual pantheon, in which
the worship of the heterogeneous dead may have greased the integra-
tion of a host of discrepant religious traditions (Brandon 1997). A his-
torical record of Cuban espiritismo based mainly on the registration of
associations has tended to obscure these dynamics, however.
progress (Román 2002, 43). While the early sociedades seemed to have
had a political bent, echoing Kardecist liberalisms (and scientifisms),
and some still do—for example, the Voz de los Misioneros de Jesús
society—their existence generally stemmed from the inspiration and
charisma of their founders, many of whom left extensive and unique
treatises that were more philosophical and moral than “scientific” in
their pretensions. In the case of the Misioneros groups, the founder
was a former member of the Cuban Liberation Army, a tailor by pro-
fession, and a spiritist poet.
More important, Argüelles Mederos and Hodge Limonta’s assump-
tion that spiritism can be measured by the number of registered adher-
ents discounts the nature of what spiritism offered: healing technology.
A popular spiritual figure of the 1930s and ’40s was Antoñica Izqui-
erda, who gained a huge following due to her miraculous cures with
water. She was later incarcerated in Havana’s Mazorra, the psychiatric
institution, but her aquatic cult persists today, especially in Pinar del
Río (cf. Bolívar, González, and del Río 2007, 99–106). Similarly, Román
recounts the story of Clavelito, a singer and prolific radio healer in the
early 1950s who “magnetized” water over Cuba’s radio airwaves and
whose healing prowess was reaffirmed by the hundreds who wrote in
thanking him for his cures. Clavelito’s success confounded those who
wished to condemn him as promoting superstition, popular religios-
ity, or even messianism. “Clavelito’s regime required little of patients,”
claims Román:
There were no pilgrimages, no sacrifices, no protracted prayers,
and in fact no cultic activity as such. As Clavelito put it, he required
only a glass of water, faith, and respectful silence. . . . Clavelito’s
faith demanded nothing; it was unrehearsed and actualized only
in the cure itself rather in ritual preparations. (2007, 154)
As it spread beyond the centers and into households, espiritismo took
on local contours that enhanced the simplicity of what it best offered:
a means of contact with the deceased, as well as a way to identify and
fix mundane calamities and physical distress. In this it was natural to
acquire the more pragmatic aspects of existing healing and mediumis-
tic traditions, particularly Afro-Cuban ones.
While it is tempting to see the emergence of an espiritismo cruzado
as a mutation of Kardecist spiritism, locating spiritist transformations
54 · Developing the Dead
Occidental espiritismo
wilderness” into which people ventured at their own peril (ibid., 195).
Espiritistas made an immediate and effective, yet necessarily separate,
ritual space for Afro-Cuban ancestors, particularly the eggún, whose
veneration had been extinguished in the New World, whereby they
lost their place in a structure they had occupied prominently in Yoruba
territories (Brandon 1997, 136). Since the hierarchy of beings in Yor-
uba-based religion placed the eggún between the human being and the
oricha, espiritismo was perfectly positioned to provide a flexible ritual
means to address this ontological discrepancy. In the practice of Palo
Monte, mediums constituted the speediest means of discerning the
wishes of the nfumbe, the entities with whom paleros sustain working
pacts, as well as those of the spirits that oversee the nfumbe’s missions
and that guide the construction of the palero’s ritual objects. More-
over, santeros and paleros began to borrow from spiritism’s conceptual
repertoire, particularly notions relating to progressive reincarnation
and evolution; conversely, the orichas and other deities began to fulfill
the role of protectors and spirit guides amongst espiritistas (Brandon
1997, 88). One’s tutelary oricha-santo is indeed referred to by spirit-
ists and santeros alike as one’s angel de la guardia [guardian angel], a
demonstrably Kardecist-Christian notion.
A cosmological and ritual symbiosis between espiritismo and the
predominant Afro-Cuban religious traditions was thus formed by
historically contingent processes, such as similar experiences of mar-
ginalization and repression, particularly with regards to the Catholic
Church, and by an ongoing ritual mutuality that bled through con-
ceptual boundaries and allowed spiritism’s evolutionary ontography
to became commonplace among those who dealt with the dead. The
term misa espiritual in Cuban espiritismo derives from the homolo-
gous Catholic ceremonies offered to the Afro-Cuban dead at nine days,
after which other Afro-Cuban funeral rites would begin. Yet, as Lydia
Cabrera notes, one ceremony does not invalidate the other (1993, 64),
and the dead frequently ask for church masses as well as Afro-Cuban
and spiritist rites, although it is likely that at some point the misa es-
piritual replaced its Catholic counterpart almost entirely. Brandon
indeed argues that “in some ways, the healing-oriented Espiritismo
probably appeared to Early Santería practitioners as a more conge-
nial form of Christianity” (1997, 88), where at least there were certain
familiarities, such as the belief in saints, even if these were remote.
Spiritism and the Place of the Dead in Afro-Cuban Religion · 59
dead were now given a voice in how those initiations were to proceed:
when and by whom. While espiritistas were, and still are, regarded as
mediums of somewhat “lesser” kinds of beings, the muertos, the con-
cept of the cordón espiritual has become paramount to the religious
differentiation process. Like the family dead, the spirit guides do not
simply bless or veto a ritual decision; they generally determine an indi-
vidual’s religious path from the outset. In Palo Monte this is especially
relevant: persons simply do not (or should not) undergo initiation un-
less they have a muerto in their cordón who “knew of those things”
in his or her life and who will take charge of ritual affairs after offi-
ciation. In Santería much the same obtains. As one of my informants
put it: “Todo lo que se recibe en el santo tiene que tener un respaldo
espiritual” [Everything received in Ocha must have a spiritual backing]
(Máximo 2006).
What is at stake in these observations is not just the relationship
between espiritismo and its sister cults, but indeed the importance of
espiritismo in articulating the relationship between the two Reglas.
Palmié has dedicated a good portion of his Wizards and Scientists to
unraveling the historical dimensions of the relationship between Regla
de Ocha and Palo Monte, which “may have been accelerated by the
catalytic effect of spiritism, easing the intellectual integration of het-
erogeneous conceptions about the dead in the two major Afro-Cuban
traditions” (2002, 192). Ocha and Palo, he argues, “stand to each other
like religion and magic, expressive and instrumental forms of human-
divine interaction,” where Palo’s self-conception as “mystical entrepre-
neurs and mercenary healers is, at least in part, objectified in specific
opposition to ocha,” which embodies a notion of an “idealized social-
ity” (ibid., 193–94). Crucially, Palmié argues that neither one “could
have evolved to their present phenomenology and moralized positions
along a spectrum of differentiated ritual idioms without the presence
of the other within the same social framework” (ibid., 193). Cuban es-
piritismo, to a large extent, provided one of the most significant idioms
of such forms of differentiation by way of its own economy of light and
evolution, through which Afro-Cuban deities, entities, and muertos
could be conceptualized under the same roof. Notions of materiality
and morality, which I explore in a later chapter, become critical to this
integrated yet difference-based taxonomy.
Spiritism and the Place of the Dead in Afro-Cuban Religion · 61
II. Iku Lobi Ocha: The dead give birth to the saints
It is well known that the dead must be informed of and consulted about
any rite undertaken with the santos; thus, the dead “give birth” to the
santos. But this relationship is often expressed via understandings of
the dead that do not provide as clear a separation between the domains
of santo and muerto as discourses suggest. Ocha manifests two kinds
of conceptual pulls that reveal the sect’s tensions with espiritismo: one
toward the eggún as an anonymous, and even dangerous, collectivity
of beings under the deity Iku and another toward a characterization
of the eggún as a set of differentiated, quasihuman entities, creatively
(if not always safely) enmeshed in the fabric of each person’s religious
life. Epiritismo speaks most directly to the latter tendency, vital to the
development of religious selfhood and reinforced in Santería since its
emergence on the religious scene in the nineteenth century.
Influenced by religious traditions of West African origin, in par-
ticular those associated with the Lucumí, Arará, Fon, and Yoruba eth-
nic groups (in today’s Nigeria: Dahomey, Togo, and Benin), Santería,
or Regla de Ocha, comprises a set of practices around the worship of
62 · Developing the Dead
(but with whom they are not, however, equivalent), the orichas-santos
are whimsical, jealous, vain, and womanizing, as well as able to show
infinite mercy, kindness, justice, and generosity to those who earn
their love. Ocha’s complex oral traditions, now in written forms such
as libretas [manuals], comprise hundreds of patakíes [myths, stories
and moral tales] that detail the creation of the world by Olofi, the su-
preme deity, as well as the lives and trials of all the other orichas-santos
born of his hands. Obbatalá, for example, one of Ocha’s most sacred
orichas-santos, is associated with Jesus Christ or with La Virgen de las
Mercedes; Yemayá, the goddess of the seas and maternity, is associated
with La Virgen de Regla, Havana’s patroness. In Africa, there were and
still are hundreds of such orichas; in Cuba, no more than about twenty
are regularly venerated, although many have multiple avatars (cf. D. H.
Brown 2003). Young santeros often complain of the gradual loss of rit-
ual secrets, which has further reduced the repertoire. Santería ceremo-
nies, such as the batá or tambor [sacred drum] celebrations, are lively
rites of homage and possession open to noninitiates, where tribute is
paid to the orichas-santos through lavish feasts and the construction of
beautiful thrones, whether in cramped apartments or spacious houses.
Like espiritistas, many santeros make their living through consultation,
although they do so through the medium of caracoles [cowry shells].
The santero must interpret the divination signs, letras—also called od-
dunes—yielded by his or her caracoles, and associated stories and say-
ings, of which there are hundreds, relating the particular oricha-santo’s
message to the particulars of the client at hand.
ity” (1992, 63), though the relationship between the two is far from
clear in either parlance or recorded theology. Furthermore, it is un-
likely that the notion of “supernatural” is the best frame from which
to apprehend it. On the one hand, the difference between the oricha-
santo and the eggún or muerto is often posited as a purely quantitative
one—a matter of grades of “evolution” and “light” (often articulated in
this Kardecist language), where the oricha-santo is an undeniably su-
perior kind of eggún, much like a Catholic saint. After all, the orichas-
santos were once African men and women, elevated through worship
cycles over generations, just like Christian saints were canonized after
their deaths, enabling their powers of divine intervention. In this read-
ing, the “spirit” underlies (gives birth to) the “saint” because, hypo-
thetically, it could eventually become one: Processually speaking, the
dead (or rather, Death, Iku) come first, and only then do the divin-
ized dead, a particular kind of transcendent being. The oricha-santo
is thus “made” via its ascension, which paradoxically requires its ma-
terial grounding. But, on the other hand, the orichas-santos are also
regarded as aspects of nature, undifferentiated and impersonalized in
their crudest form. They speak through, as well as respond to and grow
with, the natural elements that their children regularly manipulate and
employ, but their correspondence with the characteristics of earthly
phenomena such as thunder, metal, wind, and plants is less represen-
tational than it is internal, constitutive. They “speak through” because
they are nature—the spirits of nature—which makes their distinction
from the muertos a deeply qualitative one. Within this umbrella in-
terpretation there is possibly another that is not mutually exclusive:
that is, that the orichas-santos are not necessarily a “they” at all, but a
cosmic multiplicity whose anthropomorphization may in fact require
the work of the dead, especially in possession events.
This tension is exemplified suggestively in the following statements,
taken from an interview with Mercedes, a dedicated santera working
in a prominent Havana religious institution:
and orichas are clearly distinct beings. This distinction cuts deeper for
some practitioners. For many santeros, forces exist within the same
cosmos that respond in the most immediate sense to either the realm
of the santo or that of the muerto. For example, before a future iyawó
receives initiation, he or she must choose a stone, sometimes several,
to form the basis of his or her material santo (the otá). Older santeros
will say that one must always ask the stone whether it belongs to the
santo or to the muerto, for all otanes, like people, come with a pre-
determined fate, particular tratados [agreements with Olofi], which
make them unique. Both santeros and paleros must be attentive to this,
even if it is now commonly assumed that hierberos—sellers of religious
objects, ingredients, and plants—have done this “sorting” process be-
forehand, saving their clients the trouble (hierberos are typically sons
and daughters of Osain, the oricha-santo of plants and herbs and thus
capacitated for this job). The separation between caminos de muerto
and caminos de santo is further observed in the fact that the initiate’s
eggunes need to be formally separated at the entrance of the cuarto de
santo before the iyawó receives his or her deity through a sacrificial
ceremony where the dead are fed. In the same manner, contemporary
santeros and santeras will never keep their cosas de muerto [things of
the dead] next to their cosas de santo [things of the saint]; nor will they
fall into trance with an oricha-santo during a spiritist misa espiritual.
But some orichas-santos are indeed so intertwined with the domain
of the eggún that their initiation ceremonies invite and work both reg-
isters simultaneously, confounding neat divisions between them. This
is the case, for example, with the asiento of the oricha-santo Oyá, the
most powerful of the three muerteras, the goddesses of death (Oyá,
along with Oba and Yewá, are female orichas-santos associated with
spirits, death, corpse decomposition, and the cemetery). In Oyá’s
unique initiation ceremony, which involves visiting nine different cem-
eteries in the process of “making the santo,” a bóveda espiritual [altar]
must be constructed both outside and, more importantly, inside the
cuarto de santo. While the dead that are placed inside this sacred room
are those of the initiate’s cordón espiritual, whom Oyá embraces and,
in some sense, integrates into her own “making,” the bóveda placed
outside the room caters to the muertos who come with her corriente,
such as religious ancestors. Thus, while a distinction is ritually ef-
fectuated between Oyá the oricha-santo and the eggunes of Oyá, her
Spiritism and the Place of the Dead in Afro-Cuban Religion · 69
translates here into the manifold forms of care that must be afforded
to the dead well before any religious event or ceremony begins, as well
as during these events. This precedence in time and space constitutes
an inviolable principle of Ocha practice. Failure to appease the dead re-
sults in the ultimate failure of the santero’s enterprise. I was a firsthand
witness of such a failure at the beginning of some ritual procedures
of my own, namely, when I received the guerrero deities and Olokún.
When these newly born oricha-santos were asked by my godfather to
make their pronunciations through his oracle, they appeared hesitant,
repeatedly stuck on the sign okana—meaning that the deities were
unsatisfied and that an investigation of the problem should be under-
taken. This investigation led to the muertos, who felt they had not been
duly acknowledged.
The eggún, in Santería, are traditionally the spirits of the dead, from
ritual ancestors to kin. Considered to be under the auspicious power
of their king, Oddua, and distinct from the deity Iku, who is thought
to be the breath of death itself or the act or moment of dying (and
with whom santeros can make pacts to postpone their demise or to
accelerate that of another person), there are at least two kinds of eggún
in Yoruba-based Cuban cosmology: the chunibakuo and the insi. The
first category refers to the spirits of those initiated in Ocha, and the
second encompasses, according to Leonel, a santero of thirty years’
experience, “the shadow of the spirits of the initiated.” Leonel told me
that the term “shadow” (sombra) here represents the person’s essence
before initiation: their memories, the deposit of their experience. The
insis, then, are symbolically also the spirits of the noninitiated, for, as
he describes: “This word ‘shadow’ indicates something that is not com-
pletely defined” (Leonel Verdeja Orallo 2005). It refers to entities that
are somehow not identifiable in their totality, those that one cannot
“see” with clarity because they have not been “born” in Santería like
those of the chunibakuo.
Montalbito, a santero in his thirties, complements Leonel’s under-
standing on the noninitiated in an interesting way by reversing its
terms: “For the santo, you definitely exist. It is for you that the santo
doesn’t exist. Ochún may be recognizing you, but it is you that does
72 · Developing the Dead
de santo [an oricha-santo festivity], where the dead must always eat
before any other: a plate of whatever is on the menu that day is usu-
ally enough. Indeed, many religiosos feed their eggún whether they are
celebrating a santo, a birthday, the coming of the New Year, or a Revo-
lutionary holiday. Dishes of the traditional Cuban ajiaco stew, rice and
beans, pork, cake, as well as rum and coffee may be offered. Secondly,
more ceremoniously, on oricha-santo ritual occasions where the dead
take center stage, such as in fiestas for deities associated with the realm
of the dead—Oyá, Oba, San Lázaro, and Inle, for example—or on those
specifically designed as thanksgivings for the dead, such as tambores,
cajones, or violínes (celebrations involving drum, box, and violin mu-
sic, respectively).
It is said that food for the dead should be placed on broken plates
or containers, for, as santeros say: “Platos rotos, platos muertos; jícaras
rotas, jícaras muertas” [Broken plates, dead plates; broken cups, dead
cups]. While honoring the spirits often involves offering food that the
dead enjoyed while alive, particularly with regards to deceased fam-
ily members, there are a number of specific foods that are tradition-
ally prepared for the eggún. These include rooster and goat meat, fried
black-eyed bean and red bean balls, bread and butter, sugared water,
coffee with milk, yellow or saffron rice, and pig’s head (thought by
santeros to represent human death, since pigs are similar to people).
Pieces of coconut, normally nine (the number of Oyá, the owner of
the cemetery), are also offered, as well as flowers, candles, alcohol, ci-
gars, and cascarilla—a composite of eggshell and plaster known for
its cleansing properties and its association with death and rebirth. At
one tambor I attended, the santera had placed nine glasses of water
and nine candles on the floor inside the saraza [offering], in this way
adding an aspect of a bóveda espiritual. She had also sacrificed a white
cock to her deceased father and a chicken to her great-grandfather.
At the end of any celebration, the eggún must be asked if they are
satisfied with the ritual and festive proceedings or whether they re-
quire additional gifts. This is gauged through the use of the santero’s
obbi oracle: four rounded, polished, coconut-shell pieces through
which the dead speak (“darle coco al muerto”—to give the dead coco-
nut). The santero or santera will slowly chip off pieces of coconut and
sprinkle them over the dead’s rincón [corner] as he or she performs
the moyubba, mentioning the names of the person’s eggunes. They will
74 · Developing the Dead
then let the four pieces of coconut shell fall to the floor, determining
the outcome from their final positions. The satisfaction of the dead can
also be ascertained through misas espirituales, although these are usu-
ally performed before rather than after a major eggún or oricha-santo
celebration. It is through spiritist masses that santeros and santeras
know when and how to throw parties, as well as other rites, for their
dead. It is also through espiritismo that santeros know what ritual steps
they are required to take in Santería (or Palo Monte).
Santería and espiritismo begin to meld more visibly through the no-
tion of a spirit representation. Like espiritistas, santeros cater to their
eggún not just by performing misas espirituales but also by represent-
ing them through dolls, statuettes, or other icons that speak to their
spirits’ ethnic and religious tendencies. Figurative representations,
just like Ocha’s soperas [oricha-santo ceramic vessels], hold cargas
[charges]: mixed substances that are typically sealed with wax or ce-
ment inside a hole made in the icon or woven into dolls and then con-
secrated with alcohol and smoke. Cargas can consist of different kinds
of plants, sticks, metals, coins, tobacco, honey, cascarilla, and smoked
fish (jutía) but must always hold at their heart a small sea or river stone,
which serves as the spirit’s body, its materialization. What exactly goes
into this carga mixture is often contingent on the instructions of the
muerto itself, as well as its corriente santoral [its tendency for one or
another oricha-santo]. Whether it is a doll, a shell, or a statuette, a
representation of this kind is also thought to acquire its power through
Osain, whose essence is invoked and placed in it and through whose
spirit (nature) the muerto is born. Just like an oricha-santo, then, the
making of representaciónes cargadas implies the birth of the muerto in
that particular object. Indeed, some spiritists and santeros still baptize
their spirit representations.
This association with Catholicism is further enforced in the no-
tion that traditionally the cargas were washed in an umiero [a liquid
mixture] of holy water and plants. The doll or icon was then properly
dressed and adorned after its baptism, a process accompanied by the
performance of specific Catholic prayers and Afro-Cuban chants asso-
ciated with the oricha-santo of the muerto being born. Leonel explains
Spiritism and the Place of the Dead in Afro-Cuban Religion · 75
that at the ritual christening of his main spirit, whom he calls Fran-
cisco, an African spirit, became Francisco: “Ya está bautizado, creado;
ya el puede ir a la misa hacer acto de presencia; ya tiene vida” [He is
now baptized, created; he can go to mass and assert his presence; he
now has life] (Leonel Verdeja 2006). Consecration has implications
for the effectiveness of the object, both for communication—I have
heard it called a “cell phone” to the dead—and for protection due to the
level of “materialization” of the respective muerto. In some cases, these
representations can also be fed sacrificial blood, connoting a more in-
tense relationship of material reciprocity—typical, for instance, of Palo
Monte endeavors. Once “born” in/as the representation, a spirit’s ma-
terial identification may nevertheless be transferred to a second object
if, for example, the original doll becomes old or broken. In this case,
the discarded object can be wrapped in a white cloth and placed in a
church so that God will give it “way,” here meaning, will get rid of it.
Representaciónes cargadas are likened by some santeros and es-
piritistas to resguardos, small stones or objects ritually prepared to
serve as protective amulets, for these too can respond to spirits. They
also resonate with the santero’s pagugu, a stick (cuje) that belongs to
the realm of the eggún with which the santero strikes the ground dur-
ing ceremonial singing or dancing in order to call upon the dead. The
pagugu is understood to be a messenger, a mediatory technology be-
tween worlds, usually responding to the individual’s main protective
spirit, or alternatively, the spirit “of the house,” to whose command
all other spirits are subject. Yet it is also infused with the essence or
spirit of death itself (Iku) and, as a correspondingly ambiguous object,
is normally kept outside the house in a shed, patio, or, in the old days,
a latrine, away from the life of the main house. This provides a sharp
contrast with the “lighter” presence of the santero’s bóveda espiritual,
which cohabits unproblematically with the oricha-santos. While both
the oricha-santos and the spiritual altar are placed above ground, ei-
ther on high shelves, cupboards, or, in the case of the bóveda, on a
table, the sacred cuje is associated firmly with the earth, with matter,
and with the socially liminal. The pagugu is an excellent example of
how the category of eggún articulates elements of both modern spirit-
ism and traditional forms of homage in Santería, not all of which gel.
It is at once a personalized thing—on occasions its spirit is represented
by the head of a snake with cowry shells as eyes and a mouth at the top
76 · Developing the Dead
Symbiotic technologies
anything within its contractual domain with the palero, one generally
premised on the exchange of work for material forms of attention and
incentive, particularly sacrificial animal blood. The perro is, however,
not so much amoral as a creature whose morality has become obsolete
along with his individuality, for he now lives within and for his mas-
ter’s desires, plans, and whims. Indeed, paleros often say that that the
more “unevolved,” “primitive,” and thus, unreflective a spirit, the better
he will be at performing with success, although there are exemptions
from this general assumption.
Some paleros value spirits of people whose lives and deaths have
been characterized by violence or insanity, evidence that mental con-
fusion and moral vulnerability are fundamental tropes to comprehend-
ing a perro’s efficiency in this universe. I have been told that Havana’s
Cementério Colón keeps detailed lists of incoming corpses and their
cause of death with officials establishing a black-market in bones des-
tined for paleros seeking eligible spirits for their new ngangas. Accord-
ing to these rumors, the bones of murderers, rapists, untimely deaths,
and the insane raise the price because an apego [attachment] to the
material world and its pleasures may be inferred. These circulating
representations posit the palero as a manipulator of ignorant entities,
whether for good or evil ends, since, as the saying goes: “Arriba de la
nganga no hay sentimiento” [On top of the nganga, there is no room
for sentiment]. Paleros often stress, while excluding themselves from
this category, that most practitioners of Palo Monte would rather do
daño [damage, destruction] than perform virtuous acts, for it is easier
and better paid to do so. “Unfortunately in this country there is much
envy,” says Guillermo, a middle-aged white palero. “In other countries,
envy is managed in other ways, but in this one you manage it doing
daños” (Guillermo 2011). This image of the morally corrupt perro and
palero is augmented by the copresence of spiritism within similar do-
mains of practice. I have heard paleros themselves describe their work
as a kind of anti-espiritismo: in Palo one does not give “light” to one’s
nfumbe; rather, one “darkens” it through the ongoing process of its en-
chainment, designed through time to increase the nganga’s power. It is
probable that Cuban espiritismo’s frequent reference to muertos oscu-
ros, analogous to Kardecism’s obsessive spirits of lowly evolutionary
grades, emerged at just these intersections of Palo and spiritist moral
discourses.
84 · Developing the Dead
When paleros speak of muertos, they do not simply refer to the perro
or nfumbe, the fundamento of a palero’s nganga. The muerto in Palo
is also the entity in one’s cordón espiritual who not only serves as the
main impetus for initiation, but who takes on ultimate responsibility
for the assembly, constitution, and direction of a palero’s nganga and
all its engagements thereafter. This muerto, sometimes called espiritu
de prenda, becomes the metaphorical mind and soul of the nganga
after its birth, having identified its own role and mission prior to an in-
dividual’s final religious commitment, in most cases in misas espiritu-
ales. As M., a young palero told me: “If you don’t have your own spirit
who works with muerto, you have no business getting into Palo,” by
which he means the spirit of someone who worked with “those things”
while alive (M. 2006). Indeed, with the exception of Palo’s mayombe
version, all Palo requires this existential “back-up.” The relationship
between this protective muerto, a constitutive, internal spirit, and the
palero is of an entirely different nature to the one obtaining between
the perro, an acquired, external spirit, and its master. Sometimes the
espiritu de prenda even determines how and by whom an individual’s
Palo initiation must take place, even if this goes against protocol.
In the following extract, Luis, a middle-aged santero and palero, de-
scribes the complications that can arise at the misas espirituales per-
formed before the initiatory process in Palo:
Assemblages of muertos
in some specific situation, and you tell them, “At this moment the
devil must be fought with the devil, and now is the time to fight
strong.” Instead of a white candle you’ll light a black one, and you
put on a mask so that the “other” that you’re sending your spirit
to won’t recognize you, and then you do the job. (Luis 2006)
At that moment, the nganga shifts from “Christian” to “Jewish”: that
is, the “complex” undergoes a change of register. But, as Luis also re-
marks, and every palero knows, to work for evil may also become ul-
timately self-annihilating: “It begins to eat you up, mentally, and tears
the person apart. The person’s legs start getting weak, they begin to
lose their memory, to say crazy things, offending people or threaten-
ing them, they get sick.” In short, the offender begins to experience
the same kind of disassembly of his social, psychological, and physical
persona as the recipients of his acts.
Another component—or rather, set of components—that is added
to the nganga throughout the course of its existence is spirits of vary-
ing sorts and origins. The nfumbi does not work the nganga alone; as
some paleros have told me, it will have at its disposal an army of enti-
ties accumulated over time by the palero (and his espiritu de prenda)
and integrated into the functioning of the nganga, as necessity arises.
They become parts, if sometimes spare parts, of the nganga complex.
Most of these will be dark, lowly beings that have been “trapped” (often
in bottles) as the palero undoes witchcraft sent either his way, or to a
client. They are then rerouted into the work of the nganga, destroyed,
or buried for a future occasion. Objects such as the guardiero, or any
other kind of protective object, such as a resguardo (which can often
be a small bag made of cloth) or an mpaka, made with a bull’s horn,
will be prepared to act with and on behalf of multiple spirits linked to
the house’s nganga. The insects, plants, minerals, animal blood, and
so forth that go into making these protective objects are thought to
empower and give direction to these entities, as are the prayers and
songs performed during their confection. But they are not just a ma-
terial reference for spirits, or their vessel; the muertos themselves are
also understood to be made via this packaging, or at the very least,
be made possible. In response to my inquiry about the nature of the
guardiero and other such objects, Eduardo responded that they can
be understood as different things. Sometimes the spirit of a person
92 · Developing the Dead
However, for Gell “things” are only secondary agents, essential “with
their thing-ly causal properties” to the exercise of agency as states of
mind (ibid., 20), and through which primary agents distribute their
agency. As Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell argue, “agency, here, re-
mains irreducibly human in origin, and its investment into things nec-
essarily derivative” (2007, 17); the analytical difference between person
and thing is reaffirmed, not questioned. While Gell goes some way
toward softening the boundaries between interior and exterior forms
of personhood, he only briefly alludes to a broader definition of agency
that could be of use here, ultimately dismissing it by defining objects as
“indexes” testifying to the biological existence of individuals. In some
senses, Gell’s distributed person argument works well for Palo. As a
complex, the nganga enacts and distributes the palero’s agency. But
understood in native terms, there is more than this. Ngangas are living,
pulsating things in which a collective kind of agency is achieved; one,
moreover, that is often unpredictable and irreducible to the palero’s
own intentions. As Todd Ramón Ochoa suggests, a language for Palo
has to have terms for a new materiality (2007, 486).
Another way to understand matter in Palo is through its effects,
pragmatically. Latour’s definition of action, and thus agency, is elucida-
tive in this respect. He states that an actor “is not the source of an ac-
tion but the moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward
it. . . . By definition, action is dislocated. Action is borrowed, distrib-
uted, suggested, influenced, dominated, betrayed, translated” (2005,
46). As an object of study, action is inherently uncertain and ambigu-
ous, he suggests, which should lead the researcher to identify and de-
scribe the connections and associations between things, people, and
events that lead to it. The observation that “the most powerful insight
of the social sciences is that other agencies over which we have no con-
trol make us do things” (ibid., 60) is highly pertinent. For Latour, “to
be accounted for, objects have to enter into accounts” (ibid., 79). His
point here is primarily methodological. People and nonpeople are to
be described with the same kinds of terms and ontological priority. The
shape of all people and things is seen to emerge relationally, as parts of
larger networks of associations: they are ipso facto hybrid in this sense
and cannot be separated because their “purification” always creates
more hybrids. As Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell note: “Latour offers a
new meta-theory whereby the inclusion of nonhuman/human hybrids
Spiritism and the Place of the Dead in Afro-Cuban Religion · 95
3
On Good Mediumship
Science, Revolution, and Legitimacy
Beyond Kardec
The groups and individuals considered in this chapter largely defy an-
thropological descriptions of espiritistas científicos as simple follow-
ers and reproducers of Allan Kardec’s original source doctrine. The
majority of these self-styled científico groups or individuals were, and
continue to be, impelled and organized by more complex, rich, and
mystifying doctrinal and intellectual amalgamations than those pro-
posed by strictly Kardecist philosophies, which for many simply skim
the surface of spiritual reality. As such, Cuba’s científicos resist clas-
sifications, such as those described in Chapter One, put forward by
anthropologists such as Bermúdez, Millet, and Córdova Martínez and
Sablón. These generally pit table-sitting, orderly, European-Kardecist-
following científicos against their more syncretic, pragmatic, even dis-
organized counterparts, creating an unwarranted divide between the
two camps, particularly in the capital city. As Román argues—a view to
which I subscribe entirely—it is historically and analytically redundant
100 · Developing the Dead
cal, in this regard, in his reading of Ortiz’s stance and its significant
echoes in contemporary spiritist discourse. At the beginning of his
book on Ortiz, he divides Cuban espiritismo into roughly two tenden-
cies, perhaps aiming to go beyond Ortiz’s own binarisms: one “classic,”
corresponding to an espiritismo practiced in ways similar to those of
the original doctrine; and the other “contextualized” (2002, 16), which
includes the subcategories of cruzado, cordón, and bembé de sao. A
closer look at ethnographic data reveals the contradiction in this. Not
only are contemporary scientific espiritistas deeply implicated with
the Cuban context—in the sense that the history of their practices
cannot be disentangled from the variegated environments in which
they evolved—but their raison d’être derives from an inevitable, ongo-
ing ontological contextualization. “Kardec never counted on the exis-
tence of Afro-Cuban religion,” one of my informants, Eduardo, once
observed. Espiritistas científicos in Cuba, he suggested, have to deal
with realities Kardec did not envisage: witchcraft, for example, with its
particular brands of muertos oscuros, and other complicated spiritual
phenomena produced by the convergence of multiple spiritual uni-
verses and their laws. Eduardo’s point is that the ontological milieu in
which Cuban mediums find themselves requires spiritual strategies,
languages and forms of intervention not foreseen by the doctrine’s
French founder. Classicism is not an option.
While Kardec laid the groundwork for what was to become the widely
acknowledged doctrinal basis of spiritist practices in Cuba, it is equally
the case that in Cuba many other local texts have played a defining role
in the religious and ritual directions of each group or sociedad and,
more generally, in shaping the Cuban spiritist movement. However,
in the last fifteen or so years Kardecism has provided a point of lever-
age in negotiating the hard-line Cuban political environment in which
religion of any sort has been recognized with difficulty; this has prob-
ably been helped by its philosophical tradition, and the appearance of
orderly, undramatic worship practices. In this sense, Kardecism can be
thought of as the instrumental glue that binds together certain groups
in Cuba and that promises to safeguard the continuity of their indi-
vidual spiritual treatises, Kardecist-leaning or not.
104 · Developing the Dead
there was also a sense in which the means to obtain these would have
to come from within what many regarded to be the consejo’s limiting,
politically cozy frame.
Common strands
views with members and leaders of six distinct groups, all of which
would classify themselves within the categories of espiritismo cientí-
fico, Kardecista, or de investigación. I have also drawn from my data
on two different espiritismo científico classes, including the one de-
scribed briefly above which took place at the Asociación Yoruba, as
well as from numerous informal conversations with individuals who
do not profess any institutional affiliation while nevertheless describ-
ing their interests within the same frame. The principal focus lies in
discussion of the three groups with which I spent the most time: the
Consejo Supremo Nacional de Espiritismo Cubano, also known as La
Casa de los Espiritistas, created in 1937, registered in 1940, and led
by the charismatic revolucionário Alfredo Durán; the Sociedad de Es-
tudios Psicológicos Amor y Caridad Universal, founded in the early
1940s and currently headed by two siblings, Servando and Carmen
Agramonte, both medical doctors; and the Grupo Espiritista La Voz de
los Misioneros de Jesus, a multisited spiritist confederation founded in
Trinidad (in the Cuban province of Santa Clara) at the beginning of the
twentieth century, whose Havana branch is led by Pastor Iznaga, who
also acts as president of the Misioneros.
These sociedades are captivating for different reasons, and their
methods and practices differ, but all three exhibit the same strong
feature, articulated in both discourse and practice: a rejection of the
importance of religious “materiality”—objects, icons, representations,
consumables—in their reading of the essence of espiritismo. This in
turn speaks to a common methodology of mediumship: the creation
of persons and spirits through specific mediumship technologies that
aim to contrast sharply with those of their surrounding religious mi-
lieu. While I have taken into account the opinions and experiences of
adherents, whether developing mediums in their own right or casual
participants, I mostly concentrate on those of the leaders, all of whom
are highly articulate, motivated, and socially gifted personalities. In
my view, the kinds of boundary-work that so characterize the discrete
efforts of Havana’s espiritismo científico movement in the midst of a
permeable and syncretic religious field are given direction and impetus
precisely through these individuals’ personal biographies and highly
tuned leadership skills.
110 · Developing the Dead
A Communist medium
“There are two evils in the world. The first is capitalism, and the sec-
ond is religion: belief, superstition, all that is ignorance” (Alredo Durán
Arias 2005). I would quickly become familiar with Alfredo Durán’s
views on institutionalized religion: Catholicism and its “mercenaries,”
the clergy, as well as those aimed at what he disparagingly called saint-
and icon-worship in Cuba, which referenced Afro-Cuban religious
traditions more directly. According to Durán, African slaves brought
blind superstition to Cuba, not culture; conversely, the church and its
representatives have done nothing but exploit and live off the sweat
of others in the name of God. The juxtaposition of these two ills—fe-
tishist worship and Catholic mercenarism—fueled by a discourse on
the sickness of capitalist and “imperialist” forms of material accumula-
tion, formed the cornerstone of his understanding of the role of real
espiritistas. “What good has loving or worshipping God or Jesus ever
brought us?” he would often ask rhetorically:
We should love and worship man! It is belief that has destroyed
man! While man remains ignorant there will be hate and injus-
tice, and religion will continue to exploit him. Man needs edu-
cation, progress, knowledge, especially self-knowledge, not su-
perstition. And man is not great because of his material gains
but through his obra espiritual, his pensamiento positivo, and his
virtuous acts. (Alfredo Durán Arias 2005)
“Does it makes sense,” Durán asked me one afternoon in November
2005, “that when he came to Cuba [in 1998] the Pope brought a golden
crown worth millions of dollars as a gift, when he could have donated
those millions to scientific centers here that make vaccines and medi-
cines for the rest of the world?” The worst aspect of humanity, Durán
says, is that it is creyente [believing/credulous]. “We need to be ‘inves-
tigators’ not ‘believers’! We need people to disagree, to debate, in order
to acquire knowledge; it is knowledge that will make us free thinkers!
To make a new world, we need to make a new man first!” (Alfredo
Durán Arias 2005).
On Good Mediumship: Science, Revolution, and Legitimacy · 111
for others, the materialists, to get ahead, and to exploit and en-
slave him once more. (ibid., 12)
Differing from the development of Brazilian spiritism, particularly in
the Umbanda movements of the 1930s and ’40s described by Diana
Brown (1986) in which a concerted move toward the “whitefication”
of black spirit mediumship practices was observable, the current de-
mography of científico groups in Havana shows no unambiguous con-
nection between strategies of legitimation and racial segregation or
exclusion. To the contrary: Two of the three spiritist societies that I
will discuss in more detail here had black founders and currently have
black leaders; and the other, the consejo, has a racially diverse set of
developing mediums and followers, much like the rest of Havana’s
científico movement. The “black brujo” is quasi-universally typecast
in Cuba as a socially and morally liminal figure; moreover, one that
through popular representations of Palo Monte evokes images of mys-
tical slave labor and subaltern forms of magic contrary to acceptable
parameters of civility. Científicos make no effort to hide their disdain
for Palo endeavors for their moral pliability, and, unlike Afro-Cuban
religious practitioners, they make few fine distinctions between Palo
and Ocha in this regard.
I maintain, however, that there is more to this than a simple repro-
duction of postcolonial and Revolutionary visions of African religions
as antiprogressive. Two factors in particular gain salience when ex-
amining the biographies of its leaders and founders: first, that there is
often a perceived transition from a previous state of ignorance, and/
or immorality, to one of enlightened discipline, indicating not just the
intensity of notions of education and morality in espiritismo but an
acknowledgement of common syncretic roots; and second, that this
transition implies a necessary dematerialization of spiritist practices,
which has at is heart a common spiritist and Afro-Cuban religious un-
derstanding of the role of matter in the ethics of good practice. Indeed,
this precept of dematerialization leads us to consider a more general-
ized paradox in espiritismo, without which the ontological dimension
of científico methodologies lacks context.
118 · Developing the Dead
Moral trajectories
The spiritist trajectories of Alfredo Durán and his wife Maria suggest
the centrality of narratives of conversion in espiritismo científico dis-
course, wherein education operates as both moral and religious cata-
lyst. Durán was born in the rural Oriente of Cuba to a poor agricultural
family with an espiritismo de cordón inclination. His own mother, he
told me, established an espiritismo center in 1915 that closed down
after she was struck by illness and paralysis. “There’s a certain myth
about me,” Durán said in an interview. “They say that that I was born
legs first.” At age five, he narrates, his mediumship was flourishing.
Durán says he often “told” people things and healed them with his
hands, and he was also taken to the local fields to magically ward off
the insects that ate the harvest. Later he worked in a mine where he
was exposed to poisonous minerals and metals that doctors subse-
quently warned would shorten his life. “I’m seventy and I’m still here,”
he told me in 2005, attributing his longevity to his good spiritual as-
sistance and his positive thoughts. In our conversations, Durán often
emphasized his humble, illiterate background—he learned to read and
write thanks to the Revolution—and that he mistakenly relied on the
religious ways of espiritismo de cordón, which out of “ignorance” he
followed until he came upon espiritismo científico in the 1960s. Noth-
ing comes from religion, he would say, only from knowledge, science,
and study. The consejo’s first president, in 1940, was a man called José
de la Riva. Some say he fled to the United States in 1959. The subse-
quent president was threatened with closure of the consejo in the early
’60s because she was told it had too few members to be registered as
an association. The government gave her a certain number of days in
which to raise numbers, and she turned to an old friend in Oriente,
a man called Santiestebán who led an espiritista center and was ac-
tive in national federative activities. Santiestebán in turn referred her
to the reluctant Alfredo Durán, whose fame as a healer and medium
had spread. In a matter of days, so his story goes, Durán had come up
with the necessary members and corresponding signatures, protecting
the consejo from closure. Durán was at first voted in as vice-president,
second in command to a man called Cristobál, whom he describes as
a brujero. Cristobál, according to Durán, eventually recognized the er-
ror of his ways, and in time Durán took over the leadership entirely.
On Good Mediumship: Science, Revolution, and Legitimacy · 119
to pieces. Since then, however, Durán says that he has made a special
effort to befriend this turbulent spirit and to integrate him in his own
spiritual work so that he feels needed and useful. This seems to have
worked. Maria now works side by side with her husband at the consejo
and is no longer mentally afflicted. She claims not to have knowledge
of the specific identities of the spirit guides that assist her in her cari-
dades. She only knows that the more knowledge she acquires, the more
efficient they become in their tasks and, importantly, the fewer mate-
rial aids they need. This does not mean that their “materialist” tenden-
cies have been curbed altogether, Maria says. It would not be unusual
for Durán to come upon her in the early hours of the morning smoking
cigars and drinking rum, as is characteristic of one her African spirits,
Francisca. These and other stories indicate that the lines Durán so pas-
sionately defends dividing the African/indigenous from the scientific
forms of spirit mediumship are rarely as straightforward as he projects
or would perhaps like. It also indicates his willingness to tolerate such
discrepancies. “Espiritismo is a school,” he once said, “and if one is will-
ing to learn and apply these teachings much can change.”
A different narrative of moral redemption and transformation is
told of Claudio Agramonte, the founding medium of the Sociedad
de Estudios Psicológicos Amor y Caridad Universal, perhaps the best
organized and philosophically complex of the científico groups I re-
searched. Like those of Durán and Maria, Claudio’s background was
modest. He was born in 1902 in a poor, rural town in Matanzas known
for its strongly preserved Afro-Cuban traditions and customs. Claudio
was a rebellious and party-loving young man who enjoyed drinking
and dancing. The sociedad’s leaders say he was chosen as a vehicle for
the spiritual evolution of those around him precisely because of his
qualities and his simplicity—he was an uncultured and humble black
man whose heart was in the right place.
Claudio was approached first by a spirit calling himself Rafael Alava.
Rafael appeared to Claudio one evening to tell him that he would be
given the opportunity to help humanity, but that he must do this with
discipline, not drink and dance. Claudio ignored him and continued
his decadent lifestyle until, at a party, Claudio’s body was taken over
entirely by Rafael; upon regaining consciousness, Claudio was fright-
ened to find that he had no memory, just bruises. This is when Rafael
began to change Claudio’s ways, said Antonio Agramonte, Claudio’s
On Good Mediumship: Science, Revolution, and Legitimacy · 121
objects used by local healers and witches, but, as Engelke says, both
prophets and traditional healers use material things to heal, in fact,
very often the same things. “Defining the authority of objects in ac-
cordance with the terms of the Friday message is therefore a task of
some importance,” says Engelke (ibid., 225), arguing that in the realm
of healing, “keeping the commitment to immateriality depends on the
ability to define the significance and authority of objects” (ibid., 226).
Materiality both allures and potentially corrupts, and yet is ultimately
unavoidable in some shape or form. Apostolics resolve this problem
by appealing to what they consider less material sorts of things in
their semiotics of legitimation. Thus, the things that matter most to
Apostolics, as Engelke describes, are those whose materiality is seen
to matter little, such as water, or pebbles, thought to be insignificant in
their materiality. And yet this is a boundary whose negotiation is often
fraught with tension, uncertainty, and temptation, as he also shows.
Engelke’s ethnographic example has striking parallels with the Cu-
ban científicos I have been describing. Científicos often define them-
selves by reference to the absence of ritual “things” in their cultivation
of mediumship. And yet what exactly these “things” are is a conten-
tious issue. How “material” is the body, for instance, that all mediums
without exception must use? As can be seen in Durán and Maria’s nar-
ratives, glasses of water may cross the line, even if herbal remedies
and creams do not; for others, the use of cleansing materials such as
colored cloths, alcohol, perfume, flowers, and special plants is what
distinguishes improper from proper practice. For yet others, it is of-
ferings of food and spirit representations that threaten to “material-
ize” the spirit world beyond moral reparation. While all would gasp at
the thought of developing a spirit via sacrificial animal offerings, for
instance, there is indeed a range of articulated ideologies within the
científico community in Havana regarding what precisely is meant by
“material” and “immaterial” in practice. This is a not dissimilar quan-
dary to that experienced by the so-called cruzados themselves, whose
relationship to materiality in their milieu is equally problematic and
shifting. Espiritistas cruzados contrast themselves to practitioners of
Afro-Cuban religions, for example, by describing their own espirit-
ismo as “pure”: a “camino de agua, de azucena” [a path of water, flow-
ers], as one medium and palero once told me. “Just as you see these
glasses of water, transparent and clean, an espiritista should be the
On Good Mediumship: Science, Revolution, and Legitimacy · 125
exact same way,” said another, suggesting that, ideally, spiritists should
be immune to the temptations of greed and opportunism that so afflict
other cults: a different kind of materialism. As we can guess, these are
moral statements in as much as they also allude to both espiritismo
científico and cruzado’s general avoidance of complex and sometimes
dangerous substances, such as those concocted in Palo Monte. Both
cruzados and científicos produce moral judgments on their dealings
with materiality, and they do this because both camps know that dif-
ferent kinds of muertos are produced in spaces with differing levels of
material commitment.
All espiritistas must determine the extent to which they will “repre-
sent” and/or “materialize” the various entities of their cordón espiri-
tual. In popular espiritismo practices, as we will see in the following
chapter, it is largely assumed that the espíritus de guerra, or the muer-
tos de lucha, or the africanos, Congos, and indios, should have their
own representations: plaster statuettes or images through which vital
exchanges of “things” geared to the resolution of variegated problems
may take place. Not all cordón spirits require such instantiations, how-
ever. I was never told to represent my “nun” spirit materially, for exam-
ple. Rather, my indirect cultivation of her presence was forthcoming
from my actions: attending Church masses or collecting saints’ figures
or from my thoughts and moral posture. In a similar vein, my Jewish
bureaucrat spirit would gain little from direct consecration to matter, I
was told. Instead, I should place a quill in a glass of water to represent
his intellectual intervention in my work, which, needless to say, works
on a mental plane. A gypsy or African spirit, on the other hand, is emi-
nently pragmatic and must have material attributes—a doll or figurine
to represent them, and instruments of work (flowers, perfume, honey,
for the gypsy; rum, miniature weapons, for the African). The recursiv-
ity of material offerings here is immediate: honey provides sweetness,
for example, in turn enabling the love-related successes attributed to
gypsy spirits. Other entities evade representation entirely.
Only very rarely do the most evolved entities of one’s cordón es-
piritual, such as one’s master guia, ask to be “materialized.” Just as
a palero would not think of offering misas espirituales to his nganga
126 · Developing the Dead
Bumpy steps
allows for its inevitably bumpy steps. Other científicos are less tolerant
of a spirit’s gradual progression toward immateriality or nonattach-
ment and less articulate about the role of mediums in attaining this.
Consider the following excerpt from my field description of a session
at the Misioneros de Jesús society in Havana. As is characteristic of this
sociedad, largely anonymous spirits speak through a series of mediums
that sit in propriety around a central table, while Pastor, the society’s
leader, guides the conversation or clarifies their messages. While most
who “come” speak of their current spiritual missions or of significant
events that may occur in the future, occasionally more “undesirable”
entities make their way in.
Spirit: Ai chico, we’re inside a dark cave . . . How will we get out?
Pastor: To get out of that darkness you need to understand that
you’re no longer incarnate. Let’s elevate our thoughts. Padre
Nuestro, que estás en el cielo . . .
Spirit: Aren’t you going to light us a candle?
Pastor: We don’t need that here. Positive thoughts for these
brothers. Peace, light, harmony.
Spirit: Chico, we bring lots of gold coins with us.
Pastor: No, we don’t need that here. Were you buried there?
Spirit: Ai, my goodness, how sad! Look at all these things . . . this
treasure trunk, I like it.
[The spirits remained for a while, calling themselves Congos, un-
til Pastor began to voice his impatience. I felt he wanted to
create space for more “enlightened” spirits.]
Pastor: Go away! Go away! You may come back another day;
you’ll see that you’ll go away feeling more peaceful once you’ve
learned your prayers.
Spirit: Oh! This light hurts my eyes!
Pastor: That’s progress, light . . .
Spirit: Good evening, I am a Congo! I’m a black Congo that’s been
buried alive. Are you going to let us come back another day?
Pastor: Listen, you’re very wrong and confused.
This example, like many others I recorded, shows the frequent incon-
tainability of lesser-considered entities in científico gatherings, despite
their leaders’ vigorous efforts to project the contrary, the “Ai chico” at
the beginning here suggesting these spirits were lower-classed Cubans
128 · Developing the Dead
and worse: Congos. “We don’t speak to spirits here,” Pastor told me
once, contradicting what I had seen in the episode above. “Here we
speak with our minds,” he said and contrasted his sessions with those
that actively evoke spirits in more lively rites of incorporation. Accord-
ing to Pastor, the most evolved sorts of entities communicate through
inspiration, not possession. Once, after a lengthy talk on the philoso-
phy of spiritist gatherings, a spirit spoke through the Pastor, saying:
I am saying all of this through this medium. He is merely the in-
terlocutor; there is nothing in him that is material, only the words
that I’m telling you right now. Don’t think that just any spirit can
come here and do what they please. I am speaking now because
there is a spirit guide that oriented me, that told me what I should
and shouldn’t do here today.
This anonymous spirit, who spoke an old-fashioned Spanish, explained
that he had been given authority by the conjunto misionero, the soci-
ety’s spirit leaders. He explained to his audience that every spirit that
arrives at these sessions must be observed and vetted by the society’s
higher commission of guides, who ensure that it abides by the group’s
principles and rules when it speaks. That less instructed spirits often
sneak in, however, was clear during the sessions I attended, such as the
one described above.
Similarly, I have watched Durán grapple with such transgressions,
sometimes with irritation. Once, during a Saturday mediumship ses-
sion where participants are asked what they have felt or seen during
a brief moment of meditation, an elderly woman who had been re-
ceiving what I call “spiritual hiccups” for a few minutes—indicating
the proximity of a strong muerto—told Durán that she saw a spirit
placing some kind of cooking pot or casserole on the floor next to him
and then sweeping around it. Durán, perhaps intuiting a connection to
brujería related to the pot, told the woman in a dismissive tone that she
must be wrong, that it was unlikely that this spirit was there because
this “kind” of entity does not enter through the door (“no entra por
la puerta”) at the consejo. The fact that this cosmopolitical boundary-
work can be observable at most espiritismo científico spiritual sessions
reveals the extent to which efforts must be rallied to constrain a cos-
mos that constantly threatens to spill into forbidden areas of worship.
This also references the paradoxical nature of representation/ma-
On Good Mediumship: Science, Revolution, and Legitimacy · 129
Sharp (2006, 124) notes that although French spiritism initially courted
orthodox scientific attention, it strongly resisted its conclusions, criti-
cizing “the materialist values increasingly attached to the human mind
which implied the secondary quality (or nonexistence) of the soul.” In
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the study of the senses was
to become an enterprise garnering both experts and lay experiment-
ers, and threatening to unify hitherto separate dominions through the
postulation of cross-cutting universals, such as the unconscious and
other deep layers of the mind. Psychology itself was born under the
guise of naturalizing what eventually became an untenable economy of
sensationist sciences, including spiritualism and spiritism.
As Riskin shows in her analysis of the Mesmerist investigation at
the end of the eighteenth century, commissioned to curb Mesmer’s
success, ultimately the authorities would undermine their own ma-
terialism by creating new categories of causality: “Insisting that mes-
meric patients were responding to no material medium, but instead
to a ‘moral’ force, their own imaginations, the commissioners opened
themselves to an obvious question: What precisely was this faculty of
‘imagination’? It seemed a more mysterious and troubling cause than
Mesmer’s magnetic fluid” (Riskin 2009, 137). In this analysis, it was
the investigators who extracted from Mesmerism a radically new and
immaterial force capable of causing physical sensations—the imagina-
tion (ibid., 139)—turning it into the source of a new psychology (ibid.,
141). Spiritists, however, partly resisted these conclusions and allied
themselves with what remained of the Mesmerist movement of the
mid-nineteenth century, particularly with regards to their concept of
the universal fluid Mesmer had first demonstrated and which Karde-
cists translated into the “perispirit.” However, Sharp observes that “by
the end of the century, spiritists were forced to choose between reject-
ing the transcendental or giving up the search for scientific legitimacy”
(2006, 124). Arguably, Cuban espiritistas did neither. In France and
Spain, spiritists overcame the criticisms of the Catholic Church, rally-
ing supporters. They had established themselves as an antireligious al-
On Good Mediumship: Science, Revolution, and Legitimacy · 131
ternative to spirituality. But it was in the New World that a new ground
was to be staked: mental and physical wellbeing.
In Brazil, spiritism has managed with impressive success to colo-
nize a steady ground in the alternative medicines. David Hess, who
has written about the impact of spiritist ideology on Brazilian culture,
argues that spiritism “plays a key role in mediating between elite sci-
ence and medicine on the one side and popular religion and healing
on the other” (1991, 3). Spirit doctors, much like in Cuba, form the
cornerstone of spiritism’s claims to diagnosis and treatment. Accord-
ing to Hess, for spiritists “the movement is a synthesis of both moral-
religious values (heart) and of scientific thought (head), ideological
divisions that correspond to the social divisions between evangelical
and intellectual Spiritists and between the mystical masses and the sci-
entific elites” (ibid., 34). He credits the fact that the Brazilian medical
profession was much less established in Brazil than in Europe in the
nineteenth century, with spiritism’s effectiveness at positioning itself
as a rival alternative to popular medicine (ibid., 78).
Among other points of dramatic influence, spiritism was to gen-
erate a particular brand of spiritual psychiatry, rallied by influential
political and medical figures such as Dr. Bezerra de Menezes, based
on the notion that mental illness could be caused by spirit obsession
as well as cerebral lesion. Menezes’s ideas were shot down at the time
by renowned social scientist Nina Rodrigues, among others, but spirit-
ists have largely followed his legacy of unifying their philosophy with
medical approaches, providing both spiritual services and in some
cases free allopathic medical attention to the poor. Hess (1991) noted
that spiritists operated dozens of psychiatric hospitals nationwide at
the time, some private and others part of the national health grid; in
some cases, they had also set up coextensive spiritist centers where
they perform “disobssession” treatments on those they believe to be
spiritually afflicted. In a few of these hospitals, they controlled day-
to-day treatment, which means they often provided complementary
spiritist therapies (1991, 20). Hess argues that the Brazilian influence
of the spiritist intellectual movement stems largely from those institu-
tions and associations that bear on health-related concerns, such as
the Spiritist Medical Association of São Paulo (AMESP), the Society
of Medicine and Spiritism of Rio de Janeiro, and the Campus Univer-
132 · Developing the Dead
the state channel TV Rebelde, where Paquita spoke about her spiritual
activities. I noticed that she spent the better part of her fifteen-minute
interview defending herself against the interviewer’s implicit allega-
tions of scientific heresy. It is a program known among critical Haba-
neros for its tactics of “revealing” frauds while keeping up the pretense
of disinterested exchange. The following excerpts are my translation
from the Spanish, to which I have added descriptive content.
“Do you reject medicine of the scientific kind?” the interviewer
asked her.
“No, to the contrary, I am very grateful for it, as is my family. . . . I
start at eight in the morning and sometimes finish at eight at
night, working, so late. All kinds of people come here . . . doc-
tors, nurses, children. Children from different hospitals come
here and I treat them with my hands. My gift is natural. But
I don’t reject medicine, what I do is just help with my hands.”
“So are you assuring me that what you can cure medicine can-
not?” the interviewer continued, challenging her.
“No, no, no!” replied Paquita anxiously “How would medicine not
be able to cure it? Of course it can cure! I would never reject
medicine; never in my life would I do that! I trust medicine
entirely, but I also trust my gift!”
These arguably panicky responses betray an existing tension between
spiritual healing technologies—of both the Afro-Cuban and espiritista
kind—and official discourses on Cuba’s luminary medical achieve-
ments and world-class health standards. For Paquita to assert that she
cured the medically, scientifically “incurable” would have been akin to
Mustelier’s heretic assertions in the early twentieth century that his
cures were “miraculous.” Científicos too must deal with this ideological
friction, perhaps even more so than the espiritistas de cordón—whose
cosmology and liturgy has been the subject of much study and is thus
largely seen as innocuous folklore—or more than the so-called cruza-
dos. While the latter tend to remain relatively incognito, going about
their tasks from homes or other private spaces of worship, largely
exterior to complicated philosophical-scientific treatises, científicos
arguably tread more sensitive ground, given their appeals for official
recognition. It is difficult to determine, however, the extent to which
the científicos’ often less private healing sessions cause discomfort in
On Good Mediumship: Science, Revolution, and Legitimacy · 135
the political sphere. One factor in their favor in this regard seems to
be their continued emphasis on the science and rationality of their
endeavors, whether this meets reality or not.
Just as in Afro-Cuban religious domains, health is a foundational
concern for spiritists. Mediums are fond of saying that people seek or
become spiritists out of “need,” not curiosity or whim. Structural and
political factors clearly have their place in this dynamic. Espiritismo
de cordon, for example, seems to have flourished in the eastern Cuban
countryside in part as a response to the sicknesses of a population
largely ignored by the postcolonial regime, despite its relatively ad-
vanced medical technologies (Bermúdez 1968). But if the Revolution
had expected swift change following its education and health reform
campaigns in the 1960s, it was to be disappointed. Instead, cordón still
specializes overwhelmingly in the treatment of physical and mental ail-
ments, and its mediums are in high demand, as are those of other spir-
itist denominations. While the authorities perhaps expect the diseases
treated in religious circles to be of a different order to those brought
to bona fide doctors, and indeed Cubans are notorious for their use of
both medical and religious resources, it is uncertain whether each ac-
counts for entirely different domains of wellbeing.
Both paleros and santeros argue that initiations strengthen people’s
biophysical reality—their immune systems for example, in some cases
quite noticeably; rituals are not simply matters of belief but are effica-
cious in achieving physiological as well as psychological betterment.
Meanwhile, the growing crowds of pilgrims at the San Lázaro sanctu-
ary in Havana are testament to the escalating disappointment many
Cubans feel toward what has become a crippled and corrupt national
medical system (Hagedorn 2002). The government’s painstakingly
projected image of Cuba as a medical superpower has largely crum-
bled, in Cuban if not foreign eyes, particularly with the nation’s recent
foray into medical tourism. The abandoned state of many of Havana’s
ordinary hospitals is evidence of a growing disparity between official
discourse and lived reality, and científicos are not immune to these
disparities, while not unfailingly siding with the mystical.
Maritza, the leader of a Havana-based society called Sendero de
Luz y Amor, once recounted to me with horror how one of her medi-
ums, diagnosed with breast cancer a few months earlier, had repeat-
edly refused treatment in one of Havana’s best hospitals in favor of
136 · Developing the Dead
Rebeca
mention was made of who or what “it” was. R., the ex-palero, began to
coax and joke with it, speaking to it in a derogatory way so as to pro-
voke a therapeutic confrontation. Suddenly Rebeca’s body contorted
and began to spasm. The group’s mediums said that the spirit had be-
gun to feel trapped during the conversation—evidenced by the grow-
ing expressions of agony on Rebeca’s face—and had decided to come
through. Rebeca cried out and fell to the floor. For about ten minutes
she rolled back and forth, grabbing her stomach tightly and crying in
pain with her eyes shut. They tried to sit her back in her chair but her
body was rigid, prostrate, and hard to move. She was clearly suffering,
and Aldama said that her spirit had died of stomach cancer, which was
now manifesting in Rebeca. Beba put both hands on Rebeca’s head and
talked to her slowly and deliberately, asking that she relax and that the
spirit leave her alone. She also brought some cologne from inside the
house and cleansed the girl’s legs. Eventually, Rebeca stopped breath-
ing heavily and crying, and returned to normal. The spirit had gone.
Due to the exceptional power of the cause of her disturbance, Re-
beca receives gradual and careful treatment by the group. Aldama is
certain that he saved her from being wrongly institutionalized; he also
is certain that he will eventually be able to save her spiritually. This
seems to be what his sociedad’s methodology professes to achieve: a
discernment of the rightful causes of a given illness through collabo-
ration between seers of both medical-physical and spiritual-psycho-
logical domains. But it also seemed to me that this may be a less sym-
metrical arrangement than he claims. After all, the cases discussed
by Aldama and his group of healers tended to be those where spirit
influences overshadowed physiological ones, thus justifying their in-
tervention. That medicine badly needs recourse to spiritist diagnostic
technologies seemed clear; it is less clear where espiritismo needs its
medical counterparts, except for validation.
The Agramontes
medium that the spirits can “demineralize” the “mineral and vegetable
corpuscles” that they carry over from previous existences. “What we
try to do here is explain things simply, clearly, because what happens
has nothing to do with mystery or miracles: this is pure physics, we
work with energy,” she says. In this way, learning mediumship is a two-
fold therapy, one that works for both sides of the spirit-person divide.
“Spirits need to materialize to evolve and to be able to metabolize, and
the only way they can do it is through us.”
It is unsurprising, perhaps, that this sociedad’s mediums conceive
of their efforts as a type of psychological social work, albeit one whose
coordinates are premised on a “spiritual physics,” as Carmen would
say. The group’s idiom is thus less one of science than an alternative
scientific idiom, articulated perseveringly through the pragmatics of
mediumship development, which I spent several months observing,
both at public Saturday sessions, and the more private youth escuelitas.
Antonio said, “OK, let’s talk. What is it that you want?” The spirit
replied, “I’m so ashamed.” Antonio asked why he felt this way and the
spirit responded that he did not want to talk: “I don’t want to face life.”
Why? “I don’t feel like it.” H. was now was sitting with his head between
his legs. The spirit went on to say that he felt frustrated and as if he
could not accomplish anything in his life. Antonio said that maybe H.’s
own spirit could be of help.
Servando commented that the spirit had experienced problems in
the mother’s womb, and that he had developed antisocial tendencies
while alive, never quite adapting to his surroundings. “This spirit did
not have a normal cerebral organic evolution,” he said. Both he and
Antonio agreed that these “lesions” were probably affecting H.’s own
brain. Servando further noted that this spirit had another spirit stuck
to it (pegado)—a woman—probably with whom he had incurred some
karmic debt during his existence. Antonio lit a candle and said, “Look
what I have here. Do you know what this is? This is light. This light
represents what we wish to give you; you’re lacking in light.” He held
the candle to the spirit’s face. The spirit then muttered that H. could
not be spontaneous because he (the spirit) was trying to put brakes on
his flow, especially his words.
“Is this vengeance on H.?” the investigators ask.
A debate ensued on the nature of this entity and the participants
came to the rudimentary conclusion that this spirit was jealous. But
they also began a convencimiento, a dialogue with the purpose of
bringing the spirit to its (moral) senses.
“You can let go of this anguish, this anxiety you carry,” they said,
“and be happy. You must stop causing H. harm.”
Antonio told the group that he thought this spirit had some sort of
problem with H. in another incarnation.
“What did he do to you?” Antonio asked him directly. “We are going
to investigate what conflict you have with this materia.”
“This is a school where we study mental education,” Servando’s wife
added. “We can help you.”
The senior mediums in the room speculated that perhaps H. had
done something to disrupt this spirit’s emotional life in another exis-
tence. Antonio said that man has two tendencies—la humanidad and
la animalidad—and that the animal instincts predominated in this
spirit because his only motivation was crude emotion and feeling. An
152 · Developing the Dead
Our Father prayer was said, and then Antonio told the young medium
who had performed the initial cleansing to “quitarle el espiritu.” As
she grabbed H.’s hands in hers, passed a white cloth over his face and
body, and pressed her own head to his forehead, H. slowly came out of
his trance. The group had initiated what would probably be a lengthy
therapeutic intervention with H.’s troublesome spirit.
Social medicine
one whose body is interlocked with the minds, wills, and distresses of
the disembodied entities to which he or she is bound. Indeed, while
most espiritistas conceive of the person as extended and relational,
this sociedad recasts both the person’s spirit and those of her extended
self as located not inside her body but as embedded in her body’s cel-
lular structure. This rather revolutionary vision may be in part seen as
a contravention of Kardec’s tripartite concept of the body, spirit, and
perispirit. Claudio Agramonte, through José de Luz, adds complexity
to what is an untenable division in practice, particularly spiritual-med-
ical practice, transforming it into a workable manifesto for legitimate
healing. Corpuscular theory medicalizes the perispirit, locating it as
the source of historical ailments, expressed both as a pathological at-
tachment to a previous identity and an interpsychological scar to be
revealed through investigative mediumship insight. But, by positing
the body as an instrument for the metabolic functioning of a wider
universe of beings (bóveda material, bóveda espiritual), whereby its
chemistry is spiritualized, the sociedad’s founder and current leaders
also imply that illness should be perceived as the consequence of wider
social and even political processes, as well as a signal of a person’s ul-
timate responsibility and agency over them.
This means that mediumship not only serves an immediate social
purpose (social work), but may also constitute a diagnostic and even
regulatory device for the health of a larger, temporally and spatially
extended social system, allowing for the release of toxic dispositions
greater than merely those pertaining to living individuals. What kind
of society is therefore imagined here, we may ask? The Sociedad Amor
y Caridad evokes an image of historicity that is ultimately at odds with
what Palmié has called the narrative structure of Western historical
imagination. “Since at least the eighteenth century,” he says, “Western
historians have constructed their claims on the past on the basis of
conceptions of a linear and irreversible growth of unbridgeable tem-
poral distance between past and present realities” (2002, 5). In this
paradigm, as Palmié observes, spirits are nothing more than denizens
of a world that no longer exists, necessitating their own representa-
tion in order to take on agency and presence. All the espiritistas I have
described so far work from a contrary assumption, however. The dead
are far from gone. But what I find captivating about this sociedad’s
154 · Developing the Dead
philosophy is that they take this to the extreme. Spirits are not a lan-
guage of the body, but of the body, indissociable from its most intimate
molecular properties and their ontogeny. History is thus intimately
embedded, transparent in its pathologies and ultimately redeemable
through self-knowledge and integration. If spiritism is a medicine at
all, then, it would be a thoroughly social kind of medicine.
4
Encounter, Selfhood,
and Multiplicity
Plácido
luminosity of the spirits that accompany him. His parents were ru-
ral folk, Catholics, and they lived in the provinces. Spiritual phenom-
ena were not conceived of in his family, let alone understood or dealt
with. As such, he would experience the loneliness of many sleepless
nights, where the Mexican muerto would approach and speak to him.
It frightened Plácido, and he would hide under the bed, hoping the
voice would go away. There was no one around to recognize his symp-
toms or to encourage him to work with them. He did his best to ignore
this strange presence until the day he received his first real “proof.” The
spirit told him not to go horse riding that day, for he would be badly in-
jured; Plácido went riding anyway and had an ugly fall that further im-
paired his already precarious physical state. However, it was not until
his seventeenth birthday, in the context of a celebration party, that the
spirit made its first unambiguous manifestation by descending into his
body unexpectedly, in an entirely inconvenient social environment. He
describes this event as a turning point or revelation, more importantly,
as the incentive he needed to finally accept his destiny as a gifted indi-
vidual. He realized that he had no choice but to desarrollarse, telling
us that he had gained quite a following for his remarkable accuracy. In
Pinar del Rio (the easternmost province of Cuba), he claims proudly,
people have a saying: “Dios en el cielo, Placidito en la tierra” [God in
the skies, and Little Plácido on earth].
As occurred with a handful of other extraordinary individuals
whom I met during this period in Havana, something stayed with me
from these encounters. I was not only moved by Plácido’s talent, his
sincerity, and his courage as a human being in the face of his poverty
and his physical difficulties, but he impressed upon me the extent of a
coexistence of “selves” among mediums, particularly in their conscious
and physical forms. In my conversations with him, Plácido highlighted
the limits of his understanding of the information filtering through
him. It seemed to me that in his acceptance of such limits, in which
was implied a deep-rooted confidence in the veracity and effectiveness
of his other “selves,” he was at the same time laying claim to them as
part of his own self. While this disregard for the mechanics of “knowl-
edge” may not be a trait common to all espiritistas, it did underline an
important aspect of the relationship between all mediums and their
spirits that I regularly encountered: a silent solidarity with, commit-
ment to, and trust in, the respective missions of the entities that ac-
Encounter, Selfhood, and Multiplicity · 159
company them. It was plain that Plácido was not merely Plácido—he
had been since childhood much more than merely that contained by
the boundaries of his body. His “luminosity” or “genius” was both in-
nate—implicit in his own being or in his capacity for being—and tied
to his spirits, from which he, as a medium and as a person, could not
be extricated.
Spirit possession studies tend to see the emergence and persistence
of spirits as embodiments or expressions of outer, shifting realities,
instantiated or articulated in and as bodily experience. This approach
is often presented in anthropologically sophisticated ways, such as in
Paul Stoller’s captivating account of possession among Niger’s Song-
hay communities (1989) or in Aihwa Ong’s ethnography of Malay fac-
tory workers’ spirit attacks in the wake of shifting economic and so-
cial realities for women (1987). Yet I would challenge this concept of
change as linearly causal or dialogical. Rather, I posit a “capacity” for
spirits within entirely constitutive dimensions of a self, albeit a self
unconfined to itself. As I suggest in chapter 1, this requires engaging
with a different ontology of being as well as selfhood that requires a
shift from notions of reaction and resistance to those that emphasize
activation, realization, and becoming. As one informant once told me,
“There is no desarrollo that is not deeply personal, that is not there
already” (Teresita Fernández 2005). While she was referring explicitly
to the fact that someone either has the gift for spirit mediation or not,
her claim also alluded to the idea that “development” is a process that
“gives life” to preexisting potentialities within oneself. As reflections
and substantiators of this process, social others are crucial to the acti-
vation of particular selves, underlining the importance of both private,
spontaneous forms of spirit encounter and their social sanctioning and
identification, not just a posteriori, but inevitably also as a means of
encounter itself. Following Latour (2004), I argue that these first in-
stances of spiritual calling are best conceptualized as the “acquisition”
of a body through learning to be affected by agentive registers that are
experienced as other to oneself.
A calling
physical and, as such, often public: vivid apparitions and sights, unfa-
miliar bodily sensations, hearing voices, prophetic dreams and lucid
premonitions, momentary psychological distress or loss of memory,
spontaneous possession episodes, and the appearance of medically
incomprehensible sicknesses. These manifestations, however revela-
tory and defining at a given moment, constitute the tipping point of
individual spiritual processes that are thought to take years to gain
shape. Indeed, spirit mediumship does not ultimately require conver-
sion, in the mental or emotional sense of the term; rather it implies the
discovery of deep-seated, albeit previously unacknowledged, abilities.
In retrospect, many mediums will speak of having understood their
talent early in life—and thus discovery being “rediscovery”—but of not
wanting to believe or engage “in those things” either through fear, ig-
norance, or lack of social acceptance. That such responsibilities even-
tually find them is evident in the unexpected and often tension-filled
character of such processes of rediscovery. The extranormal sensitiv-
ity and perception that Cubans refer to as mediunidad is usually first
manifest precisely at challenging junctures of physical and emotional
wellbeing, where pain and confusion threaten to dissolve givens of
self, sentience and sanity. The above-mentioned symptoms—visions,
sensations, unwanted experiences of possession—trigger a reaction,
a search for explanations and relief, and in the best of circumstances,
spiritual modes of identification and help. Thus, mediumship is objec-
tified at points where multiplicity becomes undeniable, visceral, and
even damaging if repressed, inviting radical transformation. These fis-
sures in the constitution and experience of a previously held self, and
at times its disintegration, “unmake worlds” (Scarry 1985) so that these
can be remade anew, generally in communities of experts. In this sense,
Cuban forms of espiritismo resonate with other spirit cults described
by anthropologists worldwide, such as the acquisition of ngulu spirits
among Lungu healers in Zambia, which results in a “change in social
role, coupled with a sense of changed and expanded selfhood” (Willis
1999, 152). As with espiritistas, these healers’ life stories suggest that
“selfhood is paradoxically both plural and integral” (ibid., 150), often
becoming apparent through illnesses.
Encounter, Selfhood, and Multiplicity · 161
Leonel
Leonel, my espírita and santero friend, now in his fifties, was seven
years old when he first showed signs of being unusual. He began to have
sudden and violent seizures, as well as exhibiting a constant restless-
ness and inability to sleep. At the time, Leonel’s father, an agronomist,
was mobilized by the government in the provinces and spent large
amounts of time away from home, which left his mother, Virginia, to
handle the situation by herself. Both Leonel (senior) and Virginia were
committed revolutionaries. They had taken part in the literacy cam-
paigns of the early 1960s, believed in the ideals of the socialist project,
and, as with many white folk in this position, had limited or no contact
with the religious world, regarding it as a mostly African superstition.
Worried sick, Virginia took Leonelito to as many psychologists and
psychiatrists as she had word of, from one clinic to the next, further
exhausting the hospitals in the capital. His eventual diagnosis was epi-
lepsy, and he was soon medicated heavily. Some of these medicines
would destroy his teeth, and others provoked unbearable migraines,
headaches he was to experience until his midthirties as a long-term
consequence of these drugs. Still, he would experience uncontrollable
seizures, sometimes at home, other times at school, being regularly
sent home by his teachers. His restlessness did not decrease; instead,
Leonelito would sit up for hours at night fiddling with his toys and talk-
ing to himself. Virginia could not sleep and became desperate.
At one of the hospital visits, Virginia sat with her small son in the
waiting room next to an older Afro-Cuban woman accompanying her
granddaughter, also an epileptic. She told Virginia that the medicine
Leonel was being given was slowly killing him, that what he had was
not epilepsy but an urgent need to develop spiritually, and that she
should take him to someone who could really attend to him, for he was
born to be a cabeza grande (literal translation: big head). In retrospect,
Virginia realized that the woman was an espiritista, but, ignorant of
religious “things” back then, she had barely understood what the me-
dium meant. Bewildered, she contacted the only person she could
think of who might be able to help: an uncle who had always claimed
to “see” things (despite family cynicism) and who had some contacts
among religiosos.
164 · Developing the Dead
gious prohibitions were still in effect in 1979, and in the humblest way
possible, for resources were scarce, but by the eleventh day, he was an
iyawó.
Leonel’s story shows how illness can become a catalyst in the devel-
opment of a spiritist self, which may then grow in a direction that en-
compasses other expressions of religiosity, such as Santería. The onset
of illness is perceived less as a spirit attack than as a dramatic sign of
the individual’s gift for spiritual mediation within the field of la reli-
gion. The solution would not be exorcism, but an acceptance of these
new properties of the individual’s own functioning, which manifest
physically at first, and which are crucial to the broader religious com-
munity (cf. Nuñez Molina 1987, for a Puerto Rican example). Indeed,
we should be wary of placing too strong an emphasis on the illness-
healing dimension of this development (for spiritist examples cf. Koss
1977, as well as Koss-Chioino 2006; Garrison 1977a, 1977b, 1978). A
host of fascinating studies on the construction of the religious self and
of the emergence of a consciousness of spirits, in or out of possession,
shows us that the onset of spirit mediumship may be more about the
“becoming” of a person in conjunction with spirit entities over time
than a recovery from illness or trauma (cf. for example Goldman 1985,
2005; 2007; McCarthy Brown 1991; Wafer 1991).
For Cuban espiritistas, the body and its manifold sensory apparatus are
subject to potentially infinite forms of spiritual manifestation, not just
through the onset of illness or possession but by virtue of the myriad
shades of consciousness through which it is capable of extending the
self. An exploration of the senses as legitimate vehicles of informa-
tion is crucial in coming to terms with how different modes of percep-
tive experience can emerge as meaningful and long-lasting keys to the
emergence of different kinds of selfhood. In some ways, we could say
that mediumship, as a tool for knowing, comes into existence precisely
in this interface between embodiment and objectification, whereby
certain sensations, images, and feelings become valuable knowledge
by virtue of their identification with a growing spiritual self-awareness.
This is less a question of interpretation or reframing than of recogniz-
ing paths of self-making through sensorial and somatic openness that
166 · Developing the Dead
are as different as the mediums who experience and develop them. The
point at which this awareness strikes often signals a road of no return
for the medium, becoming critical to his or her self-definition as an
espiritista.
Diasmel, an archeology and theology graduate now in his late thir-
ties, remembers his first encounter, aged eight, emotionally. He recalls
having seen, on a crowded city bus, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre,
Cuba’s patron saint, associated with the deity Ochún in Santería, with
whom he would commence a lifelong relationship as a devout believer
and worshipper. The poignant nature of his vision, while of an oricha-
santo, signaled a spiritist calling that his mother was willing to nurture,
greatly facilitating Diasmel’s subsequent development process. In the
years following his vision, Diasmel would fall into states of shaking
trance, hear voices, and consciously feel his body and mind given over
to multiple other presences whose contours would shift and shape his
own responses, moods, expressions, and intellectual interests (Dia-
smel 2005). Another medium I interviewed, an elderly woman called
Marta, described to me in detail how at the age of five she received
an ominous warning of the hurricane that would destroy a great deal
of the island in 1944. Her vision, of a tall man in a dark cape pouring
water from a jar and looking at her intensely, told Marta that a deadly
cyclone was on its way. As a poor peasant’s daughter in a small rural
community, where the majority of the palm- and clay-built houses col-
lapsed, this event marked Marta out as “special” (Marta 2005). At the
age of seventy, when I met her, Marta was still speaking of predicting
and appeasing the great forces of nature and even of having foreseen
the onset of climate change.
While evocative visions such as those described above are not un-
common events in the life of an espiritista, knowledge is more often
received through what espiritistas refer to as the mente [mind’s eye].
Mediums attribute spiritual significance to images that appear spon-
taneously in their minds, as well as to sudden feelings or emotions,
perceived to come from “without.” The imagination as a tool for spiri-
tual reconnaissance is so pronounced in espiritismo that information
is thought to reach the conscious mind quite easily through it, though
this must be distinguished from one’s own fantasies. The development
of an expanded sense of trust is here essential. Eventually, mediums
Encounter, Selfhood, and Multiplicity · 167
will learn to say “Mis muertos me dejan ver” [My muertos are letting
me see], relative to such forms of access. Imagination is thus seen as a
greater function of a collective of spirits, rather than as an individual
cognitive property or effect. Engaging with it reinforces existing over-
laps between physical and nonphysical landscapes which coalesce pre-
cisely in such zones of liminal control (in the mental sense).
In espiritismo imagination is less a combinatory or creative tech-
nology than it is a means of revealing what the world really is, with
a corresponding sense of awe. A similar argument can be forwarded
for emotions. Feelings are often conceptualized as spirit-induced “in-
spirations” and interpreted as extrabodily, expansive, and connective
experiences. They can also be symptoms of unproductive forms of
spirit approximation. Behavioral differences with respect to emotional
responses are seen as particularly indicative of spirit influences: impa-
tience where there would normally be tranquility, sadness where once
there was joy and laughter. “I have always considered myself someone
who would liven up a party,” says Alfredo, a social worker in his late
twenties. “But recently I’ve lost my shine, my confidence.” Alfredo ra-
tionalizes this as the acercamiento of one of his muertos, a spirit with
certain emotional conflicts. Jon Mitchell’s proposal of emotions as a
category of knowledge on a par with the semiotic and the practical
(1997) seems apt for the spiritist case as well as that of the Maltese
Christians he describes.
What I have been calling the “capacity” for spirits is conceptual-
ized by espiritistas along a flexible and nonexclusionary spectrum that
ranges from its experience in conscious states, such as videncia—the
ability to “see,” either in the mind’s eye’ or, more literally, as one sees
physical objects—to seemingly less conscious ones, such as dreaming,
as I will describe below. But mediumship can also manifest as the im-
mediacy of “gut-feelings” or presentiments, bodily sensations at the
margins of consciousness, sudden feelings of certain knowledge, as
well as the perception of one’s body as the canvas of others’ physical-
ity, pain, or illness (medianidad sensitiva), resembling what Romberg,
in reference to Puerto Rican spiritists, calls “mimetic somatization”
(2009, 199). Espiritistas begin with a perception of an “otherness” very
often at the limits of apprehension and understanding, which may then
grow in intensity and meaning as they “organize” their cordón espiri-
168 · Developing the Dead
tual. These talents for feeling, seeing or hearing may be talked about
as facultades [faculties] or dones [gifts of God], virtues that may be
“marked” in one’s destiny much like discovering that one has Yemayá
or Changó marked as one’s oricha-santo. They essentially signal recep-
tiveness brought on by pressures that are generally invisible to others,
but which with time are expected to lead to sensorial, perceptive, and
cognitive lucidity, a language of knowing.
Instances of spectacular prophecy and other powerful sensory and
visual experiences are not lacking in spiritist biographical narratives.
Among the most salient of such experiences, however paradoxical, is
dreaming, which for many constitutes one of the least mediated arenas
for spiritual contact. Dreaming has been compared, by some of my
informants, to a state of trance, or even death, where an individual’s
physical and mental boundaries are dissolved, making spirit encoun-
ters accessible to both laypersons and mediums.
Spirits in dreams
space unhindered, meeting with the souls of the deceased and other
free entities, tied to its own matter only by a thin thread, the perispirit,
which prevents it from fatally detaching from bodily life. In her eth-
nography of Puerto Rican spiritist brujas, Raquel Romberg describes
how, due to the influence of spiritism on the island, dreams are of-
ten regarded by believers and laypersons alike as present memories
of previous lives (2009, 51). In Cuba, likewise, many profess a faith
in the symbolic and literal content of their dreams. Some mediums
even describe themselves as “dreaming mediums”: “Me lo ponen en
sueños” [I receive from my spirits through dreams]. Among practitio-
ners, dreams are “really real” events in and of themselves, as Maitland
Dean argues (1993, 34): the dream “takes its place within the ongoing
process of social interaction,” an interaction which necessarily encom-
passes gods, orichas, spirits, and saints.
A discussion of dreams, as Herdt (1987) notes, inevitably remits to
questions of selfhood and its relationship to embodiment. Among the
Sambia of Papua New Guinea, “the soul leaves the body and roams in
different places, near or far, familiar or unfamiliar, as if it could glide
on the wind. The soul leaves the body and takes one’s thought with it,
leaving the body empty” (Herdt 1987, 58). His informants tell him that
their soul visits places that their thought sees, experiencing events they
call “dream-things.” Indeed, explains Herdt, “dreams are not viewed as
memories of dreams (in our sense) but narratives of events” (ibid.). In
a similar vein, real sight for Cuban spiritists and people of faith occurs
through the spirit, as spirit, whose perception is understood to achieve
a transparency often unavailable in waking life. It is unsurprising that
first “contact” may occur during sleep, through powerful imagery.
Learning how to extricate and understand the connection between a
dream state and an unfolding waking reality is a task that faces the
potential dreaming medium as well as the layperson, for it is in this
superimposition that the predictive rationale is made possible. Dreams
essentially communicate, not abstractly, but very much in the context
of a particular kind of self: “not to heed the warnings, blessings and
instructions of a dream is to rebuff the spirits” (Maitland Dean 1993,
254).
Dream realities are indeed so powerful in Cuba that they can recon-
figure an individual’s self-understanding, providing scope for negotia-
170 · Developing the Dead
tion of a new kind of self. In the following story, for example, Alberto,
an ex-Jehovah’s Witness, describes his religious transformation as
caused by a dream.
me go. There was another patient in the same room, and when
the check up rounds had finished, she said to me: “Listen, mi
negro [lit. my black], come here. I want to ask you a question.
Do you practice any religion?” I tell her I don’t. She tells me, “Mi
negro, I felt that a very powerful force took hold of you.” And I ask
her, “Did you see anyone or anything?” She says, “No, I don’t see.
I have the grace of feeling, not seeing. But I felt that you couldn’t
move, and neither could you breathe. I was watching you. Tell
me if it’s true or not.” I tell her, “Yes, it’s true.” She then asks me
how it was that I was able to resist it, since she didn’t understand
how I could’ve rid myself of something so strong. “I saw how it
took hold of you, but I also saw how it left you. Who did you call
upon? Do you practice any religion? Do you believe in anything?”
And so I smiled, and since I couldn’t tell her that I was a Jehovah’s
Witness [because this would have been possible grounds for ex-
pulsion from the university in the pre-Special Period days], I just
tell her, “No, I believe in God, I have faith in God.” She just stared
at me. . . . It was clear to me that it was my muerto who was be-
ginning to manifest, and of course, when I invoked Jehovah and
Jesus Christ, he would distance himself because I was calling on
a deity.
I’m sure it was the eggún of mine, since after much time had
gone by, I saw an espiritista once who asked me: “Fulano, have
you finally given up on that Jehovah’s Witness religion?” And I
told her I had. “At last,” she says to me. “How painful it was. It was
a true shame that with that African you have, that eggún of yours,
that you continued practicing that religion. You know, I had seen
that eggún, but I couldn’t mention it to you because if I had you
would’ve told me that it was the devil I was referring to.” And she
added: “And that eggún, it has really served you well, because the
way things were going it was for you to have already been killed
for the disobedience of staying in something that doesn’t belong
to you . . .” That eggún forgave me because I knew nothing about
la religión! I got lost in the Witness’s religion because that had
been my only experience. It had been my consolation.
After that dream in the cave with my brother, I had it again
and again. And the brothers would insist that it was the devil. So
I think that from then on, those eggún, those muertos, began to
172 · Developing the Dead
stairs to the roof of the building, taking with her a notebook and pencil.
She told herself: “I feel bad, I need to montar my muerto,” though she
had never done so before. “So I climb up and I lean against a tank on
the roof, and I tell him, you’re not going to let me fall from here, you’ll
protect me. I needed to mount him because I had to break up what I
had absorbed” (romper lo que yo recogí) (Annelis 2011; all quotations
in the chapter from that interview). Annelis had sensed for some time
that she had an African spirit, even though neither she nor others had
seen him.
“I put a little rosary in the glass of water, and I smoked,” she said.
Then she began to cry incessantly, which she attributes to the first
spirit that came. “First came my nun spirit, crying. Then I began to
fall into a trance state, which was when my africano came. I was writ-
ing throughout all of this time, and in reality I didn’t know what I was
writing. I’d never done this before. I was alone. It was my first time, my
first muerto, my first everything!” (Annelis 2011). Annelis’ spirits left
her notes telling her what she had to do to protect and cleanse herself
from the witchcraft, including baths with certain plants. They had even
drawn symbols and cosmograms she had never seen before. But the
instructions worked, and a few hours later her scorching fever had
subsided. As a talented medium at the very start of her development,
Annelis is now intent on deepening her knowledge of her muertos, of
whom she has only vague intuitions. “I want to do a thorough inves-
tigation into my cordón espiritual. I don’t care if I have a room full of
muertos or very few, I want to know who’s responsible for my head,
who it is that I will ask for help when I do an obra espiritual” (Annelis
2011).
Espiritistas are experts at discerning information which makes a
difference, be it in their bodies or minds, in conscious or unconscious
states. Much the same principle is at work when they develop explicit
means of knowledge retrieval through divination, as the next section
will show.
Spirits use the world and its matter to communicate with people.
Knowledge is transmitted through dreams, sensations, images, ill-
nesses, situations, signs, objects, and states of possession. But there
Encounter, Selfhood, and Multiplicity · 175
Orientations
* * *
But this is not as seamless a process as either phenomenologists or
embodied cognition theorists might posit. Spiritual encounter, in its
myriad manifestations, calls into question not only existing meaning
or self-structures, but the notion that the body is entirely one’s own.
Michael Jackson notes this when he says that awareness is “forever
shifting between ecstatic and recessive extremes—of having a sense
of ourselves as fully embodied and an equal persuasive sense of being
disembodied” (1998, 10); in other words, of having a world, but at the
same time of being it. Intersubjectivity is here crucial to engendering
such forms of reflexivity. Indeed, he says, quoting William James, “we
have as many selves as there are others who accord us recognition and
carry our image in their mind” (ibid.). In the case studies I explore next,
it will become apparent that the self in espiritismo emerges from just
such frictions. Mediums learn new “orientational processes” (Csordas
1994) through practice and habitus (Bourdieu 1977), such as a concep-
tion of their bodies and its sensoria as maps of knowledge. But this
understanding is achieved with a simultaneous awareness that they are
not their bodies, or at least, not just their bodies, but rather something
which comes into being through them.
Csordas argues that “self is neither substance nor entity, but an
indeterminate capacity to engage or become oriented in the world,
characterized by effort and reflexivity” (1994, 5). In this sense, he says,
“self occurs as a conjunction prereflective bodily experience, cultur-
ally constituted world or milieu, and situational specificity or habitus”
(ibid.). Orientations are postures, modes of somatic engagement and
182 · Developing the Dead
following story highlights the notion that mediums often feel pushed
into developing selves that transcend their own immediate knowledge
and lives, as well as bodies. It also points to the importance of a no-
tion of mission and service, and to the role of others in signposting its
unfolding. Finally, it alludes to the ways in which espiritistas carve out
their own methods of divination, sometimes after trial and error.
Teresita
Teresita tells me she was seven years old when she first witnessed a
ceremony for the dead: a misa espiritual. As an only child, she had
been abandoned by her mother to the care of her doting grandmother,
whom she describes as traditionally Catholic and a devout follower of
San Lázaro, a saint associated with illness and healing, and with the
deity Babalu-Ayé in Afro-Cuban religion. Although Teresita accompa-
nied her grandmother to pray or bring flowers to San Lázaro and Santa
Barbara at their respective churches in Havana and often watched her
offering candles and tobacco at their altar at home, it was not until one
of her aunts died that she had her first contact with espiritismo’s world,
entirely unknown to her until that evening. She observed, alone, from
behind the door in the quiet darkness of her room in their small house,
how the women and men sang, passed on messages from the spirits,
and fell into states of seeming hysteria and possession. She was fright-
ened but intrigued. When her grandmother died only a few years later,
leaving her once more in the hands of her mother, a spiritist, she began
to reject the idea of such practices, particularly as she saw her mother’s
own intentions as “unclean.” Her mother, she says, had been a good es-
piritista once, before she started to work for evil ends. Teresita rebelled
against her and against Afro-Cuban religion more generally for much
of her adolescence. “I had always seen my grandmother pleading to
the saints, asking them for blessings, for health, for love. How could I
now understand that my mother had her own gift and used it to do bad
things to people?” (Teresita Fernández 2005; this and all subsequent
quotations in this chapter).
Teresita was twenty years old when she had to again face her source
of anger. A colleague asked her to go with her to see a cartomantica.
Unwillingly, and with much protest, Teresita did her friend the favor,
and the medium, upon seeing her, swiftly told Teresita that she was
184 · Developing the Dead
going to consult with her as well. “But I can’t pay you,” she told the me-
dium. “I don’t want you to. I just need to see you,” the latter responded.
She began to tell me that she knew that whatever she was to say
to me, I would pay no attention to, but that she was going to say
it anyway. She told me: “Don’t reject this, because you see this I’m
doing here? One day you will do it too.” Deep down I told myself,
this woman is mad, but she seemed to read my thoughts! She
said: “No, I’m not mad. It’s been tough for you, with that mother
of yours. But what you have is a disenchantment with a person,
not with la religion.”
The woman asked Teresita to come back for a spiritual cleansing, since
the spirit of her grandmother was unhealthily attached to her, crying,
making Teresita cry in turn. She was experiencing depression at the
time, she admits now. But she returned to the medium and was suc-
cessfully cleansed.
After this emotional beginning, Teresita began to attend misas es-
pirituales. She was frequently told of her need for desarrollo espiritual,
but it was not until she fell suddenly into trance during one of the
sessions that she began to take these warnings seriously. “Your dead
are just there, fighting, because they want to work, and you won’t let
them!” the head medium told Teresita, scolding her. She sat Teresita
down, against her will, at the center of the room in order to induce her
spirits to take hold of her. Amidst singing, praying, and cleansing acts,
Teresita felt cold, faint, and dizzy and eventually felt herself pass out.
On coming to, she found herself with her trousers rolled up and a cigar
in her mouth, a stench of alcohol emanating from her sweaty body.
“What the hell am I doing with a cigar in my mouth?” she asked. She
had never smoked. Her African spirit, it appeared, had spent the bet-
ter part of the evening cleaning all those present. But Teresita did not
want to “pass” muertos. She tried to resist, but her body would often
be rough-handled by her africano during possession, and she quickly
understood that her fragile build could not sustainably withstand it.
It also frightened her because she would lose control of her own wits,
smoking and swearing and otherwise being uncharacteristically un-
couth. The spirit was not “educated.” Not wishing to develop in this
manner, she began to search for a way to communicate to the dead
Encounter, Selfhood, and Multiplicity · 185
Teresita: I’m going to tell you everything that they tell me here. It
may be that some of it you know already, and some you don’t.
[card throw] Are you aware at this time, of any quarrel be-
tween your family members?
Client: Well . . . I had some problems with my father recently.
Teresita: They are small problems, don’t worry, nothing that can’t
be resolved. [card throw] The first thing that comes up here is
this—your family problems. But don’t be so worried, change
that face of yours, relax so that this can flow more openly. At
the end of the day, the message that my gitana is transmitting
here is your worry with all of these misunderstandings. But
when they [the spirits] give this kind of message, it is because
they will also tell you how you can resolve things in the end.
Encounter, Selfhood, and Multiplicity · 187
Truly gifted espiritistas are often talked about not as single individuals
with sight, but as mediums of particular spirits—“¡Tiene un muerto!”
[She has one hell of a spirit!]—to the extent that spirits can transcend
their mediums’ personas entirely, eclipsing their human “material”
of manifestation. Xiomara, one of my good friends in Havana, often
visited an elderly medium called Marcelina in Centro Habana to see
Paloyansan, the formidable Haitian entity with whom the lady worked
(discussed in the epilogue). It was the muerto, not the woman, to whom
Xiomara always referred. “Tomorrow I’m going to see Paloyansan,
want to come?” she would ask me over the phone. Over the years that
I knew her, she developed a caring and respectful relationship to this
spirit, who, time after time, demonstrated his power of predicting, un-
derstanding, and promoting positive changes in Xiomara’s life. As with
many other cases I observed, it was Paloyansan’s vision and healing
efficacy, and not just his medium’s, that drew her clients. This quality
of partnership, or coupling, in Cuban espiritismo is not just a corollary
of working with certain spirits over a designated amount of time; it is
intrinsic to the very definition of that work, making it possible. At the
core of this understanding of mediumship is a notion of process as
constitutive of the “selfing” endeavor.
Knowing the elements of one’s cordón is a task achievable perhaps
only retrospectively, as a reflexive conclusion of an entire life’s worth of
service. A temporary affinity between a medium and one of her spirits
may at the next moment vanish and transform the working priorities
of both elements of the relationship. A spirit may be both an agent and
a recipient of these changes and their consequences, for just as it may
complete its task and subsequently “retire” to less immediate spaces
of influence in a medium’s cordón, a medium too may move on, opt
for alternative oracles or modes of divining, and in so doing call forth
the presence of others in the shadows until that moment. Even those
mediums who work for years with the same spirit are not exempt from
the processual rule of thumb. Leonel told me of one such case, which
is both paradigmatic of processual understandings of self and unusual,
in that the spirit in question “moved on” to its own reincarnation.
192 · Developing the Dead
When I was starting out in this world, I must have been eighteen
or nineteen, there was a very famous lady here in Havana who
worked with the spirit of a doctor. She dedicated herself to heal-
ing and curing people, and she even prescribed medicine, some of
which was already a little obsolete at that time, but still available
in the pharmacy. Her house would fill up with people, patients
of all kinds—liver failure, respiratory disease, all sorts—and this
made her extremely well known. I remember that one fine day
this lady received the information that this spirit with whom she
worked wanted her to gather a meeting of people, a misa espiri-
tual, so that he could say goodbye, because he was finishing his
duties and was ready to reincarnate. It was quite beautiful. And in
a way it was interesting: so many people came to this misa to say
their goodbyes. But it was also sad for them, because many saw
in this spirit some kind of security or permanence. I think there
are two parts to the message we can take from this: that the spirit
evolved, finished his task and continued his process of evolution
through incarnation, but also it is as if this situation were telling
people that spirits are there to help but not to be converted into
dependencies, since all of us also enter, exit, act, and grow.
Leonel himself has been subject to this processuality during his long
career as a medium. While his main African spirit, Francisco, remains
constant as his partner and protective companion, he shifted some
years ago to working with other entities, such as that of an Arab as-
tronomer, who also informs and guides his interest in astrology, which
he was practicing with great success at the time I met him. Leonel’s
mechanisms of retrieving information have also changed as a conse-
quence for, like Teresita, he no longer allows Francisco to take his body
in trance, finding it exhausting, but prefers more subtle oracles. These
include the astrological chart itself, which he interprets using his own
acquired expertise and experience, as well as his Arab spirit’s input.
The point here is that awareness of oneself as a medium also implicates
awareness that one’s ability as such is contingent on the evolving rela-
tionships one builds with one’s cordón espiritual, which never cease to
be mutable and subject to one’s own life path and choices.
This notion of process is so central to conceptions of the eternal
movement of spirits and people in the cosmos, that very often spiri-
Encounter, Selfhood, and Multiplicity · 193
brings them into being and, as such, are not “given” but depend on new
events. Espiritistas recognize the cordón espiritual as structuring of
the self. However, this structure comes alive through acts that simul-
taneously highlight its emergent, shifting qualities. This contingency
is a core part of spiritist understandings of the self ’s existence, as a
structure and a process, as I will explain, pointing to a fluid dynamic
between them.
If the cordón espiritual affords the person particular skills and apti-
tudes, as well as direction and guidance, it may also induce predis-
positions for aggression, impatience, vanity, as well as illnesses, even
substance dependence. Cuban spiritists and religiosos largely rational-
ize their traits in ways consistent with the biographical characteristics
of their muertos. An artist would have one or more spirits whose lives
were dedicated to artistic production; a writer would be guided by the
spirit of someone who was an intellectual; a religious person in a posi-
tion of great responsibility would most certainly be strongly influenced
by the spirit of someone who had given their life to religion, and so on,
to cite obvious examples. Subtler influences also prevail: a spirit of a
bureaucrat will tend to help the person to be organized and prompt; a
spirit of a gypsy will promote sensuality and perhaps a taste for danc-
ing; a Buddhist muerto will transmit serenity and a desire for solitude.
In the same way, any one of these spirits can transmit faults. As one
friend once told me, while his “painter” spirit has shaped his life’s di-
rection toward fine art, his profession, this spirit has also made him
weak with women, inciting in him womanizing impulses that he must
constantly fight to curb. Another informant tells me he should refrain
from drinking, since one of his muertos was an alcoholic in life. In the
same vein, another friend once told me that she has a spirit of a sexu-
ally indulgent woman in her cordón, but that she does not present the
same behavior because she has refused to “give way” to the potential
influence of this entity in her own psyche.
While Cuban spiritism retains the idea of a principle spirit-guide,
an espiritu de luz, as Cubans say, this entity is conceived rather as an
orchestrator of a collectivity of beings each of which brings into circu-
lation a multitude of virtual potentials of self, subject to one another’s
Encounter, Selfhood, and Multiplicity · 195
libre albedrío [ultimate free will]. This builds the person-spirit relation
on a foundation of mutual pulls and tugs, where through their own
choice of conduct persons establish alternatively positive or negative
but continuous loops of feed-back, encouraging certain potentials at
the expense of others, with effects on both sides. Thus, by refrain-
ing from alcohol consumption, my informant understands that he is
at once helping his muerto to overcome his alcoholic tendency (or a
memory of it) and, as such, his muerto’s own evolution. In Cuban es-
piritismo, contrary to classical Kardecism, responsibility belongs to
both persons and spirits: One enables the positive development of the
other but can also deter it, even if involuntarily. It is also in this way
that the “affinity” between person and a particular spirit—even if a
priori—can expand or wane with time and circumstance, rendering
the self-complex a system in perpetual motion, constituted by waves
of proximity and distance between the living person and their spiritual
counterparts.
Thus, getting to know one’s spirits is not exactly tantamount to
knowing oneself, or at least a preexisting self, for a spirit’s influence
cannot be fully determined until the individual has himself propor-
tioned the contextual conditions for it to become manifest, or before
real world experience. Had my painter friend never picked up a paint
brush, he would not have called forth his respective muerto, initiating
an artistic development path. On a more ominous and personal note,
had I not been the victim of witchcraft, which I once was, my own
africano sorcerer would never have stepped up to protect me so vis-
ibly, commanding presence thereafter in my cordón espiritual. As with
Lienhardt’s description of Dinka “Powers” (1961), spirits are knowable
only through personal encounters, and particularly in the early stages
of mediumship development, this separation between aspects of the
self must be actively sought. The spirit identification process always
implicates others, who themselves take part in the processual consti-
tution of the self, both in retrospective forms of explanation and real-
time interpretations of events and behavior.
Cuban espiritistas conceive of their work, both in relation to them-
selves and to others, as bringing about the necessary unification of
spirit and physical worlds, so that both can play their respective parts
to their best. For both mediums and nonmediums, being in commu-
nion with one’s spirits is important not only to the efficacy of their
196 · Developing the Dead
protective mission and thus to one’s physical well being, but to the suc-
cessful consolidation of one’s camino de vida (life path) and thus one’s
psychological and emotional stability. Individuals who find themselves
alienated from their cordón espiritual are not only lesser-protected be-
ings, but also less able to make the right choices and decisions when
they present themselves, for they are not fully themselves. A part of
them, or of what they are capable of being, is debilitated or dispersed,
because their spirits are facets of each individual: doors that can open
and close at designated moments in time. Misas espirituales and spiri-
tual consultations in great part constitute mechanisms by which the
utility of such spirits is revealed, according to the identities of each, as
well the necessity of developing these into one’s daily conduct or not,
particularly with respect to the experience of present circumstances
or difficulties. In espiritismo, contra Kardecist precepts, all spirits are
good for something; every one of them will have specialized knowl-
edge, whether it is cosmological, ritual, moral, or intellectual, which
can be put to use. But it also follows from this that while the predomi-
nant concept in the spiritist developmental procedure is one of unifica-
tion, or interpenetration, this is possible only after a process of separa-
tion and discernment, for this is exactly when these choices become
evident, or better, become choices. “It’s not that we don’t have our own
spirit, individuality, or path,” Hector, a young medium once said to me.
“We just need to be able to tell the difference between all these influ-
ences and ourselves. For while all these tendencies filter through us, we
are the ultimate deciders of what we do with them, how we live them,
and make our daily decisions” (Hector 2006). Analytically, we could
say that when mediums literally develop their spirits and encourage
the development of those of others, they are splintering and then ob-
jectifying “bits” of their own constitution as beings. While instances of
first encounter such as those I describe above provide critical impulse
to the necessary division of the self, thus its multiplication, solidifying
the dividends of this splintering can take a lifetime: it is the Cuban
spiritist selfhood project itself.
Cuban espiritismo projects an image of the self as holographic, nei-
ther confined to its interiority nor statically extended, but in three-
dimensional emergence, with partial connections being made, rein-
forced, or attenuated constantly. The nature of this hologram suggests
connectivity and contiguity on an imminent plane between a living
Encounter, Selfhood, and Multiplicity · 197
courage to help build A.’s cuadro and, adding on to each other’s visions,
arrived at the preliminary conclusion that L. was having problems
with her husband and perhaps also with her youngest son. The women
warned L. to be wary of him, since she did not know whom he associ-
ated with. One of the mediums said she had “received” a song from a
Conga spirit who belonged to L. and began to sing it briefly. This song
seemed to be signaling something else. The medium suggested that
L. was working a prenda in Palo with the help of this muerto, but L.
did not confirm or deny this. “Luz!” she said, however, confirming the
existence of the Conga. An effort was made by Ana to induce L. into
trance with this female spirit: Songs were sung to the African lines of
spirits, and L. was made to stand up and hold hands with Ana, ally-
ing her with Ana’s strong corriente, but to no avail. L. had only minor
twitches and shakes. One of the other neophytes then stood up and
was inspired to clean the participants with a small bunch of basil leaves
she had brought. She appeared to be half in trance when doing so and
later told us that it was the spirit of her own deceased mother whom
she was “passing,” some of whose muertos she herself had inherited.
She sang while she spun us around in turn.
A young man sitting next to me asked me if I was Russian. He said
he perceived the spirit of an old lady, a type of medium or healer who
wore necklaces or pendants with bones or perhaps teeth, and who
worked magic. He asked if I knew someone like this, and I said no. Ana
confirmed her godchild’s vision but expanded on it. She said she saw a
white-haired old lady with very light, short hair but could also discern
her as her younger self as if in a photograph in the countryside. Ana
said I should place a glass of water for her in my altar. The neophytes
described the spirits of others: a Hindu, with a thick black moustache,
that belonged to P., a girl in her twenties; a Buddhist monk for another
woman present; as well as a series of primary associations between the
participants and some of the oricha-santos, Obbatalá, Ochún. Ana’s
escuelita had reclaimed its flow.
Mediums know that there is a fine line between imaginative fabri-
cations and knowledge, and the difference is confidence. In escuelitas,
mediums are taught to be unapologetic and unconcerned with the im-
mediate truth-value of their assertions, for it is thought that the more
confidence one builds the less static and more direct the arrival of in-
formation becomes with time. Imagination and sensation are given
200 · Developing the Dead
free reign, so that they can in time be whittled down, carved up, and
educated to become not just meaningful events but useful ones. This
clearly occurs not as a process of knowledge “transmission” as such
from elders, mentors or teachers, but of enskillment: in Tim Ingold’s
words, through the “education of attention” (2000, 2001). Contrary
to cognitivists, Ingold argues that skills and capacities “arise within
processes of development, as properties of dynamic self-organization
of the total field of relationships in which a person’s life unfolds” (2001,
131). Those capacities particular to perception and motor skills be-
come embodied in an organism through the training, guidance, and in-
tervention of experienced practitioners (ibid.) and not through a trans-
mission of data or representations. This is illustrated in espiritismo.
The notion of a mental “representation” has little bearing here, because
for the most part spiritist knowledge does not consist in ritual secrets
or formulas but in cues for the nurture of varying degrees of spiri-
tual presence. Teachers teach only in as much as they guide individual
processes of becoming in a medium, processes that create “entangle-
ments” (Ingold 2000) between visible and invisible agencies, ideal and
material domains, and between persons embroiled in the same ritual
task. Self-trust, in this sense, implies a higher-level consciousness of
such entanglements and a conviction, or faith, in the equivalence of
oneself with the knowledge that is made available through these net-
worked existential conditions. I have demonstrated this in relation to
some oracular strategies, whereby the medium becomes central to her
own divination production. But perhaps the most obvious example
of the conflation of oneself with one’s knowledge is the experience of
being possessed. I argued earlier that many spirit possession studies
often misleadingly assume that trance-possession experiences imply
a substitution of one “self ” for another, a dissociation, mostly because
this seems consistent with many mediums’ assertions that they lose
consciousness of themselves and their memory during the event. But
Cuban espiritistas tell an alternative story.
While most espiritistas tend not to fully remember the events that
occur during a period of possession, nor feel the physical effects of
what the spirit may have consumed through them, trance is conceptu-
alized as a kind of endeavor of co-presence, rather than substitution.
Indeed, the latter option might well imply death, inasmuch as an ab-
sence in the body of its vital energy would mean its extinguishment.
Encounter, Selfhood, and Multiplicity · 201
some extent “supervised” by her main work spirit, or her guía espiri-
tual. As her ultimate gatekeeper, it is this entity that decides whether
or not it is safe for a trance medium to “pass” another muerto. This
notion is exemplified in the fact that the gatekeeper is often the first
to possess the medium before another spirit comes through her body,
particularly if the latter does not belong to her cordón. This may be
seen as a seal of approval, also occurring at the end of trance as an act
of closure, but it is also an act of presence. I often saw this occur with
Olga who has an Indio spirit who often opens and closes her posses-
sion experience in order to cleanse her body of the residual energies
of other spirits. In spiritist cosmology, a spirit guide can temporarily
share a medium’s body with another spirit, if need be. When the me-
dium is possessed by a lowly, obsessing entity, this spirit co-presence
becomes essential; not least because in the end it is the person’s muerto
who sends the “obsessor” away from those he might have harmed, in-
cluding the medium. Thus, if trance mediums assert that they rarely
lose control over themselves, it is because their “selves” are clearly
not modeled on ghost-in-the-machine logics; rather, they incorporate
those very spirits who safeguard and help decide the destiny of their
bodies. Maria Laura Cavalcanti’s distinction between “possession” and
“incorporation” with reference to Brazilian spiritist practices (2008,
100), where the former implies an annihilation of self-control while the
latter does not, may be relevant here. While Cuban espiritistas rarely
use the word “incorporate”—bajar, montar, pasar would be terms with
greater currency—it seems that an incorporative view of possession
makes more sense in this context than one that privileges a replace-
ment of agencies, with the psychological baggage implied.
which case there must be a self to choose such ends, even if it is socially
determined. The question of what exactly this self looks like is rarely
explored in the accounts of Lewis or others, as fruitful as these may be
(e.g. Ong 1987). Vincent Crapanzano follows this line by defining pos-
session as “any altered state of consciousness indigenously interpreted
in terms of the influence of an alien spirit” (1977, 7). He characterizes
it as the powerful instantiation of an “idiom for articulating a certain
range of experience,” which “once rendered an event, is cast within the
world of meaning and may then provide a basis for action” (1977, 11).
In contrast to Lewis, Crapanzano stops short of regarding possession
as performance, but neither does he explain how this “articulation” or
“instantiation” of social processes becomes somatic, physical, and real
to those who experience it.
Are the possessed simply acting out a cultural script, either in con-
scious fashion or, in Durkheimian terms, as a manifestation of a mys-
terious collective unconscious? So elusive is the explicit connection
between “idiom” and “experience” that many theorists succumb to the
temptation of pathologizing possession. If, on the one hand, Lewis’s
approach lies at the Hobbesean end of conceptualizations of self, with
greater attention given to the more socially enacted aspects of pos-
session, these latter theorists are closer to the Humean end, seeking
recourse to psychological or psychiatric models of a “deep” self. While
most anthropologists (medical or otherwise) would disagree with the
extreme view of states of trance as manifestations of schizophrenia or
hysteria, many stress that possession requires an ability to dissociate
in the psychiatric sense of the word, making evident the alternating of
two or more distinct “selves” (such as in Multiple Personality Disor-
der). Levy, Mageo, and Howard (1996, 19), for example, claim that a
predisposition to dissociating and a cultural environment that makes
conventional use of possession are two necessary conditions “for full
possession to occur” in any given society. The “possessed self ” here is
evidently subject to a pathological undercurrent, whether or not the
possessed describe themselves in such terms. While, as Morten Klass
rightly argues, dissociative states are not necessarily sickness states
(2003, 41), anthropology has a long history of blurring the two, as well
as of loosely employing psychopathology terminology in ethnographic
description and analysis (for instance, Metraux, 1972 [1959]).
Some of the most fascinating and subtle recent studies of posses-
208 · Developing the Dead
sion experience still fall prey to the notion that spirits serve a social
function. For instance, in her work on zar possession among Hofriyati
women in Arabic-speaking Sudan (1989), Janice Boddy defends the
suggestion that during possession a woman is allowed to rediscover a
kind of selfhood or otherness of which she is deprived in normal, male-
dominated society. For Boddy, a Hofriyati woman’s self is so overde-
termined by socialization—bearing the burden of some of society’s
principal values—that a possession episode allows for a certain, cru-
cial perspective, a claim to a more subjective self: possession encour-
ages reflection, “a limited dismantling of the taken-for-granted world,”
which can enable the possessed to see her own life in a different light,
argues Boddy (1988, 20). The paradox, she notes, is that possession de-
fends the person while also enabling and enhancing the non-Hofryiati
self, even if only temporarily. But as sophisticated and convincing as
Boddy’s analysis is, I feel that she puts herself in a difficult paradoxical
place by positing the zar as idiom and experiential reality.
Zar is first of all a cultural phenomenon, better still, a cultural
resource appropriated by individuals under certain conditions.
Viewed as such, it consists of symbols and associations available
to be taken up and manipulated in hundreds of different ways.
But if they are symbolic, spirits defy conventionalization: they are
beings, actors, agents. . . . Spirits’ selfhood, too, is constituted in
relationships to others. (1989, 137)
While it is undeniable that spiritually “transcendent” experiences like
possession are often registers of societal change and personal distress,
effective means of empowerment, or ways by which to work out exis-
tential uncertainties in the face of social change, that is not all they are.
Possession rituals are often part of powerful and effective systems of
religious healing, and an anthropology that aims to get to the core of
their effectiveness must ask what it is that has the potential to change
individuals without the reducing the scope of their experience or rel-
egating it to a matter of belief. In many accounts, a person can both
use a particular “idiom” to express social unrest or personal liminality
and be said to truly believe in the veracity of that possession, thus, to
be used by it also, but it is not clear how. A part of this entrapment,
I would argue, has to do with anthropology’s conception of what is
Encounter, Selfhood, and Multiplicity · 209
Alternative models
models here to come to terms with the relation between what Handel-
man has called “interior socialities” (2002) and the recursitivities of
their outer forms and manifestations. In particular, I am interested in
the manner by which coexisting registers, potentials, or voices of Self
create ever expanding albeit indeterminate horizons of possibility for
persons. There is necessarily a plasticity of Self inherent in this process.
And plasticity, as Catherine Malabou reminds us (2008), is not flex-
ibility, but the capacity to both receive and give form; to sculpt oneself
in the process of becoming. As Handelman argues, “if interior selfness
is a quantumlike ‘domain,’ then self-transformation may be the coming
into being of patterns of selfness that are possibilities of that very self-
ness, though selfness ‘itself ’ probably cannot be bounded (or defined)”
(2002, 238).
I began this chapter with a concern with body and embodiment,
and I can also now end it with these same concerns, since we can only
assume that spiritual ontogeny or development would consist precisely
of the embodied materialization of some existential probabilities over
others. In the next chapter, I will show that this process of material-
izing potentials is one of bringing forth worlds as selves, a process that
is not simply recreative or representational, but cosmogonical, from
virtuality to existence.
5
Development as Cosmogony
Ritual and Materialization
This was the turning point of the misa, as Marcia fell into possession
with her muerto guide, an elderly African creole spirit called Ma Juana,
prompted by the growing tempo of the song.
Marcia slowly bent over in her chair and remained contorted until,
with a jerk, she shuddered, shook, and looked up. Her expression had
changed. The spirit, Ma Juana, had mounted. “Dissea que traiga vino
seco” [Bring some wine], she stuttered, using the third person to refer
to herself in this command. Ma Juana spoke in a creolized form of
Spanish (bozal) associated with Cuban slaves and common to Afri-
can, or Congo, spirits. “What are you saying, vieja?” Kelly responded,
frowning. She would act as Ma Juana’s interpreter from now on; it was
obviously not the first time they had met. Ma Juana told her in broken
Spanish that her legs hurt and that she needed to clean them with
vino seco to alleviate the pain. “Dissea que está cansao” [It’s tired], she
insisted, looking at her limbs. Ma Juana was an elderly muerto. She
rubbed her eyes and face in a tired, soulful gesture. Then she called
the family members to come to her, one by one. She made Juan touch
the floor with his hands in respect. Then, grabbing them, she spun
him around a few times and whispered something in his ear, adding
in a warning tone: “Cuidado con la noche” [Be wary of the night].
Each went up in turn, including Juan’s brother-in-law Johnny whom
218 · Developing the Dead
the heart of how spiritists understand their divine task. Giving light
wishes the dead well and aids the ascension or elevation of the departed
to “higher” spaces, through song, prayer, and thought. But it also em-
powers, ennobles, aggrandizes, and enhances the potency and vision
of the dead in assisting and guiding the living. Giving light occurs both
in and out of possession states, in the former case by allowing the dead
to speak in unmediated fashion to the living and thus either achieve
closure or pass on critical messages more directly. As such, giving light
is also a knowledge-related endeavor, one of clarification, discernment.
“Sometimes spirits don’t know they’re dead,” Marcia said. “They think
they can use your body for all sorts of things, getting drunk and smok-
ing, for example”—a common complaint among mediums (Marcia
2005). It is not a coincidence, she told me, that often the first spirits a
medium learns to incorporate are those of deceased family members,
entities whose close association with the medium in question makes
their influence particularly powerful. In her case, it had been an uncle,
although she gradually moved on to work with her own protective
spirits and guides, her muertos de luz, as is customary. Darle luz al
muerto can thus become darle conocimiento al muerto, giving the dead
knowledge, sometimes, of their state of physical extinguishment.
itists, santeros, and paleros with whom I enjoyed a warm and trusting
relationship and in whose religious house many of the insights of this
book were made possible. In the first example I describe, Eduardo and
Olga’s misa aims to examine the antecedents of a case of witchcraft in
which the discernment of the victim’s muertos comes to the fore as a
potential antidote; in the second example, in which I delve into my per-
sonal experiences with their misas, I speak about Eduardo and Olga’s
identification of the entities of my cordón espiritual and their curious
process of continual metamorphosis, linking to earlier observations
made on the processual nature of spirit-person relations.
Yo me voy de recogido
[I am going on a journey]
Y muy pronto volveré
[Very soon I shall return]
Si me encuentro un ser perdido
[If I find myself a lost soul on the way]
De regreso lo traeré
[I will bring him with me on my way back]
Si la palma me domina
[If the palm tree is my support]
Y la ceiba es mi pared
[If the ceiba tree is my wall]
Donde vive Lucerito
[Wherever Lucerito lives]
Allí vivo yo también
[There I shall live too]
Quindebula, quindebula
[Who is there? Who is speaking?]
Buenas noches
[Good evening]
Quindebula, quindebula
[Who is there? Who is speaking]
Son las horas
[It’s time now]
could absorb the heat: “Cucuyo [firefly] give me sight because I can’t
see,” he sang over and over to appeal to this muerto. Eduardo then
grabbed some bundles of hierbas that he previously prepared by spit-
ting alcohol and smoking on them, and asked Gertulio to get on his
feet, handing the plants to the spirit, who began to clean him. Ta’ Julien
passed them over his head, shoulders, and all over his torso and legs,
making small grunting sounds in the process. Romario sang: “Clean
him, clean him, clean him like my nfumbe does.” The spirit broke the
plant and flower bunch in two after he was done, leaving the remains
on the floor, which he stepped over decisively. He then asked for a half
coconut shell with aguardiente and after taking a sip sprayed Gertulio
with a cloud of alcohol, before slowly rolling a whole coconut over
the latter’s body. Ta’ Julien then held the whole nut above Gertulio’s
head for a few contemplative seconds, before letting it crash to the
floor. It broke on impact, and its pieces were swept up with the other
hierba leftovers. After this, Gertulio was again cleansed, first with co-
logned water, then with wafts of tobacco smoke, followed by a single
sunflower which the spirit then decapitated, thereby severing Gertu-
lio’s bad energies. Finally, something surprising occurred: He began to
make whooping calls, similar to those in images of American Plains
Indians, with his hand tapping his mouth. Ta’ Julien had let Olga’s indio
spirit come to bless the ceremony for a few short moments. Soon they
were both gone. Olga shook systemically, her eyes closed, as a farewell
song was offered by the other two mediums.
Se va buen amigo
[There goes my friend]
Se va caminando
[There he goes walking]
Se va buen amigo
[There goes my friend]
Se va para su nganga
[Back to his nganga]
As is so often the case, this misa de investigación had turned into a
session for purification and cleansing, in this case, due to the gravity
of the witchcraft discovered, with Eduardo and Olga’s Palo spirit, for
whom certain mambos, Palo songs, and spiritist plegárias had to be
performed. In contrast to the misa I described at the beginning of this
226 · Developing the Dead
chapter, this one had a distinct Palo flavor. But however central the
detection of Gertulio’s witchcraft was to the misa’s development, it
came hand in hand with the identification and description of his muer-
tos, understood as the prime instruments of the continued security of
Gertulio’s selfhood.
Spiritual alliances
Figure 5. A misa espiritual at Eduardo and Olga’s house. Photo by Ana Stela Cunha.
transformation, so that the spirit can help you with that phase.” One
of the clearest examples of this I came across was that of my gypsy
spirit. On my first research trip, Eduardo and Olga described her as a
Spanish vidente, a dark-skinned, knife-carrying, street-wise type who
worked by divining with cards and whose ways of the world helped me
with my professional endeavors; in the misas I attended on subsequent
visits to Cuba, this would change. “Your spirits all look different this
time,” said Olga in 2009. “Your gitana doesn’t come with castanets
and cards anymore. She’s more like an Arab gitana.” Olga described
her as wearing a long, transparent tunic over her trousers and shirt,
and many necklaces. She also had something around her head, a thin
golden chain with small coins dangling from it. “This spirit is bringing
you much desenvolvimiento and light, especially in matters relating
to the heart,” Olga said. “She reflects a certain clarity, a joyfulness,”
remarking that it may have been a product of the violín [violin party] I
had thrown for her earlier in my stay and with which she was demon-
strably happy. However, in 2011 the gitana had again changed her step.
“There was a transformation here once more,” Olga commented during
my first misa of the fieldwork season. “She comes as a sort of emissary
of Ochún, dressed in vibrant yellow and with a turban on her head. It’s
like she comes with a paso de santo,” by which Olga meant that the gi-
tana was now signaling an alliance with the forces of Santería, in which
I would indeed receive some minor initiations this time. “She brings a
little clay pot, in which are five small river stones, and she places them
in front of you. She’s protecting you from health problems that may be
coming your way, cleansing you with river water.” Like my gypsy spirit,
my indio, my Jewish bureaucrat, and my nuns underwent a significant
evolución. Some new muertos also made their appearance, such as two
African spirits, while older ones, such as the Hungarian woman, now
presented themselves embedded in collectives, in this case a troupe of
traditional Eastern European folk dancers.
But these were not entities that I should simply take for granted.
Alongside their discernment and description came detailed pieces of
advice on how to activate the qualities they seemed to bring, even if
these were circumstantial. If, on the one hand, the “bureaucrat,” the
gypsy, and the nuns came with me, and thus were an internal logic of
my own existence, on the other, their appearance on the mediumistic
stage—the misas—invited consideration of how to bring their essence
Above: Figure 6.
Party for the gypsy
spirits at Eduardo
and Olga’s house.
The writing on
the blue meringue
cake reads Feli-
cidades Espíritus
[Congratulations,
spirits]. Photo by
the author.
Left: Figure 7.
Gyspy spirit rep-
resentation. Photo
by the author.
Development as Cosmogony: Ritual and Materialization · 231
into being effectively: what to place for them, how to dress their rep-
resentations, what changes to make in myself to ensure their greater
impact, and so on. Espiritismo furnishes its clients with the necessary
knowledge of how best to materialize their muertos’ potentials in their
lives, which in most cases implies a commitment to material forms of
recreation and reciprocity. This “matter,” however, does not just pro-
duce or express signs of an existing relation. It has ontological effects,
for “things” create possibilities in the spirit world as much as spirits
constitute possibilities of being in the physical one.
232 · Developing the Dead
Misas de coronación
Distributed knowledge
Maria Esther was a young and dynamic medium whose talents I had
heard about through a series of contacts. She was known for her out-
standing ability to pinpoint people’s problems and to access specific
images and occurrences in their pasts; working alone with a deck
of cards, she was highly sought after. On the day I booked my turno
[time slot] to visit and interview her, I decided to convince a friend
of mine, Elmer, to come with me. Elmer had a nasty wound on his
leg—a product of a childhood electrical accident—that would not heal
despite many years of medical attention, and I thought Maria Esther
might give him some advice or herbal remedies. He was no stranger
to espiritistas and santeros, and had even been “given” a santo a few
years previously, although he frequently professed his skepticism and
disenchantment with la religión. As I had expected, Elmer was reticent
at first but agreed to come. However, on the way back from the consul-
tation, he recounted with some disappointment and even annoyance
how Maria Esther had so miserably failed to “see” him properly, join-
ing his list of farsantes [fakes] or wanna-be mediums that pretend to
have more facultades than they can actually demonstrate. Just another
descarada [shameless person], he told his partner when he got home
to their flat, rather brusquely.
It occurred to me that the harsh verdict Elmer had passed on Maria
Esther’s efficacy was in fact far from unambiguous. Indeed, Elmer was
not suggesting that all espiritistas are farsantes, thus invalidating the
reality of the spirit world, or that all espiritistas farsantes are farsantes
all the time. His comments pointed to a more complex relationship
with the existence of spirits and their manifestation. Elmer had been
told by the medium that his mother lived far away; that he had just
fought with his girlfriend or wife; and that he would have a son who
would be very special to him. On telling me this, he had burst into
fits of laughter. We both knew that Elmer’s elderly mother lived in an
apartment on the floor directly beneath him and that he was unlikely
ever to have children because he had always been gay (adoption is dif-
240 · Developing the Dead
ficult in Cuba, let alone for gay men). The espiritista had added, “Vas
a viajar; yo veo papeles” [You’re going to travel; I see papers], which,
while positive and highly desirable as a fortune-telling statement, had
seemed too suspiciously typical of spiritist predictions to swallow.
“But,” Elmer confessed, “she did get a couple of things right. She said
that I have two sisters and that my mother has always had a kind of
obsession with me because of some sort of physical condition I have
experienced since I was a child.” Elmer admitted that he had been a
difficult customer during the consultation. “I kept saying ‘No’ to her
assertions,” he said with a smile on his face, “and that probably put her
off,” even if there had been good spiritual fluido to start with, which he
reluctantly revealed he had felt:
But why should I lie when they say something that is blatantly
not the case? I’ve never been impressed by an espiritista, and I’ve
never met any of those mediums people talk about that can tell
you your past, present, and future the moment that see you. Most
of them can tell you some truths and can get one or two things
right. . . . What usually happens is that many people that go and
consult them are fanatics and take every word as if from God. It’s
absurd. Las personas se fanatizan [people become fanatics], and
the fanatics take this knowledge as all defining. (Elmer 2006)
What seemed to be at stake for Elmer was not the existence of the
spirit world per se, but the existence of the spirit world for him, in his
consultation, and more specifically, Maria Esther’s inability to sum-
mon it despite her claim of being able to do so. The concept of “be-
lief ” here became linked to the possibility of translation, or movement,
from one realm of existence to another; that is, from possibility to ac-
tuality, from nonbeing to being. At stake was the relationship between
the two made possible by the medium, wherein the spiritual affinity
between the medium and the receiver of her messages was critical. In
Elmer’s own interpretation, his constant denials, voiced openly dur-
ing the consultation, inevitably acted as continuous breaks, blocking
the medium’s attempt to establish a good communicational path. They
were obstacles. Even with the potential for good fluido, then, Maria
Esther was unable to actualize it into correct information about Elmer,
at least in because of an affinity Elmer could not find with her.
Development as Cosmogony: Ritual and Materialization · 241
like Elmer, a prueba can become a pivotal event, and this is indeed
what motivates the entry of many into sustained contact with espirit-
ismo and espiritistas.
Knowledge does not come in propositional form; rather, just like
the three-dimensional cuadro “painted” among mediums at misas I
described above, it is expected that a person’s exposure to spiritist me-
diums is a progressive and emergent development in itself, inasmuch
as spiritual development is also about coming into knowledge about
oneself and one’s spirits. If spirits are part of a person’s constitution,
not just that of a medium, then the more these come to the fore and
are identified and worked, the more one also is to the spirit world and,
thus, to the medium’s vision. It is not surprising that according to many
mediums, spirits of developed mediums are more visible to the medi-
umistic gaze than are those of a nondeveloped person.
told me of muertos, “is to work. If you don’t work them, you don’t chal-
lenge them; they will become slow, like the spirits of a child, and fall
into a deep sleep” (Montalbito 2006). Luis confirms this when he says:
Working your spirits makes them expand, gives them strength.
Because they haven’t been asleep, they’ve been working much as
they had when they were alive. It keeps them active and they like
it. They like it that you throw parties or misas for them, to come
down and pass through a medium’s body, to cleanse others, to
receive gifts.
As various pieces of the virtual self come alive, so to speak, so too do
the medium’s vitality, agency, and spiritual vision. The role of “things”
in this activation process is constitutive. Only through its material
recreation does the self-in-potential afford change. Thus, at stake in
the making of the person is an ongoing and ontologically crosscutting
dialogue between the universe of tangible, physical substances, on the
one hand, and on the other, a domain of entities that not only “mate-
rialize” via these substances but that are in turn enabled by these into
acting back upon matter, world, persons, with efficacy and presence.
The “inner” self thus becomes “outer” in order to find itself and create
both modes of awareness and a deeper consciousness of its extension
over time.
son, truths, or sudden pieces of advice, even when she never met them
before. “It’s not something I control,” she added, “it just happens.” But
Alexia keeps a bóveda espiritual at home that she greets every day.
“Every week I change the water and place some flowers,” she says, but
she also sits and prays. Having been raised as a Catholic, she finds it
easy to connect to her muertos through prayer. “I do this so that they’ll
accompany me when I leave the house, and I do feel them with me”
(Alexia 2008). Alexia was a nonbeliever for much of her life, partly be-
cause of the social and political context during her upbringing, but also
because she had felt repelled, even disgusted, by la religión. While she
eventually married a santero, she had always kept herself away from his
“things.” A couple of strong pruebas in her life created a dramatic shift
of perspective. In the second episode, fifteen years prior to my meeting
her, Alexia was on her way home from the center where she worked
as a psychotherapist. As she got on the guagua [bus], she began to feel
cold sweats. In her body a heavy feeling loomed which wasn’t right;
she tried to speak but her vocal chords were frozen. She felt that her
body wasn’t hers. Slipping quickly off the bus, she sat on a bench in
the bus stop for what seemed like a long period of time. Her mind felt
absent, and even to this day her memory of the event is minimal. All
she remembers is walking aimlessly on the city’s streets for hours, as if
she were possessed by something. She recognized nothing around her.
Eventually Alexia accidentally wandered past her own home, where
her mother, sick with worry, sat gazing from the window in the hopes
of seeing her daughter arrive.
She was “cleaned” by a local espiritista whose number had strangely
been written on a paper in her pocket at the time and slowly felt bet-
ter. But she had to seek more extensive help. Alexia perceives what
happened to her as induced by her protective muertos. It was an aviso,
a warning for her to wake up to her spirits. After this experience, she
contacted the espiritista who had saved her and for two years began
her spiritual development by her side. She discovered her cordón es-
piritual, and even though she had always been afraid of misas, she be-
gan attending them. Alexia was terrified of feeling those lightning-bolt
spiritual “currents” that would often strike her during rituals and was
reluctant to fall into trance.
Gradually, she educated her muertos, her eggún, as she says, and this
246 · Developing the Dead
ert influence precisely because they are taken for granted; they become
invisible through our alienation from them, perceived as autonomous
and separate from persons who ultimately brought them into being. In
religious contexts, materiality can become so crucial precisely because
it often expresses the inexpressible, or intangible: immateriality, divin-
ity, God (cf. Engelke 2007).
But a perspective that understands the effects of “matter” through
processes of objectification ultimately has the human being as its point
of reference, however exotic a society’s logic of materiality may be.
Thus, while consciousness is dependent on “things,” those “things” are
dependent on consciousness only inasmuch as the conscious agent
modifies his or her behavior toward and through them. The issue that
Cuban espiritistas would raise with this is obvious: If the “self ” and its
consciousness are extended in time and space by virtue of a self-in-
potential that already includes a fundamental invisible dimension—its
“entities”—then the power of “things” is not simply a matter for an
exclusive human consciousness that imbues them with agency.
If we go further, we can say that in espiritismo “things” do more
than provide platforms for certain kinds of consciousness, knowledge,
or skill; they generate forms of dialogue between ontological domains
that serve to change the landscape at both ends—the spirit’s and the
person’s. It is not simply that the world is cut up materially in different
ways, some of which render the intangible tangible; the spirit world
also becomes “materialized” by virtue of the material operations of
persons, with recursive effects on all levels of existence. Indeed, the
concept of “materialization” in espiritismo flouts unidirectional un-
derstandings of “bringing into being,” or “causing to become real or
actual,” or “appearing in physical or bodily form.” For as much as the
muertos may take shape in a medium’s consciousness through their
materialities, shaping in turn the relationships she constructs with as-
pects of her extended self, so too will these materialities bear signs of
the constant work done on their basis at a spiritual level. Miller argues
that “the more humanity reaches toward the conceptualization of the
immaterial, the more important the specific form of its materializa-
tion” (2005, 28). But the fact is that the activities of materialization in
which espiritistas engage are less about conceptualizing than they are
about affording spiritual ammunition for matter-based change. This
is because “matter” is much more than its material properties. Ob-
256 · Developing the Dead
told Daniel his name. Consistent with the idea that potentially difficult
situations prompt the appearance of one’s muertos, Daniel says that
the first time he came to him, this muerto revealed the identity of a
troublesome person at Daniel’s work who would eventually cause his
expulsion by way of witchcraft. “The more he develops,” Daniel says,
“the clearer my dreams are with him, and the clearer his manifestation
is to other mediums that see him.” But the turning point of this clarity
was a doll representation Daniel made for the spirit.
the power to change, modify, add to, take away, or benefit from
the archetype. . . . In Santería we will use cascarilla, honey, rum,
for example. With bee’s honey the deity can modify something
about or on you, or give you something you need. In espiritismo
it is similar. Often the muertos say, “Place two príncipe flowers for
me,” because it’s like those two flowers will give him authority to
help you with what you’re asking. If you don’t give them anything,
it makes it much harder for them. It’s like the offering is also a
kind of permission. The gift that you place, as a human being,
you, is a sacrifice. Sacrifices are not just animals. Those two flow-
ers that you give your spirit are also a sacrifice, so that he can have
the authority to help you. So that energies superior to the spirit’s
can have authority to help you. (Eduardo Silva 2011)
A representation, and its gifts, may then quite literally feed, clothe, or-
nament, and arm a spirit by virtue not just of the intention and plea of
their giver, but of the “substance” that is generated through the objects,
opening up pathways of vitalization, action, and effect: a substance
that is both physical and ideal. At stake in Eduardo’s explanation are
both notions of the power of sympathy—like attracting like (honey be-
ing generative of sweetness, for example)—and empowerment, in the
sense that objects are modes of conceding (and requesting) permission
for certain spiritual acts. More interesting, however, is his understand-
ing of the transgressiveness of “archetypes” or images. Eduardo, and
most other spiritists I met, in one way or another subverted Jungian
notions of an a priori universe of symbols (or cosmology) by suggesting
that matter produces its own symbolic forms, transmuted to a meta-
physical domain where they may effect change. Thus, archetypes, for
Eduardo, are far from static, unconscious structures; rather, material-
ity necessarily participates in the creation and recreation of cosmology.
In 2011 I met Robertico, the spirit of a young man who had died an un-
timely death in the streets of Havana and now materialized in Olga and
Eduardo’s house through Olga’s body. When he descended, preceding
262 · Developing the Dead
a Santería rite in which I was taking part, I asked him how it felt in the
spiritual world. It was the first time that I had had the opportunity to
ask this of any muerto. Here is what he said.
I feel better right now. . . . when I died I was feeling very disturbed.
Because as you know I took my fall when it was not yet my time to
go. Due to my bad conduct, I failed on this earthly plane. I didn’t
know how to live; I lived everything too fast. . . . I have a lot to
purge in the spiritual world, which is why I’m here at this moment
and why I’ve been granted permission by the beings of light to
come and cleanse myself of the paths that I took. . . . I don’t need
the cigar, the tobacco, the rum, or the beer. I do it because it’s a
means of identifying myself with the living on an earthly dimen-
sion and to liberate myself from a world I once lived in, but I don’t
need those things to give any prueba in this world. . . . Why this
[the cigarettes, the alcohol]? This is nothing to me. I take them
because it’s a means for me to vibrate in the material world and
to identify with it. . . . I am a beam of light, an aluminum sphere,
something that vibrates, and that feels lonely, that’s me. (Rober-
tico via Olga Silva 2011)
As Robertico left Olga’s body, Eduardo softly sang a song he had made
up to pay homage to him: “Virgen de la Caridad / ilumina a Robertico /
para que pueda bajar a la tierra / y pueda darse un traguito” [Virgin of
Charity / cast your light on Robertico / so that he can come down to
this earth / and have himself a little drink].
This brief encounter was unusual for several reasons, not least be-
cause spirits as young to the netherworld as Robertico are hard to
come by in Cuban espiritismo. But more important was his allusion
to the role of “things.” I knew from my extensive contact with practi-
tioners of creole espiritismo that things matter—not because they rep-
resent, but because they augment, furnish, aggrandize, and so forth.
But Robertico had just added another piece to this puzzle of “things.”
What he suggested was that material objects and consumables matter
not in themselves, but because they create the means by which spirits
can identify themselves with and in the material, human world. In this
sense, Eduardo’s chant seems to perform this identification. His aim
was surely not to suggest that Robertico would “come down” just to
drink, but to exaggerate his connectedness to materiality in order to
Development as Cosmogony: Ritual and Materialization · 263
enact his respect for this spirit’s trajectory in his own religious house.
Both Robertico and Eduardo, then, appear to engage in a kind of reflex-
ive double-play, wherein a spirit’s existential condition of both being
of the world and without it is rendered intelligible and the basis for
further action.
In a similar vein, before she passed away, Teresita sang this song to
Azucena, her gypsy spirit:
El día que nací yo
[On the day that I was born]
Que planeta reinaría
[I wonder which planet reigned]
Por donde quiera que voy
[For wherever I go]
Que mala suerte la mía
[What bad luck I have]
Azucena had had many lovers in life, until one of them stabbed and
killed her in a jealous rage. Now, in death, Teresita sings her tragedy
back to her in this plegária that emphasizes her sad luck. That which
made her human “rehumanizes” her in a space-time no longer her own
but to which she is called to serve nevertheless. Crucial to note here is
the spirit’s willingness to be represented, made known in knowledge,
copied through verse—since it was Azucena herself who transmitted
the song to Teresita. This highlights the role of such performative re-
flexivities, in particular, the place of words and songs in dialoguing
with the spirits in order to recreate them in social spaces, such as mi-
sas. This is coherent with other accounts of spirit possession whereby
spirits are experienced as being largely constituted through and by
words (for example, Lambek 1989; Placido 2001). Ultimately, however,
what is at stake is not simply a conceptualization of spirit-evocation
practices, but of performative and communicational techniques that
bring spirit selves into being by providing platforms for self-identifica-
tion with a place to which they hypothetically no longer belong.
In his book Acts of Meaning (1990), Jerome Bruner criticizes the
“cognitive revolution” for opting for an information-processing view
while relegating meaning-making processes to a lesser position. Bruner
takes a cultural psychology approach in his methodology of investigat-
ing the self, arguing that this implies two requirements.
264 · Developing the Dead
One of them is that such studies must focus upon the meanings
in terms of which Self is defined both by the individual and by the
culture in which he or she participates. But this does not suffice
if we are to understand how a “self ” is negotiated, for Self is not
simply the resultant of contemplative reflection. The second re-
quirement, then, is to attend to the practices in which “the mean-
ings of self ” are achieved and put to use. These, in effect, provide
us with a more “distributed” view of Self. (original emphasis 1990,
116)
Bruner follows William James in suggesting that the self is not confined
to an interior but is extended in its environment through its myriad
relations; that, too, is implicit in the argument that I have been propos-
ing. Like Bruner, espiritistas do not regard their “selves” as objects of
contemplative reflection but as negotiated in action and practice in as
much as these selves encompass spirits that are felt, acted, and spoken
into existence. My contention here is that certain communicative per-
formances, what Tambiah has called “illocutionary acts” (2008, 322),
illuminate the processes whereby these “selves” come into being, ac-
quiring forms that are crystallized by their grounding in a shared, pub-
lic arena. Ritual is effective, says Rappaport, because when perform-
ers become part of the orders that their performances realize, they
become fused with their messages, at least temporarily (2008, 416).
Certainly, a strong component of this are social others who observe,
participate, and become embroiled in the performative experience.
Models of communication and performance such as those of Jakobson
(1960) and Bauman (1977) highlight the special function of the audi-
ence. For Bauman (1977, 11), for instance, the performer is accountable
to his or her audience, not just for the content of the communication
but for the way it is carried out; performance implies a special intensity
of awareness with regards to the act of expression itself, particularly on
the part of the audience. Audiences are intrinsic to the results of espir-
itismo rites not simply because they condone and consolidate enacted
realities, but because they help make them meaningful—Bruner’s con-
cern. In contrast with the premises of cultural psychology, however,
in espiritismo self-related meanings do not precede acts but are the
results of the acts themselves. Espiritista performances are not about
communication to and of the spirit world and its denizens, per se;
Development as Cosmogony: Ritual and Materialization · 265
rather, they are designed to mime such forces into becoming by recre-
ating their presence. Communication is not referentially but ontologi-
cally impactful. Kendall Walton argues that engagement with a work
of art can engender a game of imaginative make-believe in which the
work is used as a prop for the creation of a fictional world (1990), using
the term “performative mimesis.” I use it here to indicate how words
can become props not for make-believe but for the work of creating or
enabling certain realities through forms of imaginative, if sensorially
grounded, mimetic constructions. This directs us to some basic con-
siderations of the espiritista’s enterprise.
Espiritistas seem to be engaged in the process of creating some-
thing, via their subjectivities, that already exists: spirits. On the one
hand, spirits belong to a realm that preexists any one medium’s appro-
priation of it: They are cosmological constituents of the self-in-poten-
tial, having come with the person from birth. On the other, the muertos
need to be made immanent, earthly, incarnate, through the medium,
in order for their presence to be ascertained and enjoyed. Under the
logic of this last statement, it would be fair to claim that for all intents
and purposes, there are no muertos without the living to particular-
ize their existences. In other words, unless the alterity or otherness
of these entities is denied by the medium—a denial made through the
conscious development of herself as their extension—spirits cannot be
generative of the otherness (information, difference) that makes them
so valuable as seers, and as doers beyond the earthly. But what kind
of leap does this involve? Ultimately, I would argue that the problem
posed for us by espiritismo is of how to convert a spirit’s condition of
“potential” into one of “presence,” where both deep consciousness and
precise awareness on the part of the medium are both the very begin-
ning of the journey and its end product. The question is not whether
the world of the dead is separate, or alien, to the world of the living. In
Cuban espiritismo, the first can only become known via the latter, and
via the bridges the living must make to mobilize and materialize the
dead.
To recap what has been said earlier, we could say that the movement
from potentiality to presence can be conceptualized as two important
processes, each one of which is embedded and dependent on the other:
firstly, the process of educating the dead and secondly, the process of
materializing the dead. In the first instance, education is essentially a
266 · Developing the Dead
drive for clarity—away from the dark murkiness of obscurity and pas-
sivity and any linguistic, psychological, or behavioral confusion on the
part of the spirit. This also encompasses the medium’s education; the
spirit exists through her as much as she also wills it into being. If spirits
are individuals-in-potential, then this process of rudimentary social-
ization, of educating the wilderness of the undifferentiated dead into
the civility of social and religious life, is the first step in the atomization
and personalization of the muertos.
The second process takes off directly from the idea that there must
be, quite literally, a transition from an initial state of social formless-
ness to one of form and consequence. Spirits are fluido, which while
in spiritist theology denotes a semimaterial substance that can have
effects on the more solid matter that comprises the world of the living,
is also indicative of their physical fluidity, unboundedness, and malle-
ability. Materializing the dead gives them shape, consolidates them in
materiality, and recognizes their essence in order to translate it into
the immanence of the meaningful moment, or life. In this sense, ma-
terialization implies a simulation: to represent is to create a copy of a
world that is at once the subject of, and implicated in, its own existence
in the copying process. Mediums “re-present” (rather than represent)
the spirit world, in order to experience it, variably through dolls, icons,
bóvedas, identity-specific songs, clothes, and ritual objects, but also
via their investment in certain sets of behavior, thought, preferences. I
distinguish this from what Romberg has called the “mirroring drama”
(2009, 154) at the same time as I acknowledge striking similarities be-
tween contexts. According to Romberg, Puerto Rican brujos mimic
their clients’ bewitched bodies, enabling states in their clients of emo-
tional openness that promote the instigation of healing (ibid.). As I
noted previously, for Cuban espiritistas this mirroring is more than
just representational; the doll does not simply stand for something, nor
does the bodily posture; they bring that something into being through
the manipulation of its existence in the world. This suggests a very
particular kind of mimesis, of an active or cosmogonic sort.
In Michael Taussig’s Mimesis and Alterity (1993), this active notion
of mimesis is taken to new analytical lengths. Likeness, he argues, is
a powerful means to evoke and control the perceived alterity of the
other, be it the colonizer, the demon, or the God, where often repre-
sentation and represented blur. The representation is no simple copy
Development as Cosmogony: Ritual and Materialization · 267
C.’s muerto was that of a woman who had been the victim of her hus-
band’s witchcraft before she died. Lila told me that Luis had performed
a rite the evening before to release this muerto of her burden, carried
on with her into the afterlife. She showed me the evidence of the obra:
a bowl on the floor with some liquid inside it containing a large iron
chain. There were other offerings in the room. A doll, representing
a Palo spirit, sat next to a blue candle, surrounded by plates of rice,
chicken, and cake. The spirit representation of a black man sat along-
side a half shell of coconut filled with liquor and a large pig’s head.
Behind the pig’s head was a box of Cohiba cigars, an offering from one
of the godchildren. Lila explained that the muertos “had eaten” the day
before, to “gain strength.” The drummers played continuously but were
not yet singing. This section of the cajón was for the Palo muertos ex-
clusively. Back in the main patio, the espiritistas waited for their turn.
The cajón p’al muerto is basically an extended, instrumental misa
espiritual. Kenneth Routon describes these ceremonies as “hybrid,
drawing from an assortment of ritual idioms borrowed from Kar-
decian Spiritism, Afro-Creole religions, and folk Catholicism [com-
bining the] rhythmic styles of Cuban rumba with spirituals in praise
of various classes or ‘commissions’ of the dead” (2010, 113). The cajón
began as a misa: Prayers were read from Kardec’s abridged book of
prayers, the participants cleansed themselves with a mixture of per-
fumed water and herbs, and, as is customary, the singing opened with
plegárias dedicated to the saints, Jesus, and the ecclesiastical commis-
sions. Then, the muertos were beckoned, particularly the spirit guides
of those present, referred to in this song as “missionaries” called to
“labor” on earth.
The initially tranquil misa soon turned into a lively rite of prolonged
possession, drumming, and dancing. The spirits were being called. The
main espiritista singer asked all those present to concentrate on the
songs so that the corrientes espirituales could manifest (“¡Ponganse
para eso!”). “So that they come and tell us things,” said Lila excitedly
to me. She suspected that there were a series of muertos nearby that
needed some coaxing, as did the head medium, who wasted no time.
The following plegarias seemed to clinch it:
Vamo a guerrear
[Let’s go and fight]
“Let’s see if it’s true!” shouted the lead singer, encouraging the Conga
muerto who was threatening to take the body of a woman present.
“Aunque sea un momentico, tú tienes que venir” [Even if it’s just for a
moment, you must come], she sang repeatedly. The woman shuddered,
lost her footing, closed her eyes, and when she opened them, greeted
the musicians coyly. “Salem malekum,” said the spirit, extending her
arm. “Malekum salem,” they responded, content. The spirit breathed
heavily, wide eyed. “I fight nine battles,” she exclaimed provocatively.
“You don’t play with me!” She looked at Luis, and he approached and
hugged her tenderly. She cackled, spun several times, then began to
address several of the audience members with messages, puffing on a
cigar she had been offered.
As any regular participant of misas will tell you, repetition and
rhythm are key to invocation, particularly in the performance of what
Cubans call plegárias, the ritual songs. Repetition enables speedy
learning but, at a deeper level, resonates with the intentions of the
singers—to bring forth insistently, by prodding, coaxing, and encour-
aging those spirits at the margins of existence. Plegárias tend to begin
at the initiative of one of the head mediums, called mediums cabeceros,
and are triggered by the perception of the impending proximity of
particular spirits among the group and their respective identities. Me-
diums cabeceros must be sufficiently competent and experienced to
make clear-cut decisions with respect to the ways they will allow the
ritual to unfold; this means being able to encourage appropriate me-
diumship and conduct, and to judge good spirits from bad ones, deci-
sions in which their own spirits are active. But they also play a crucial
part in the appearance of information in the first place. This means that
their attention must be constantly alert toward producing a rhythm
272 · Developing the Dead
In this plegária, the singers both call Mama Francisca and mimic her
presence (in the second part) as if she were speaking back to the singer,
whose initial call it was. This illustrates the point I made above about
the dual nature of such songs, which serves to incite and welcome the
spirit’s presence; that is, which serves to bring about contagion via
copy and vice versa. This song, however, is not actually about any spirit
specifically called Mama Francisca; it is about a spirit whose physical
appearance or cultural heritage approximates that of a “Francisca” type
(a female Conga), but whose particular intentions and characteristics
must be ascertained and articulated during the more improvisational
section of the song, which can last indefinitely. Thus, we know, at least
provisionally, that the spirit comes from the “mountains” (which prob-
ably implies an association with witchcraft or Palo) and that she comes
“slowly” (which could tell us she is old). It is the job of the main singer
to allow us to see this as the singing progresses; she must build those
bridges conceptually and, in a sense, visually, since the spirit must be
seen by others. But this plegária is interesting for a further reason.
“¿Pa’ que tú me llamas?” [Why do you call me?], asks the spirit, almost
rhetorically. “Me llamo como quieras” [I’m called whatever you like],
she says.
On the one hand, the spirit, who is fluido, nameless, undifferenti-
ated, part of the magma that is the spirit world, is being summoned
into existence near the living—she is being called upon to assume spe-
cific form. But “why?” she asks. On the other, the spirit is willing its
invention, giving itself to be whatever is created from its representa-
276 · Developing the Dead
tion via the enactment of song: “You call me what you like.” “Tú no me
conoces” [You don’t know me]—but the point is that through a recre-
ative effort, they will. The medium’s task here is precisely that: to make
her known. And it repeats again and again: “¿Pa’ que tú me llamas, si
tu no me conoces?, ¿pa’ que tú me llamas?” The other becomes the self,
the absent becomes the present, and the nameless the named. It seems
that this is exemplary of the spiritist paradox in active negotiation,
which turns persons-in-potential and spirits, into “things”—people
and agents—through its insistent and seductive representation. It is
unsurprising that this song is very often performed in order to coerce
the mediums and the spirits into ultimate contact: trance-possession.
Thus, in a misa espiritual, songs are not only reflections of the
spiritual dynamic at play at any one given moment, but they also in-
duce and shape it. Singing, which in this context can be described as
the performance of a type of musical conversation between the head
medium (lead singer) and the participants (the chorus) who respond
to him, not only aims to pay homage to the entities already present,
but also encourages and makes visible those that lie in the “shadows”
at the periphery of existence. The plegária’s power to facilitate this
flow is due mostly to its mimetic dynamic: By speaking directly to the
spirit’s identity, to the spirit’s group identity—its commission, or to
its so-called corriente santoral—a song represents what is desired for
the mediumistic moment. Neither copy nor contact takes primacy;
rather, the accomplishment of the plegária and the torrent of spirit
manifestation that may follow constitute an elucidating example of ex-
actly how both of these processes are mutually implicated. The spirit’s
presence is sensed, intuited, and yet it is not made fully present until
it is represented. Just as Taussig’s ethnography of the Cuna medicine
man describes the nature of spirits to the spirits themselves in order
to penetrate their reality, the medium must somehow demonstrate her
knowledge of the spirit to the spirit, proving her skill in achieving its
existence on her plane.
The Congos were not the only spirits to make their presence felt
during the cajón. The indios, who also have a close association with
Palo Monte, promptly arrived in the second half of the ceremony. In
order to draw them out, the following song was performed.
Development as Cosmogony: Ritual and Materialization · 277
But corrientes can also be understood in a different way, and this brings
me to my final point. The term corriente both indicates a spirit’s be-
longingness to a particular oricha-santo, thus, a corriente santoral,
and in a more general way refers to formlessness of the spirit whose
280 · Developing the Dead
power is felt: Mediums will often say, “¡Hay una corriente espiritual
muy fuerte!” [There is a very strong spiritual current here]. The power,
however, remains undefined until the moment of its manifestation as
a particular entity. Mediums thus make spirits, so to speak, from cor-
rientes, entities from fluido, information from sensation.
night, but she did not appear, and finally he fell asleep from exhaustion.
The following morning he woke and searched for her, consumed by an-
ger and humiliation. Paloyansan felt betrayed and robbed—Macachita
had kept the gold and broken her promise to him, as she had to so
many other men. “Why would I ever sleep with an ugly negro like you?”
she asked Paloyansan disdainfully when he finally caught up with her.
“You’re a thief!” he shouted at her, hurt. But her father always turned a
blind eye to Macachita’s mischief. “No one can touch my daughter,” he
would say, even when everyone knew she stole from the slaves of her
father’s plantation. But fate would punish Macachita. After she treated
one of Paloyansan’s compadres the same way, the new victim—a proud
black man called Atá José—found her as she was riding her horse in the
fields, pulled her from it, and split her head open with an axe.
Although he was never a slave, Paloyansan cut cane to earn his liv-
ing. He also received a rudimentary education, a distinction among
negros at the time. The master’s wife had taken to him and had taught
him how to read and write. “You need to learn, you’re very bruto [stu-
pid, ignorant, uncouth],” she would say almost tenderly, although she
became angry when she saw that Paloyansan was observing Macachita
instead of tending to his homework. When Paloyansan’s parents died,
things changed, Paloyansan said: “After that I had to open up my own
pathway in life.” His parents had come from Africa as slaves. But he had
been born a Haitian; his was the New World, as he explains:
When I was born, there weren’t that many people in the world.
We would cure our illnesses with herbs and plants. We would
wash our clothes with plantain tree rubber [platanicho]. This
was before the revolution in Haiti, so we’re talking about the
eighteenth century. There were no houses, just fields and moun-
tains. My father would be the one to help my mother through
her births. (Paloyansan 2011; this and all subsequent quotations)
Eventually, when an old man, Paloyansan had his own children, two
boys, with a Haitian woman called Uliana Francisca. She was illiterate
and still a slave when they met, and Paloyansan paid for her freedom
by working at the plantation where she labored. She had worked a cart
of oxen in the fields. “I couldn’t have a slave as a wife,” he said. Despite
the large age gap between them, Paloyansan’s wife predeceased him.
“When I died I was a hundred twenty years old,” he said. “I lived so long
284 · Developing the Dead
because of the chicken, goat, and beef soups I ate. Back then it wasn’t
like it is today, where people can’t eat anything!”
During the last years of his life, Paloyansan had become an effective
healer and medicine man; people from all over the area came to see
him. He consulted, as did his Haitian wife: “What I had during that
time was videncia. By way of a large stone that my mother had left
me, my fundamento.” Paloyansan says that his wife had not wanted
children for a long time and that he had given her herbal beverages
so that she would not fall pregnant, yet when she finally fell gravely ill
with fever, there were no plant remedies that could save her: “When I
died, I said to my wife [also dead]: ‘I cannot live anymore, everything
I had to do I’ve done it already.’ And she tells me: ‘But who’s going to
take care of the boys?’ They were only twelve and thirteen then.”
“If in life I healed well, in death, I was a good muerto,” Paloyansan
remarks. “I helped a lot of people.” He had gone once to Cuba as a
twenty-four-year-old, with his father on a boat, in the spirit of explora-
tion and travel. “When I came to Cuba nothing was constructed,” he
said. “It was when everything was starting. We were there for a week.
My father didn’t like it at all.” Unbeknownst to him then, Paloyansan
would return to Cuba, but this time as a spirit.
Marcelina was twelve years old when Paloyansan came to her. She
would experience convulsions and fits, attacks that at first frightened
her parents, who thought she might be epileptic. Finally, they were
advised by a medium who had observed that the girl had a very strong
muerto to try to take her to a spiritist center called Monte Oscuro, in
Oriente. They treated her there, and she began to fall into controlled
trance with Paloyansan. “The muerto becomes attached to the person
he sympathizes with, and I really liked that chiquita [girl] from the
start,” he said. “It was in Monte Oscuro where I first manifested.” Also,
at the age of twelve Marcelina had her first child, a boy. She is now
fifty-eight, which puts Paloyansan’s arrival as a muerto in Cuba in the
earthly year of 1965. “Now I work very little,” he says, “but back then
that girl would begin to consult at ten in the morning and finish at two
in the morning. Her mother would say: ‘This is going to kill her!’” Mar-
celina was in Monte Oscuro until she was fourteen, after which her
mother moved both of them to Havana. There, a mulatta woman called
Luz headed a spiritual center to which Marcelina’s mother would take
Epilogue: Biographical Intersections · 285
do not just render her spirits visible or public to others, but indeed
enable their expansion in Marcelina’s own awareness. As a medium,
she has not just cultivated Paloyansan’s presence at the level of the
mind, imagination, or sensation; she brings him forth materially, visu-
ally, narratively. As much as they already exist as potentials, muertos
need to be guided into existence as social facts, in a social and mate-
rial environment that mirrors them. Constructing material markers
for a given self-system is instrumental in forging this system’s ability
to achieve presence and influence, and thus social existence. People
do not just relate to the muertos in Cuba as they would to ideas or
beliefs, and muertos are not simply acted upon in a social drama of a
person’s weaving and design. Paloyansan’s recounting of his own life,
prior to Marcelina and with her, is evidence that, as Panagiotopoulos
says, the muertos fundamentally relate people, being themselves also
relations (2011, 99) between events, destinies, sensations, certainties,
and knowledges.
In chapter 1, I propose that developing the dead is a process impli-
cating, among other vectors, the animation and cohabitation of shared
pasts whose stories remain untold, peripheral. To some extent this is
certainly true. For instance, speaking of the cajón, the rumba party
for the dead performed by practitioners of Afro-Cuban religion, Ken-
neth Routon argues that these ceremonies “celebrate a bewildering
entanglement of bodies, racial geographies, cosmological domains,
and historical fields,” expressing, among other things, “hybrid reli-
gious imaginaries of belonging that stress the transnational roots of
the Cuban nation” (2010, 113). Routon proposes that the “spirits who
like to rumba” are national caricatures—the sensual mulatta Conga,
for instance, or the elderly black brujo—“moral artifacts of the colonial
and postcolonial imagination” (ibid., 115), resembling what Garoutte
and Wambaugh mean when they describe the espiritistas’ muertos
as a stereotypic “generic inventory” (2007, 160) of the island’s labor
populations. Yet, the story of Paloyansan’s life is one that suggests, as
Wirtz points out, that “spirit biographies are perhaps necessarily frag-
mentary, mysterious, and even obfuscating” because the work of self-
fashioning—be it from the medium’s or the spirit’s point of view—is
never over (2013, 127). Paloyansan’s biography is not exempt from am-
biguities and inconsistencies, implying, perhaps, that we should read it
not as a factual historical account but rather as a manifestation of what
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Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Agramonte, Antonio, 120, 126, 142, 147,
150–52
Aboy, Nelson, 70, 100 Agramonte, Carmen, 142, 146, 149
Acercamiento (coming closer), 162, 233, Agramonte, Claudio, 115, 120–21, 142–44,
249–50, 280–81 147
Aché (energy substance), 57, 64, 275 Agramonte, Servando, 142, 145, 148, 150–51
Acts of Meaning (Bruner), 263–64 Aguardiente (sugarcane alcohol), 56, 173,
Affinity: corriente santoral, 66–67, 77, 222, 225
278–80; muertos and client, 178, 240; Alava, Francisco, 121
muertos and medium, 191, 195 Alava, Rafael, 120–21
Africa: fetishism of, 101, 110; Hofriyati of, Alberto (medium), 170–72
208; Mozambique, 210; Nyamosoro of, Alcohol, sugarcane (aguardiente), 56, 173,
210; orichas in, 63; slaves from, 59, 110, 222, 225
116–17, 164, 217; Sudan, 208; Yoruba, 5–6, Alcoholism, 194, 195
58, 106; Zambia, 160; Zimbabwe, 123–24 Aldama Hernández, Secundino, 136–41
Afro-Brazilian religions: Candomblé, ix–x, Alfredo (medium), 84–85, 87, 167
132, 193; Umbanda, 117, 132 Alliance, 57–61, 226–28
Afro-Creole sorcery. See Witchcraft Altars (bóvedas espirituales), 214; as-
Afro-Cuban religions: atavistic stance on, semblage of, 57, 246–47; daily sitting at,
114–17; calling in, 159–60; commercial- 245, 250; as entry point, 246–47, 250;
ization of, 27; espiritismo differences examples of, 25–26, 248; expansion of,
from, 61–67; espiritismo relations to, 249–50; materialization work of, 244–51;
36–39, 50–51, 57–61, 221–22; Havana’s spiritual makeup and, 144
networks of, 24–27; labeling, 38; logics American psychics, 180
of practice in, 24–25; muertos alliance of, Amerindian spirits (indios), 197, 225, 251,
57–61; persecution of, 22–23; prolifera- 277
tion of, 16–17, 23, 26–27; racialization of, Amor y Caridad Universal. See Sociedad de
33, 59, 87, 116–17; rejection of, 110–16; Estudios Psicológicos Amor y Caridad
restriction of, 23; Revolution ethos and, Universal
28–29, 114; secularization of, 30–32; self- Ana (medium), 198–99
hood concepts in, 5–6, 14, 31–32. See also Ancestors: attachments of, 149, 183–84,
Palo; Santería 213–19; homage to, 72–74; house haunt-
Afro-Cuban religious ministers. See ing by, 213–19; orichas as, 51, 57–58, 62
Religiosos Angel de la guardia (guardian angel), 58,
Agency, 93–95, 138, 203. See also Selfhood 62
308 · Index
Anthropology: material culture studies of, Body: agency of, 93–95, 138, 203;
254–55; multiplicity biases of, 202–9. See cognitive theory of, 180–81; dream
also Ethnography detachment from, 168, 169; Kardecist
Apostolics, 123–24 tripartite of, 142–43, 153; learning to
Arabic, 224 have, 188–90; life exchange and, 92–93;
Argüelles Mederos, Aníbal, 32, 53 muertos disentanglement from, 142–47,
Ascension. See Evolution 151–52; selfhood orientations and,
Asociación Yoruba de Cuba, 106 180–83; substitution or co-presence,
Associations: Consejo Supremo Nacional 200–202; trauma metabolization by,
de Espiritistas, 104–5, 109, 111, 118–19; 145–47. See also Possession; Somatic
contemporary status quo of, 105–7; markers; Somatization
growth of, 47, 48; materiality rejection by, Books. See Texts
109; medical, 131–32; Misioneros de Jesús, Bóveda material (spiritual makeup), 144
53, 109, 127–28; National Confederation Bóvedas espirituales. See Altars
of Cuban Spiritism, 51; officially sanc- Brandon, George, 50, 58–59
tioned, 51–52, 104, 105–7; psychological Brazil: Afro-Brazilian religions, ix–x, 117,
reframing of, 52; regulation of, 48–49, 132, 193; medical mediums in, 131–32,
51–52, 104; Sociedad Científica para el 133; orichas in, 63–64
Estudio del Espiritismo, 123, 137. See also Brito de Armas, Xiomara, 191, 231, 238,
Sociedad de Estudios Psicológicos Amor y 260
Caridad Universal Brotherton, P. Sean, 16–17, 29
Astrology, 137 Brujería. See Witchcraft
Atavism, 114–17 Bruner, Jerome, 263–64
Awareness: consciousness or, 188–89; dual-
ity of, 181–82 Cabrera, Lydia, 33–34, 50–51, 58–59, 79
Ayorinde, Christine, 24, 30–31, 114 Cajón p’al muerto (drumming for the
Azucena (spirit), 185, 263 dead), 269–72, 274–78, 288
Calling, to mediumship, 158, 159–60,
Babalawo (Ifá priest): as eggún, 69; ethos of, 161–65
28; initiation, 62 Calling spirits. See Materialization
Babalu-Ayé (San Lázaro), 69, 170, 213, 236, Cambio de vida (life exchanges), 92–93
252, 278–79 Camino de vida (life path), 196, 285–87,
Bad spirits. See Dark spirits 290
Bandura, Albert, 211 Candomblé, ix, 132, 193. See also Santería
Bantu-Congo. See Palo Capitalism, 19, 110
Bantu gods (mpungos), 59, 80, 85 Card throwing espiritistas (cartomanti-
Battles, everyday (la lucha), 5–6, 18, 259 cas), 175–77, 183–88
Believers (creyentes), 2, 23, 24, 110. See also Cargas (charges), 74–76
Non-believers Caribbean natives (indios), 54, 87, 197
Bermúdez, Armando Andrés, 34–36, 46 Caridad (charity spiritism), 35–36
Bettelheim, Judith, 249 Cartomanticas (card throwing espiritis-
Biography: mediumship intersections, tas), 175–77, 183–88
285–90; of muertos, 7–8, 55–57, 59, 129, La Casa de los Espiritistas. See Consejo
194–97, 282–84 Supremo Nacional de Espiritistas
Black market, 20, 83 Cascarilla (chalk), 73, 214, 233, 246, 258
Blanca (medium), 2–3 Castellanos, Isabel, 37
Boddy, Janice, 208 Castellanos, Jorge, 37
Index · 309
Castro, Fidel, 133, 172; Communist Party of, Communicative flow: blocking, 185–86, 198,
3, 17, 22, 30, 104; internationalist reform 240; in possession, 200–202; practicing,
of, 24; liberalizing measures of, 19; reli- 197–200
gious restrictions by, 23–24; rhetoric of, Communist espiritistas, 23, 110–11
17. See also Revolution Communist Party, 3, 17, 22, 30, 104. See also
Castro, Raul, 21 Revolution
Catholicism: espiritismo and, 33–34, 37, Conferences, 105–7
58–59, 214–17; ignorance in, 110–11; Palo Congo. See Palo
cosmology and, 85; rejection of, 45, 46, Consciousness, 188–90, 200–201, 255
110–11; Revolution restriction of, 23–24 Consejo Supremo Nacional de Espiritistas,
Cavalcanti, Maria Laura, 202 104–5, 109, 111, 118–19
CDRs. See Committees for the Defense of Contact and Contagion, Law of, 267,
the Revolution 280–81
Ceremonies. See Ritual Copying, 265, 266–68, 275, 280–81
Chalk (cascarilla), 73, 214, 233, 246, 258 Cordón, espiritismo de (cord spiritism). See
Chants (moyubbas), 72, 73–74. See also Espiritismo de cordón
Songs Cordón espiritual (spiritual cord): changes
Charges (cargas), 74–76 in, 173–74, 191–97, 228–29; conceptu-
Charity spiritism (espiritismo de caridad), alization of, 7, 45; Creolization and, 38;
35–36 cuadro espiritual and, 235–37; of Espírito
Christianity: dream transformation from, Santo, 228–29; evolution mutuality with,
170–72; rejection of, 43–44, 45; selfhood 195–97; identity groups of, 197; investi-
concepts in, 14, 204. See also Catholicism gation of, 77, 148–52, 221–26, 236–37;
Cientifico (scientific spiritism). See Espirit- material requirements of, 125–26; nfumbe
ismo cientifico and, 86–87; organizing, 242–44; oricha
Cigar smoke, 218, 233 and eggún hybrid of, 68–69; principle
Classes, 105–7, 147–52, 197–200, 227–28 guide of, 194–95, 202; role of, 6, 60, 87
Clavelito (radio healer), 53 Coronación (coronation mass), xi, 232–34
Cleansing (santiguación): actions, 148, 149, Corpuscles, 142–43
202, 216, 218, 225; appropriateness of, Corriente santoral (affinity of saints), 66–67,
124; materials, 148, 214, 216, 218, 251, 77, 278–80
253 Cosmogony: defining, xiii; legitimacy meth-
Clients: affinity with, 178, 240; communica- ods, 122–25
tive flow with, 198 Cosmology: espiritismo, 4, 14–15, 36–37, 54;
Coconut shells, 73–74, 225 Kardecist, 42–45, 112, 142–44; Palo, 5–6,
Cognitive theory, 180–81, 211 85; Santería, 61–62, 63–67
Coldness, 69, 157, 216, 233, 245 Crapanzano, Vincent, 207
Coleman, Simon, 272 Creole sorcery. See Witchcraft
Colombian Indians, 168 Creolization, 36–39, 41–42
Colors, 87, 126, 156 Creyentes (believers), 2, 23, 24, 110. See also
Coming closer (acercamiento), 162, 233, Non-believers
249–50, 280–81 Crossed spiritism. See Espiritismo cruzado
Comisión (identity groups), 197, 277–78 Crowning, 232–34
Commercialism, 20–21, 26, 27 Cruzado. See Espiritismo cruzado
Committees for the Defense of the Revolu- Csordas, Thomas, 181–82, 189
tion (CDRs), 22 Cuadros espiritual (spiritual paintings),
Communication style, 152, 238 234–37
310 · Index
tishist, 101, 110; future of, 289–90; growth moral, of, 107–8, 111–14, 123–25, 129;
of, 47, 53–54; institutionalization of, 48– non-believer relatives as, 1–3; paradox
49, 51–52, 103–5; non-believer respect of, of, 123–26, 128–29, 208, 276; psychia-
1–3; Oriente, 47–48, 50, 54–55, 118, 284; try methodology of, 136–39; psychiatry
origins of, 14–15, 36–37, 46–47, 54–55; recognition of, 131–32; religioso differ-
Palo alliance with, 57–61; psychology of, ences from, 10, 27; religioso similarities to,
15; publications, 47; purpose of, 29; racial- 50–51, 58; responsible methods of, 109,
ization of, 33, 59, 87, 116–17; reciprocity 144–45; strengthening, 135, 146–47, 161;
in, 257–58, 289; regulation of, 48–49, trauma metabolizing of, 145–47; unifica-
50–51; research challenges in, ix–xii, 4–5; tion between, 36, 39–40
research gap in, ix–x, 4–5, 33; Santería Espírito Santo, Diana, 231; cordón of, 228–
alliance with, 57–61; as social work, 108, 29; coronation of, xi, 233; escuelita experi-
147, 152–54; theoretical, 106–7; western, ence of, 199; healing of, xi; investigation
55–57; world-making, xii–xiii, 14, 39, 289. of, 148–49; research methodology of, ix–
See also Espiritistas; Medical mediums; xii, 8–9; Santería initiations of, xi, 71
Mediumship Espiritu de luz (spirit guide supervisor, light
Espiritismo cientifico (scientific spiritism): spirit), 194–95
amalgamated basis of, 99–101, 123; classi- Ethnography: classifications by, 34–36, 102;
fication of, 34–35, 52, 99–100; conversion early studies of, 49–51; gap, ix–x, 4–5,
to, 118–20; differentiation of, 97–99, 102, 33; secularization by, 30–32; selfhood
123; elitism in, 103–5; Espírito Santo’s concepts in, 11–13, 14
experience with, 148–49; materiality Ette Indians, 168
rejected by, 44–45, 109, 112–14, 123–25; Europe, New Religious Movement in, 43–44
medical field friction with, 134; moral- European spiritism. See Kardecism
ity measured by, 107–8, 111–14; muertos Evil. See Dark spirits
material transgressions in, 126–29; race Evolution: cordón mutuality of, 195–97;
viewed by, 116–17, 129; ritual, 33; Santería disassembly or, 88–89; human rein-
concerns of, 115–16. See also Kardecism carnation, 44–45, 142–44; karma and,
Espiritismo cruzado (crossed spiritism): clas- 45; levels, 142–44, 258–61; light giving
sification of, 35, 36, 53–54, 100; cordón for, 213–19; from material attachment,
differences from, 55–57; cosmology of, 4; 126–29, 142–44, 149–52, 215–19; muertos
Espírito Santo’s experience with, xi; ritu- reincarnation, 191–94
als, 55–57; universality of, 4 Exorcism, 80, 173–74, 222–26
Espiritismo de caridad (charity spiritism),
35–36 Fakes (farsantes), 239–42
Espiritismo de cordón (cord spiritism): Fallibility, 238, 239–42
classification of, 34; cruzado differences Farewell songs, 225, 277
from, 55–57; medical field friction with, Farsantes (fakes), 239–42
134–35; origins of, 48, 54–55; rituals, 34, Fate, 12, 14, 68
54–55 Fear: of death, 145–46; exploitation of, 115,
Espiritismo de mesa (table spiritism). See 145–46, 219
Espiritismo cientifico Fernández, Teresita (medium), 183–88
Espiritistas (spirit mediums): cartomantica, Fertility rates, 21
175–77, 183–88; characteristics of, 9–10; Fetishism, 101, 110
communist, 110–11; criticisms between, Fever, 173–74
241–42; dreaming, 168–73; energy trans- Figarola, Joel James, 55
fer, 56–57, 65–67, 92–93, 138; legitimacy, Flowers, 150, 225, 232, 251, 258
medical, of, 130–36, 152–54; legitimacy, Fluido (energy substance), 57, 64, 275
312 · Index
Materialization: via altars, 244–51; via 196, 285–87, 290; limitations of, 138–39,
coronación, 232–34; non-requirement of, 158–59, 178, 238, 239–42; muertos affinity
260–61; process challenges, 261–68; via in, 191, 195; muertos personality mutuality
representation, 74–76, 251–53; require- in, 194–97; personal life and, 243; psy-
ment of, 258–60; via songs, 224, 232–33, chographic, 121, 174, 177–78; responsible
268–73, 274–80; via substances and methods of, 109, 144–45; somatization at
objects, 74–76, 254–58; via texts, 272 start of, 161–68, 170–71, 173–74, 184; in
Material markers: agency of, 93–95; cargas, youth, 142, 158, 163–65, 166, 173–74, 284.
74–76; cleansing, 148, 214, 216, 218, 251, See also Initiation; Selfhood; specific types
253; coconut shells, 73–74, 225; colors of mediums
of, 87, 126, 156; commercialization of, Menezes, Bezerra de, 131–32
26, 27; divination, 62, 63, 69–70, 73–74, Mental illness: from dark spirits, 83, 91, 92,
176; dolls, 74–75, 215, 251–53, 253; eggún 139–41; development process, 142–45;
figures, 74–76; flowers, 150, 225, 232, 251, healing, 131–32, 136–41, 145–47; multiple
258; hierberos sorting of, 68; light giving personality disorder, 139–41, 207, 211;
ritual, 214; oricha fixed into, 64, 68; place- strengthening against, 145–47
ment of, 253; protective, 88–92; statu- Mercedes (medium), 65–66, 106
ettes, 251–53, 252; stones, 64, 68, 74, 75, Mesa (table spiritism). See Espiritismo
229; types of, 25–26, 124, 227, 251–58; cientifico
vessels, 64, 79. See also Ngangas Mesmerism, 44, 130
Mauss, Marcel, 203–5 Metabolization, trauma, 145–47
Mead, G. H., 13 Middle class progress, 46–47
Medical mediums: in Brazil, 131–32, 133; La Milagrosa (medium), 133–34
cases, 149, 284–86; dangers to, 138–39; Miller, Daniel, 254–55
defining role of, 139; doctor muertos with, Millet, José, 33, 35–36
133–34; Espírito Santo’s experience with, Mimesis, 265, 266–68, 275, 280–81
148–49; legitimacy of, 130–36, 152–54; Mimesis and Alterity (Taussig), 266–67
mainstream acceptance of, 131–32, 133; Mind, Self, and Society (Mead), 13
mainstream decline and, 20–21, 135; Mineral corpuscles, 142–43
mainstream friction with, 133–35; social Misas espiritual (spiritual masses): cajón,
work of, 152–54. See also Health prob- 269–72, 274–78, 288; classes, 197–200,
lems; Spiritual psychiatry 227–28; coronación, xi, 232–34; differen-
The Mediums’ Book (Kardec), 37, 42 tiation of, 58, 219–21; exorcism, 222–26;
Mediumship: agency and, 93–95, 138, 203; functions of, 219–22; investigación, 77,
altar as entry point to, 246–47, 250; 148–52, 221–26, 236–37; light giving,
biographical intersections in, 285–90; 213–19; mimesis in, 268, 275, 280–81; or-
blocking, 183–85, 198, 240; calling to, der and request of, 74, 76–78; protection,
158, 159–60, 161–65; classes, 105–7, 222–26; spiritual paintings in, 234–35
147–52, 197–200, 227–28; client affin- Misioneros de Jesús, Voz de los, 53, 109,
ity and, 178, 240; cognitive theory on, 127–28
180–81; communicative flow in, 185–86, Money divisiveness, 18–21
197–202; cordón changes in, 191–94, Montalbito (medium), 250
228–29; destructive, 83, 91, 92, 139–41; El Monte (Cabrera), 33–34, 50, 59
fallibility in, 238, 239–42; health problem Monte Oscuro temple, 54
catalyst for, 161–65, 173–74; immaterial, Morality: cientifico measures of, 107–8,
123–25, 260–61; knowledge distribu- 111–14; corruption of, 49, 82–83, 84–85,
tion in, 237–39; knowledge partiality in, 115–16; double, 22; legitimacy and, 107–8,
234–37; language of, 152, 238; life path of, 111–14, 123–25, 129; materiality and,
Index · 315
122–25; Mesmerist force of, 130; meta- somatization by, 161–68, 170–71, 173–74,
physical separation of, 204; redemption 184; songs to let go, 225, 277; Spanish,
of, 118–21 185, 229; specialization of, 196; trauma
Morphic fields, 15, 210–11 released from, 145–47; young, 261–62.
Moyubbas (homage-paying chants), 72, See also Cordón espiritual; Dark spirits;
73–74 Eggún; Nfumbe
Mozambique, 210 Multiple personality disorder, 139–41, 207,
Mpungos (Bantu gods), 59, 80, 85 211
Muertos (spirits of the dead): acercamiento, Multiplicity: alternative models of, 209–12;
162, 233, 249–50, 280–81; Afro-Cuban al- anthropological biases on, 202–9; com-
liance of, 57–61; Arabic, 224; assemblage municative flow, 197–202; mutuality in,
of, 79–82, 88–93; biographical intersec- 194–97; process in, 191–94; self-systems
tions of, 285–90; biographical view of, in, 191–94, 209–12
7–8, 55–57, 59, 129, 194–97, 282–84; Music. See Songs
body disentanglement of, 142–47, 151–52; Mustelier, Hilário, 122
cajón p’al, 269–72, 274–78, 288; choos-
ing, 7; classification of, 258–61; client Nacer arriba de Nkisi (Palo initiation rite),
affinity to, 178, 240; communicative flow 80
with, 185–86, 197–202; coronation of, National Confederation of Cuban Spiritism,
xi, 232–34; Creolization of, 38, 41–42; 51
death ignorance of, 219; defining, xii; doc- Nationhood, 28–29, 49, 99
tor, 133–34; dream visits from, 168–72; Native Americans. See Amerindian spirits
educating, 147–52, 242–44, 265–66; Natural laws, 49–50
ethnographers of, early, 50–51; evolution Neck tingling, 185, 186, 198
of, 193–96, 213–19, 258–61; existence Neocolonialism, 47–49
process, 261–68; exorcism of, 80, 173–74, Newman, Deena, 179–80
222–26; family alliance of, 226–28; fam- New Religious Movement, 43–44
ily haunting by, 213–19, 222–26; gypsy, Nfumbe (Palo spirits of the dead): assem-
125, 185–86, 229, 230, 263, 278; Haitian, blages of, 88–93; differentiation of, 57–58;
172–73, 191, 256, 282–88; hierarchy of, hierarchy of, 86–88
86–88, 242–44; Hofriyati, 208; homage Ngangas (Palo material recipients): agency
to, 72–74, 87–88, 215, 230; house haunt- of, 93–95; assemblage of, 79–82, 89–91;
ing, 214–19; Indian, 56, 87, 197, 223, 225, examples of, 81; good or evil of, 83,
259–60, 277; indio Amerindian, 197, 225, 84–85; mental illness from, 83, 91, 92,
251, 277; indio Caribbean native, 54, 87, 139–41; nfumbe interaction with, 86–88;
197; inside-outside paradox of, 39–40; power of, 82–83, 92–93
language of, 238, 259; life path of, 285–87, Non-believers: conversion of, 245; espirit-
290; light giving to, 213–19; material ismo respect by, 1–3; mediumship fallibil-
attachments of, 126–29, 142–45, 149–52, ity and, 239–42
215–19; medicine and, 132–36; medium Number divination, 176–77
affinity to, 191, 195; moral redemption Nyamosoro, 210
from, 120–21; oricha comparison to,
50–51, 63–67; orichas corriente and, Obbatalá, 63, 77, 164, 187
278–80; personalities of, 7–8, 55–57, 59, Objectification, 254–55
129, 194–97, 282–84; public familiarity Objects. See Material markers
with, 3; reincarnation of, 191–94; repre- Ochá. See Santería
sentation, 74–76, 251–53; resolving role Oddua, 71
of, 5–6, 18, 55; slave, 59, 164, 217, 282–85; Offerings. See Homage
316 · Index
Psychiatry. See Spiritual psychiatry 51–52; events leading to, 17–18; medi-
Psychic corpuscles, 142–43 cal field during, 133, 135; persecution in,
Psychics, 180. See also Divination; Visions 22–23; promises of, 21; religious restric-
Psychographic mediumship, 121, 174, 177–78 tion by, 23–24; secularization by, 30–32;
Psychology: mesmerist, 130; of selfhood, 15, segregation in, 19–20
207, 211–12; slavery mindset, 110, 116–17; Riskin, Jessica, 44, 130
societies reframed under, 52. See also Rites. See Misas espiritual
Mental illness Ritual: caridad, 35, 36; cientifico, 33; cleans-
Psychosynthesis, 211 ing actions, 148, 149, 202, 216, 218, 225;
Publications, 47 cordón, 34, 54–55; cruzado, 55–57; death,
Puerto Rico, 46, 132, 169 69, 183; eggún figure, 74–75; energy
transfer, 56–57, 65–67; heterogeneity of,
Quiñones, Arcadio Díaz, 101 36; light giving, 213–19; loss of, 63; oricha
fixing, 64, 68; performance importance
Race: cientifico view of, 116–17, 129; evolu- in, 261–68; rejection of, 113–15; waste, 25,
tion levels and, 259; money divisiveness 115. See also Homage; Misas espiritual;
and, 19 Songs
Racialization, 33, 59, 87, 116–17 Riva, José de la, 121
Rayamiento (Palo initiation rite), 80 Robertico (spirit), 226, 261–63
Regla de Lucumí. See Santería Román, Reinaldo, 33, 48, 52–53, 122
Regla de Ochá. See Santería Romario (medium), 222–25
Reglas de Congo. See Palo Romberg, Raquel, 132, 169
Reincarnation: human, 44–45, 142–44; of Routon, Kenneth, 16, 288
muertos, 191–94; past lives, 169 Rumba, 269–72, 274–78
Religion: freedom of, 23–27; ignorance of,
110–11, 113–14. See also Afro-Brazilian Sablón, Oscar Barzaga, 47–48
religions; Afro-Cuban religions; Catholi- Saint (santo). See Orichas
cism; Christianity San Lázaro (Babalu-Ayé), 69, 170, 213, 236,
Religiosos (Afro-Cuban religious ministers): 252, 278–79
double morality of, 22; espiritista differ- San Manuel, 269
ences from, 10, 27; espiritista similarities San Miguel, 216–17
to, 50–51, 58; selfhood of, 10, 24–26; Sansi, Roger, 193
somatization of, 164–65, 166, 170–71, Santería: altars, 247, 249, 250; biographical
173–74, 184 intersections in, 285–86; cartomanticas,
Religious ministers. See Religiosos 183–88; cientifico concerns about, 115–16;
Religious objects. See Material markers classes, 198–99; cosmology, 61–62,
Religious object sellers (hierberos), 68 63–67; counterproductivity of, 115–16;
Religious sects (Sectas religiosas) (Commu- divination, 175, 177; espiritismo alliance
nist Party), 30 with, 57–61; Espírito Santo’s initiation in,
Representation, 74–76, 251–53. See also xi; groups of, 61; hierarchy in, 58; initiates,
Materiality; Material markers 26, 27, 59–60, 62, 68–69, 165; initiation
Research: gap, ix–x, 4–5, 33; methodol- into, xi, 59–60, 62, 66, 68–69, 164–65;
ogy, ix–xii, 8–9. See also Anthropology; light giving ritual in, 213–19; morality
Ethnography questioned in, 115–16; purpose of, 5–6;
Resolving, 5–6, 18, 55 songs, 278–80; texts, 63; universality of,
Revolution: Afro-Cuban religious ethos and, 50–51. See also Eggún; Orichas
28–29, 114; association regulation and, Santiguación. See Cleansing
318 · Index
Spiritist paradox, 123–26, 128–29, 208, 276 Amerindian spirits, 197, 225, 251, 277;
Spirit mediums. See Espiritistas; embargo, 18; spiritual psychiatry with, 137
Mediumship Unwrapping of the self (desarrollo), 12,
The Spirits’ Book (Kardec), 37, 42 158–59
Spirits of the dead. See Eggún; Muertos;
Nfumbe Vegetable corpuscles, 142–43
Spiritual cord. See Cordón espiritual Verdeja Orallo, Leonel (medium), 71, 74–75,
Spiritual makeup (bóveda material), 144 163–65, 191–92, 243
Spiritual masses. See Misas espiritual Vessels, 64, 79
Spiritual paintings (cuadros espiritual), Vieito, Ángel Lago, 103–4
234–37 Vigilance, 21–23
Spiritual psychiatry: case studies, 139–41, Virgen de Regla, 213, 278
150–51; methodology, 136–39; muertos Visions: about, 165–68; coronation, 233;
disentanglement, 142–47; recognition of, divination, 178–79, 180; dream, 168–73
131–32; trauma metabolization, 145–47 Vitebsky, Piers, 208
Statuettes, 251–53, 252 Voz de los Misioneros de Jesús, 53
Stick (pagugu), 75–76
Stones (otanes), 64, 68, 74, 75, 229 Wambaugh, Anneke, 12, 56, 247
Sudan, 208 Wars, independence, 47–49, 55
Sugarcane alcohol (aguardiente), 56, 173, Washington, Peter, 44
222, 225 Water: divination, 178–79; healing, 53, 57;
Sullivan, Harry S., 211 understanding, 247, 248, 249–50
Superstition, 110 Western provinces, 55–57
Swedenborgism, 44 Willerslev, Rane, 182, 209, 268
Syncretism, 5 Wirtz, Kristina, 114–15, 259, 286, 288–89
Witchcraft (brujería): at birth, 236; exorciz-
Table spiritism (espiritismo de mesa). See ing, 80, 173–74, 222–26; life exchange,
Espiritismo cientifico 92–93; mimesis in, 267; morality of,
Tarot, 175 82–83; nganga assemblage for, 79–82,
Taussig, Michael, 266–67, 280 89–91; process of, 92, 138; rejection of, 16,
Taylor, Charles, 203, 204 114, 122; types of, 80
Teresita (medium), 183–88, 263 Wizards and Scientists (Palmié), 60
Texts: Kardecist, 37, 42–43, 214; materializa- World-making, xii–xiii, 14, 39, 289
tion power of, 272; psychographic writing, Writing, psychographic, 121, 174, 177–78,
121, 174, 177–78, 260; Santería, 63 260
Toren, Christina, 203
Tourism, 19–20, 26–27 Yemayá, 63, 66, 278
Trade crisis, 17–18 Yoruba, 5–6, 58, 106. See also Santería
Training. See Education Youth: mediumship in, 142, 158, 163–65,
Trance. See Possession 166, 173–74, 284; muertos in, 261–62
Trauma metabolization, 145–47
Trust, 197–98, 200 Zambia, 160
Zar (Hofriyati spirits), 208
Umbanda, 117, 132 Zimbabwe, 123–24
United States: American psychics, 180;
Diana EsPírito Santo is assistant professor in social anthropology
at the Institute of Sociology, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
She has authored several articles in academic journals and is coeditor
of two volumes on the anthropology of religion, including The Social
Life of Spirits.