Video: Negation, Not-knowing, and the Dark in Brazilian and Cuban Creole Forms of Religion

February 22, 2022
Espirito
A conversation with Diana Espírito Santo took place on Feb. 16.

In this event, Diana Espírito Santo will examine the ambiguous, dark spaces of paradox from the point of view of two distinct ethnographic sites: Brazil and Cuba, with Umbanda and creole espiritismo respectively. In exploring the various vignettes—of a self that must forget itself in order to retain its mode of conscious trance in Brazil, of the impossibility of knowing one’s spirits in a multiplying metamorphic cosmos in Cuba, both signaling the general breakdown of reality and its knowability—she will think through an interstitial, in-between, impossible logic, and will call out the gaps in scholarly approach premised on the notion that knowledge is there to be grasped, with the right techniques.

Diana Espírito Santo is associate professor of social anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She is author of Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo (University Press of Florida, 2015), Spirited Histories: Technologies, Media and Trauma in Paranormal Chile (Routledge, 2022), and co-editor of The Social Life of Spirits (University of Chicago Press, 2014), among others. Currently she is researching the ufological “absurd” through the lens of negative theology.

“Negation, Not-knowing, and the Dark in Brazilian and Cuban Creole Forms of Religion” is part of the CSWR’s new initiative, “Transcendence and Transformation.”

 

FULL TRANSCRIPT: 

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Good afternoon. And welcome to our first gnosiology event for 2022. My name is Giovanna Parmigiani. And I'm the host of this series organized within the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative at the CSWR here at Harvard Divinity School.

The series focuses on ways of knowing that are often labeled as non-rational, traditionally referred to as gnosis in Western philosophical and religious traditions. And often understood in contraposition to science, these ways of knowing are becoming more and more influential in contemporary societies, popular culture, and academic research.

It is with immense pleasure that I introduce our guest, Professor Diana Espirito Santo who will talk today about her current research on negation, not-knowing, and the dark in Brazilian and Cuban Creole forms of religion.

She will examine the ambiguous space of paradox from the point of view of two distinct ethnographic sites, Brazil and Cuba, with Umbanda and Creole Espiritismo, respectively. By thinking through an interstitial, in between, impossible logic, she will point out the gaps in scholarly approaches premised on the notion that knowledge is that to be grasped with the right techniques.

Professor Espirito Santo is an Associate Professor of social anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. She works and published extensively on the topics of spirit possession and mediumship in the context of Cuban Espiritismo and Umbanda.

I signal just a couple of books that might be particularly interesting for the audience of this series, the 2021 "Mattering the Invisible, Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral," a volume edited with Jack Hunter, who also will be a host, a guest, of this series later on in the semester, and the 2014 "The Social Life of Spirits," edited with Ruy Blanes.

More recently, Professor Espirito Santo started working on the so-called paranormal. And she has a forthcoming book with Rutledge on this topic titled, "Spirited History, Technologies, Media, and Trauma in Paranormal Chile." So thank you, Diana, for being here. And please, the stage is yours.

DIANA ESPIRITO SANTO: Thank you very much, Giovanna. Thank you for the invitation. And thank you for the Harvard Divinity School for having me. It's a real pleasure and an honor to be the first talk in this interesting series of talks. OK. So can I have my PowerPoint, please?

Right. So my talk is called Negation, Not-knowing, and the Dark in Brazilian and Cuban Creole Forms of Religion. We can stay with this slide for a little bit. So this first section is called, Anthropology in the Dark.

In Roy Wagner's Coyote Anthropology, published in 2010, a [INAUDIBLE] Socratic style conversation dialectic with the coyote, the trickster in Native American cosmologist, coyote says, there's nothing in the phenomenology of things, but that it is a feature of the names we give them. That is the shamanism of the foregrounded figures that we have learned to perceive in our looking and thinking world.

The name does not represent what it refers to. And still, some things remain unnameable. The third path in relation to this is what Wagner and coyote call the vanishing point, I quote, the part that cannot be verbalized, no matter how many times you repeat it in quote. It is a dimensionless point, Wagner says.

This paper deals with these fringes of not-knowing, the dimensionless in two ethnographic contexts that I know well and have spent years researching, Brazil and Cuba. These contexts have, in common, an engagement with another world of being.

And these are not self-enclosed, neat cosmologies. There are cosmological threads that lead nowhere for the people involved, that open more questions than they answer, and that may cause the stillness of conceptual thinking. While anthropology, my discipline, can self-reflexively understand the extremity of its limitation in relation to itself, it has not acknowledged the shadows of the world of its interlocutors as well.

Bruce Kapferer says that, I quote, the commanding anthropological imagination finds it difficult to conceive of anything concerned with human endeavor that lies outside of human constructional, cultural, and social processes.

An implication of this is that one element of ongoing social life cannot be abstracted out or separated from the whole, that there are corners where no sense rules, where there's nothing to say, and no narrative or explanation or logic comes up against a brick wall in the cultures we study, especially our logic.

Anthropology deals excessively well with ordered as well as fractured cosmologies, where all kinds of inversions and transgressions take place. But there is room for uncertainty, doubt, or paradox, and conceptual [INAUDIBLE] only as a privative, as something missing on the way to hypothetically more complete picture, culture, or life.

Doubt, moreover, perpetual doubt and uncertainty are regarded as either crippling or purposefully obfuscating, as an effect of sociopolitical and economic disarray, for instance, or the religious ideology of blind faith, an abandonment of objectivity, that James [? Letts ?] argues, I would say wrongly, is also characteristic of the paranormal sciences.

What is not known is taken in exactly this sense, as ontological extractive, an absence to be added to later, namely, filled to fuller knowledge. In other words, there's never any scope for not knowing, for conceptual dissonance or vacuity nor for profound paradox.

These assumptions are highly problematic with spirit possession, [INAUDIBLE] argues, where what does not get captured is perhaps more relevant than what is. Knowledge is not on a continuum, the opposite of which is not knowing, argues [INAUDIBLE] and Irvine.

In their analysis of two islands, Cyprus and Orkney, the authors examined the idea that magic is experienced ambivalently in the realm of not knowing, and that this enables their interlocutors, I'm quoting, to retain a distance but also entertain the possibility of magic being real and powerful.

Magical knowledge stutters here, they say, citing Deleuze and Guattari. And magical experience presents itself as fragmented and erratic. The idea that spirits are knowable through embodiments or even through participation or skilled interaction is equally premised on the notion that knowledge is somehow there to be grasped with the right means, with techniques.

The mystical, religious, or spiritual experience often does not take the form of gradual immersion or even absorption to sight learning or skill learning, neither is it simply a relational or ontological kind of co-constitution. Sometimes, it is fuzzy, interstitial, or even absent, by definition.

More recent work is illuminating. The recently published edited volume has attempted to grapple with peripheral spaces, positing the generativity for social theory, for methodology.

Martinez, Frederiksen and Di Puppo argue that their book, "Peripheral Methodologies," explores the ways in which, I quote, "The unarticulated, the edgy, and the unknown can be considered a form of thinking about problems, questions, and evidence, which also entails reflecting upon what it means to be on the periphery."

They rightly argue that during fieldwork, we encounter phenomena that we cannot understand, at the very limits of perception or comprehension. But they ask, what if we resist the urge to extract meaning and assemble fragments into a whole?

Vulnerability, feeling lost, not knowing, and staying in the in-between allows for creativity, for finding languages to write the incomplete or invisible. What if gathering data were about the preservation of suspension and surprise, the embrace of not knowing and/or indeed unlearning, magnifying awareness out of the outer limits or what remains unknown?

In his foreword to this book, Paul Stoller expresses this through description of one of his friends and interlocutors, Adamu Jenitongo, who lives close to the dangerous middle, the unknown, the bush, replete with mystery and danger, and by lineage became a sorcerer himself, a [INAUDIBLE] Stoller says that Jenitongo lives a life filled with what John Keats called negative capability, the capacity to live within completeness and contradiction.

Stoller tells us one experience of what he calls not knowing your backside from your front side when he was awoken in the middle of the night at Adamu Jenitongo's house what seemed to be footsteps and high-pitched screeching, followed by the scratching on the corrugated tin door. The screeching now sounded like a child's wail, with donkeys braying, and dogs howling in the distance.

Adamu's son later told him that he had heard the guardians of the bush. Stoller's response to this, to his own encounter with non-knowledge or the absurd as an anthropologist, is to remain between art and ethnography, to evoke the remedy of art, to tell a good story while acknowledging, I cite, "not knowing, unlearning, in the absence of knowledge."

For some scholars, these impasses are natural no-gos for anthropology. As Matthijs van de Port suggests, in relation to the phenomenon of possession in Brazilian Candomblé, there is something in possession trance that refuses to be signified, not simply for those studying it but for those experiencing it.

He continues, no matter how clever our attempts to break the mystery, something about possession remains enigmatic, unapproachable, resisting the word, displaying the failure of representation. Explanatory cosmological models only go so far, he says, for the possessed. It is a mystery locked up in the here and now of bodily experience. This is what van de Port said.

The real, he says, quoting Zizek, is something that persists only as failed, mist in a shadow. And it solves itself as soon as we try to grasp it in its positive nature. The real is paradoxical to the extreme. It disappears as soon as we represent it. It is exterior to all civilization.

Perhaps all we can do as scholars is to study native discourses and actions that vie to protect the really real from outside claims, fake simulations, cultural appropriations such as is the case with Candomblé. Thus, as van de Port claims, we will be seeing an objectification of certain forms of the real.

A way out of this representational conundrum, I suggest, is to attempt to understand what people do with the paradox of the negative, what ontological innovations are made possible through this recognition. To speak of the inaccessibility of the real sounds like science fiction.

In science fiction, as Eugene Thacker argues in relation to the work of HP Lovecraft, there is a proliferation of beings, of life that defy description. Take, for example, the shoggoths or elder things, monsters that in Lovecraft's tales, can barely be named or described or even thought.

They have material bodies but no fixed form. And encounters with them occur in a strange, I quote, no place that is neither quite that of the phenomena world of the human subject or the numinal world of an external reality. It's somewhere in between.

Thacker says these creatures represent the very horizon of human thoughts, the limits of thought to think life at all. Lovecraft's characters verify this third form of life. He says, the threat is not the monster or that which threatens existing categories of knowledge, rather it is the nameless thing. The weird is the life according to the logic of an inaccessible real.

So in the rest of this paper, I will think the two case studies of Cuba and Brazil through this embrace of impossible logic and argue that paradox here can be thought through negative theology, the medieval counter-orthodox school of thought that gives prominence to negation in a description of God.

And it's great that I'm in Harvard Divinity School because you're all going to really criticize, which is great. So as [INAUDIBLE] argues, by denying the possibility to name God, negative theology cuts at the very root of our cognitive makeup, the impulse, human impulse, to name and put things in categories.

In the ethnographic themes and examples that I explore here, I argue that what is not known or not knowable, by definition, takes shape through extreme forms of self-reflexivity which encompasses the cosmos itself as a recursive element of this reflexivity.

I suggest that to understand how paradoxes are generated, lived, or managed, we cannot analytically differentiate between real and imagined realities. Unknowable, ineffable realities perceived at the margins of experience and perception as non-conceptual or as negation, are often understood as the very grounding of reality itself.

For interlocutors I've discussed in this paper, this place of not knowing speaks a different language altogether, and it is a language of paradox.

And now I'm going to go into my first case study, which is Brazilian Umbanda. And I will explain this the theoretical grounding for negative theology after I speak about my Cuban case as well. So Brazilian Umbanda the first thing that's-- can you please pass the other slide.

- Great.

DIANA ESPIRITO SANTO: And the first thing, it will be about Umbanda, a religion born from an early 20th century middle class preoccupation with ethnic and racial inclusion and exclusion. It is conceived by early scholars of Afro-Brazilian religions such as [INAUDIBLE] as Brazil's first national religion.

One, its cosmology is a vast web of [INAUDIBLE] that correspond to entities. They correspond and are classified under the lines of the Orixas the Afro-Brazilian gods of Candomblé and its [INAUDIBLE] religions throughout Brazil. The normative cosmological format is of seven lines of entities, each headed by two Orixas such as Oxala, Oxum, Oxossi, Xango, Obaluaye, Nana, and Lemanja.

Within these lines are the specific [INAUDIBLE] which evoke a series of characters seen as formative of Brazil's identity-- the Criancas, the children, Caboclos, the Native American spirit of Umbanda, the Preto Velhos, the elderly African slave spirits, Pomba Giras an agglomerated archetypal figure of a prostitute, as well as spirit characters under the category of [INAUDIBLE] the people of the streets, which for me are the most fascinating.

Other spirit kinds are Boladeiros, cattle herders, Marinheiros, stranded sailors, and gypsies. Umbanda possession rites are called Giras and are usually dedicated to one kind of spirit entity. Can you pass the slide, please?

But as I have argued elsewhere, mediums here do not just absorb and represent figures of Brazilian history in their bodies. Possession trance, known through the active term of incorporation, incorporacion, instantiates cosmology in its very act. Spirits become particulars of other spirits, gaining shape as they occur in people's bodies and lives.

In the predominant semi-conscious trance that results from processes of incorporation, the paradoxical work of the self involves both excessive self-awareness and excessive self-forgetting, or in other words, an awareness and forgetting, in what is a fine line of staying with the spirit, keeping it in one's body. This is the paradox, I think, at the heart of Umbanda.

When Sarah was 15, she began to experience one in Candomble, the most well-known Afro-Brazilian religion called [INAUDIBLE] act of uncontrolled possession, which made her sick and pass out every time. Her older sister had begun to work in at Dinheiro, an Umbanda temple from an early age and begged her to accept her fate as a medium.

But Sarah was resistant. It was not until much later on when her sister moved back to her town to her house and set up an altar in her room that something was unleashed. A gypsy spirit came in her sister's body, claiming her.

Eventually, she learned, she, Sarah, learned the movement through which she could come in her body, a movement of the arms upwards. And since then, Sarah and her husband Miguel have been mediums, exclusively, of gypsy spirits.

But neither mediumship nor spirit is the same in different bodies. She says they maintain strong resemblances, but they differ. She also talks of this process as coffee with milk, which is extremely revealing Brazil's logics of visualization as well.

So they maintain strong resemblance but very different. It depends on how their energy is coming, on how it's allowed to come. That depends on your own energy. Proof of this was the entirely different characteristics of her [NON-ENGLISH] a gypsy spirit in her sister's body, which is patently aggressive. And in hers, in which she was not aggressive.

There has to be a conscious element in [NON-ENGLISH] incorporation. Sometimes, the transition is so subtle it is barely noticeable. I raise my arms in the air, and I sway my hips, and then she comes. And then I feel myself dancing magnificently. I try to keep it up, which of course, I can't. What I feel happening and what really happens are two completely different things.

The downside of this, she says, is watching yourself on playback in a recording of a possession ceremony when you realize you haven't actually done half of what you felt that you were doing. So she says, when you first incorporate, it takes a while for you to be able to open your eyes. Then little by little, you do, and eventually, you talk.

You're going to speak and not be heard. And that's what it feels like, like you're talking, but no one is listening to you. Some people compare the sensation to what happens when you die. The medium doesn't know what's going on. But he thinks he's the one pulling the strings, and it's not anymore.

Because it's like I say, he doesn't leave his body, the medium. He still has consciousness. Some people more, some people less. But you think it's you there, and it's not anymore, at least it's not only you. The beginning stages of developing skills for trance are the most confusing for most mediums. In Umbanda, this is notable exactly because most incorporation is not unconscious.

Pilar was a young medium I met in Rio de Janeiro in 2011. She was articulate, self-reflexive, she had a master's in anthropology. And she's fully conscious of the contradictions of trance itself. And Pilar told me about a turbulent journey as an Umbanda medium.

So she has an entity that has come in her a few times, the Cambocle, and notes that what is special about her is that once she incorporates, one of her hands turns into a butterfly fluttering in the air. She cleans the ambience with this gesture.

Once she came in her so strongly that her whole body began to shake convulsively. I never asked her for her name or where she comes from. Some of my other spirits were easier to identify. But this one was always so ephemeral. I felt that if I forced her to speak, she would dissipate with the wind. And I would never feel her again.

This fragility is evident also at the heart of Umbanda temples as temple leaders struggle to firm [INAUDIBLE] the entities in medium's bodies. Pilar says that spirits are not things, they are influences. They gel with mediums. Incorporation is not substitution. Both are there.

To let these influences flow through you, I'm now citing [INAUDIBLE] you need to concentrate on what's happening. But at the same time, try not to think too hard about yourself. It's a balancing act of awareness, and at the same time, of self-forgetting.

When we develop an Umbanda, this balance is the skill we're learning. But what goes wrong or what remains incoherent or in friction is almost as revealing as what goes right. At the time I met her, Pilar was contemplating whether to stay at home at the Umbanda temple she was at the time or to leave.

Before finding her way there, Pilar had been to two of the temples that had retrograde her development, leaving her seriously ill. The leader of one of the temples-- the leader of the current temples, sorry, Doña Clara was a strong-willed, traditional Afro-Brazilian woman with clear prerogatives to both training and discipline.

Pilar had rebooted, as she described, but she had begun to incorporate a Petro Velho, an elderly female slave spirit who debilitated her physically. Petro Velhos walk on canes, their backs bent forward, spines pulled, legs shaking. Pilar has premature arthritis and found that fixing her Preto Velho, keeping her from coming and going, was physically challenging.

But it was not just this. Doña Clara told Pilar not to try and exert control, to be passive, not to think too much. First, from that initial state of torpor a medium gets when she begins, to the almost imperceptible vibrations on the legs, to the feeling that something comes and stays with you, Pilar says that soon, you can sit on a stool, kneel before the altar, ask for the chief spirit's blessing.

You just has become absolutely theirs. And soon, you start being able to surrender your voice. And that voice begins to ask for things, a glass of water, bitter coffee, a pipe. But then at other times, Umbanda's culture became explicitly conscious and difficult to set aside.

Pilar experienced clear oscillations in consciousness that she described as unproductive for the setting. She began to get in her own way. Tobacco was the first point of friction. Pilar had never smoked. And Preto Velho consult while puffing on a smoke, on a pipe. Doña Clara would insist that her Preto Velho smoke.

But Pilar felt that her entity had never wanted it in the first place. She says, I got the feeling that many of the items in Umbanda are not for the spirits but for the mediums. They are our crutches. What I felt was more or less this. At the religious center, I'm being taught what gestures to carry through the impulse that I receive from my spirit.

For a while, I thought I did this well. There were some things that I thought were genuine impulses from the Preto Velho. For instance, she blessed the air when she came. That wasn't me. That was her. It wasn't scripted. But there were others. The kneeling, the asking for the chief's blessing, the smoking that I perceived to be more forced more on me.

So we have, in both of these examples, magnified processes of the interstitiality or in-betweeness of self inside a description of trance and the nefarious consequences of too much self-consciousness in processes of incorporation.

There is an aconceptual zone where the medium both is and is not, where there's a transformation of not knowing into the complex enaction of a cosmology, which is at once linear and nonlinear, both representational and recursive, and both knowable and ultimately, beyond knowledge. It is a cosmology and potential that is at stake in the end.

What lies on the other side is ultimately inscrutable, undefinable in categorical terms. The idea that among many young practitioners, Umbanda's entities are vibrations that can divide infinitely rather than just incarnate souls with particular lives and deaths, makes this inevitability more pronounced. For some, the names of the entities are just labels created by the formalization of the work and used by the entities themselves.

My next example is [NON-ENGLISH] Sorry. You have to pass all the way through to following one's-- yeah. This here. Stay here.

So the second unit refers to the Afro-Cuban religious cosmos where spirit metamorphosis is a usual occurrence. Spirits, even one's own, always retain the capacity to become other to themselves, to transform. This ontological transformational precept is primary to the spirit's biography itself.

Cuban Creole espiritismo, a practice that inherits its concerns from both 19th-century French spiritualism and on Afro-Cuban emphasis on the material here now, turns on the idea that every person has a unique set of protective spirits, the corazon espiritual, which are present since birth and which can exhibit an infinite amount of identities.

These spirits come as African, Indian, Arab, gypsy, or European spirits, most commonly, but can assume any shape from spirits of nuns and priests to casino owners of 1940s and also Chinese laborers, basically, a whole constellation of identities that have conformed Cuba's historical demographic.

So Cuban espiritista's theories of selfhood are therefore based on a simple principle that the person is composed of both visible and invisible components, with corresponding consequences for understandings of causality.

But if there is a circumscription a spirit made himself, these wider selves are also systems in perpetual motion and transformation. They move outwards and towards events, accidents, characteristics only they have access to, only they can see.

These non-selves are always a step ahead. They exist in the in-between, in the darkness of categories, and so ultimately, unconceptualizable, even as they pull their medium selves into this abyss.

Psychological and spiritual truths here are aspects of one and the same metamorphic phenomena, with spirits having the virtual potential to deconstruct and reconstruct selves, creating an endless variety of forms of themselves, with corollaries for their medium's understanding of themselves, of course.

But there's always a dark or blind spot, a place where no explanation and description holds. In African religion, in which I include Creole versions of espiritismo, we are thus all born dead mortals. But it is not always obvious who they are, in the first place. This lack of spirit's biographical specifics is, in fact, an entry point into Cuban espiritismo's logics of negation.

While mediums regularly refer to the physical and psychological characteristics of their mortals, their skin color and builds, if the spirits walk with a gait, if they had subservient suffered lives, what personalities they have, I have actually met very few espiritistas that were able to give historically or biographically accurate and detailed descriptions or depictions of the spirits.

As Christina [? Vert ?] says, spirit biographies are necessarily fragmentary, mysterious, and even obfuscating, rather than fully revealing or coherent. I have argued elsewhere that there's a pervasive notion of ontological fluidity or plasticity that subverts linear readings of who spirits are, which collapse the psychology with the cosmology.

We can start with the notion of this [NON-ENGLISH] which translates to something unfolded, the metamorphosis of certain spirit shapes and identities into others. This can be seen, for instance, in an African entity observed by the medium's extra perceptual apparatuses into an Arab one or a Native American Indian reforming itself into European one.

This shift in presentation, which may also include manifesting as older or younger versions of themselves, are routine in [NON-ENGLISH] main mediumship rites. That spirit contains several versions of itself, perhaps infinite ones, embedded virtually in their constitution, is explained in multiple ways, including that their past lives, reincarnations made available as skins for manifestation.

Mortals can also mutate into different versions of themselves through shared symbols in the Afro-Cuban cosmos. For instance, there's a Santeria and Catholicism, and to a certain extent, Palo Monte which is another Afro-Cuban religion, a spirit that presents itself as a crippled old man draped in a purple cape and followed by dogs, is projecting itself as a version of San Lazaro, St. Lazarus, associated in Santeria with Babalu Aye, the god of plague, illness, and cures.

A gitana or a gypsy spirit that comes dressed in yellow, the color of the love goddess [? Exun, ?] project a symbol of love, perhaps romance. So these associations to Santeria, and to some extent, Palo Monte, are called corrientes, currents. And by themselves, are understood as messages to the mediums or participants.

In the case of San Lazaro spirit, perhaps a warning of impending sickness or healing. In the case of the gitana, a foreshadowing of future-present love processes. Excellent. In any case, as is obvious, both the [NON-ENGLISH] and the corriente phenomena are not thought to be arbitrary but eminently linked to the recipient of the message, usually the person whose spirits they are.

These differential spirit aesthetics reflect a need for a corresponding shift in human behavior or knowledge, and neither insight accompany this person's own spiritual evolution, so to speak.

But even this cosmological inherent capacity for metamorphosis questions the limits of human knowledge. Once in a [NON-ENGLISH] I attended, namely for the ritual identification of the spirits of Fran's, mediums were at a loss as to how to explain why Fran had an African spirit who was both a man and his wife.

It was as if a single entity took turns, appearing as both ends of a past relationship, oscillating on the spiritual stage. This [NON-ENGLISH] of relations in a single spirit manifestation is even more baffling than entities who transform themselves according to their reincarnations as people from different epics. Martha, an elderly medium I interviewed, vouches for the fact that you can fall into trance with your own past lives.

So what are mortals then? We could ask in all this soup of possibilities? The collective conceptualization of the mortal itself in Cuba is almost purposely vague and with some complaints. So Guzman, the practitioner of Santerian espiritismo, reminds that mediums always have the same descriptions of African spirits.

For instance, they're typically named Francisca, Tajose, or there are others, such as the gitana or well, Indio, right? So the African character always comes with an ax, he says, and his pants rolled up to his knees and with no shoes. The Congos, in particular, are seen as temperamental and brutes associated with witchcraft and magic. I'm not going to get into the racial aspect of this whole thing.

For Guzman, these identities have become so archetypal that no one diverges from them. The gitanas are attractive and flirtatious. And the Indios, a category that includes both Indigenous Caribbean peoples. and Native Americans, are associated with battle and valor.

For Guzman, these larger figures are components of what he calls the mental atmosphere of Cuba. They are not individual mortals who have lived and died. They're more like the Orixas, the deities of the Afro-Cuban religious sphere.

So the road is long and uncertain for those who want knowledge on their spirits. And it involves a careful exploration of aspects of one's own personality that may converge with those of one's mortals. These convergences are the only clues.

Yet, there's something even less out of the medium's conceptual grasp in relation to their mortals. It is not just that on manifesting through symbols of a commission of spirits. And then there are many commissions, including the medical commission or the African Commission.

They are summoning up the power of the collective as well as any potential spirit in it for the effect of their mission. It is also that for some mediums, it is that mortals can only appear to what is expected from those who see them.

For one of my oldest interlocutors, Eduardo, a practitioner of espiritismo, Palo Monte, Santeria, he's also [INAUDIBLE] with Santeria, the spirit must be conceivable by the mediums that apprehended, that see it. We can only see what we expect to see.

As such, it must appear under the guise of an identity that is possible within a certain conceptual cultural cosmos. To appropriate Jung's theory of the collective unconscious to point to the pool of possibilities, are available to spirit's physical appearance, to the mediums.

Spirit is, in effect, the purest cultural languages of the particular geographical space in which they are summoned to work. But this is also because mediums project these [INAUDIBLE] in manifestation, which in the case of Cuba, are archetypes such as el Afrikano, la gitana, el Indio, and so on.

Espirista mediums basically work with this, as-if identity maker, among others, among other things, in order to develop and strengthen their own spiritual constitutions. But the question of the real, even among the most studious of mediums such as Eduardo, is ultimately inaccessible. It is in this expanding cosmos that the idea of the inconceivable or indescribable is implicit.

As one Indio spirit sings, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH], I have an Indio who dresses as Congo, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH], I have a Congo who dresses as an Indio. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] go forward, go forth. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] Indios, [? Shakara ?] shakara. The Indios have arrived. And [? shakara ?] is a sound they make. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] And with them, come the Congos.

OK. So a discussion with negative theology. Mind, self, and other in the two examples I gave, simply do not behave as cognitive or social psychologists expect. Anthropologist Katherine Ewing has famously argued that a single model of self or person is not adequate for describing how selves are experienced or represented in any culture.

There's no one concept that is applicable in any cultural space. And if we look at the importance of the unconscious, we could observe as Douglas Hollan has, that self-awareness is not seamless or coherent. Everybody is able to embrace interpsychic conflict, unconscious divisions within the self, repressions and hidden traumas or desires.

What is not explicitly known here can take on immeasurable importance because not-known categories of experience and affect that are [INAUDIBLE] in a given environment or [INAUDIBLE] which have been pushed into the shadows, unacknowledged.

But we can question whether the self is radical enough, even in its fragmentation, whether it is other enough. [INAUDIBLE] both in Brazilian Umbanda and Cuban Espiritismo, behaves very much like parapsychologist envision the phenomena of psi, the unknown factor in extrasensory perception, as a process that violates basic natural laws.

Hansen cites what some of these are, as I quote, an event cannot proceed its cause, a person's mind cannot directly affect the material world except through the nervous system. Mental life depends on the brain. We obtain knowledge from the world only through the senses. Minds, selves, and bodies behave in fundamentally anti-structural ways in the two ethnographies I have described.

I suggest that one way to grasp this is to look at theological negation as inspiration. Negation here signals the limits of thoughts, in this case, not simply of cosmological knowledge and imagination, but of bodily access to it in the first place.

There is an ineffability felt at the very margins of bodily experience. It is an irretrievable horizon, one that can never really be reached, but that is, at the same time, worked somehow into cosmology, cosmology that works.

To speak of the dark-- and let me have some tea before I go into negative theology. To speak of the dark is not necessarily to speak of literal darkness. Pseudo-Dionysus of Areopagite, or Denys, an unorthodox thinker that has become associated with the founding of the apophatic tradition, negative theology, was to exert enormous influence on medieval European Christian philosophy.

He posited that God cannot be-- and here I'm citing [? Kidd-- ?] completely or comprehensively captured by concepts and language for the reason that this apply to beings, discrete limited entities, and not to pure being itself, abundant manifold, which Denys identified with God.

According to Dionysus, however, because we are immersed in beings that we describe with concepts, we can draw from scripture for words and conceptions with which to seek divinity. These may include father, son, or wisdom.

But while the contemplation of these names might allow one to approach God, it is in the recognition that he can never be known in his entirety. [? Knepper ?] says that the expression and expressability seems to require at least some measure of real resistance, hyperbole, linguistic creativity.

He notices how Denys sometimes uses hyperprefixes, for instance, hyper being, hyper god, hyper good, which at the same time, removes God from the picture, because the standard translation from Greek, hyper, is beyond. He also uses negation as a standard rhetorical technique, giving birth to the term, negative theology.

Furthermore, he employs conflictive visual and spatial metaphors, such as that God dwells in luminous darkness, darkness so dark that it is paradoxically brilliant, light so brilliant that is paradoxically dark. A spatial metaphor would be god's dwelling as a divine mountain, the apex of which is enshrouded in luminous darkness, one that invites the [INAUDIBLE] in shrouds and profound unknowing.

So in [INAUDIBLE] book and experience of the uncategorizable then, one needs to exercise a non-conceptual kind of consciousness while at the same time relying on one's own vocabulary. Further, nothing or negation here is not necessarily equivalent to nothing.

For Meister Eckhart, a German medieval mystical theologian, God was referred to as Godhead, an enigmatic figure inaccessible to us. I use Eugene Thacker's understanding here. Eckhart's nothing is not privative if defined by absence.

Thacker begins his analysis of Eckhart's project of divine mediation in Sermon 19 in a passage that is, Paul rose from the ground with eyes open and saw nothing. And Thacker says Eckhart elaborates different senses of the term nothing. [INAUDIBLE] Yeah. Maybe I do, maybe I don't. Yeah. I'll go for it.

He summarizes the first sense of the term nothing in the following way. He saw nothing that is God. God is nothing, and God is something. What is something is also nothing. The first sense is the most elaborate in that it deals with the philosophical notion of God as nothing. But in nothing that is at the same time not simply negative or privative. It is a notion of the divine in terms of a nothing that has little to do with any ontological notion of nothing.

There's no mystical experience in the sense of having an experience or of containing something substantial that builds one up. And so there is a self-abnegation or releasement of the subject in which one finds nothing that is like finding God. I cut a few of the sentences.

If God is beyond being, then he is both nothing and something, nameless, with no attributes or properties. The divine is thought of in terms of contradiction or paradox. We find echoes of this in both the Brazilian and the Cuban ethnographies in the sense of the very limit of framing and knowing an entity, at least from the point of view of reformed and forming itself.

Rather, in Brazilian Umbanda, the self must be abnegated, relinquished in order to apprehend other, but also fully acknowledged. And in Cuba, the nothing could refer to the infinity of possibilities that are not amenable to human cognizance. They signal both everything and nothing at once in their inaccessibility and in their full potentialities.

Further, like Pseudo-Dionysus, in both places, there are as-if languages of description, recognized as limited and arbitrary in a categorization of spirits, but necessary, nevertheless. Some of these languages are more paradoxical than others, particularly those that are static, archetypal, that clearly indicate that an unknown something is availing itself of that cultural mask.

Still, there is a path to be painstakingly made in each one of these cases. We could cite the example of Ruysbroeck a Dutch mystic, posits a weightless abyss, sorry, a path without a path that is both expressed in the sense of being lost and in the sense of fathomless depths.

For Ruysbroeck, this mystical itinerary, that self-negation, darkness, but also the appreciation of divine beatitude, this is also [INAUDIBLE] There's a fullness of divine union in Ruysbroeck that comes with the first recognition of inaccessibility.

Phyllis [? Mazzocchi ?] has also used the metaphor of the wanderer to frame some of these dynamics. The non-conceptual realm of the imaginal, she says, is a living a one that continually constellates paradoxes.

It is chaotic, uncertain, what medieval alchemists and mystics would call a dark void. The wonder bestrides the threshold between what is and what is not, existent, nameable, clean, sacred, the potentiality of the liminal space between. In both the Brazilian and the Cuban case, the wonder is also ultimately the creator of cosmology through this movement.

So this paper regards the states of paradox at the edge of the real or inside the dimensionless point, to cite Wagner, as generative cosmology itself. It's cosmogonic. This is not just about psyche or mind, about finding which the stillness or immediacy within oneself.

It's about the creation of ontology, being expressed as spirits, God's ancestors, or living people themselves and their materialities. So this is why [INAUDIBLE] religious thought and action has not been taken into account by scholars who have looked at paradox as this motivation or inspiration.

And in his book, "The Uses of Paradox," Francis Matthew Berger argues for the notion that a tolerance for paradox-- I'm almost finished-- in religion comes with the consideration of the social attitudes that the believer has in relation to his group.

So he says, paradoxes were horrifying and offended religious thinker fearful for the external boundary of his or her group. Conversely, a thinker concerned to bring outsiders into his group or a group will feel awe and reverence for paradox and view it as a sacred mediator.

[INAUDIBLE] explains that cognitive dissonance, the theory devised by psychologist Leon Festinger to account for the psychology of change when two beliefs are dissonant, is often the main component of paradoxical statements such as [? Collin's ?] paradoxical anecdote in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the limits of reason, or as mentioned by Berger, [INAUDIBLE] contradictory statements frequently assigned to students in [INAUDIBLE] by Buddhism.

Berger also argues that Kierkegaard, among others, treats negativity as the motive force of individual inward deepening. The negative moved an individual in increasing inwardness to the religious spheres, the deepest, most inward sphere of existence.

Thus, for Kierkegaard, contradiction must be appropriated, not resolved. Proper religious disposition can only come about by an ineradicable dissonance. Language is, of course, the primary means to which to express the ineffable, the negative.

We can see this clearly in Pseudo-Dionysius' inauguration of mystical reflection. That [? Berger ?] stands on paradox does not take into consideration other more active, even material aspects of reflecting, ones with potentially cosmological creative nature.

The two case studies here demonstrate the nature of the paradoxical imagination, made concrete, manifest, through the cultivation and materialization of spirit entities. The first one sees this negotiation of the dark taking place in relation to trance in Brazilian Umbanda to a consciousness that must be trained to walk the line between the dark, the all encompassing cosmos of entities, the non-nameable and their earthly bodily shapes.

And the second delves into the appropriation of darkness in Cuban espiritismo and Afro-Cuban religion. This is not simply about a self that, unfolding itself in myriad spirits, would themselves unfold and transform into others, necessarily cannot know its limits. It's about an eminently creative self.

Perhaps, there are ways to conceptualize this-- to conceptualize this. And let me try here through negative theology. So apophasis, according to Catherine Keller, commits us to a cloud of impossible, of unknown, which reveals, in turn, an uncertainty as possibility.

She says, one may read in the Dionysian exercise of the constructive negation, rather than the binary dialectic or the triumph of the third way, the [INAUDIBLE] third space of unfinished, indeed, boundless exercise in self-transformation, not a [INAUDIBLE] of names but a chaotic multiplicity and overflow in excess. This makes sense.

Keller further mentions Nicholas de Souza, another apophatic thinker, for whom there is a paradox of representing a transcendent creator when he does not stand outside this very creation, where he is of it. It is an infolding and unfolding God in a cosmos of interpretations where these are seeped in possibility, quantum-like.

In my opinion, both of my case studies also imply this double movement of infoldment and unfolding. And here, I stop, even though I had a conclusion, where I was mentioning Jeffrey Kripal.

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you so much, Diana, for this, the lecture of yours. I was really looking forward actually to hear your conclusions. But you know, you just mentioned that you wanted to add something from Jeff Kripal.

DIANA ESPIRITO SANTO: Yeah. So my conclusion is about how Jeffrey Kripal in this incredible book called "The Flip" which is basically a kind of a continuation and synthesis of other books, including also "The Impossible," which is my favorite book in the world.

He basically says that there is-- because this deeper ground of being is before and beyond all mental or material form and is neither mental nor material, it cannot speak in human language or even in mathematics. It is of an entirely different order. And it's-- and so it speaks to us in the only way it can, in super strange images, often paradoxes and bizarre and absurd narratives.

I don't think my fieldwork has to do necessarily with bizarre and absurd narratives. But certainly, with the limits of knowledge as it is, and not knowledge in the sense of the opposite of which is non-knowledge, but knowledge in the sense that there's sort of a darkness that infolds and outfolds in a continual sense and which also materializes as kind of a world for the people involved.

And I like this, the stance of this paradoxical methodology which he takes when he does his reading of these classic paranormal experts like Fred Myer or Zach Bales where it's the text itself that basically infolds the paranormal and that basically becomes the zone of-- the zone of apparition, in a sense.

I find that super fascinating because it's not symbolic, and it's not non-symbolic. It's somewhere in the middle. And that's what I-- yeah, that's what I find fascinating also in terms of my new work on ufology.

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Well, that's fascinating. I think that's your troubling our thinking about knowledge and not knowledge on a continuum. It's really very promising and generative. Before moving to the questions of the audience that I encourage to [INAUDIBLE] the questions on the Q&A function, just a basic question.

Since not all the audience of this gnosiology series is academic or has an anthropological background, you briefly mentioned on how the notion of spirit possession and mediumship troubles our ideas of mind, self, person, and bodies, do you want to say a little bit more with this idea?

[INAUDIBLE] not all of us are academics, and some are students and some are students at heart And I think it's a very important point to better understand the whole lecture of yours.

DIANA ESPIRITO SANTO: I mean, I think that the heart of my lecture, as much as it is not knowing and the darkness and what people do with the darkness, it's actually self and the kind of generative movements of self in the world. And this idea that we are these self-encapsulated selves inside these bodies is completely dualistic.

And you see this-- you can see this, an experiment with these ideas in spirit possession where self is actually put very much in question in the sense that possession strides a line between being and not being, but also, it's paradoxical as well. So there is spirit. That person is both in and outside the social milieu, right?

So if we look at it, for instance, in relation to an image, we could think of, I don't know, the Mobius strip. The Mobius strip is a strip where it's possible to move from the inside of a strip to its outside in a seamless form without crossing a boundary, without making a deciding line.

And that could be a super way to think about possessions and also about self in the sense that we are always informing and informed by the world. And in possession as well, in possession, there is-- of course, there are these what [? Neumann ?] would call catastrophic points.

And I talk about this. Well, we talk about this in the book that I edited with a colleague, Matan Shapiro, called "The Dynamic Cosmos" where we move from the inside to the outside but also from the outside to the inside.

So in Cuba, this catastrophic point could be, for instance, the materialization of entities, right, a materialization of entities through dolls or through religious materiality, which then also has an effect on yourself and not yourself encased in a body, yourself as an expanded being in the world in terms of-- you could think of Bateson's mind, this system of expanding causality in the world.

And in Brazil, perhaps, this catastrophic point could be the loss of oneself, the loss and also the regaining of oneself in terms of possession in terms of the trans experience. Because even though you need to be losing yourself, losing your self-consciousness, you also could be-- you also need to be self-conscious of the fact that you can't be self-conscious.

And also the entity needs to have you as a pillar to manifest, not just in your body but also in relation to the kinds of characteristics it brings forth. So there is all kinds of paradoxes involved there. I'm not sure if I'm simplifying this. But I think that we can deconstruct self, and we can deconstruct possession. But they're both, basically, two sides of a similar coin.

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: I think that's very well put, actually. I tend to-- I tend always to say to my students that we tend to understand self, personhood, individual as overlapping. But the reality is that things are much more complicated.

And spirit possession, thinking about spirit possession in the way you just said, I think it's very useful to deconstruct our ideas and experience of the boundaries of ourselves. So thank you very much for doing this clarification.

I also have a question. How much in your understanding of knowledge is language and expression important? What's the role of language and thinking verbally and being able to communicate? You use ineffable several times to gesture towards what you're currently looking at. And so can you talk a little more about this?

DIANA ESPIRITO SANTO: I mean, language is absolutely important for all religions in the Afro-American world. Language in relation to what you chant during songs, what kinds of pronunciations you make in order to make a ritual efficacious, all of these things are language-based.

It's not just actions, not just thought. It's language. Language is there to demarcate, to name things, right? But at the same time, I think the flip side of this is that, yes, there is this sort of demarcation of the world. You are now [INAUDIBLE]

This would be what-- Martin Holbraad has this the idea of infinition, an inventive definition of a person, as you invent new things as you pronounce them. And I think that completely makes sense. But I think the flip side of that, and I think this is also relevant, at least in some circles, is that language is a kind of a-- not a crutch, but a kind of a mask for things which are clearly beyond language.

So if you want to-- I mean, you don't have anything else but language. So if that language is also a visual language, you see the Indio, you chant to Indios. This is what you do. And if you chant to gypsy spirits, they may appear. So language is a motivator for the spirit world. And it is also solidifier of certain ontological properties in that world. So in that sense, language is extremely important.

But I think language here can also-- reflexively, language can also be something which can be deconstructed. Because clearly, if you know like Eduardo, my main interlocutor, what you chant or what you sing or what you say and how you see what you say is specific to a cultural manifestation, to a cultural form, so a culture, then you know that's also limited. You know that there's something, perhaps, beyond that.

And I've always been very interested in the trickster elements of cosmologies and shapeshifters and things like tricksters, [INAUDIBLE] for instance. And this is I think what [INAUDIBLE] teach us, that things are always in constant flow and a constant, continual transformation.

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you very much, Diana, for offering us this generative perspective and framework in order to understand spiritual possession, mediumship, and beyond, I would say. I think it's time to wrap up now. Thank you again for your participation and wonderful talk. And thank you all for having been with us.

Please stay tuned on the activities of this CSWR, the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative and of Gnosiology. And you can find all this information on the CSWR website that you can find in the chat, including the registration link for our next gnosiologist event that will be next week.

I will have a conversation with Professor Elizabeth Perez on guts and other knowledges and religions of the African diaspora. So thanks again and have a lovely rest of your day.

DIANA ESPIRITO SANTO: Thank you very much. Thank you all who attended. Thanks.

- Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.

- Copyright, 2022. The president and fellows of Harvard College.

See also: Video, Gnoseologies