Exciting and Exclusive Narrative from the Villas-Bôas Brothers: The Indians Speak with the Spirits

Living in the jungle, our heroes from the Sertão share details about the lives of the Indigenous people and their relationship with the “supernatural.”

Text by Marlene R. Severino Nobre

We had a family meeting: the Villas-Bôas brothers, Sulamita Mareines and her son Ivo, and we from Folha Espírita, to discuss a topic that is so little known or poorly publicized: religion among the Indigenous peoples.

Ivo had returned enthusiastic from his expeditions to the Xingu River in the Amazon.  Sulamita found the courage to take a plane and head in the same direction, in order to study Indigenous customs in their natural habitat.  While we have not yet formed this important caravan, we gathered very important insights right here in São Paulo, in this sensational interview with Cláudio Villas-Bôas.

In the anteroom, our conversation transported us to the forest.  We could already breathe the pure air of the jungle, see the shiny fish, golden under the sun’s rays, wriggling in the skilled hands of native fishermen.  This evocation of our most genuine roots lulled our thoughts with hope for the future.  In the days to come, when the desire for peace ensures humanity continual progress and definitive spiritual achievements, the rulers of nations will be wise and kind men with broad mediumistic faculties, ensuring a climate of tranquility for the collective – just as we all dream.

History for the children of the third millennium will be told somewhat like this: “Our rulers, my children, are the shamans of the 21st century – priests, fathers, and teachers…”  And the man who inherited the Earth will express, in his actions, the convergence of science, philosophy, and religion – essential bonds with the Kingdom of the Supreme Giver of Life!

FE – Cláudio, first, I want to express our great satisfaction in interviewing you and Orlando.  You know, you are both people deeply respected by all of us Brazilians.  The Villas-Bôas family is connected to what is most simple and pure that we have: our Indigenous people.  Well, I believe our readers would really like to know: what is the religion of the Indigenous people?

Cláudio – That is actually a very complex subject.  It’s a matter, above all, of conceptualization: can the behavior of Indigenous people toward the supernatural really be called religion?  I ask this question initially so that we can better frame the issue.  What we understand as religion doesn’t have a counterpart in Indigenous culture.

FE – Generally speaking, do the Indigenous people believe in survival after death?  Do they communicate with entities that no longer have physical bodies?  And what about their belief in God?

Cláudio – The Indigenous people have their cultural heroes and a whole set of experiences with the supernatural, which we call pajelança (shamanic practice).  I wouldn’t classify that as religion.  Pajelança is an entire practice that their pajé, or shaman – as we would classify them – uses to contact the supernatural.  It’s a complete technique they know and develop depending on the moment and the need.  Now, religion has a much broader concept; it implies worship, a connection between those that are alive and something higher – for example, with the Creator, the Being who made the world.  Indigenous people don’t believe in a Creator Being; they have their cultural heroes.

FE – Cláudio, how is a pajé chosen?

Cláudio – Pajés always emerge when someone shows a tendency for it.  To understand it better, it’s necessary to say that there’s a wide variety of Spirits – or categories of Spirits – among the Indigenous people: there are those who dwell in the depths of the waters, others who live in the forest.  When an Indigenous person is hunting or fishing, sometimes he can be affected by one of these supernatural entities.  When that happens, he becomes connected to that particular Spirit; he returns to the village disturbed, and his relatives call for a pajé who had a similar origin.

The shaman or pajé comes to find out what happened.  The Indian tells him, in an almost unconscious state – I don’t know if it was feigned, but it happens among the indians – that he was “taken” by Jacuí – Jacuí appeared- or he heard Jacuí’s flute.  The pajé then begins to initiate this Indian who was affected by this supernatural influence in order to make him a pajé connected to this category of Spirit, which is Jacuí.

FE – Would Jacuí be the Spirit of the forest?

Cláudio – No, it’s the Spirit of the depths of the waters.

FE – Currently, who is the main pajé in the Upper Xingu?

Cláudio – There are several pajés, and as such, all hold a position within the group not only of religious importance but also socioeconomic.

FE – In the case of Tacumã, do you recall anything specific about how he became a pajé?

Cláudio – I know the whole story up until he became a great pajé.  Tacumã was fishing in the Coluene River and then returned to the village with a high fever.  His relatives went to ask for help at the health post, thinking he had malaria…  When we arrived to investigate, the pajés were already around him, and they said: “What he has is not a disease that you can cure… It’s not a disease of civilized people.  He was taken by Jacuí, so we are the ones who know how to heal Tacumã.”

They began the pajelança (healing ritual), and indeed, the Indian recovered, returned to normal.  After that, he started having some very strange episodes; he would run into the forest, return to the village, climb houses, roll downstairs, taken over by the Spirit.  This influence remained until he was able to dominate that category of Spirit, when the village people accepted him as a living person representing that spiritual entity.

The matter of pajelança among the Xingu indians is very complex.  Orlando and I are working on a project to explain in detail what really happens in these situations.  It’s not easy to explain like this, in just a few lines.  Even more so for me, as I have difficulty expressing myself.

FE – That’s not what we’re hearing; you express yourself very well.

Sulamita – Do you believe that there was a spiritual influence, an intelligence from another dimension acting upon Tacumã?

Cláudio – You know, today there’s a lot of confusion regarding these things, but for a long time we’ve believed in something that transcends our life.  Even science studies parapsychological phenomena, and today, no one doubts that non-physical forces act upon us.

Sulamita – You don’t doubt it?

Cláudio – I don’t doubt it.

Sulamita – Congratulations!

Cláudio – Who can, for example, deny that pajelança is linked to something beyond what can be assessed!

Sulamita – Such openness!  Congratulations!  Now, could you tell us in detail the story of the two children that Tacumã found in the forest?

Cláudio – Exactly. That happened in the Kalapalo village.  The father went out fishing, taking his two children, and at a certain point in the day, he left the children by the edge of the Marivarré lagoon, a lagoon near our post, which is the park headquarters.  When he came back, the children were no longer there.  He searched everywhere and then returned to the village asking for help.  Everyone helped in the search, but without success.  The next day, a pajé from the Kalapalos said that a Spirit, Evurá, had taken the children.  The pajé wasn’t able to complete the pajelança and the children didn’t return.

They then sought out other pajés from other tribes – Kuikuro, Meinaco, Arueti – and all gathered at the Kalapalo village, but no luck.  That’s when someone remembered Tacumã.  By that time, he was already the village chief, but he wasn’t yet respected as a great pajé.  Still, there was hope, since Tacumã was the son of a pajé who had become famous, and maybe he could find the children who had been missing for five days.  Tacumã came with a group of assisting pajés and performed the entire pajelança, singing and conducting the spiritual summoning.  When he finished, he said the children would appear at 10 a.m. the next day.  He said that Evurá, a Spirit, had taken the children, but that he had spoken with him, and they were already on their way back.

Remarkably, at 10 a.m., there was a scream in the forest, and the children appeared at the edge of the savannah.  I was there!  I cannot doubt it because we witnessed all of this.  When the children appeared, their relatives ran to grab them, but Tacumã shouted: “Don’t go, or she’ll go and never come back…”  But the relatives ran toward them anyway, and the children went back into the woods and disappeared again.  Tacumã then did more work with a lot of pajelança, a lot of smoke from those nearly 3 cm thick cigar – huge.  He smoked one after another, entered a trance, and said: “Tomorrow he will return again, but tomorrow no one goes there, I will go to get the children.”  This is real – ask Orlando – we witnessed it.

At 10 a.m., there was a scream from the children at the forest’s edge, and they appeared.  Then Tacumã, with his rattle in hand, sang as he walked toward the children and, assisted by another pajé, led them by the arm to their parents’ house.  They were two girls, one nine and the other six years old.

Ivo – I imagine there wasn’t even a possibility for those children to be fed.

Cláudio – I condensed the story quite a bit – they spent twenty days in the forest.

Ivo – And they came back unharmed?

Cláudio – We took one of our small planes and brought the children to the post.  They were put on IV fluids; they were just skin and bones.

FE – Could you say something about the funeral ceremony the Indians perform?

Cláudio – The Guarup is the funeral ceremony.  It’s within their religious dimension.  Indians believe that the deceased has another destiny, outside of the reality where we live.  They hold this ceremony to release the dead, to expel them from here, because they believe that the ian – the soul – remains near the relatives because of longing, but everyone must detach.  The ceremony includes exorcisms; it’s a collective solution to avoid the problem of longing.  After the Guarup, the dead person’s relatives are washed, painted, so they can forget the deceased.  Then, the widower can remarry, the child no longer has to remember the father, the wife no longer the husband, and so on.

FE – Do the Indians put anything in the graves?

Cláudio – I must explain that for the Indians, the soul must travel a long and difficult path before reaching Uivat – or Heaven – where there’s a village similar to the one on Earth.  In this village, the soul will live fully.  They place bows, arrows, and clubs in the grave so that the deceased can cross that harsh region, where there are enormous hawks that can destroy him.  One must overcome this difficult path to reach the village of happiness – Heaven.

FE – How wonderful! The pure faith of the simple people!

Cláudio – Indeed, there are details of great beauty.  In our book Xingu: The Indians and Their Myths, we analyzed all of this.  There are ethnologists, for example, who treat religion and magic as the same thing, but for us, they are completely different.  Magic is a technique, a way of contacting the supernatural; religion is pure worship, an understanding of the supernatural – it is something static.

Sulamita – It is amazing how much schools in Brazil distort the religion of the indians!  They teach, for instance, that they worship the Sun, the Moon, etc., when it’s nothing like that.

Cláudio – Religion is always passed down from father to son.  Religion is a metaphysical structure. Every indian knows that he has a destiny, that his soul will exist on a specific plane.  This knowledge doesn’t require any technique, there is no dynamic process involved.  That’s not the case with pajelança.

FE – Is pajelança a technique?

Cláudio – It’s a power the living has to contact the entities.

FE – Is there a specific type of pajelança for each case?

Cláudio – Of course.  Each case is connected to a particular category of Spirit.  A pajé never covers all the spiritual entities.  There are pajés of Jacuí, of Anhangú, of Aratí – each one commands a certain range of Spirits.

Sulamita – And do they perform healing through this relationship?

Cláudio – They do.  And even today, when something happens to one of them, we go there with our little jeep.  We go to the village.  Many times, they say: “No, Cláudio, this is not torrun-tor-run, this is not a caraíba disease [non-Indigenous illness], only we know how to deal with it.  Wait, we will heal him, he will get better, no need for medicine.”

FE – And does he get better?

Cláudio – He does.

Ivo – When I visited Xingu, I learned a lot about the Indigenous people, and I’d like you to confirm something.  Is it true that there is no punishment for an Indigenous person when they make a mistake?

Cláudio – To answer that, we need to remember that in Indigenous civilization, there is no general chief who commands, for instance, work or duties etc.  The Indigenous society is organized into families, and each family is independent from the other.  The chief – morere-quê in the Kamaiurá language – is the one responsible for the village courtyard; his role is simply to oversee the happenings there, where the social life of the Indigenous people unfolds.  It’s never a position of command to determine this or that task.  No, he only has to answer for his family.  But any ceremony in the courtyard must be presided over by him.

When the village receives visitors from another tribe for a festival, for example, the chief must receive these friendly neighbors.  So, in that case, he truly acts as a chief, assuming that position.  But he has no authority to correct any misbehavior.  We say this because there is no concept of crime among the Indigenous people.  If an Indigenous person, for example, steals something from another – a feather, a bow, an ornament – the others just make fun of it; there’s no one to say, “You did wrong, you’re bad.”  No, they don’t devalue people, don’t look down on them or marginalize them because of such events.

FE – So there are no crimes among them?

Cláudio – No. There’s only a magical punishment when they conclude that a sorcerer caused the death of another Indigenous person.  In that case, he is considered a dangerous individual by the whole group, and then they eliminate him – they kill him.

Sulamita – They conclude that the person was killed by sorcery…

Cláudio – Yes, by sorcery.  But even that kind of punishment is rare.

FE – I think that in the future, we will come to make use of all primitive experiences, adapting them to our acquired intellectual level.  After the year 2000, we hope to be governed by spiritualized beings who will be like the pajés, possessing moral authority over us, also allowing us to engage with the spiritual world…

Cláudio – I believe that the “primitive” has a lot to teach us civilized people.  We have distorted our lives so much – take, for example, our economic complications.  We have so much complex philosophy.  The Indigenous person has something so pure… When I read Sartre or Heidegger – such difficult philosophers – one discovers, especially in Heidegger’s work Fundamento do Ser, so much about the essence of truth.  Such depth!  There’s nothing there about knowledge expansion through technology.  One can see in the Indigenous person the essence of these absolute positions found in philosophy itself.

FE – I’d like you to conclude by explaining how that relates to the Indigenous person.

Cláudio – The Indigenous person is spontaneous; all his behavior is, in a way, pure.  He is authentic. He doesn’t desire anything.  He is simply a man before life.  There is an extraordinary connection between the Indigenous person and the ethics of Krishnamurti.

FE – With Krishnamurti?

Cláudio – Yes, precisely because of the spontaneity.  The Indigenous person does not fear death.  It’s the living who have the problem of longing and must distance themselves from the memory of the dead.  But the one who is about to die does not fear death.

FE – Interesting. The Indigenous people live according to the saying of Our Lord Jesus Christ: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matthew 6:34)

Cláudio – An old Indigenous person is joyful; the older they get, the happier they are.  They’re not thinking, “Tomorrow, I’ll be dead.”  No, the older they are, the more cheerful they become.  They are cared for and enjoy the respect of the village.  I did not like the book “Velhice, essa realidade incomôda” (Old Age, this uncomfortable reality), by Simone de Beauvois.  In any continent, she may have found a place where the elderly are despised, but here in Brazil, at least, we cannot say that the elderly are despised by our people.

FE – What other phenomenon did you observe in contact with the Indians?

Cláudio – Numerous.  One of them occurred when we arrived, in 1945, at the Kalapalos village.  Five days later, the Aurás Indians also came.  The Kalapalos were surprised because they were not expecting their visit.  The Aurás then explained that they had been warned that civilized people were arriving in the Kalapalos village.

FE – How interesting! This means that your mission was already being announced by the Spirits to the Indians!