I was driving Victor, Otávio and his boyfriend Jorge to a celebration of Candomblé in Alaketu, one of Salvador's old and famous terreiros (temples). Four gays in a rental car, all dressed in immaculate white, as Candomblé ceremonies require. The initiative for the outing had been mine. As always, Victor had been hesitant to accompany me. He dislikes the ceremonies, with their long hours of just sitting, watching the initiates dance to the drumming, and waiting for the orixá spirits to arrive and possess the initiates’ bodies. This time, however, he had figured this was an opportunity for me to meet his friend Otávio, who was ‘from Candomblé’, and might be of use for my research. I do not know what Victor had told Otávio about me, but I dare speculate that the prestige of a European-who-works-at-a-university-and-writesabout-Candomblé had piqued Otévio's interest in joining.

While driving, I explained that the terreiro we were going to visit was a very old one, of great repute and on its way to be recognized by the Bahian state as ‘cultural heritage’. Otávio, a chubby adolescent with straightened black hair wearing a rather risqué lace blouse, exclaimed “chiquééééérima”, which may be translated as “how fabulous”. Otávio lived in a distant suburb of Salvador, and although he was in the early stages of initiation into Candomblé, he had never been to this terreiro. He had not even heard of it. I was reminded, once more, that the Candomblé of anthropologists and the Candomblé of local practitioners pertained to different, only partially overlapping circuits.

Otávio informed us he had just taken a bath, to cleanse himself of the couple of beers he had drank earlier in the day. “With beer in my body, the orixá won't come,” he explained. When we arrived at the terreiro he said that the coming of a spirit called Iansá was certain for his body was restless. “It is as if waves of heat and cold go through my body.” The eyes of his boyfriend Jorge – a silent kid with the fluffy beginning of a moustache, who followed Otávio like a shadow – shone with excitement. Victor responded by saying that it would be a good thing if he got possessed, because that was the kind of stuff I was interested in.

Although I am slightly embarrassed to admit it, there is no denying the fact that when I entered the Igreja de São Francisco in Salvador, Bahia – one of the most famous baroque churches in Brazil – I had an immediate bodily reaction: my nipples hardened. No goose bumps, no gasping for air, no shivers down my spine (bodily responses which somehow feel more admissible to open an academic discussion) but hard nipples. And mind you, it wasn't even the first time I entered this church.

‘The erection of nipples’, writes the Wikipedia entry on the subject (where I hastily sought to objectify the curious response of this unruly body of mine), ‘is due to the contraction of smooth muscle under the control of the autonomic nervous system’. The site also reassures me that hard nipples are

For whatever this information is worth, the important fact to note here is that an architectural space worked my ‘autonomic nervous system’. A religious building made my ‘cylindrically arranged muscle cells’ respond, quite independent of what I deem appropriate for visiting a church or consider becoming for opening an academic inquiry. What this oddly detached encyclopedic language effectively brings to the fore, then, is that in situations where people enter religious buildings, the body is as much a medium as the church. Both are sensationproducing instruments. Rather than sticking to the sender (church)-receiver (visitor) model, we are dealing with the intersection of two mediating systems.

In this contribution, I want to draw attention to what seems to be the sovereign power of an aesthetic formation such as a church building over (the body of ) its visitors–more in particular the sense of loss and disorientation that comes with it.

Since Jorge Amado's publication of Jubiabá, endless cycles of quotation have effected a genuine proliferation of Candomblé imagery in Bahia's public sphere. Quoting, as I have stated before, is always a procedure that produces distance. It removes you from the source. It takes the heat out of things, so to speak. ‘Look, it has been said before! I’m only quoting!’ Yet it also creates little pipelines between fields that were hitherto unconnected. Through these pipelines the color of the quote – its feel, its temperature, its texture – is passed on to the new surroundings in which it was inserted. In this process, both the quote itself and its new context are bound to change their meaning.

In Salvador, the process of quoting Candomblé has now reached a stage that is exemplified by the advertisement campaign of Tidelli garden equipment: the orixás are only recognizable as such because of the presence of emblematic symbols (Xangô's fire, Iemanjá's hand-held mirror, Oxóssi's bow-and-arrow, Iansá's sword). Other than that, they look like the hip members of a young, urban party crowd – beautiful, seductive, desirable – and they are supposed to confer meaning onto garden chairs and garden tables. With the Tidelli posters we are light-years away from Dr Nina's ill-lit, messy terreiros, or Jorge Amado's sweaty, foaming ceremonies. And yet, some echoes of these earlier renditions of the Candomblé universe remain.

Quotations of Candomblé such as the Tidelli campaign are all over the place in the public sphere of contemporary Salvador. To evoke the sheer density of Candomblé imagery in Salvador, and the accompanying sensation that these images are in a process of ‘drifting out of meaning’, I was tempted to proceed this chapter with a rather unorthodox form of ethnographic description, namely to simply ‘show it all’: to start a plain enumeration of the manifestations of Candomblé's public forms that would go on-and-on-and-on, page after page, so as to end up with a text resembling that famous Borgesian project of making a map of the empire on a scale of one to one.

Oh! Bahia da magia, dos feitiços e da fé. Oh! Bahia of magic, fetishes and faith.

Bahia que tem tantas igrejas, Bahia that has so many churches,

e tanto Candomblé. and so much Candomble.

… …

Vem, vem, vem, em busca da Bahia! Come, come, come, in search of Bahia!

Cidade da tentação, City of temptation,

onde meu feitiço impera. where my magic spell reigns.

Vem, se me trazes o teu coração! Come, if you bring me your heart!

Vem, a Bahia te espera, Bahia, Bahia! Come, Bahia awaits you, Bahia, Bahia!

This study will take you to Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, a palm-fringed place that likes to tell the world that it is the next best thing to paradise – and puts on a rather convincing performance of the paradisiacal (until, of course, it starts to rain). The roots of this project, however, stretch back to another time and place: the war-ridden Serbia of the early 1990s, where I conducted my first long-term anthropological fieldwork, and where I had to face the fact that people are not only shocked by the horrific spectacle of an all-out war, but seduced by it as well. In the book that I wrote about those dark and turbulent times, I found myself struggling with what I now recognize to be the great themes of Lacanian thought: the Serbian townsmen that figure in Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild (van de Port 1998) had sought refuge from their traumatic experiences in World War II in ‘the symbolic order’ of Titoist Yugoslavia, which had provided them with a master-narrative to make sense of their past, present and future. This symbolic order, however, proved incapable to stand up to the forces of the Real. Faced with their world falling apart, my Serbian interlocutors resorted to fantasy: the kind of daydreaming that screens off the rents and fissures in one's narration of the world and is thus capable to restore the symbolic order. Yet they also gave themselves over to the debauchery of their Gypsy bars and to the ecstasies of war, in a desperate attempt to access a ‘really real’ beyond all narration and daydreaming.

The montage-like statuettes that you see in the pictures on the left examples of a popular art form from 19th-century Bahia and are called O Menino Jesus no Monte, the Child Jesus on the Mountain. They are sometimes also referred to as lapinhas, ‘little caves’, as many of them exhibit a dark void in the middle of the mountain, suggestive of a cave. What little information I found on these lapinhas reveals that they were made in Bahian convents in the Reconcavo area. The nuns from the Convento de Recolhimento de Nosso Senhora dos Humildes in the town of Santo Amaro de Purificacao where particularly famed for their artistic skills, and produced a great number of these lapinhas. Guarded under glass bell jars or in oratories, they were put on display in Bahian homes in the Christmas period (Marques & Araújo 2006; Silva 2007).

I do not, however, bring these lapinhas to your attention as an overture to a discussion of the artistic skills of Bahian nuns or of Bahian Christmas celebrations. I present them here, at the beginning of this chapter, because they are a particularly revealing materialization of a baroque ‘cosmovision’. This cosmovision – which might be understood as the configuration of the relationships between human beings, god(s) and the world they inhabit – needs to be fleshed out halfway this book for a number of reasons. Being more explicit about what a baroque register of worldmaking is (and does) may help to clarify the heuristic work that the notion of ‘the baroque’ has done in the preceding chapters. Moreover, a thorough discussion of a baroque cosmovision helps to prepare an interpretative framework for the chapters to come, which deal with responses in the Candombé community to that never-ending stream of visitors knocking on the doors of their temples.

So take a good look at these lapinhas, which in their basic structure are all alike. What you see is the child Jesus who, in king-like posture and outfit, reigns over a world that is represented as a pile of fragments: rooster, seashell, rabbit, house, little man, flower, duck. Glued to the mountain in random fashion, these individual elements are mere emblems: their meaning does not exceed the depth of a pictogram. Nothing in these lapinhas invites you to ponder the deeper significance of roosters, flowers or ducks, nor their mutual relations.

I have pushpinned two photocopied portraits of Dr Raimundo Nina Rodrigues (1862-1906) on the wall of my office in Amsterdam. They have been sitting there for months now, stuck somewhat unceremoniously between postcards from a summer's trip to the baroque churches of southern Spain, a printout with several how-to-avoid-RSI-exercises from my physiotherapist and teaching schedules for the next semester.

One of the portraits depicts Dr Nina as a young man. It seems to follow the conventions of portraiture in the Brazil of the second half of the 19th century, when – as Ana Maria Mauad tells us – Brazilians were in the grip of a genuine estatuamania (‘statue-mania’) and wanted their portraits to recall the statues of powerful great men on public squares (1997: 228). If that indeed is what the painter has tried to accomplish, the result is not entirely convincing. The portrait shows him to be a pale, skinny doutor, hiding behind an immense moustache and with a look in his eyes that expresses something midway between worry and desperation. The black coat over a spotless white shirt with starched collar, and the fur-trimmed cassock that indicates academic stature hardly produce the desired effect; other than a certain stiffness, there is little in this portrait that recalls the potency and might of a statue towering over a public square.

The other portrait, in an oval frame, was painted not too long before Dr Nina's death. Here he is portrayed full frontal, and made to look like the eminence grise of the Institute for Legal Medicine in Bahia where he was positioned as a professor of forensic medicine. The fur-trimmed cassock is still there, and the moustache – now pointing downwards – is even bigger. The frivolous, embroidered neck scarf of the earlier painting has been replaced by an austere-looking white one. His hair has gone almost as white. It is hard to believe that the man on this painting was only in his late thirties, early forties.

I had read the work of Dr Nina before I had even started my fieldwork in Bahia.

When I came across these words by the Dadaist artist Arthur Cravan (in Shelton 1984: 323) they were instantly recognizable, their content and tenor effortlessly graspable, commonsensical to the point of simply being true. Who would not understand this set of preferences? Who would not opt for the possibility to trade the world of Mademoiselle Franfreluche and her well rehearsed steps for a place where experience has the immediacy of clean punches, left jabs and right uppercuts? Let me be dragged along over snow-covered mountains. Let me court ever-darker shades of black, with all the moving out of control, and all the risk-taking this courting might imply.

There is no denying that the promise of Saint-Bernard dogs and nègres boxeurs is what makes me end up in places like Bahia – hot, exuberant, ever-dripping Bahia, where a gringo such as myself is subjected to a 24-hours invitation to drop the studious attitude, to part from scholarly ways of getting to know the world, and enter into more immediate modes of being.

You would not want to be deceived, however, into picturing me as a kindred being to the pugilist, poet, traveler, crook, loudmouth, provocateur and troublemaker that was Arthur Cravan. I was raised under the sign of the gavotte: once a stamping peasant dance from the Dauphinée that had allowed ‘for the lord to kiss all the other ladies, and for the lady to kiss all the other lords’, but destined to become a baroque affair of elegant nodding and courteous bowing, ‘intricately choreographed both in terms of step execution and floor pattern’. From desirous kissing to courteous bowing: that pretty much characterizes all that I was made to be when growing up in a middle-class suburb in the Catholic deep south of the Netherlands. Here, the derivatives of the cultural and sexual revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s had arrived in such forms as homespun, hand-knitted sweaters, Bulgarian folk dancing, macrobiotic recipes, feminist inspired relational experimentation and indeed, the playing of distinctly pre-modern baroque music.

I was giving a visiting colleague a tour of Salvador, and the ogã must have seen us coming, climbing the many steps leading to Casa Branca, one of the oldest and most reputed terreiros of Salvador. Undoubtedly, he had assumed that we were just another couple of curious tourists. We started chatting.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of tourists that visit here and they always ask a lot of questions. They always want to know about possession. Whether it is for real, and stuff like that.’

My colleague, missing out on what I took to be a veiled instruction not to ask questions about the cult, asked if it had happened that tourists would fall in trance during the ceremonies. He nodded.

‘Sure, it happens that tourists fall in trance. Every once in a while it happens. At one time, we even had visiting nuns falling in trance!’

The ogã seemed quite eager to serve us this little detail. There was pride in his voice, triumph in his laughing eyes when he countered my expression of disbelief.

‘Yeah! Nuns! Freiras!’

The image is, of course, quite commanding. One can almost see it happen: little blond backpacker girls – of the kind that swarm Salvador's historical center by the dozens – being invaded by the African Other they had come to gaze at. Rheumatic and pale nuns’ bodies surrendering to the sensual beating of the drums; their wimples and rosaries flapping around in the whirling movement of the dance. Tourist curiosity and catholic propriety being crushed under the sheer force of the spirits.

The ogã's story is instructive as to how people from Candomblé seek to counter the predicament that, in the public sphere of contemporary Salvador, any image of their cult ‘can mean absolutely anything else’. It is also an apt illustration as to how the allegorical imagination, discussed in the previous chapter, informs cultists how to go about this challenge.

One day, when we were returning from the village where Victor grew up, he told me to leave the BR-342, the highway that connects Salvador with the Bahian hinterland. Behind those hills, he said, pointing at a ridge of green hills to the left of the road, lies O Milagre de São Roque – the Miracle of Saint Rochus. It was a place where his madrinha used to take him when he was a small boy. Usually they would go there on foot, all the way from Amélia Rodrigues, to fetch holy water from a spring. Yet sometimes his madrinha – who was a mãe-de-santo – would organize a pick-up truck to take all of her initiates at once.

‘I’m sure it is the kind of place you like,’ Victor reassured me as I found myself cursing while trying to get off the BR-342 with its racing traffic. There had been no sign to indicate the exit. Worse: there was no exit to the pot-holed dirt road he had wanted me to take.

We passed some ramshackle dwellings, and a group of sugarcane cutters taking a break at the roadside, basking in the late afternoon sun. We drove past endless meadows, and the listless gazes of white cows. And then we headed in the direction of the wooded hills.

‘It has been a long time,’ Victor said. ‘But I think that this is where it is.

’ On one of the hills stood a small, whitewashed chapel. Around it some wooden shacks, closed. Signboards indicated ‘drinks for sale’, but there was no one to be seen. Victor explained that every August there was a big pilgrimage to this place. And on Sundays too, groups of pilgrims would make it over here.

We parked the car and I followed Victor down a path that led into a valley.

The Miracle of Saint Rochus turned out to be a truly enchanting place. The wild profusion of plants and trees of the tropical forest – all imaginable forms and all imaginable shades of green – had receded to form an open space. Right in the middle of this clearing stood two monumental bushes of bamboo. They seemed to be moaning and groaning as the wind caused their gigantic poles to rub against each other.

On one of my visits to Gantois I caught sight of Luis, a fellow anthropologist. He was standing on the other side of the barracão, the great ceremonial hall of the terreiro. As it was very crowded, it was impossible to reach him. We acknowledged each other's presence with a nod.

The purpose of my visit to Gantois was a celebration in honor of Oxum, the Candomblé deity of beauty and of the sweet waters. The barracao had been decorated with garlands and cloths in the yellow and golden colors of the orixá. As always, the splendid performance sought to recreate an ‘Africa’ on Brazilian soil – with non-stop drumming, Yorubá chanting, and an impressive gathering of temple dignitaries dressed in their imported Nigerian garments: grands boubous, wax-print dresses, and colorful kaftans with matching hats.

For some reason, my observer's eye lingered on the floral decorations that hung from the ceiling: Styrofoam balls in which little dried flowers and golden, spray-painted leaflets had been stuck. These floral balls, fastened to the ceiling with velvety ribbons in a soft yellow tone, could only be described with the word ‘Biedermeier’ – the romantic rococo style of early 19th-century Vienna. I am not sure whether I had already made a mental note saying ‘these quaint little bouquets don't look like Africa to me’ when I met Luis’ eyes, who clearly had been observing me observing the floral decorations. We both burst into laughter, having seen something to which we, as anthropologists, should not have been paying attention. Clearly, our fieldwork diaries of that day were supposed to mention the ritual sequence of the ceremony, the names of the orixás that had come to celebrate, the presence and absence of honorary guests, the quality of the drumming and the food. They should not, however, mention Biedermeier bouquets hanging from the ceiling.

In all of its triviality, the example shows that the people from Gantois had found themselves seduced by an aesthetic that runs counter to their ideological, political and religious pursuits.

‘I love Candomblé!’ We were sitting in a fancy bar and the girl was sipping from a spicy, ginger-based cocktail called Maria Bonita. She sported glasses with a hip frame in red and white and she was from Macéio, capital of the neighboring state of Alagoas. Having learned about the topic of my research she beamed with enthusiasm.

‘I love everything about it. The music, the celebrations, the mythology. It is beautiful. And I’m devoted to my Orixá, my guide and protector.’

She bared one shoulder to show me a small tattoo, an abstract depiction of an elegant round hand mirror, one of the attributes of the Candomblé sea goddess Iemanjá.

‘That's right. I’m her daughter. I always thought I was, everyone kept telling me. And then it was confirmed by a mãe-de-santo in Cabula who played the búzios (the cowry shell oracle) for me. Had to go all the way over there, take a bus. It was kind of scary, that neighborhood. She was a black lady, you know. Very old, very kind. Uma daquelas (one of those), who truly know about these things, and who don't charge you. You just leave a donation.’

All during my research I would meet people with similar stories – and similar shining eyes – when I told them that I was studying Candomblé.

‘Ah, cool!’, they would say. ‘Candomblé!’ And then they would have some story or other of their relation with the cult: reveal which of the orixas were supposedly in charge of their head; point out their earrings made of búzios in a golden frame; make a reference to a CD by Virginia Rodrigues, who sings Candomblé songs in bel canto; a show by megastar Carlinhos Brown, who constantly makes references to the Candomble universe in which he grew up; or to a recent exhibition of the elegant black-and-white photographs by Pierre Verger.

The way Candomblé is extolled in cultural circles – an extolment that stands in flagrant contrast to the dismissive views of Dr Nina, discussed in the previous chapter – has everything to do with the fact that Candomble has become the trademark of the Bahian state.

The field notes I made on 4 February 2008, were brief. ‘Insist on the thought,’ it says (underlined like that), ‘that this is what it is all about’.

Bahian carnival is hardly a time to write extensive field notes. Yet I vividly recall the urge I had felt that night to write these few lines. Three o’clock in the morning or thereabouts. Slightly tipsy from a beer too many. Yet not so much as to refrain from waking my laptop from its slumber and sending this commandment to a future ‘me’: the sober ‘me’ that sits behind a desk, caught up in writing and theorizing, and that is no longer satiated with a magic just experienced. The ‘me’ who would probably no longer be willing to take that moment as wholeheartedly, as totalizing and world-engulfing as it had been then and there, on the Avenida Oceânica. The ‘me’ who would allow himself to be a traitor to the revelation of a moment that had shown ‘what it is all about’.

The nocturnal memo from 4 February leaves me with two questions. The first one asks what had been so perfectly summarized in that ecstatic moment. What was the ‘it’ in the exclamation that ‘this is what it is all about’? Candomble, the spirit possession cult that I had been studying for years? Bahia? The secret of life itself? God? An expanded ‘me’, encompassing the world? The second question concerns this instruction to my sober me: why this concern that the revelation on Avenida Oceanica would not make it through the night?