On New Year's Eve, the white-clad throngs gather on Brazil's beaches after dark, more than a million people in Rio alone. They bear worldly offerings—lipstick, combs, jewelry, perfume, mirrors, flowers—to give to a vain, beauteous sea goddess. Called lemanjá, she is one of the pantheon worshiped by the various devotees of the pagan cults known as Umbanda, Quimbanda, Candomble, or—to its detractors—as Macumba.
Near flat altars on the sand stand priests and priestesses; well-dressed Brazilians as well as poor favelados line up to receive their blessings. Drums beat, drinking and chanting start, and worshipers seized by spirits begin their slow, rotating dance. As the old year wanes, fireworks flare above the beach. Then at midnight, hundreds of thousands of little homemade rafts bearing the offerings are pushed or paddled far out into the waves. If the offering is "accepted" by lemanjá it does not wash back onto the shore and it spells a lucky New Year. Hours later the people wander away, and by dawn all that is left on the sand is a mountain of trash, including the forlorn offerings that returned.
The beach rite is the biggest showcase for Brazil's pagan religion, but more intimate celebrations are held all year long. On paper Brazil has the world's largest Catholic population; about 90% of Brazilians call themselves Catholics. Many of them are also among the 20 million or more devotees of spiritism, a term that embraces a spectrum of practices from witchcraft to extrasensory psychological exercises.
This syncretistic religion has grown out of Brazil's ethnic mixture and unusual degree of miscegenation. Though the indigenous Indians and imported African slaves took on a Christian faç.ade to please the Portuguese colonists, they never really gave up their own religions, and the church, from the beginning, had to accommodate them. Today, many Brazilians practice two religions at once, going to Sunday Mass, then returning to the same church on Monday's "night of the souls" to burn candles invoking their favorite spirits.
Spiritist rites run the gamut from sanitized middle-class meetings with benches set out for tourists, to clandestine nightlong orgies in forest grottos. Whatever the style, all groups believe in a family of "spirits" or orixas, who usually resemble Christian saints. Thus lemanjá, the sea goddess, is identified with the Virgin Mary and Oxóssi with St. Sebastian.
The orixas can be called forth, through chanting, drumming and prayer, to inhabit the bodies of the worshipers, cure them of ailments, and give them personal advice. The worshiper seeks to become a cavalo (horse), inhabited by a spirit, and enter into a semidivine state. In the more African rites, blood from sacrificial goats and chickens is drunk. One priestess customarily breaks a glass and dances on it barefoot with a devotee. In another cult, the priestesses are usually venerated prostitutes.