Às portas da casa santa: ritual, holografia e figuração no Santo Daime

Abstract

This ethnography seeks to delineate the contours of a Daimist cosmology and synthesize its broadest and most general terms as it follows a complex process of what might be called symbolic incorporation, an activity inherent to what is here designated as ritual machinery. The argumentative axis runs through the central Daimist trope (visible/invisible) through an obvious approach to the process of tropic expansion (Wagner, 2017) and the effects they elicit through the sacralization of the beverage and its consumption ritual, considered here as a sacrificial operator. The demonstrative method is based on a dialogic of "affectation" (Favret-Saada, 2005) and operates as an autoethnography, here indicated as a learning experience conducted in two Brazilian Daimist centers: Céu do Beija-Flor/MS and Céu do Gamarra/MG. The terms of this learning—by its very nature the learning of a creative modeling of perception through the figuration of the invisible world—are narrated in a series of ethnographic landscapes situated in the interstices of the interior and exterior, of subjectivity and the self-modeling of the trope, of collective categories in their conventional definitions and their analogical and embodied experimentation in the world of mirações. What is sought is a native theory of effect, where emic categories such as force, current, and miração, and the terms of a Daimist corporeality such as ritual vomiting and memory, are taken as expressive means of an eminently holographic ontology of transformation.