Enskilment as Embodied Spirituality: From Possession to Precision in the Performative Settings of Two Brazilian Religions

Abstract Enskilment requires bodily involvement; and rarely, if ever, can bodily and spiritual practices be separated. In this chapter, two performative ritual settings are compared, one is the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, in which possession by the gods (Orixas) is the core, the other is the Neo-Pentecostal (Evangelical) Church in Brazil, The Universal Church of The Kingdom of God (IURD), in which ritual participation requires precision in time and space. There is a paradoxical overlap between the cosmologies of these two religions in the sense that one of the aims of The Universal Church is liberation (libertação), understood as the expulsion of Exu, the trickster and messenger god, who is regarded as associated with the devil in the Afro-Brazilian religions. The argument is that a new community of practise, informed by globalization, appears in The Universal Church, and that this requires and builds upon types of enskilment that are quite different from the body techniques of spirit mediumship in Candomblé, which subjectivates mediums in their personal relation to the Orixa. In contrast, spatiality and temporality in The Universal Church promotes a subjectivation of people as citizens of the modern word.