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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2018
Sectarian religious groups in Brazil, not of Afro-Brazilian origin, have been formed primarily in the backlands of the Northeast. There they have flourished during two approximate time periods, 1815 to 1840 and 1870 to the present. This paper will examine the religious groups of the Brazilian backlands as social phenomena.
The locale of the sects, the backlands sertão, is both a geographical and cultural subregion of the Northeast. The latter area is generally defined as comprising the states of Piauí, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Sergipe, Alagôas, and northern Bahia. Geographically the sertão is an area subject to recurrent drought, lying back of fertile coastal plains from Salvador in Bahia to Natal in Rio Grande do Norte, touching the coast in Ceará, and again retreating inland in Piauí.
1 There is a short account of Serra do Rodeador in Francisco Augusto Pereira da Costa, Folk-lore pernambucana (n.p., n.d.), pp. 33-35. The Brazilian sociologist Rene Ribeiro has unearthed a lengthy manuscript account in the Brazilian archives, which he has summarized in his article, “Brazilian Messianic Movements” in Millennial Dreams in Action, edited by Sylvia Thrupp, Supp. II to the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History (The Hague: Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History, 1962).
2 Most of the authors who have written about Pedra Bonita have summarized Pereira de Costa, pp. 35-44. See also Antônio Attico de Souza Leite, Fanatismo religioso. Memoria sobre o reino encantado na comarca de Villa Bella (2nd ed., Juiz de Fora, Brazil, 1898). Two English travelers who were in Pernambuco at the time that the Pedra Bonita group was dispersed, or shortly thereafter, have left accounts of the sect. Daniel P. Kidder gives a somewhat garbled account in his Sketches of Residence and Travels in Brazil (Philadelphia: Sorin and Ball, 1845), I, 149-151. George Gardner transcribes a letter addressed to the president of Pernambuco concerning Pedra Bonita written on May 25, 1838; see his Travels in the Interior of Brazil (2nd ed., London: Reeve, Benham, and Reeve, 1849), pp. 166-167.
3 The classic work on Canudos is Euclides da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands, trans. Samuel Putnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).
4 The literature on Padre Cicero is extensive and often polemic. The most objective account is probably M. Bergström Lourenço Filho, Juàzeiro do Padre Cícero (3rd. ed., São Paulo: Edições Melhoramentos, 1963).
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18 Da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands, p. 134.
19 Ibid., p. 137.
20 Ibid., p. 136.
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26 Ibid., p. 117.
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35 Gardner, Travels in the Interior of Brazil, pp. 166-167.
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37 Ibid., pp. 209-210.
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