Page 60 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

“Don’t Ask Questions, Just Observe!” 45

or whatever other expressive forms is—as Mãe Stella maintains—“dangerous,
leading into true labyrinths, and with dire results.” She certainly does not
stand alone in her dismissal of all abstractions from direct experience. A
Candomblé priestess told anthropologist Luis Nicolau Parés:

No one can ever really talk with certainty about the mysteries. The myster-
ies are the mysteries. The secrets are the secrets, and no one will ever know
anything. Those who study, those who come to observe, they are observing,
but they don’t know the deep knowledge. For one says one thing, and
another says another thing, and so they only leave one confused. I always
leave the researchers dangling . . . (1997, 2)

This specific understanding of religious knowledge—with its stress on
religious practices, rather than exegesis—privileges the human body as the
prime site of what Mircea Eliade (1959) has called hierophany, the appear-
ance of the sacred. Initiation rituals, animal sacrifice, spirit possession—in
all these activities the human-body-in-performative-action is the medium
to gain access to the mysterious fundamentos, the “deep knowledge”
(Johnson 2002; cf. Van de Port 2005b) that Candomblé holds in high
esteem. Statues and images only become meaningful after the bodily inter-
vention of the priest in ritual acts. Words—as Juana Elbein dos Santos
made clear—do not have power because of their explicatory potential, but
because they are utterances of the body, involving breath, saliva, bodily
temperature (1989, 46). Visual and discursive registers of mediation are
explicitly declared to be inadequate for the transmission of “deep
knowledge”—“mere images, mere words,” as one of my interlocutors
phrased it.
The performance of silence clearly serves to uphold the primacy of this
conception of knowledge over other forms of knowing. Of course, there is
other knowledge about the cult, as Mãe Stella’s frequent media appear-
ances testify. Terreiros have opened Web sites, published books, launched
CDs with sacred chants and rhythms, have worked with documentary
makers, and have produced videos. They organize study meetings and fes-
tivals to which they invite the press, hoping to get (and often getting)

media coverage. There is also an emergent “tradition” of making photo
albums and home videos of the important ceremonies that mark the pro-
gress of a cultist in the initiation process. Yet all of that is indeed under-
stood as “another kind of knowledge.” When asked why Ilê Axé Opô
Afonjá opened up a Web site on the Internet, Mãe Stella replied:

As far as the Internet is concerned, we only did it to make public, even
abroad, that there is an Axé in the way that we understand it, and what it is