José Carlos Ribeiro: An Introduction to Spiritist Therapy in Brazil

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Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder at that which one would not have been able to guess.
- Margaret Mead

The middle-aged man who had guided us through the mob on the street, into the big old house, and up a flight of stairs to a tiny bedroom, into which were crowded some two dozen people, pointed to a smiling, attractive, slender young man, probably in his late twenties, and announced, grinning broadly, “This is our healer.” Like so many Brazilians, he was of mixed African and European descent. Wearing an open sport shirt and dark trousers, José Carlos Ribeiro needed only a guitar to look like an entertainer. Not the image I’d anticipated for a Spiritist healer who had already attained some notoriety in this bustling seaside city of Fortaleza on the north coast of Brazil. This man was reputed to do surgery without using any anesthesia or antisepsis.

After I was introduced and presented my wife, Eleanor, and teenage daughter, Suzanne, I told him that I was a scholar and researcher, adding a few sentences about my previous studies in Brazil and elsewhere. My Portuguese was quite good, as I had been coming to Brazil for more than two decades to conduct research and teach. When I asked if we could observe him at work, José Carlos’s smile faded momentarily.

“Do you work for a newspaper or magazine?”

“No. If I write anything, it will be for an academic or professional publication. I have no interest in sensationalism.”

Apparently reassured, he smiled warmly. “I’ll be delighted for you to watch. We have nothing to hide.”

On the table he would later use for surgery there was a large tray with scalpels, several scissors, a few tweezers, a syringe, some cotton, gauze, adhesive tape, a glass of water, and a small pad of paper. He faced me again and placed the tray in my hands, adding, “Better than just watching, you can assist me.”

Eleanor and Suzanne stared wide-eyed. I grasped the tray, realizing that my years of anthropological training and experience could not help to suppress my uncertainty and apprehension about what was to happen next.

José Carlos turned to a waiting patient, a simply dressed, darkskinned, elderly man who was accompanied by his wife. As she started to explain her husband’s vision problem, the healer shifted his eyes away from her toward the ceiling. Although I was unable to understand what he said next, I saw him begin to shake almost violently. Later, he told me that this happens when a spirit possesses his body.

Large numbers of Brazilians are convinced that spirits may take over the bodies of special individuals who are referred to as mediums. Initiates of African-derived religions, for example, enter trances, often while chanting or dancing, to embody supernatural beings believed to be from Africa or a mixture of African deities and Roman Catholic saints. Once possessed, they offer help with material as well as spiritual problems to fellow adherents or visitors.

But José Carlos was a follower of the Christian-oriented Kardecist tradition. Its conviction that spirits of the dead can communicate with the living has American and French origins (1). Kardecist mediums become possessed without songs, dances, or sacrificial rituals. Being chosen by a spirit to serve as its medium often requires only the medium’s own inner readiness; although, as we shall see, more often training programs are provided.

José Carlos interrupted the woman’s account of her husband’s symptoms: “Do you believe in God?” The soft tone of his previous speech was replaced by a sharp accent that sounded almost like a native speaker of Spanish trying to communicate in Portuguese. I did not yet know that the spirit believed to possess him was St. Ignatius of Loyola, the sixteenth-century founder of the Society of Jesus. (2) Before either of them could answer, he commanded: “Think of God! Think of God!”

Even as he issued this order, he picked up a scalpel from the tray I held and plunged it up under the lid of the upper rim of the man’s left eye. Some of the onlookers gasped. One woman screamed. With a series of jabbing and twisting movements he slid the instrument down under the eye. Substituting the back of a tweezers taken from the tray with his left hand for the scalpel, he eased the eye forward, tilting it out of its socket. Using the scalpel still held in his right hand, he scraped what seemed to be the cornea of the protruding eye.

I was standing beside José Carlos, Suzanne behind me and Eleanor shoulder to shoulder with other onlookers behind the healer. I was struggling just to keep the tray in my hand from shaking or tilting. I allowed myself a momentary glance at my wife. Her face had turned pale, her mouth was hanging open, and her eyes were blinking rapidly. I feared she might faint. What could I do to help her? My mind seemed frozen.

José Carlos, without shifting his gaze from the old man in front of him, left the tweezers and eye dangling momentarily and moved his left hand over his shoulder. He barely touched Eleanor’s face as he mumbled something I couldn’t hear. Her complexion and expression almost instantly returned to normal. He once again gripped the tweezers.

He scraped the eye a few more times with the scalpel, then slid the tweezers to the top of the eye under the lid where the scalpel had first been thrust. He pulled the tweezers out. Back went the eyeball. All this happened in just a minute or two.

José Carlos covered the eye with some gauze and adhesive tape.

“Did that hurt?” he asked. “Did you feel any pain?”

“No. I know what you did but I couldn’t feel it.”

The healer took a pen from his shirt pocket and the pad of paper from the tray and looked off into space as he wrote a prescription that seemingly flowed from the writing tool. He handed it to the old man’s startled wife and rattled off a list of foods to be eaten or avoided, plus other orders about what her husband must and must not do.

“Go,” he added, gesturing the couple away. “You will be well.”

During the momentary pause between patients I looked at Eleanor.

We both turned to our daughter: “You okay?”

She nodded, and with an uncertain smile, asked, “What have we gotten into?”

Still holding the tray, I shrugged, thinking about the happenstance that had brought us here. The previous morning I was relaxing on the balcony of our second-story apartment, enjoying the ocean breeze, browsing through the local newspaper, hearing the voices of my wife and daughters inside finishing their breakfasts. I wouldn’t start teaching at the university until some weeks later.

I turned the page and changed my life.

The words “José Carlos Ribeiro” in a headline gripped my attention because that’s the name of one of our Brazilian godsons. He had been born in our apartment in Rio de Janeiro during a research sojourn more than fifteen years previously. His mother was Maria, whom we had hired to assist Eleanor with toddler Suzanne and our two other children while I was off doing interviews and collecting data. After a few weeks with us, she had revealed her pregnancy. Months later we attended José Carlos’s baptism, serving as his godparents in a rural village church.

“Ellie!” I shouted, almost as a reflex. “Look at this!”

She appeared on the balcony in moments, shadowed by slim, adolescent Suzanne. By then I had read the first paragraphs below the headline. Not our godson, but a Spiritist medium with the identical name. The coincidence seized my curiosity and led me to recall my reading about a man named Zé Arigó (3), credited with doing spectacular surgeries without the use of anesthesia and antisepsis while in trance in the 1960s. The address where this José Carlos Ribeiro would be doing healing was in the paper.

“Let’s see if we can meet him.”

So early the next morning, we started our walk into downtown Fortaleza in search of this other José Carlos Ribeiro. Fortaleza, capital of the northeastern state of Ceará, is less than a hundred miles south of the equator. The temperature was already escalating. Still, we walked rapidly, both eager and anxious.

We turned a corner. Ahead of us, a couple hundred people stood in line in front of a large house, across from what we later learned were the offices of the National Health Services. Young and old, well to do and poor, a mix of racial identities - they were all seeking the healer I hoped to see in action.

The man facing the head of the line was ordinary looking, a typical northern Brazilian mixture of European and Indian. He was handing out numbers and tickets after a few words with each person. Trying to sound far more self-assured than I felt, I handed him my card identifying me as both an American professor and a visiting faculty member at the Federal University of Ceará’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology for the semester beginning in August 1981.

“Would it be possible for me to meet the healer?” I asked.

He went to the doorway and talked with another gatekeeper. Then he motioned to us: “Come with me.”

In a few minutes we were inside the house. No breezes reached the already steamy interior of the building. People crowded every available space. The murmur of their voices and odor of their bodies in the heat followed us up the flight of stairs to the room where we now stood.

Throughout the morning, the healer alternated between men and women, between those on whom he performed surgeries and those for whom he only wrote prescriptions. He removed cysts and tumors, repeated the popping out and scraping of eyeballs, and repaired what we thought was a detached retina. No one was given any anesthetic. The instruments on the tray were used repeatedly without being cleaned. In each case, diagnosis, surgery, bandaging, writing of a prescription for postoperative medication, and dictation of a list of behavioral restrictions and a special diet were all completed in a few minutes. Nonsurgery patients required even less time. José Carlos provided prescriptions for cures or to prepare patients for return visits and possible future surgeries.

Each time he wrote a prescription, he looked away from his hand and the pad of paper. Some of the medications were available at a regular pharmacy or in the market. Others could be found at an “Umbanda shop,” where herbs, teas, baths, candles, and incenses are sold. A few were very obscure and difficult to obtain because they were so old in their formulations or so new that they were available only in the metropolitan centers of southern Brazil where the large, multinational drug companies had laboratories and outlets.

José Carlos, a high school graduate, had no further formal education. He did not charge fees for his consultations, diagnoses, prescriptions, surgeries, or other treatments. All were provided as charity. Brazilian Kardecist-Spiritists believe that healer-mediums receive spirits who in a previous lifetime were trained and practiced as doctors, surgeons, and other health care specialists. These spirits desire to perform the highly valued charitable act of helping the sick but do not need or wish to reincarnate (4).

Mediums possessed by such spirits provide various types of treatment. Passes may be administered, transmitting healing energy to the patient from the spirit world. Prescriptions are written, often for allopathic or homeopathic remedies. As we shall see, disobsessions - in which low-level spirits believed to be causing mental or physical illnesses are exorcised - are performed. Only a very small number of mediums perform surgeries.

José Carlos gave several patients prescriptions for a medicine obtainable only on the premises from his cousin or from a companion who travels with José Carlos as an assistant and confidant. Patients were charged the equivalent of four or five dollars to defray the cost of preparation, bottling, and shipping. Because of this payment, some in the Spiritist movement were to question José Carlos’s integrity.

Late in the afternoon, the healer was approached by several people who came as a group on behalf of their brother, bedridden with a cancer diagnosed by his physician as terminal. Even as one of them was explaining why the stricken man was unable to come to this location, José Carlos was staring past them and writing a prescription.

“Give this to him. He can be cured. I will operate on him next week. But tomorrow morning I’ll come see him.”

It was evening before he finished with his last patient. Although the experience had left Eleanor, Suzanne, and me exhilarated but exhausted, he seemed full of energy. We’d been told that José Carlos would be back again in the morning.

“May I return and continue to observe your work?” I asked.

“Of course, of course.” He smiled. “You were a fine assistant.”

I laughed. After the fifth patient I had been relieved of my trayholding duties.

Eleanor, Suzanne, and I headed for dinner and home in the warm night darkness. Our minds and conversation were whirlpools of questions without answers. How could we have seen what we saw? Who would ever believe us? Why had we not heard much more about Spiritist healers? How about casualties from the cutting without sterilizing instruments or using antiseptics on the wounds? Why would that large and very diverse crowd of patients choose to risk even prescriptions from this unlicensed and essentially untrained practitioner, to say nothing of being cut into by him without the slightest anesthesia? Were they somehow hypnotized? What about afterward? Had anyone ever checked to see if the people who submit themselves to this treatment actually get well? Or return for more treatments?

Our questions were very American. But the gentle breeze with its faint patina of garden perfumes reminded us that any answers would have to be Brazilian. This culture has elements from colonial Portugal, from the indigenous Indians whom the Portuguese conquered and impressed into plantation peonage, and from Africans imported as slaves. These elements have coalesced into a milieu that must be comprehended in its own terms.

We arrived the next morning as another crowd was gathering. Approaching the door at the same time were the brothers of the man José Carlos had promised to visit that day. They wanted to thank him for saving the man’s life, invite him to lunch, and drive him and any assistants to where their brother lived.

“Last night,” said the thin, intense one who did the talking the day before, “his whole body swelled up. We thought his veins would burst! Suddenly, he fell off his chair and we saw him bleeding. Our doctor came right away and told us to prepare for the end, probably before the night was over. He gave us a prescription for a shot of morphine to ease the pain and left. But we’d already gotten the medicine you prescribed just before the doctor came, and that’s what we used.”

The medicine had arrived by airline from Recife, capital of the neighboring state of Pernambuco, several hundred miles distant. This family of means and education, having searched Fortaleza’s pharmacies in vain, prevailed on a friend with a ham radio to solicit help from contacts in other cities. It’s difficult for most outside the Spiritist community to make sense of such effort and expense to carry out the instructions, not of a licensed, professional physician, but of an alleged healer with no training in modern biomedicine.

Adherents of Brazilian Spiritism, loosely organized by the Spiritist Federation, include practicing medical doctors, lawyers, university professors, engineers, architects, pharmacists, and other professionals who hold positions of prestige and importance in Brazilian society. Some are members of elite families who have traveled to and studied in North America and Europe. Many are well versed in Western, rationalist knowledge. Yet at times they choose to be operated on by healer-mediums lacking in medical training and credentials. Later we were to work with Spiritist healers even less educated than José Carlos.

As promised, José Carlos, his cousin, and several volunteer helpers arrived for an early lunch. The recipient of his prescription, apparently so close to death the night before, had already eaten but was still seated at the dining room table waiting to greet the healer. José Carlos sympathized with his patient’s desire to walk to a nearby store to get a pack of cigarettes but sent him upstairs to his bedroom.

The healer ate the ample meal rapidly and engaged in goodhumored conversation with family members and his own group. Afterward, he was accompanied upstairs by at least twenty onlookers. Once again he mumbled to himself, shook convulsively while looking at the ceiling, and spoke authoritatively with the same stilted accent: “I will operate on you next Thursday. Soon you will be well. Your cancer will be cured. Meanwhile, rest. Rest and take your medicine.”

He turned from the bed and descended the stairs, once again talking in his normal voice.

We returned to the house full of people who had been waiting for his attention and treatment. José Carlos selected another “volunteer” assistant, a surgeon who was a friend and former classmate of the very patient just visited. A large man, middle-aged and with a precise mustache and an air of expertise, he had come to observe the practitioner into whose hands his friend’s life had been placed. They stood before an attractive young woman who was to be treated first this afternoon. Even before she spoke, José Carlos went through the process of entering trance. He then picked up a scalpel and drove it into her cheek so precisely that only a small incision was made. From this he drained a cyst and removed it in several pieces. She sat quietly for the brief time it took him, her oval face placid. After an assistant closed and bandaged the incision, she smiled a little.

The next few patients were given prescriptions. This break gave me a chance to ask the visiting surgeon, a licensed physician and not a Spiritist, about what I’d seen.

“In your professional opinion, how well was that done?”

“His technique was impressive,” he replied. “Most physicians would have cut an incision four times that size in order to lift the cyst out whole. That is a less exacting technique but then it produces much more bleeding and surrounding tissue damage.”

“Would it take less time that way? This happened pretty quickly.” He looked at me very directly: “I’ve never seen this done so quickly - a fraction of the time usually required.”

“How could he have learned and perfected such skill?”

Poker-faced, the surgeon shrugged. I tried two more questions: “What about no anesthetic? And no antiseptic to clean the scalpel and the wound?”

Another shrug.

By a quarter after three, José Carlos was treating the last of the people who had gathered at this house to see him. Only then did I learn that he would be escorted immediately to another place, already teeming with others seeking his attention. After the second house, there would be a throng waiting for him at a third dwelling. He completed his work there by about five in the afternoon. We returned to the first house, where a jam-packed crowd had formed and was once again awaiting his return.

Without pausing to rest, he moved quickly from patient to patient - examining, diagnosing, writing prescriptions, dispensing his own medicine, performing more surgeries, and scheduling others. Well into the evening he saw the last patient here, but more awaited him at a suburban Spiritist center. That at last concluded the work for this second day. José Carlos glanced at a clock on the wall. It was almost ten at night.

“Dinner!” he exclaimed, looking at his assistants with a broad smile on a face that showed no sign of weariness. “We haven’t had any dinner. We must eat!”

Six of us accompanied him to a beachfront restaurant that provided a singer along with delicious food. When the singer took a break, José Carlos moved to the microphone. He picked up the guitar left there and fulfilled my initial image of him as an entertainer, playing and singing to the obvious delight of the other patrons. I was able to hear the ocean drumming on the shore and retreating waves hissing about the sea’s secrets. We ate, danced, and sang until after midnight.

At eight the next morning the healer was back at work, looking fresh and full of energy. After the night before, I felt well enough acquainted to use the pause for a hurried lunch to ask questions: How did he diagnose patients and decide what medicines to prescribe? Where did he acquire his surgical skills?

“I don’t know how to answer you,” he replied, “since I’m not the one who does this work.” His tone was earnest, his expression without a trace of guile. “St. Ignatius does what is required for each of the patients. Afterward my assistants tell me what he had contributed through me to their well-being. I have no memory of the services rendered.”

“How can you keep on working hour after hour into the night?” I asked, impressed with his energy and tenacity.

“Whenever I return from trance, I feel rested and relaxed, even at the end of the day.”

On the fourth day, however, José Carlos appeared far from relaxed. He seemed agitated. When he was not in trance, there was an undertone of tension to his conversation, an uncharacteristic irritability. Once again, I used the brief lunchtime for conversation, wondering aloud if something was troubling him.

“They’re after me.” His youthful face was clouded with some mixture of anger and sadness. “The police received a complaint from the state medical society. I’ve been accused of violating the law prohibiting the practice of medicine without a license. They’ve warned me: Stop treating people and leave town or be arrested and charged.” “Can that actually happen?”

“Back in the early sixties, a well-known healer popularly known as Zé Arigó was put on trial, found guilty, and sent to jail. And he had far more well-placed supporters than I do.”

“Why so much opposition to what you do?”

“Look across the street,” he replied, referring to the offices of the National Health Services. “This is not a good place to have been rented for my work. Those doctors look out and see all these people waiting for treatments we give to them. Many must be covered by national health insurance - that would mean fees for those doctors if they didn’t come here.”

“Wouldn’t they have known wherever you were located? After all, I read about you in the newspaper. And there’s been mention on the radio.”

For the first time José Carlos smiled a little. “Being under their noses may have been the last straw.” He stood up, reached across the table, and put a friendly hand momentarily on my shoulder. “We must return to our patients.”

Two days later, would-be patients arrived to find José Carlos gone. He’d retreated, unannounced, to a distant suburb, where he was still treating the few who knew of his move. But within days the media discovered and reported his activities. Again the long lines of those seeking his aid formed.

Maria Laura, the hostess of a local radio show on Spiritist themes, came to conduct an interview and observed the cousin collecting money for the special medicine. Without asking for an explanation, she denounced José Carlos on her program and in a newspaper column, accusing him of fraud. The issue had nothing to do with his treatments: there were no complaints, no reports of infections, deaths, or even worsened conditions. There was only the alleged violation of the Spiritist prohibition against receiving payments. But the accuser, daughter of European immigrants and owner of a dress factory, was an activist in the Spiritist community in Fortaleza. What she said carried weight.

Ten days after I first saw him, this healer with the same name as my godson quietly disappeared. The police were satisfied that they had done their job. The medical society was pleased to have protected the public. Those Spiritists opposed to him as a fraud for taking money rejoiced in the preservation of the purity of their beliefs. The cancer victim who anticipated the possibility of a miraculous surgery was in despair.

Two days earlier José Carlos had given me the address and telephone number for his home in Goiânia, capital of the interior state of Goiás. I tried the number from time to time over a period of two decades to no avail. In the future, on my way to see another healer in a nearby town, I went to the address. He was not there. I was neither to see nor hear of him again.

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Footnotes

(1) See: - Weisberg, Barbara. 2004. Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.
- Greenfield, Sidney M. The Return of Dr. Fritz: Spiritist Healing and Patronage Networks in Urban, Industrial Brazil. Social Science and Medicine 24:1095–1108.
- Cavalcanti, Maria Laura. 1983. O Mundo Invisível: Cosmologia, Sistema Ritualm e Noção de Pessoa no Espiritismo. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editoras.

(2) St. Ignatius is also the primary spirit received by João Teixeira de Farias, a healer-medium from Abadiânia, another town in the interior of the state of Goiás. João is popular in Brazil and the United States, which he visits periodically. He is known in English as John of God.

(3) Fuller, John. 1974. Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife. New York: Crowell.

(4) Greenfield, Sidney M. 1987. The Return of Dr. Fritz: Spiritist Healing and Patronage Networks in Urban, Industrial Brazil. Social Science and Medicine 24:1095–1108.

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