Urban Neoshamanism: Updating the Sacred Jurema in Northeast Brazil

Abstract

Contemporary urban life has shown an increasing discomfort to individuals who have been experiencing almost epidemic symptoms of stress, depression and persistent melancholy as a result of experiences increasingly removed from a satisfactory and comfortable human sense. We study here the involvement of two individuals from quite different origins involved in the search for this meaning and who found in neoshamanism a way of returning to Nature and fullness, still inserted in the urban social life to which they belong. Although of Italian origin, Garone comes to Brazil and from revelations given by the jurema itself as an entity, he receives a call for the creation of his own neoshamanic line, associating techniques experienced in several countries with his own experience of these revelations. He was responsible for the establishment of four more groups here in Brazil and another one in Italy. Nilma is a Brazilian descendant of the Anambés, people from a traditional indigenous community in Pará. Her original group did not have a tradition of using power plants. Biologist with a postgraduate degree in Human Ecology also found in the neoshamanic use of Jurema, the rescue of his identity and ancestral reconnection. Their reunion was motivated by the anthropological studies of their academic formation. Both find in the northeastern origin of this sacrament an identification that brings them to their coexistence, and both start to take up residence in the region.The two cases addressed demonstrate the need for a new meaning of religiosity in the urban environment, which can be catalyzed by the use of power plants, if necessary modified for uses in adapted environments, even if they are far from their ancestral origin. Both have in the Santo Daime Doctrine a gateway established to access a ritualistic way that allowed the development of two different lines of neoshamanism based on the use of Jurema. Both adapt to their own environment a different manifestation, revealed by the ritual itself for each one.