For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about Afro-Brazilian religious philosophies.
Seu Silva was enjoying an ordinary middle-class Brazilian life before the spirits intervened. One night he awoke with a start to find himself sitting on a grave in a cemetery miles from home. Another time he woke up shirtless, standing in the surf. He sought professional help before eventually being directed to a man who worked with spirits, who fell into a trance and diagnosed his condition: the *exu *Tranca Rua (the trickster spirit of an ancient defrocked Portuguese priest) was responsible for the nighttime journeys, and the spirits were calling Seu Silva to serve them as a medium. Seu Silva accepted the summons, and eventually became the founder and leader of the House of Father John, a center of the Umbanda religion in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, where he serves the faithful by giving voice to helpful spirits who mediate between practitioners and deities.
Social anthropologist Lindsay Hale recounts Seu Silva’s story, and his ministry, in his book Hearing the Mermaid’s Song. Umbanda is a relatively new religion, founded in the early 20th century, that includes elements of 19th-century French Kardecist Spiritism, popular Catholicism, romanticized indigenous elements, and Candomblé—a family of religious traditions carried to Brazil from Africa by enslaved people.