By what kind of awkward revenge does a witch-healer have a revelatory vision, à la Catholic saint, in an urban consumer society today? Perhaps the usurpation of Catholic signs, gestures, visions, and miracles has left its mark not only on priests and fervent churchgoers but also on witchhealers, so-called heretics. This odd complicity between persecutors and persecuted, originating in the distant past and surviving the Inquisition, seems to be resurfacing now in unexpected ways. Fame and pride replace destitution and shame.

If the conquest of the Indies had been attained through the sword, colonization was carried out under the auspices...

Veladas such as these have been extremely popular on the island since the late 1850s, when Kardec’s books on Spiritism were first introduced. One historian writes that the “evocation of spirits was in great vogue at fashionable parties in Puerto Rico as early as 1856” (CruzMonclova 1958:643). In the early years, however, and probably even as late as the first years of the 1900s, veladas seem to have been initiated or conducted not by members of the general public but by physicians, lawyers, journalists, and intellectuals identified with liberal and emancipation ideals who had access to these imported Kardecean texts....

Only in a world pervaded by the dynamic circulation of commodities does such an array of disparate religious icons and beliefs have the possibility of coming together in one place. Free-flowing international healing and magic beliefs found a fertile space here under laws protecting free trade and freedom of religion. Encouraged by the liberal consumer-capitalist state, practices previously marginalized enter a new phase within the free market enterprise of religious practice and alternative healing systems.

Ernesto Pichardo, a santero promoting the institutionalization of Santería as a religion in the United States, said to Russell Miller of the New York Times...

Having completed her improvised morning prayer, Haydée had officially opened her altar for the day and become “spiritually ready” to begin consulting her clients. She had been ill for a few weeks, and she looked forward to resuming her consultations. As on many other occasions when she explained the sacrifice involved in her mission as a bruja to clients and friends, she expressed it in this prayer, asking for strength and direction from God so as to help those in need. I saw how powerful her words could be, even for occasional clients who might have been invited to attend...

As I worked with Haydée in her altar on a regular basis, I gradually began to grasp what Tonio had meant when he said that Haydée was a mediumnidad positiva and that she had a beautiful, clean cuadro.

One’s cuadro, or personal spiritual power, is also one’sdones, spiritual baggage, and it comprises the spirits—the guardian angels—who follow our lives from birth to death.¹ It can simultaneouslypromoteandbe a sign of havingprosperity, luck, love, and respect. Similar to Calvinist belief, prosperity is a sign of being “blessed” (tener bendiciones) by the spirits. But unlike the...

As on this occasion, in Spiritist consultation ceremonies and veladas, various elements of Catholic worship are combined with features of Santería. For instance, trabajos intended to restore a husband’s love are made with calabashes and then offered to Changó, king of love. In cleansing rituals, corn and beans, traditional offerings to Changó, are used in conjunction with the smoking of cigars (photo 6.2), associated with indigenous people and reverence of the Indio, exemplifying the merging of African, Creole, and indigenous deities, as well as Catholic saints, that occurs in Spiritist ceremonies such as Carmen’s.

Likewise, dancing with colored bandannas (each...

The modern bureaucratic system has been viewed by a number of historical and political sociologists, for example, Max Weber (1983) and Reinhard Bendix (1978), as a positive development that turns away from traditional, irrational forms of governance. Briefly, the modern state, with its functional compartmentalization of bureaucratic organizations, was to be guided instead by rationality and technology. Notwithstanding its Kafkaesque dehumanization, the technical expertise of bureaucratic officials— responding only to the functional orientations of their organizations— would have an equalizing effect on citizens. This, it was assumed, would forestall partisan forms of mediation between individuals and the state. All this...

The ultimate law that governs the spiritual sphere, the Law of Love, supersedes all human-made laws. All actions are to be measured against the life and teachings of Jesus, and it is left to the conscience of each person to determine the righteousness of an action. Even when human laws protect one’s actions, it is in the spiritual sphere that these actions will eventually be judged. Given the Spiritist Law of Cause and Effect and Law of Reincarnation, the consequences of one’s actions might reverberate for generations. Thus debts to society are expected to be paid at the spiritual level...