Canudos, Brazil, utopian religious community 1893-1897

[jondwhite]

An interesting tale to pass the time

Quote:

In 1893, Antônio settled with a handful of followers on an abandoned farm in Canudos. They were squatters on land belonging to the richest landowner in the province, the Baron of Jeremoabo. Northeastern Brazil was a lawless place, and desperately poor. Less than one percent of the inhabitants owned more than the clothes on their backs. In the 1870s, drought had killed a million people. At the end of the 1890s, it killed a million more. For the dispossessed, Canudos acted like a magnet. From across the Northeast, landless peasants and former slaves streamed into the Holy City. There they were joined by backland cow drovers and uprooted Kiriri Indians, and even a few bandits. By 1897, Canudos had grown into a town of 30,000 people, the second largest in the province.

For a few years the experiment flourished. The city was run as a communitarian theocracy, with rule by apostle. Property was held in common. Money and alcohol were banned. Businessmen moved in, setting up a thriving trade in leather with the coast.

This is the part of the story where I would normally explain that it was all really a cult, that Conselheiro was a fanatic, and that his movement was really about self-aggrandizement or sexual control. That’s generally the case with charismatic movements and self-contained utopias. From the beginning, millenarian movements, no matter how egalitarian, have been afflicted by a creeping Jim Jones-ism: megalomania among the leaders and subservience in the followers, all leading up to catastrophe in the end. But that doesn’t seem to have been the case in Canudos. While the city grew, Conselheiro kept doing what he had always done: preaching and building churches. He left the day-to-day administration of the town to his deputies, the apostles. He was treated like a beato, a holy man, but he didn’t take on airs. ‘The Counselor’ was just a nickname. Conselheiro always referred to himself by his given name, Antonio Maciel. From the outside, it looks as if he made good on his promise. He returned the church to its communal roots, and built a place where race and class didn’t matter.

 

http://www.theawl.com/2013/04/our-radical-future-cults-utopias-and-rebellions-of-the-1890s

[Author]

Posts