Amerindian Perspectivism in the Mythicized Discourses of Popular Catholicism in the Amazon

This article aims to problematize, through the theoretical contributions of the post-colonial studies, the catholic church’s colonization project towards the Amapaense Amazon’s popular catholicism - such as the Myth of Cobra Grande - constituted as a project evolved around eurocentric and judeo-christian assumptions to the detriment of afro-amerindian cultural, identity and religious expressions, of catholic communities in the urban and rural areas of the brazilian Amazon. The amazonian population develops strategies of resistance and re-existence in order to maintain their religious traditions around festa dos santos (festival of saints), pilgrimages, festivities, rosaries, quermesses, and other activities as forms of origins establishment or origins return for the foundation of a narrative identity..

Yet already a century later the highest truth no longer resided in what discourse was or did, but in what it said: a day came when truth was displaced from the ritualized, efficacious and just act of enunciation, towards the utterance itself, its meaning, its form, its object, its relation to its reference. (Michel Foucault) The religious and cultural aspects in the Amazon context are complex, plural and split. Since the beginning of the europeans' presence in the Amazon, catholicism was important for the implementation of a colonizing project endorsed by the great maritime powers in the 15th and 16th centuries, such as Portugal and Spain, which begat a variety of experienced and shared identity expressions that were syncretic by hybridizations and miscegenations, that show us a very different conception of the world than that dictated by europeans, caucasians, christians and westerners.
The religious and cultural aspects defended by the catholic church, however, were important to justify the imposition of a model of society brought to the Amazon by europeans, through a project that rejected the cultural values of indigenous peoples and, later, the traditional values of the black culture.
The catholic church's objective in the Amazon was to turn the region into a christian region in the shapes thought by the catholic hierarchy... in the performance of jesuit, benedictine, franciscan and tridentine priests, polygamy, shamanism, venator rituals, polytheistic beliefs and practices, the clothing and other habits subsequent to the amerindian, black and ribeirinhos (river dwellers) mentality and identity were repudiated. Through catechization, they would taught the pillars of the catholic faith, the need to believe and live sacramental values (baptism, marriage, priesthood, confession), the division of labour between men and women and, mostly, the belief in the one God as defended by judeo-christian values.
There were many deaths, arrests, censorship, persecution, inquisition to fight the values considered as devil worship and barbarian by priests... those arising from african and indigenous aspects that we call afro-amerindians. However, popular amazonian catholicism is nuanced by a residual mentality that reinterpreted the identity signs of these ethnicities in the ethos of its practitioners, generating a polyphonic, heteroglossic discourse, in which these believers' voices echo the voices of social and historical resonant forces, that explains the regular moments in popular celebrations of catholic communities that have the presence of elements such as derrubada do mastro (falling of a tree), cortejo, food, music, dances, prayers, benzedores, religious counseling, incorporation of spirits, alcoholic drinks, enchanted, myths (boto, curupira, cobra grande, among others), community experiences, etc.
Naturally, the conflict was established in the implantation of catholicism's religious discourse, because its true means of enunciation would be the confrontation between colonial REIS, Marcos Vinicius Freitas; PEREIRA, Marcos Paulo Torres. Amerindian Perspectivism in the Mythicized Discourses of Popular Catholicism in the Amazon Dossiê practices and beliefs and traditional practices and beliefs of the colonized, between social and historical voices in this relational universe of dialogical enunciation, in the attempts to impose romanized catholicism on catholic communities in the Amazon were shocked by the resistance in maintaining the traditional values experienced by these peoples. On the one hand, the priests rigidly defended the liturgical values of the christian mass, they tried to easily offer access to the sacraments among the indigenous, black and ribeirinho people, through theater, songs and sermons.
Otherwise, the amazonian communities, whether as a strategy of resistance or of re-existence, assimilate catholic teachings and associate them with their traditions, not allowing the erasure of their cultural values.
This article aims to problematize the discourses of sectors of the catholic hierarchy, that argue vigorously for their values, their dogmas, their worldview based on judeo-christian foundations, in contrast to the residual discourses of syncretic religious aspects of amazonian culture, in the tópos of its popular catholicism in which the myth of Cobra Grande 1 -and its derivations -becomes resignified from fabled material into belief... The veracity's report of the existence of the "Cobra Grande" is shared by many, exempting it from the dictional fiction characteristic, mainly in rural communities and in small cities in the interior of the amazonian states, as in Pará and Amapá. The State of Amapá is the Brazilian region in the far north of Brazil.
We have approximately 800 thousand inhabitants and 16 municipalities. This region is part of the Plato de Guianas.
As Bakhtin stated (2010, p. 106), all the constituent forms of this amazonian popular catholic discourse, in which Cobra Grande becomes a participant, are from social and historical voices that give it certain concrete meanings that organize themselves in a harmonious belief system -because they are assimilated, because they are syncretic -expressing its socio-ideological position, which differ from that colonizer catholicism and those beliefs of the amerindian, black and riverside of the colonized, because it is no longer one discourse with its origins, but a new religious discourse different from those that originated it, even if it keeps similarities with them.
We rely on post-colonial authors, such as Stuart Hall (1996;2003), Albert Memmi (1996), Homi K. Bhabha (1998) and Agenor Sarraf Pacheco (2013), to help us reflect how these religious values and cultural residuals have become identity signs of resistance and the re-existence of amazonian religiosity. We also used some references from theorists of the religious phenomenon in the Amazon, such as Eduardo Galvão (1976) and Raimundo Heraldo Maués (1995), among other theorists, trying to understand how power markers struggled for the preservation of the myth 2 of Cobra Grande in the syncretic religious discourse of popular amazonian catholicism, through a theoretical and methodological reflection that, based on the religious experience around this myth in the amapaense (related to Amapá, a state in the northern region of Brazil) Amazon, questions the imposition of religiosity brought by catholic priests.
If "cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture" (HALL, 1996, p. 70), then the resistance to adhere to the belief practices and to the catholic rite consists in refusing to discredit, to forget, to erase the particularities that the amapaense amazonian communities attribute to themselves as belonging to a sphere of representation that distinguishes them as individuals and as a group.
The discourses of the colonizer and of the colonized, under the symbology of Cobra Grande, constitute a new discourse arising from an interculturality that revives the mentality of the subjects participating in the enunciation, therefore, the concept of identity adopted in this study will take place as a self-narrative (BHABHA, 1998;RICOEUR, 1991), because as a practical category identity is always a matter of narrating oneself, a work constituted through the hermeneutics of oneself, by means of a change of perspective from reflection to analysis, through the understanding that the "individualizing perspective of narrative identity seeks to designate who makes the discourse and the action, making oneself as another identify, in a range of particular things of the same type, the one about they were willing to narrate about, mobilizing operators of individualization" (PEREIRA, 2019, p. 150).
When we talk about cultural and religious aspects of the amapaense Amazon, the strong influence of the catholic church on people's daily lives is natural. Their way of speaking, their actions, economic and political activities, sociability with other people, beliefs, customs, mentality, in many other situations are inspired by the judeo-christian values (PIMENTEL, 2015).
According to Reis and Carmo (2015), data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) in 2010 shows that the amapaense society is mostly catholic, because around 64% of the population identifies with christian catholic values. In absolute terms, we can say that the state of Amapá is a majority of catholics and not a catholical hegemonic, as it was until the 1970s, 2 "The myth is an interpretation of nature, a preliminary phase of philosophy as it seeks an explanation -knowledge -of the world. As the myth is the answer to an implicit question, this answer apprehends the elements about what is questioned and assembles them together in an event -which has an allegorical function. The characters of this reportanswer, being allegorical, whether they are human beings, animals, plants, objects, or natural phenomena, do not represent caricatures or aspects of a psyche, but representations of a third phenomenon, which is being explained. The jump from the events of the report-answer to the explanation of the phenomenon -generally natural -takes place by analogy, making the report itself have a metaphorical function ". (SPERBER, 2009, p. 266) when more than 90% of the population was essentially catholic (REIS & CARMO, 2015, p. 180 Conforming to Mafra (2013, p. 20), IBGE data show us a "radiography" of the profile of the amazonian religious field throughout history, however, there are flaws: the data cannot measure the double or triple belonging of people, it cannot identify issues concerning to religious syncretism, as well as it fails to capture how legends, myths, tales and popular beliefs affect amazonians' lives.
Even though the catholic church is the largest religious institution in the Amazon regarding to number of supporters, it does not necessarily maintain the same influence on society as it did in the middle of the 20th century (MAFRA, 2013, p. 34). Afro-Amerindian aspects associated with catholic habits show the religious and cultural characteristics of the Amazon caboclo (a person whose parents are indigenous and white people) (MAUÉS 1995, p. 56). Considering these data collected by IBGE as exponents of identity markers serves us as an instrument of problematization of the concept of identity, as it explains its changing character in time and in space regarding to the religious aspect of the amapaense Amazon, in a convergence movement of the difference coming from this discursive device.
Identity does not signal that stable core of the self, unfolding from beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without change; the bit of the self which remains alwaysalready 'the same', identical to itself across time. Nor is it that 'collective or true self hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed "selves" which a people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common' and which can stabilize, fix or guarantee an unchanging 'oneness' or cultural belongingness underlying all the other superficial differences… They are subject to a radical historicization. (HALL, 2000, p. 108) According to Maués (1999, p. 73), popular catholicism is one of the trademarks of the catholic church in the Amazon... devotion to saints, pilgrimages, rosaries, quermesses, novenas, festivities, promises, litanies, processions -markers of this identity -are elements that cannot be missing from catholic celebrations in urban and rural communities. The priests, in a search for controlling the discourse to homogeneity, try to control the praying practices, the organization of the celebrations and other elements justifying that catholic activities cannot adopt profane elements (MAUÉS, 1995, p. 60), however, in the popular festivities, the elements of catholic spirituality, even though highlighted, coexist with traditional practices and beliefs of the communities, demarcating in masses, baptisms, weddings, parties and catechesis the residual, revived and resignified afro-amerindian elements. In dialogue with a ribeirinho inhabitant of the Buiussú river, in Melgaço, an expert puxador de coluna (vertebral column puller), who inherited from his mother the art of healing bodies with muscle sprain or "muscle stiffness", we became aware that among the natural oils used to work stiffed or displaced regions of the body, there is the "tacacá" of the sloth -a kind of liquid found between the bony joints of the animal that, in the afro-indigenous cosmological understanding, does not suffer from these problems. According to the puller, the animal tacacá is the best oil he knows for working massages in inflexible and painful parts of the body, because the sloth performs with mastery and skill the biggest "jugglings" by carrying a powerful lubricant in its joints. The explanation for the use of "sloth's tacacá" as a powerful medicine for solving spine problems rests on the deep relationship of the man with the Marajoara fauna and flora. Expert in the codes and rules of the forest and animal life, the ribeirinho puller demonstrates harmony with the dynamics of the ribeirinho culture and understanding of their potential to guarantee their existence of their traditions. (PACHECO, 2013, p. 484) Another important aspect of amazonian religiosity is the enchanted. According to Figueiredo (2009) analyzing the representation of that colonizer who, even if refusing to assume the role of dominance over another, when in contact with the colonized who was previously the distant, the exotic, and who now is "living and suffering humanity", comes to rescue them. For the catholic church, the characterizer of "living and suffering humanity" would perfectly apply to amazonian communities, because would not this be the evangelizing north of its doctrine... taking God to those who need Him? But, for the author, at the same time that this colonizer understands the other as belonging to humanity, he "has another civilization before him, customs differing from his own, men whose reactions often surprise him, with whom he does not feel deep affinity". And he adds: the colonizer "cannot help judging those people and that civilization. How can one deny that they are underdeveloped, that their customs are oddly changeable and their culture outdated? (1977, p. 37). In the same way, we repeat: for the catholic church, "everything that departs from their values are, of course, demonized and pathologized ".
In the same tone, Viveiros de Castro (2017, p. 189) wrote about the evangelizing process of the church to the amerindians, to the Tupinambás, explaining how totally different perceptions of the world made it impossible to fully grasp the enunciation imposed on them by the colonizer: Thus it is seen that the three constitutive absences of the brazilian gentile were causally linked: they had no faith because they had no law, they had no law because they had no king. Their language didn't even have the sound (f's, l's and r's), nor the sense. True belief assumes regular submission to the rule, and this it assumes the exercise of coercion by a sovereign. Because they had no king, they believed in priests; for the same reason, because they didn't have it, they discredited. The State's refusal (...) was not only manifested, or mainly, in a prophetic discourse that denies the social order (...); it was already embedded in the relationship with every discourse, as an order of reasons with totalizing pretension, and this included the word of the karaiba. The Tupinambás did everything they were told by prophets and priests -except what they didn't want to.  Martins (2007), such bishop, jointly with priests, threw stones, insulted or even articulated with political authorities places to arrest pastors, pajés, "wizards", witchers, with the justification of being charlatans or healers (MARTINS, 2007, p 80).
The author points out that the printed "Estrela da Manhã" newspaper was created in that capital with the eagerness to criticize the advance of protestantism and the urban and rural mentality of people who no longer followed catholic values, also to defend the elimination of "barbarian" customs that happened between black people, ribeirinho people and indigenous people (customs that were religious activities related to pajelança, tambor, shamanism, or other healing rituals). The In the municipality of Macapá, state of Amapá, the narrative about Cobra Grande takes place in one of the main tourist spots in the city, Pedra do Guindaste, located 300 meters from the Amazon River, next to the Trapiche Eliezer Levy, in the commercial and touristic area, where, throughout the year, several tourists take photos and touch the stone in order to learn more about the myth.
On it, Pedra do Guindaste, is the image of São José, the one whose elected as patron and protector of Amapá through the discourse of the Catholic Church, made by portuguese sculptor Antônio Ferreira da Costa. In the middle of the 20th century, this monument was used as a target for the firing exercises of soldiers linked to the former Federal Territory, as the structure is located next to the São José Fortress, in the edge of the Municipality of Macapá.
According to the participants of this research, mainly older residents of the Perpetuo Socorro neighborhood, in Macapá, which was formerly known as Praia street and women's Igarapé, there is under the Pedra do Guindaste a large snake with imaginable dimensions that, when the tide is low, leaves the rock to drink water. As the snake returns with the high tide, the water never covered the stone because its presence would elevate the monument. The syncretic symbolic of this representation produces an image of heteronomic protection: the greatest protection did not come from public power, but it did from the protection offered by the symbolic mark... on Pedra do Guindaste rests the catholic image of the protector and patron, São José; under the Stone, the Cobra Grande.
Still for the participants, if someone dares to remove the stone from its place, the Amazonas River would increase its water volume and the whole city of Macapá would sink, enchanted. In addition to this collected version during the research, another one presented itself to the origin of Pedra do Guindaste: it is said that the first inhabitants of the coast of Macapá would have been the Tucujús indigenous tribe. A very beautiful indian of that ethnicity fell in love with an indian who harvested food in that region every day. They started a relationship and every day the couple repeated the same things: the man went out to collect the food and the woman accompanied him to the beach, staying until the sunset in Lagoa dos Índios. In the late afternoon, they both returned to their homes. One day, the couple went down to the river to get supplies and the woman, as usual, was waiting for him. However, that day he did not return. As her beloved did not return, the indian squat and cried. For days and nights, her weeping repeated until her death. In the same place where she had stayed, a mysterious stone shaped like a woman's body appeared.
In the 1970s, as Reis & Carvalho (2016, p 160)  goes beyond the meaning of the ego to understanding and feeling that is that of all humans, of all beings endowed with conscience not because they thought but because they were thought...
Perspectivist because it is not a single point of view, that of official catholicism, but that of different points of view constituents of a parental community made up of people, animals, spirits, plants and everything else imagined as a subject, distinct from each other not by essence -that everything is human! -but by corporealities. Câmara Cascudo presented us the myth: Between the Amazon River and the Trombetas River a woman felt pregnant when bathing in the river. The children were born and it was a pair of twins who came into the world in the form of two dark snakes: Maria Caninana and Honorato. As they could not live on the land, the mother threw them in the paraná do Cachoeri. Honorato was strong and good and from time to time he came to visit his mother. At night he would drag his huge body along the creaky sand. Left the monstrous snake skin, turning into a handsome boy, all dressed in white. At dawn, Honorato went down the bank and got inside the snake and plunged into the waters of paraná. He saved a lot of people from drowning, won big and ferocious fish, like the river piraíba piranha that fought him for three days. Maria Caninana was violent and bad. It flooded the boats, killed the castaways, attacked the fishermen. Cobra Norato killed his sister and became alone in the streams. When there were parties in the villages, he used to go up disenchanted, all dressed in white to dance with the girls. At dawn Honorato was going to fulfill his destiny. Its biggest desire was to be disenchanted by someone who had the courage to drip his mouth open three drops of woman's milk and give an iron cut virgin on the snake's head stretched out on the beach. In Cametá, Norato became friends with a soldier who disenchanted him as needed. Norato even helped burning the body of the big snake where he had lived so many years and started to live as a man in that same city. (CASCUDO, 2000, p. 39) Norato's metamorphosis -from snake to man, from man to snake -is notmoral change, but a physical and symbolic one, because his humanity existed independently of the nature of the body he wore. According to Câmara Cascudo, it was a transformation nuanced by the body as clothing, as costuming, as instrument, in a condition of being momentaneously snake or human, and not of being eternally snake or human, through a immanent perspectivist comprehension to the enunciation of the myth.
Norato's body becomes a combination of social meanings and object of social significance, since in his body orbits meanings that evoke the cause and the instrument of designation and transformations in the scope of identity, continuously apparatus to discursive action that articulates REIS, Marcos Vinicius Freitas; PEREIRA, Marcos Paulo Torres. Amerindian Perspectivism in the Mythicized Discourses of Popular Catholicism in the Amazon Dossiê sociocultural and cosmological meanings -young man in white whose snake skin had left to participate in festivities; snake that abandoned white men's clothes to fulfill his desire in the river.
The veracity report of the existence of "Cobra Grande" is shared by many people, mainly in rural communities or small towns in the interior states, transforming what the catholic hierarchy defined as fiction into diction. To traditional amazonian communities, however, in a residual perspectivist apprehension, the report is a truth of faith, because there is no distinction and distances between the human and the divine, between the physical and the metaphysical, because the human is not perfect in being for a moment, but in being eternally in a certain condition of nature, culturally modeled in a notion on which the epithet of alterity is subordinated. In this statement, the Myth must not be understood as a false explanation by means of images and fables, but a traditional narration which relates to events that happened at the beginning of time and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of men of today, and, in a general manner, establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in his world. (RICOEUR, 2013, p. 21) It is also worth noticing the distinction that followed the serpent of the catholic discourse of traditional amazonian... while in the first the snake evokes evil, for being the seductress in Eden, the one who had alienated humanity from God; in the second, the snake is participant in common living, present in rivers and forests and also in traditional Amazo cosmogony. It is common for each region to have its own representation of myth, some centering their discourse on the figure of Norato, when looking for a manifestation of humanity in the symbolic of the Cobra; in other regions, however, when one seeks in myth the manifestation of a death drive 3 , Maria Caninana or even the Cobra Sofia. In traditional narratives, Cobra Grande has magical abilities, being able to eliminate breaches, protect a certain person or town, become human, it could also kill people or One, the science aiming to help or even punish for something wrong or some disobedience, or even mistreatment of the environment.
The apprehension -and the experience! -of this myth in the enunciation of popular Amazon catholicism expresses different levels of knowledge, not only marked, but also formulated from cosmogonic emotions and perceptions of the world. Following the writings of Bhabha (1998), the speech that evokes the presence of Cobra Grande, Norato, Sofia and/or Maria Caninana would become performativity, because it would resume the ethnic-cultural discourse in a task of discursive erasure of the colonial to the identity foundation of oneself, because, we repeat, the discourse that revives Cobra would not be fiction, but a diction for the amazonian populations. Far from being grounded in imagery recovery from the past, Cobra is alive, creates contexts of action and relationship, projects experiences and interacts with her own.
Even the colonial discourse having combated the discourse of the colonized in all possible forms (censorship, persecutions, prisons, inquisitions and deaths), in Amazon communities, what would be, to the colonizer, demoniac and barbarian, would be resignified and redivive in the enunciation of popular catholicism, sharpening the common living, the ethos of its practitioners, because this was identity, accessible and common, because it was a cosmogonic and traditional experience, because the forest context inserted them and protected them much more than that of distant origin imposed on them.
The configurations of meaning immanent to the symbolic of the Cobra Grande, emanate the demarcation of an essence, a truth to the ethos of the amapaense Amazons, indeed!, however, they still emanate a decolonial positioning of resistance and re-existence between the subject who positions himself and the positioned subject, to the resumption of a leading role in his experience whose corollary resignifies the communitarian experience of resistance to erasure and silencing that would be imposed on him… So the Cobra hisses, the Cobra wakes up, the Cobra sheds its skin, drinks gengibirra and she dances... Cobra is alive and among those who can see her enchantment. In this regard, resistance is made.

Final cnsiderations
The Catholic Church has always tried to be hegemony in the Amazon from its religious proposal. With the arrival of diocesan orders, creation of parishes, creation of prelaces, bishoprics and missionaries, the objective was to combat the influence of indigenous and african religion and culture, so it repudiated any identity signs of the traditional amazonian communities that did not commune with their worldview.
Its colonizing project consisted of erasing what it considered as enemies of the faith, so, throughout history, it faced in many ways the advancement of protestants in Amapá... it burned bibles, arrested pastors, threw stones and slandered. African-based religions and indigenous traditions, in turn, have always been associated with demoniac practices by the religious discursive statement of discursive religious homogeneity.
The construction of the image of São José in the Trapiche Eliezer Levy on the edge of Macapá had become an exhibitor of this objective of erasing traditional culture, for through the insertion of a discursive power exhibitor resignifying catholicism to a mark, Pedra do Guindaste, which traditionally was an ethnic identity sign.
The religious image sought to erase the myth of Cobra Grande from the amapaense mentality through the action of power -and the location of the mark in Macapá's tourist and commercial area would maximize this representation, because it added even more power to the imaginary construction that Macapá was a christian city. Even with all these actions, the church's intent had not been realized because the amapaense Amazon is marked by cultural and religious diversity since its genesis. To accept tax discourses would be to submit to the colonizer, therefore the strategy of resistance and re-existence: assimilating the colonizer's discourse, but making it syncretic, amalgamated with popular religiosity, experienced not only in the belief of the enchanted ones of the forest and the orixás, but resignified in the dialogue with the catholic saints, with dogmatic questions, whence a new residual statement emerged, crystallized by its origin, but new in its nature… the popular amazonian catholicism.
As exhibitors of this other ethos in the statement that constitutes the potentiation of otherness, the teachings propagated from the Cobra myth show the face of the amazonian caboclo culture, thus becoming a marker of identity the meaning of life, its relation to death and mourning, the meaning of ones forms of survival, of their political and social organization... coming from that perspective that the afro-amerindian cosmogonic view resignifies.
The 3 meter high image of São José at Pedra do Guindaste did not succeed in destroying Cobra Grande's performance of the mentality of the amapaenses... on the contrary, the participants of this identity performance of which the image is a milestone seem to believe that São José accepted the traditional beliefs and accepted that the magical powers of Cobra Grande would also help the people from Macapá, protecting them, securing them from all evils. If, before, destroying the monument would mean provoking the anger of Cobra Grande and not having her help in valuing life, in the discourse of popular catholicism, São José would also take their pains, because in the belief of these people the two would be allies. If provoking one's anger would already be unadvisable, perhaps now that they are together it is even more.