The Revolted saint

the image of Saint Sebastian, and its appropriation in afro-brazilian religions, as an iconic act in the Santa Irmandade do Contestado

Abstract

The arrest of the image of a Catholic saint, reported from the poetry of a rebel who acted in the Contestado War, is the leading thread of the analysis proposed in the article. The approach has as a research problem to revisit the historiography of the religiosity of Contestado and to propose connections between the belief in the Catholic saints, evoked by the rebels of Contestado, with religiosities of African matrix. More specifically, it proposes the crossing of the relationship between the image of São Sebastião and that of the Orixá Oxossi. The approach is unprecedented, as until now the interpretation of the Contestado religiosity with the category of rustic Catholicism constructed by the sociologist Duglas Teixeira Monteiro is in force. The connection between the belief of the Contestado faithful with religiosities of African matrix is constructed from traces left in the historiographical tradition on the conflict, in particular comments, footnotes and indications for reading presented in the works of Maurício Vinhas de Queiroz, Márcia Espig and Zélia Lemos. The main source, however, is a poem, in decimal form, attributed to the rebel leader Adeodato Ramos, compiled from oral tradition by the folklorist Euclides Felippe. The hypothesis raised is that the centrality of the presence of São Sebastião as the maximum leadership of the sacred phalanx worshipped by the rebels, as well as its crossing with religions of Afro-Brazilian matrix, is related, among other factors, to the role occupied by the strength and expressiveness of the saint's sculpture, which was built in natural size. The theoretical framework that will support the analysis is the iconic act theory elaborated by the art historian Horst Bredekamp.

Keywords: Saint Sebastian. Afro-Brazilian religiosity. Contestado War. Oxoss.