Macumba: White and Black Magic in Brazil

by A.J. Langguth

Jack Langguth is a novelist and former New York Times reporter who became intrigued with Macumba, and set out on a quest to discover its secrets for himself. Beginning in Rio, where the magic is fairly sophisticated (there is a fair-haired witch of Copacabana, who was possessed at the age of twenty, to the horror of her Swiss parents), Langguth moves to the remote forests of Bahia, where the faith remains closer to its primitive African origins. Here the religion worships the good spirits of ancient gods and Indian chiefs from past centuries while giving full due to the Devil and propitiating evil with blood sacrifices. Since the celebrants court the possession of their bodies by these gods, every ritual ends in hysteria and frenzy. From that state, the spirits can heal a man, make him rich, destroy his enemies, or bring him love. Langguth finally comes to the village of Camamu, where both black and white magic abounds, and finds himself covered in blood as he awaits a spirit of his own. Despite this total immersion in the rituals, Langguth went on asking skeptical questions that allowed him to produce here the first objective book on Macumba in English. It is a completely fascinating approach to a phenomenon that has been left too long unexplored.

273 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

A.J. "Jack" Langguth was a Professor at the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California and an American author and journalist. In addition to his non-fiction work, he is the author of several dark, satirical novels. A graduate of Harvard College, Langguth was South East Asian correspondent and Saigon bureau chief for "The New York Times" during the Vietnam war. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1975, and received the The Freedom Forum Award, honoring the nation's top journalism educators, in 2001.
A nonfiction study of the Reconstruction Era, is scheduled to be published in 2013.