‘IT’S ALL TO DO WITH WORDS’: AN ANALYSIS

OF SPIRIT POSSESSION IN THE VENEZUELAN

CULT OF MARÍA LIONZA

B P
London School of Economics & Political Science

Humans possessed by spirits are often described as ill or distressed, lacking power, control,
and agency, and spirit possession has been described as a kind of ventriloquism in which
mediums acquire a voice more powerful than their own as humans. What remains unsaid
and unheard is what the spirits and humans talk about during possession episodes.This article
suggests that the tendency to focus on the form and not the content of possession episodes
has allowed for another form of ventriloquism, in which anthropologists themselves use the
mediums to speak to their own agendas. Against this tendency, participants in the cult of
María Lionza see words as central to the cult, to be listened to carefully. An analysis of the
content of their possession episodes reveals how, far from being passive, deprived of agency,
and ‘muted’, the possessed in the cult are actively engaged in an ongoing conversation with
anthropologists, historians, the media, and the state.

In most anthropological accounts, humans who become possessed by spirits

are described as ill or distressed, as lacking power, control, and agency, their
experience one of loss (Bourgouignon 1973; Crapanzano 1977; Lewis 1989;
Obeyesekere 1981; Ong 1988). Such accounts generally assume that the
mediums participate in possession so as to acquire a more powerful and
authoritative voice than the one they have as humans. Spirit possession is thus
described by anthropologists as a kind of ventriloquism in which the mediums
use the spirits in order to speak (Nourse 1996: 425). What anthropological
analyses tend to leave unclear, however, is what the spirits and the possessed
actually say during possession episodes. Instead, they tend to focus on the
context in which spirit possession develops, on its form, and on the social,
economic, or ethnic background of the participants.1 By contrast, mediums
and believers in the Venezuelan cult of María Lionza describe their cult, their
beliefs, their relations with the spirits, and the spirits themselves as being con-
stituted through and by words. Words, they affirm, are what the cult is all
about. This article develops out of an attempt to make sense of this striking
discrepancy between perceptions of spirit possession within the María Lionza
cult and anthropological understandings of the phenomenon.
Boddy (1994: 408) states that spirit possession has long attracted anthropo-
logical interest and ‘has rarely missed a theoretical beat’ because, in its form,
‘it appears dramatically and intransigently exotic, unrecognizable’ (1994: 407-
© Royal Anthropological Institute 2001.
J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 7, 207-224
208 BARBARA PLACIDO

8). Exoticism, however, is not the only possible explanation for anthropologi-
cal interest in possession. The tendency to focus on the form of possession
episodes (which is often elaborate) and to neglect the content (which, by con-
trast, is often prosaic) has allowed for ‘others’ – that is, neither the spirits, nor
the possessed, nor the believers – to speak through the possessed. More specifi-
cally, this article argues, spirit possession can be described as a form of ven-
triloquism in which anthropologists themselves use the mediums in order to
speak. Often it is the anthropologist who seems to take hold of the possessed
and speak through their bodies, and the voice gained by the possessed becomes
that of the anthropologist. On further examination, their agendas seem to
coincide with remarkable regularity. Like the anthropologists, the latter seem
to be contesting, depending on shifts in emphasis within the discipline, gender
and ethnic inequalities, marginality, colonialism, capitalism, or racism. Indeed,
so frequently have anthropologists and the possessed coincided in this way that
one could imagine a reversal of perspective: not anthropology analysing spirit
possession, but spirit possession as a window onto the variety of shapes anthro-
pological theories have taken over the years.
As academic discussion has developed, the suggested causes leading to spirit
possession have also changed. Possession itself has moved from being seen as
an illness to becoming an idiom of distress. Spirit cults have thus slowly shifted
from being considered weapons of the weak, responses to disempowerment
caused by political, economic, ethnic, and gender factors, to being seen as his-
torically sensitive modes of cultural resistance (Brown 1994; Stoller 1989).
Boddy (1988: 5), for example, argues that in Hofryati (Northern Sudan)
possession is not a cult of the afflicted, but is rather central to cultural pro-
duction. Instead of seeing possession as women’s direct claim to redress, she
affirms that one should see it as ‘an embodied critique of colonial, national
or global hegemonies whose abrasions are deeply, but not exclusively, felt by
women’ (Boddy 1994: 419).
The more recent approaches described above see popular religion and
possession cults as anti-institutional ‘cultural resistance’ and as ‘cultural cri-
tique’, and their aim is often that of attributing agency to subordinate peoples.
However, in the end these approaches risk denying agency to the possessed
and instead attributing them an agency and a voice that are not their own,
leaving the words spoken during possession episodes unheard. Furthermore,
the anthropological constructions of possession described above are culturally
specific: they are based mostly on possession phenomena occurring in Islamic
societies in Africa and Asia. Spirit possession, however, also occurs both within
institutionalized settings and within a Christian context. In Africa, Pentecostal
Churches and other Christian-derived religious organizations employ posses-
sion as a religious experience (Meyer 1999; Peel 1968). Churches and cults
compete with and borrow from each other (Hagan 1988). Similarly, in Latin
America, spirit possession routinely occurs within religious cults of Afro-
American origin reworked within a Catholic context, such as Umbanda,
Candomblé, Santería, and Voodoo (Brandon 1993; Brown 1991; Brown 1994;
Wafer 1991).
The literature on spirit possession has tended to ignore studies in these
more institutionalized settings. Equally, the literature on Afro-American cults,
Pentecostal and Christian Churches has not generally focused on spirit
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possession per se. One objective of my research on María Lionza has been to
recognize the links between these generally separate fields of research, between
institutionalized cults and spirit possession.
Another recent, related shift in anthropology towards cultural interpreta-
tions has led anthropologists to define spirit possession as an idiom of com-
munication used differently in different societies and to consider how this
idiom is constructed and used. Thus, more contextualixed accounts of spirit
possession have been generated (Crapanzano 1977; Obeyesekere 1981).
However, even here, little attention has been paid to what is ‘literally’ expressed
through these idioms, to what is actually said and done during possession
episodes. According to Lambek (1980: 323), this ends up re-establishing the
association between spirit possession and distress, thus reducing or categoriz-
ing possession as something else. To avoid this, we should see it as a text, as
constituting a system of communication, whether or not one is, by Western
definitions, distressed; we should create a model of spirit possession which
focuses ‘on the product rather than on the process of production’ (Lambek
1989: 55). This article takes up Lambek’s suggestion that analyses of spirit
possession should focus on content and not only on form, on what is actu-
ally done and said during these episodes.
The content of possession episodes, what is said and done when the spirits
‘descend’ into the mediums, is something that participants in the Venezuelan
cult of María Lionza value very highly and listen to very carefully. It is during
these episodes that the spirits of the cult are constructed, that knowledge about
them is created and legitimized, that the cult itself is given shape. The spirits
exist in the world of the believer: in other words, they are social persons
(Lambek 1980; 1989). Furthermore, participants in the cult not only have a
voice of their own, and with it agency and power, but also have the capac-
ity to speak on behalf of the anthropologists, the media, and the official
narratives about the cult produced by the Venezuelan state. Episodes of spirit
possession illustrate how, in the cult of María Lionza at least, there is a
constant feedback between academics, the people, and the phenomena they
study. Spirit possession is experienced as ‘empowering’ people. Far from being
passive, deprived of agency, and ‘muted’, the possessed are actively engaged in
an ongoing conversation with anthropologists, historians, the media, and the
state. It is within this conversation that the cult is created.

The cult of María Lionza

The Venezuelan cult of María Lionza is centred around the figure of a young
girl who can appear in two guises. As a powerful and sexy Indian woman,
she is depicted naked, riding a tapir, and holding between her upstreched arms
a human pelvis. Under this guise she is often referred to as ‘Yara’, this being,
some people say, her authentic Indian name. She can also appear as a white
virginal young girl, wearing a blue mantle over her head and shoulders and
bearing a striking resemblance to the Virgin Mary, with whom she shares the
name María. Also known as ‘the Queen’, María Lionza reigns over a kingdom
of spirits located in the centre of the Venezuelan democratic state which the
state officially recognizes and legitimizes. The mountain of Sorte, six hour’s
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drive from Caracas, is the María Lionza National Park. It is inhabited by a

large number of spirits and, at weekends and on particular holidays, by large
numbers of pilgrims. The pilgrims who go to Sorte are low- and middle-class
urban Venezuelans, mestizos who see in their pilgrimages to the mountain,
considered an autochthonous sacred place, a manner of strengthening what
they describe as their authentic Indian identity (although they would never
describe themselves as Indians or blacks outside the cult). The spirits of the
Queen’s kingdom are historical and legendary characters from Venezuela’s
history. They include ‘el Libertador’, Simón Bolívar, the man who fought for
and won the independence of many Latin American countries, the paramount
Venezuelan national hero and centre of a national state cult; ‘el Negro Felipe’,
a black man who is said to have fought with Bolívar in the Independence
Wars; ‘el Indio Guaicaipuro’, who is believed to have fought against the Con-
querors at the time of the Conquest; José Gregorio Hernandez, a popular and
much-loved Venezuelan doctor, who is in the process of sanctification
(Margolies 1988).
When María Lionza in her Virgin-Mary guise, el Negro Felipe, and el
Indio Guaicaipuro appear together, they are defined as ‘Las Tres Potencias’,
the Three Powers, and are described as the emblem of the Venezuelan nation,
as the essence of the three races that make it up. They are also a figura-
tive version of the Venezuelan flag, each character being associated with one
of its three colours (blue, red, and yellow). When depicted in her Indian
guise, María Lionza looks like an inversion of the best-known image of el
Libertador, the one which is found at the centre of every Plaza Bolívar in the
centre of every Venezuelan village, city, and town: she rides a tapir, he rides a
horse; she is naked, he wears an army uniform; she holds a human pelvis, he
holds a sword.
All these characters, together with many others, can descend into and com-
municate with humans through the help of the materias. The materias are the
mediums who can ‘receive’ the spirits; bancos is the name given to the mediums
who can ‘work’ with the spirits but who cannot be possessed by them. Mate-
rias and bancos should always work together, the banco’s role being that of easing
the relation between spirits and materia, making the spirits feel welcome and
explaining what they say to the audience.
Believers, but also journalists, academics, and travel guides, describe the cult
as old, authentic, and of autochthonous Indian origins (Dydynski 1994: 9;
Perrottet 1993: 21). Archaeological remains found in the area of Sorte are seen
as supporting this claim: they prove that the area was inhabited by Indians
well before the Conquest. Continuity has thus been posited and established
between the Indians of the past and the practices and traditions of the pil-
grims who now visit the National Park and interact with the spirits (Barreto
1987: 51). It is the same Indians, or so the pilgrims, anthropologists, and
archaeologists claim, that we now see on people’s altars and who now descend
into the mediums’ bodies. In fact, as the Venezuelan anthropologist Barreto
(1987) has convincingly argued, although the cult of María Lionza might find
its roots in the country’s past, it developed at the beginning of the twentieth
century, when the Venezuelan state officially recognized, or reinvented, it in
an attempt to ‘rediscover’ its Indian and autochthonous past in order to forge
itself as a new and independent nation.
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The cult of María Lionza and the mountain of Sorte have thus become
representations of the country’s authentic and autochthonous past, and it is at
the mountain that spirits and humans, Indians and pilgrims, authentic inhabi-
tants and modern citizens of this oil-rich Latin American nation now meet.

María Lionza and spirit possession

Humans and spirits interact in the wilderness, near a river, if possible at the
mountain of Sorte. According to mediums and believers, spirits, strengths, or
energies (as they are variously called) can come from above and from below,
from the earth and from the sky, and we humans live in the midst of them.
Humans and spirits inhabit the same space, which is imagined as continuous
and fluid. Discontinuities and barriers exist, but they are man-made (build-
ings, houses, roads, etc.). This is why spirits prefer houses with earthen floors.
It is easier for them to descend in this kind of house, just as it is easier for
them to descend in the wilderness of the mountain, in areas where there are
no enclosures. Mediums thus organize trips to the mountain with their clients
and friends throughout the year. Humans go for various reasons: to worship
the spirits, in search of amor, salud y dinero (love, health, and money), to be
cleansed, to talk with the spirits and ask them for advice, and in search of a
general sense of well-being. Neither the mediums nor the believers go to cure
specific illnesses. When people are ill, mediums tend to recommend either a
curandero (folk-doctor) or a doctor and argue that it would be inappropriate
and useless to ask for the spirits’ help. They are engaged in what Csordas
(1997: viii) describes in his study of Catholic Charismatic Renewal in New
England as a ‘healing of the self ’. The spirits are there to help humans feel
better but not to cure them of headaches, cancer, or to help them avoid a
stroke. The possessed are never defined as ill or distressed.2
Interactions between humans and spirits take place mostly at night, and
at night the mountain becomes most powerful and overwhelming. Sorte is
characterized by a suffocating atmosphere. It is impregnated with smells
because at all times food is being cooked, candles and incense burnt, essences
poured around, different concoctions of herbs and flowers boiled and used to
wash, gunpowder made to explode on the ground. All these activities take
place against a background of the constant noise of tambores (as the drums
associated with the black populations of the coast are called) being played
incessantly, night and day. The tambores are accompanied by the sound of
people playing instruments and singing, screaming, clapping, and chatting with
each other and with the spirits, and by the music from the bands that are
sometimes called to play at the mountain. Also the earth underfoot is crowded
with things that one should not tread on, such as candles, gunpowder, and
drawings in chalk. All these objects, activities, scents, smells, and noises
contribute to making the place a stuffy, hot, crowded, dark, and humid envi-
ronment constantly interrupted by people’s relentless and restless swarming
around.
Visits to the mountain are complicated and elaborate. Sorte is seen as a
dangerous and isolated place that is difficult to reach. Visitors arrive at the
mountain carrying the large loads that they will need to construct their camps
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and altars. They bring statues of the spirits, offerings, candles, and the mate-
rials to be used in rituals, together with hammocks, pots and pans, food, and
the clothes they will have to wear while at the mountain. In Sorte humans
are not supposed to wear black, but only clothes of the three colours of the
national flag, which, as noted above, are also the three colours of the Three
Powers. Both men and women are supposed to wear shorts, amulets, and neck-
laces and, during rituals, bands around their heads. Men have to be bare-
chested. Mediums and believers say that this is because at the mountain
humans should be and feel free, primitive, and wild: they should look and
behave like Indians. In Sorte there are no given rules, no set times to eat,
sleep, or perform rituals, no distinctions between night and day. Days and
weekends spent at the mountain can be exhausting and visitors describe the
time spent there devoted to the spirits as a sacrifice. However, it is also a
period during which they have lots of fun, when they sing, play, and dance
with each other and with the spirits.
It is against this very elaborate background that episodes of possession occur,
in a place generally imagined and described in the press, by academics and
visitors, as a far-away jungle, a remote place populated by wild animals, once
inhabited by real Indians and now by their spirits. Sorte is considered the last
enclave of Indian traditions, an authentic and autochthonous culture which
remains separate from modern Venezuela, in antagonistic relation with the
latter’s urbanization, capitalism, and globalization (Martín 1990). In reality,
however, Sorte has as much in common with a decaying urban periphery as
with wilderness, and it resembles one of the many slums that exist within and
around modern Latin American cities. Moreover, far from being remote and
mysterious, it is easy to reach and less dangerous than people claim.3
It is within this very chaotic, elaborate, and exotic context that the often
banal and prosaic conversations between humans and spirits occur.

The importance of words

Wilma, a participant in the cult of María Lionza, once narrated how

the last time I was at the mountain [with her family and friends] we heard screams all
through the night. They came from the camp next to ours. It was a boy. He had been tied
up because he had the devil inside. He screamed and screamed. Finally, in the morning,
Chiro [the materia with whom they go to the mountain] went there. First thing he did, he
untied the boy, and everyone in the camp was scared. Chiro was not. He helped the boy.
Chiro said that this [spiritualism] has to do with language.

Wilma recalls that

the boy first said ‘I am God’, and Chiro replied, ‘I am light’. ‘I am the night’, said the boy
again. ‘I am the day’, said Chiro. They went on like this for a while. Then the boy said ‘I
am Satan’. Chiro replied ‘I am Lucifer, the one who brings the light’. You see, Chiro
explained to us that Lucifer is the name Satan had when he still was the angel of God.
After they pronounced that name, then the spirit left the boy.

While Wilma was telling me this story, Chiro had slowly walked towards us,
and he was standing next to us listening to what Wilma was saying. Once she
 BARBARA PLACIDO 213

had finished he turned towards me and said ‘don’t you see now that it [spiri-
tualism] is all to do with words?’
Words and language are crucial in the cult. Mediums and believers value
the content of the episodes very highly and often tape all the possession
episodes in order to listen to them over and over again. For example, Lourdes,
who is Wilma’s mother-in-law, has been taping everything that the spirits say
to her since she started going to visit them at the mountain. She spends many
evenings listening to these tapes together with her family and friends, and she
also writes down what the spirits have been saying in a notebook.These tape-
listening sessions are very interesting occasions. When the spirits are present
people focus on them; while they listen to the tapes, they explain, remember,
add information, and comment on what the spirits say. Many mediums and
believers actually remember by heart some of the most frequent and most
interesting phrases of the spirits.
Human relations with the spirits are all centred around communication and
constructed through words, and spirits themselves are defined by the ways they
speak. Every single spirit is characterized by the way he or she speaks and by
what he or she says. One can always recognize el Negro Felipe because he
speaks with no ‘l’. La Negra Francisca, a very popular and much-loved spirit,
is loud and vulgar. She is a very sexy character and when she descends she
likes to talk about men and sex. She defines herself a puta, a whore. When
she descends she flirts with men and she tells women to have fun, to dance,
flirt and sing, but she also always tells them ‘do not end up a whore like me’.
María Lionza in contrast, speaks with a very soft and low voice and always
starts by repeating at least one ‘general message’,‘a message that touches every-
body’s heart’, as Lourdes says. ‘She uses a very learned language and says “Let
us not make money into a god. It is possible to buy a cross, but not salva-
tion. Do not make promiscuity a god.” But she can also be very humble’,
Lourdes adds, ‘and says things like “I am only one of the servants of the army
of spirits that God has to help you”.’ But María Lionza also descends as the
India Yara and then, as María Milagro, a young believer, explained to me, ‘she
speaks Indian’, that is, she speaks in what is supposed to be her native Indian
language. ‘She is just like you, like those people who can speak two languages,
Spanish and another one. There are many people who can speak languages
other than Spanish, and many spirits do too.’ According to mediums and
believers, all the Indians, for example, speak both their own languages and
Spanish. But they prefer their own languages and this is why, when the Indians
descend into the mediums, it is up to the bancos to translate what they say to
the audience. There are also spirits of foreigners who speak languages other
than Spanish. ‘They do not mind speaking Spanish’, María Milagro says, ‘only
some of them are not very good. Those who have been descending for years
are slowly learning Spanish, but they still have recognizable accents, although
one can understand what they say.’
Spirits love talking. In fact they are desperate to speak because, mediums
and believers insist, spirits need to speak in order to ‘exist’. The idea that the
spirits could be wandering around without being able to express themselves
is a cause of great worry and distress for many of those who believe in them.
Virginia, a believer, offered a clear explanation of this, as she burst into tears
while we were watching the film, Ghost.The tape of this film had been rented
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for me to watch so that I would understand better what spirit-human rela-

tions are like. Ghost was considered very accurate at describing those relations.
It is about a young man, killed by someone he knows, who desperately tries,
once he has become a spirit, to find a medium, to communicate with his
fiancée, who is in danger of being killed by that same man. Ghost was a cult
movie (in more than one sense) among some mediums and believers I met:
they had learned long bits of it by heart and they were very keen that I should
understand how terribly difficult it is for the spirits to be heard, seen, and
felt; that is, to exist.
To exist, then, the spirits need to be able to speak. By allowing them to
express themselves through the mediums and by listening to what they say,
humans are somehow resuscitating them. In exchange, the spirits grant the
mediums and the humans who interact with them their support, their
strength, and all the qualities (both negative and positive) that are attached to
them. Those humans who can do so, the materias, are considered very capable,
very gifted, and very powerful. It is through words and communication that
the spirits are brought to life, in that it is during episodes of spirit possession
that they are created, that they become social persons. As Lambek (1988: 723)
has argued, the spirits as a class might be non-human, but as individuals they
are persons, as they have specific social identities distinct from the people they
possess and they engage in social relationships with various others, not only
those in whose bodies they are manifest. For him (1988: 724), ‘first and fore-
most possession creates and reproduces social persons, legitimates their appear-
ance, articulates social relationships’, and it is during possession that spirits
become social persons, in the sense that they maintain coherent identities and
consistent relationships with others.

The creation of the spirits through spoken words and written texts
Unlike the Catholic saints and the Santería Orishas with whom they are often
compared, spirits have very undefined identities. Everything about the spirits
– even the Three Powers, María Lionza, el Negro Felipe, and el Indio
Guaicaipuro – is very vague. Mediums and believers, however, know what they
look like, because statues representing them are to be found everywhere at the
mountain and in every Venezuelan town, in the perfumerías, the shops dedicated
to the cult. Spirits are like tronies, a genre of Dutch portraiture fashionable in
the seventeenth century, not intended to represent a particular individual but
rather a distinct character type (the oriental or the soldier, for example, or a
particular emotional state). Like tronies, the spirits are general characters, and it
is up to mediums and believers to transform them into social persons with a
particular identity. Mediums and believers carry out this transformation together,
depending on their own predilections and drawing on their own private expe-
riences. They draw on what they have learned from mediums who are now
dead, from relatives and friends who have been interacting with the spirits and
the cult for a long time, from what they have learned about saints, spirits, and
demons through their Catholic upbringing. Mediums also bring elements of
their lives or of the lives of their friends and clients into their understanding
of the cult to create the spirits they are more familiar with.
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Chiro and his group of friends and clients often interacted with a spirit
called ‘Jenny’. When she ‘descended’ into Chiro, Jenny described herself as a
musíu, this being the pejorative term to describe European immigrants. ‘She
is white’, Chiro told me, she used to work as an air hostess and, ‘as you can
hear yourself, she speaks Spanish with a funny accent’. Wilma, who feels that
she has a very intimate relation with Jenny, told me that ‘she comes from
Holland and was stranded in the Venezuelan jungle and lived with Indian pop-
ulations for a long time after her aeroplane crashed’. However, by the time I
left Venezuela, and with it Chiro and his friends, Jenny was no longer from
Holland. When she ‘descended’ into Chiro she would define herself simply
as ‘European’; she was not a hostess anymore, but a student doing research
in social sciences. She also started to assert that she was interested in the
Indians and their culture and knew about them because she had lived in the
jungle for a long time after her aeroplane crashed. In other words, Jenny had
acquired characteristics associated with me (I too, Chiro and his friends used
to say, was interested in ‘Indians’, and in order to live with them and to learn
about them I was spending so much time in Sorte; I too, just like Jenny, was
studying social sciences). Also, she had developed interests that Chiro himself
was now developing: he had in fact started to go to evening classes, was
preparing for the equivalent of A levels, and was planning to study social
sciences.
In order to construct specific identities for the spirits with whom they
interact, mediums and believers draw not only on their private experiences,
but also, and quite heavily, on written and visual material regarding the cult:
documentaries broadcast by national television, newspapers, guidebooks, pam-
phlets, and leaflets, together with various objects associated with the cult and
used in rituals, at the mountain, and in the perfumerías. There mediums and
believers find popular literature on the cult, a variety of leaflets on do-it-
yourself magic and rituals, pamphlets dedicated to different spirits and differ-
ent religious cults, together with the Bible and with anthropology books
dedicated to María Lionza. Many other books, written by anthropologists, his-
torians, and folklorists, are also found in the National Library in Caracas and
in public libraries of Venezuelan towns, and mediums occasionally visit them
in order, they say, to learn more about the cult. Others go to acquire infor-
mation they will use in the books they are themselves writing about the cult,
a project on which various mediums I met were engaged. In the libraries
there is an overwhelming amount of material on María Lionza and her cult.
Over the years the cult of María Lionza has come to constitute the Venezue-
lan culture product par excellence, something to be proud of, something worth
researching and preserving, something that makes Venezuela worth visiting and
is highlighted in many guidebooks and tourist information products, some-
thing to be proud of possessing and of being possessed by.
Mediums and believers refer to these books, quote from them directly
during possession episodes, use them during rituals, and keep them in their
altars together with statues of the spirits and offerings. They are powerful
objects: they can legitimize what the spirits and the mediums say and give
the mediums credibility. They render the cult official and place it, its adepts,
and its spirits in the official history and culture of Venezuela as a nation. Dif-
ferent books, however, present different versions of the cult, and mediums
216 BARBARA PLACIDO

believe that they do not offer sufficient information regarding the identity of
the various spirits. What the books affirm has therefore to be enriched, con-
firmed, or dismissed by the spirits themselves. Books themselves, that is, need
legitimation, and the spirits have the knowledge and the power to legitimate
what is written in them. The same goes for television programmes about the
cult. During possession episodes, spirits do just that: they refer to what aca-
demics and the media write and to what is shown on television. Certain
aspects they accept, others which might be new they adopt, others they reject.
Thus, what is said during episodes of possession has a role in creating the cult,
in generating knowledge about it, and also in generating anthropological
knowledge.
When the spirits descend, however, they not only affirm or reject the
knowledge and information mediums have acquired through books and
videos, they often also give new stories and unknown versions of the events
and thus provide people with new knowledge about them. Many of these
new tales and stories then appear in the books that researchers produce on
the basis of information acquired through contact with the spirits. Thus, the
feedback noted previously also works in reverse, leading to a strange move-
ment of historical characters such as Simón Bolívar from books to altars, while
other characters popular in the cult, such as el Negro Felipe and María Lionza
herself, move from altars to pamphlets, booklets, and academic books. For
example, María Lionza sometimes descends into Chiro under the name Yara,
but she generally prefers to be called María, she says ‘Yo soy Yara de el cielo
de los aborigenes Venezolanos. Pero María, éste nombre ebreo tán bello …
[I am Yara, from the sky of the Venezuelan aboriginal Indians. But María, this
beautiful Jewish name …]’. According to Chiro, when she uses her Jewish
name, María ‘defines herself as Catholic, because she draws a link between
herself and a biblical character. You see, she roots herself within the ancient
Catholic traditions’, traditions to which Chiro feels he and his version of the
cult belong. Chiro learned that María Lionza’s authentic name is Yara by
reading a book written by the Venezuelan popular historian Hector Salazar
(1988). Salazar’s Yara: the book of the century – the history of María Lionza (Yara:
el libro del siglo – historia de María Lionza) can be found in bookshops, libraries,
perfumerías, and at the mountain. Chiro has read Salazar’s book several times.
What is more, he is in it. A photo shows him performing a ritual involving
walking on coal. Chiro also contributed to the book by talking to the author,
and, he says, Salazar acquired much information regarding the cult by talking
to spiritists and believers.
According to Salazar, Yara or María Lionza, the young girl resembling the
Virgin Mary, is the daughter of María de la Onza, the wild woman depicted
naked and riding a tapir. Chiro chose to give this story to the television
reporters who went to Sorte to interview people concerning the cult. He told
them that there are two Marías. One is buena y indígena (good and indig-
enous), she stands for love, whilst the other represents and likes luxuria, sexo
y plata (lust, sex, and money). The journalists, however, seemed surprised at
his response, so Chiro said ‘I see that this is not the story you wanted, you
want the other one’. And he then started telling them about María Lionza
being a single character, the daughter of a cacique (an Indian chief) who fought
against the Conquerors. A few days after this interview, Chiro ‘brought her
 BARBARA PLACIDO 217

down’ (he led her to descend into him, rather than passively receiving the spirit,
something that good materias say they can do). After her usual introduction,
María Lionza repeated and legitimized Chiro’s favourite version of her story.
She said that she is a calm, virginal, and non-rebellious character and that
María de la Onza is her mother, a very different character from her. Chiro
then pointed out that María Lionza and María de la Onza speak in very dif-
ferent ways, with different intonations and using different words and sentences,
that they even like different music: María Lionza likes the Ave Maria, whereas
María de la Onza prefers salsa. María de la Onza made her voice and char-
acter clear when she descended later the same evening. She introduced herself
by saying, ‘I am the power, I am the Queen’. Then she explained that one
should not believe what people say about her. ‘I am not the devil that people
think I am’, she affirmed and then denied what some people at the moun-
tain believe, that she had ‘transformed all the men who have loved me into
the stones that now constitute the mountain of Sorte. It is not true that I kill
men who do not do what I want them to do.’ As Chiro later explained, ‘we
like to spread these lies and to portray María Lionza as a devoradora de hombres
[devourer of men], because that way we scare tourists away from this sacred
mountain’.
This episode illustrates the extent to which there is an intricate interplay
between academia and the media, and mediums and believers. It also reveals
how both sides are capable of creating their own privileged versions of who
the spirits are and of what the cult is about, and of how these different ver-
sions interact with each other during possession episodes. The versions of the
cult embedded in books and leaflets for the most part do stress ideas of resis-
tance and rebellion and create an image of an authentic and autochthonous
cult associated with what is constructed as authentic Venezuelan identity.
Running around the disordered and chaotic landscape of Sorte half-naked,
screaming, and disguised as fierce and belligerent Indians, the middle-class
mestizo participants in the cult do provide an image of the spirits as power-
ful and wild, ready to fight; an image which fits very well with one that
Venezuela wants to produce of itself as a country of Indians of the past resist-
ing the Conquerors and of Venezuelans of the present resisting Westerners. It
is also an image that reinforces the idea of the cult as authentic and autochtho-
nous and of the mountain as wild and dangerous, an image which panders to
anthropologists’ fascination with ideas of resistance and rebellion (Abu-Lughod
1990).
However, when they descend into the mediums, spirits hardly ever talk of
resisting and rebelling. Instead, as we shall see, they stress their ability to use
their powers and strength in order to enforce morality, middle-class values,
and the teaching of the Catholic Church.

The morality of the spirits

The spirits talk in a variety of idiosyncratic and characteristic ways and they
speak of a variety of different things. What they talk about varies depending
on how they are imagined and constructed, on who the spiritists are, and on
the composition of their audience. What characterizes them is that they are
218 BARBARA PLACIDO

constituted by formulaic, repeated statements that, as noted earlier, make the

spirits immediately recognizable to the audience. These fixed statements serve
as a framework within which the spirits, together with the spiritists4 and the
audience, can produce a variety of new stories and modes of talking.
Spirits’ speeches have various components. Beyond their repeated for-
mulae they can address specific individuals or they can refer to the spirits
themselves. Often, spirits descend to give humans specific advice regarding
questions which are troubling them at that particular time: how to feel physi-
cally and psychologically better, how to deal with difficulties at work and in
one’s family, with economic problems, and so on. When they give advice it
is considered very important for the humans to follow it. Some complain that
people very rarely do so. Humans listen to the spirits’ advice on specific prob-
lems, then they forget. This is considered bad and disruptive: humans should
listen to the spirits and obey them because they know what is right and how
to behave. Spirits get very annoyed with people who do not really listen to
them and they are said to punish them by refusing to descend.
However, spirits are not there simply to give advice on specific matters, but
also to tell people how they should lead their lives, to teach them about what
is proper and what is good. Those who go to the spirits only to ask about
specific problems do not quite understand, many say, what spiritualism is actu-
ally about. It is about learning how to live; spiritualism, mediums and be-
lievers often repeat, is a way of life. Humans need to understand that behind
every piece of advice the spirits give them there is a more general idea about
right and wrong. Spirits do not spell out how people should behave and they
do not cure specific illnesses; but they give general messages and tell people
about themselves, about their own lives; it is then up to the humans to inter-
pret, understand, and follow.
Spirits and spiritists often affirm that the mountain, the cult, their beliefs,
and their practices are about beauty and purity, about order and morality,
about becoming clean and behaving properly. It is of this pureness and
morality that the spirits speak. Regardless of the form of their embajadas (as
the act of descending and giving a message is termed), the spirits talk of
order, purity, and morality. Spirits do not perform ‘black magic’. They would
never, and this was always stressed, act against people. The spirit cannot
perform evil and would never allow materias to do so. It is people who do
not work with the spirits that do ‘bad things’. Spirits tell married couples to
stay together, young girls not to have sex before they get married, young boys
not to fool around, members of the same family not to fight. Even a spirit
like la Negra Francisca, a promiscuous, sexy, and dissolute woman, tells
mediums and believers to behave according to the teaching of the Catholic
Church.
Requests or attempts to act against the teaching of the Catholic Church
and of mainstream morality are judged very negatively by both mediums and
believers. Cathy, a medium who works in Barquisimeto, a town situated half
an hour’s drive from Sorte, felt shattered when confronted with the request
by one of her clients to behave immorally. Rosa had asked her to use the
spirits to persuade her lover to leave his partner and their children (the man
was not legally married to the woman) for her. Cathy simply could not do
this. ‘How could I stand in front of God, in front of the spirits if I did what
 BARBARA PLACIDO 219

Rosa has asked me?’ Cathy said, and then explained that although the Catholic
Church does not approve of unions between men and women outside mar-
riage, it would certainly not approve of a man abandoning his children, even
illegitimate ones. She would not do what God, the spirits, her religion (i.e.
Catholicism) forbid.
The preaching and the ethos of the spirits are certainly opposed in style to
that of mainstream society and of the Catholic Church, but not in terms of
message and of lived experience.
What the spirits say and the way they behave can be different from how
they appear, from the setting in which they descend, from the way in which
mediums and believers act when they interact with them. The specific and
idiosyncratic identities that mediums and believers create by drawing on
different sources, from written texts and from personal experiences, do not,
or do not always, consist of rebellious, counter-hegemonic characters who,
through spirit possession, fight and resist gender and ethnic inequalities, mar-
ginality, colonialism, capitalism, and racism. Nor can the spirits themselves
always be interpreted as embodied critiques of colonial, national, or global
hegemonies, as their context might suggest. In other words, the content of
spirit possession episodes does not always fit with the context in which they
occur.The image of the cult produced by focusing exclusively on the context,
the one the journalist was encouraging Chiro to support, is quite different
from the image of the cult revealed by what the spirits actually say and do
during possession episodes.

Sorte, the wilderness of a national park

The context within which episodes of possession occur – the landscape
created by the mountain of Sorte, the way in which people move and act
within it – generates an image and an understanding of the cult which has
been powerfully captured by Taussig (1987; 1997). He affirms that the power
of many Latin American, especially Colombian and Venezuelan, spirit cults (he
talks specifically of María Lionza, el Negro Felipe, and el Indio Guaicaipuro)
resides in their disorder, their approximation to chaos. It is in this disorder
and chaos that the ‘unsuspected power of the powerless’ lies (Taussig 1987:
198). Yet, he says,

wilderness is incessantly recruited by the needs of order … The wilderness here at stake
tears through the tired dichotomies of good and evil, order and chaos, the sanctity of order,
and so forth. It does not mediate these oppositions. Instead, it comes down on the side of
chaos and its healing creativity is inseparable from that taking of sides (1987: 220).

The order that these peripheral magical practices (associated with the jungle,
far away places, and wild Indians) oppose is that of the central Catholic
Church, defined as a conservative and reactionary institution. On the other
hand we can see, Taussig (1987: 167) tells us, ‘the magical realism of popular
culture as the only counter-hegemonic force capable of confronting the reac-
tionary usage to which the Church puts that same magical realism in order
to mystify it’. For Taussig, the shaman, the wild man, the spirits, and magic
constitute what does not fit in, the disorder that cannot be subsumed in any
220 BARBARA PLACIDO

hierarchy of domination (such as that inherent in the structure of the Catholic

Church) or encompassed by totalizing ideologies and institutions. Disorder
and the cults which sustain and are sustained by it are therefore images of
resistance to order, hierarchy, the centre.
Taussig’s understanding of the cult is grounded on its most visible, discon-
certing, and powerful aspects. As he (1987: 412) writes, ‘in the streaming nasal
mucus, in the shitting, in the vomiting, in the laughter as in the tears, there
lies a sorcery-centred religious mythology as lived experience, quite opposed
to the awesome authority of Christianity in its dominant mode as a state reli-
gion of submission’. Taussig concentrates on the landscape within which the
relations between spirits and humans take place, on the vomiting, running on
fire, inserting needles through one’s body, the images of scars, blood, dirt, and
tears.These certainly are important aspects of the cult, but not all the mediums
or believers are attracted by them or see them as representative of what spir-
itualism is about. They do not reveal everything about spirit possession, about
the relation between humans and spirits. Instead, it could be argued that they
reveal more of Taussig’s own predilection for decentring and deconstructing
and his fascination with chaos.5
As has been forcefully illustrated by Abu-Lughod (1990), the same fascina-
tion with resistance characterizes the analyses of many anthropologists. In
itself, Taussig’s analysis also reveals the extent to which anthropologists can
turn the possessed, the ‘medium’, into a medium through which to speak, and
thus transform spirit possession into a kind of ventriloquism.
Mediums and believers who, like Chiro, Lourdes, and Wilma, root their
practices and their understanding of the cult in their Catholic traditions and
in their middle-class background, would not deny the existence of Taussig’s
version of the cult, a version that they see publicized in books and pamphlets
and by the media, and that they appreciate in so far as it keeps the tourist
away from Sorte. But they would insist that it is not their own and that it
does not represent what the cult really is, what spiritualism is about, what the
interaction between mediums and spirits is meant to generate. For them spirit
possession does not in itself constitute a form of counter-culture. As spirits in
the cult of María Lionza reveal, possession can teach and speak of something
very different. The spirits’ narratives can and do talk of resisting and rebelling,
of other options and alternatives, but also they can be, and they are, about
reasserting a mainstream morality. Similarly, as has been illustrated by Boddy’s
discussion of Hofryati women, possession proves they are capable of enacting
and maintaining a moral order. Hofryati women give up their own agencies
in favour of the spirits, just as in everyday life they give up their own desires
for those of their parents, spouses, and children. Possession is therefore to be
seen as an extension, rather than inversion, of what is morally normative
(Boddy 1989: 139). Nourse (1996: 438) has made a similar point, affirming in
relation to the Muslim Laujé of Indonesia that ‘the female mediums are not
claiming that they were once women and therefore powerless, nor that they
are now spirits and therefore powerful. Rather, the spirits seem to be engaged
in a discourse about morality and possession itself can constitute an expres-
sion of morality.’
Spirit possession does remain in its form ‘dramatically and intransigently
exotic, unrecognizable’ (Boddy 1994: 407-8) and its form does matter to the
 BARBARA PLACIDO 221

participants. The same words, spoken elsewhere, in a different context, char-

acterized by a different form, would not have the same value. Participants in
the cult of María Lionza are aware and make strategic use of the power of
exoticism and primitivism, of the blacks and the Indians, of chaos and disor-
der. However, we should not assume that the chaotic, exotic, disconcerting
form of the cult exhausts our understanding of it.
Religious cults centred on spirit possession do not always need to be non-
conservative, counter-hegemonic, and rebellious. They do not always have to
be the means of expression of marginal or otherwise muted groups. Resis-
tance, rebellion, and distress should not always be understood as the motives
that lead people to enter into a relationship with the spirits. As Nourse (1996:
427) again has affirmed, while one can plausibly assume that the social back-
ground of the mediums does influence possession, it would not be produc-
tive to analyse possession episodes solely in terms of the mediums’ sociological
milieu. The gender and class backgrounds of the participants influence the
dialogues between spirits and human beings, but class and gender themselves
do not provide a complete explanation of possession. It is not religious cults
centred on spirit possession themselves, but what people do with them,
that can mark them as hegemonic and counter-hegemonic. But in order to
examine and understand what people do with religious cults and possession,
attention should be paid not only to the form that characterizes them, but
also to what people do and say during possession episodes. That is, in order
to capture what people do with religious cults, content and context should
not be examined in isolation from each other.

Conclusion
For the cult and for the spirits to exist, it is necessary that the latter should
speak and communicate with humans.What spirits say matters both to humans
and to the spirits themselves. What the spirits talk about varies depending on
whom they speak to, whether believers, other mediums, state officials (such
as the park-guardians who patrol the María Lionza National Park), anthro-
pologists doing research on the cult, or the media. To be able to communi-
cate with the spirits, to allow them to speak to humans, is a source of pride
for mediums and believers. To be able to make the spirits descend is an
achievement that brings humans a sense of power, pleasure, and fun. Spirit
possession reveals what humans are capable of, as they resuscitate the spirits
and appropriate their powers for themselves, for example. However, the
content of the conversations they have with the spirits can sound banal and
at times moralistic. There is a very strong discrepancy between the striking
and exotic form of possession episodes, as embodied in the landscape of Sorte,
and the apparently prosaic content of what people actually say and do when
they interact with the spirits. It is a discrepancy that echoes that between
anthropological understandings of the phenomenon and the understanding of
spirit possession within the cult of María Lionza, of which this article has
tried to make sense.
The two elements of spirit possession, its form and its content, should not
be analysed in isolation from one another, as they are part of the same process.
222 BARBARA PLACIDO

Both are integral to the nature of possession. Indeed, the contradictory dimen-
sions of the cult are fundamental to its appeal, in that they permit participants
to create for themselves radically different, idiosyncratic versions of it (Placido
1998). By separating content and context and by focusing only on the latter,
anthropologists run the risk of reducing or categorizing possession as the
epiphenomenon of something else. By leaving the words exchanged between
spirits and humans unheard, analyses of spirit possession can transform spirit
possession into a ventriloquism through which anthropologists themselves
can speak. They risk, that is, putting themselves in the position of the very
entities whom they describe the possessed as resisting, understanding posses-
sion in a manner that they themselves condemn. Ong has described how spirit
possession is dealt with by Malaysian factory managers when it occurs among
their women workers. The women are diagnosed by the managers, and also
by local academics, as ‘hysterics’, afflicted by ‘epidemic hysteria’ (Ong 1988:
29). Ong rightly argues that by rationalizing and interpreting these episodes
in terms of psychiatric disorders, the managers reproduce a Western logic and
convert workers into patients. Similarly, anthropologists are prone to repro-
ducing their own logic and converting the possessed into a medium through
which they speak to their own agenda.
In relation to the cult of María Lionza, an examination of the content of
possession episodes reveals that the possessed might not share the agenda, nor
indeed the predilections, choices, and beliefs of the anthropologists. Moreover,
it reveals that it is not up to the anthropologist to attribute an agency to the
possessed, since the latter have their own agency and their own agenda. The
possessed are neither mute nor powerless, but are rather engaged in an active
dialogue with anthropologists and other voices.

NOTES

Fieldwork in Sorte and Barquisimeto was carried out from July to December 1993 and from
April 1994 to August 1995. My thanks go to various people, especially Chiro, the Uzcategui,
and the Riera, to Garibaldi and Enrique, José Gregorio, Aldri, Liseth, Juan Vizcaya la Sra Gloria,
and Judith. I especially want to thank Joaquin Dosrey and his family, Marcella Bentivoglio,
Beatrice Viggiani, Yajaira Sanchez, Carla Jimenez, and Erik Del Bufalo, and their extended
families, for their unfailing help and very generous hospitality during my staying in Venezuela.
I am grateful for comments and criticism on versions of this article to Robert Gordon, Stephen
Hugh-Jones, Caroline Humphrey, and Adam Reed. Finally, I would like to thank the Journal’s
readers for their helpful advice.
1
Nourse’s study (1996) of the Laujé of Indonesia is an exception in that it does pay atten-
tion to what is said during possession episodes. Nourse’s work has provided interesting new
insights to which this article is indebted.
2
If, in the classical anthropological understanding of spirit possession referred to at the begin-
ning of this article, possession is associated with illness and distress, it is partly because it is in
these terms that possession is described and experienced in the societies where it is found. But,
as pointed out by Lambek (1989: 48), even when possession is associated with illness within
the society where it is found, it might be illness that is described as an idiom of possession
and not vice versa.
3
The numerous cases of assault, robbery, rape, and murder at the mountain hardly compare
with the daily violence of most Venezuelan cities. In Caracas an average of twenty people are
killed every weekend, mostly in the slum areas, which are more difficult to reach than the
mountain (there is little if any public transport) and are beyond the control of police or army.
 BARBARA PLACIDO 223

4
The Spanish word espiritista can be translated both as ‘spiritist’ and as ‘spiritualist’. I have
opted for the first of these because in some of the anthropological literature the word ‘spiri-
tist’ denotes a connection both with South America and with Catholicism, while ‘spiritualist’
indicates a connection with Protestantism and with North America (see Macklin 1974). I use
the term ‘medium’ to translate the Spanish term médium which is used in Venezuela inter-
changeably with espiritista.
5
Taussig’s fascination with resistance has been criticized by Kapferer (1988: 93), who has
argued that ‘there is no reason why a totalistic and ordered conception of the universe neces-
sarily be conservative in terms of a radically oriented Western anthropologist’.

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‘Tout est dans les mots’: une analyse de la possession par les
esprits dans le culte vénézuélien de María Líonza
Résumé
Les humains possédés par les esprits sont souvent décrits comme étant malades ou affligés,
dépourvus de pouvoir, de contrôle et d’action; la possession par les esprits a été décrite
comme une sorte de ventriloquie par laquelle les médiums acquièrent une voix plus puis-
sante que leur voix d’humains. Ce qui n’a été ni dit ni entendu est ce dont les esprits et les
humains parlent pendant les épisodes de possession. Cet article suggère que la tendance à
porter l’attention sur la forme et non sur le contenu des épisodes de possession a ouvert la
voie à une autre forme de ventriloquie, où les anthropologues mêmes utilisent les médiums
pour proférer leurs propres arguments. A l’encontre de cette tendance, les participants au
culte de María Líonza perçoivent les mots comme un aspect central du culte, réclamant
l’attention de ceux qui les écoutent. Une analyse du contenu de leurs épisodes de posses-
sion révèle comment ceux qui sont possédés dans le culte, loin d’être passifs et ‘réduits au
silence’, s’engagent activement dans une conversation continue avec les anthropologues, les
historiens, les médias et l’État.

Dept of Social Anthropology, London School of Economics & Political Science, Houghton Street, London
WC2A 2AE. [email protected]