Jurema and Toré of Northeast Brazil

Indigenous peoples of northeastern Brazil, among them the Pankararu, Atikum, Kariri-Xocó, Pankararé, and Potiguara, hold sacred a small tree called jurema, from which they make a drink usually known as jurema wine. They use it to reach the encantados, or enchanted ones, beings understood to offer healing, counsel, and protection. The drink may appear in the toré, a circular dance with song and rattles that is often public, but it is more central to closed ceremonies. Asked about its role at a ceremony in 2023, a Pankararé chief paused before answering: "The jurema is what Our Lord blessed for the population to drink." He said little more. [1, 7, 8]

A tree, a drink, and a being

The tree most associated with the drink is black jurema, Mimosa tenuiflora, native to the semi-arid scrub of the Northeast. The drink's names vary: the Pankararu call it ajucá, the Atikum and Kambiwá anjucá, and other groups simply jurema or jurema wine. [1, 5]

Which tree is used can matter. A Pankararé chief insisted that white jurema "is not used in our traditions because it is from Umbanda," referring to the Afro-Brazilian religion. The Xucuru-Kariri, by contrast, have been reported to use white jurema alongside the black for medical and religious purposes. [7]

The word itself reaches well beyond botany. It can refer to a plant, a drink, a ceremony, a spiritual being, a plane of existence, or a line of spiritual work. [1, 5] Pankararé and Kariri-Xocó accounts show part of that range. In the Pankararé account recorded in 2008 and 2009, jurema is revered as one of the enchanted. It is associated with a powerful entity called Mestre Juremeira, an enchanted Indigenous being who guides people and promotes healing during ritual. A story told by a Kariri-Xocó pajé, or spiritual leader, presents Jurema as a creator deity who, in the mythic past, taught one of the first women to make a special drink. In that telling, knowledge of the drink comes from Jurema itself. [1, 7]

People who did not die

The encantados give the drink its purpose. The Potiguara of the Paraíba coast say that the encantados live in the forest and at the bottom of rivers and the sea. They are invisible and immortal, and they are "not people like us," though they once were. Older Potiguara told of unbaptized children who were abandoned in the forest or on riverbanks, carried off by animals, and transformed. Having never passed through death, the encantados keep something human, including a body with blood in its veins. [2]

The Kiriri of Bahia draw a similar line. The enchanted, they said in the 1990s, are alive, and a spirit of the dead belongs to white people's practices. For them, the kingdoms where the enchanted live can be reached only by drinking jurema. The Tuxá likewise treat drinking it as the condition for evidence of the enchanted. Other peoples describe the encounter differently. Among the Atikum, the enchanted appear through a subtle possession combined with a vision of the spiritual plane, and some enchanted beings are said to have passed through death. Kariri-Xocó participants have said that jurema brings visions and dreams of another world without taking a person out of a normal state of consciousness, and that it cleanses the body of evil spirits. [2, 3, 7]

The arrow and its removal

For the Potiguara, the enchanted are both protectors and a danger. Their lords can grant abundant fishing and hunting, but an enchanted being who takes a liking to someone may strike that person with an arrow, called a flechada, delivered by a look. In one account, a mother dreamed that the water mother had taken a fancy to her son and asked that he be kept from the river. The aunt caring for him took him there anyway, and he came home with a high fever. The mother went to a prayer healer. Speaking through the healer in a strange voice, the water mother said the boy had been struck, and a master spirit confirmed that she was his "owner" but would not take him. When the water mother returned, she drew a blue feather from the boy's navel and said it was her arrow. [2]

Potiguara prayer healers treat fevers, body pains, the evil eye, and snakebite with prayers, green branches, baths, and honey-based remedies, and people often prefer them to doctors. Specialists labeled catimbozeiros use many of the same methods, but they also work with jurema, pipe smoke, and possession, and they are said to travel to the enchanted or receive them in the body. Catimbó is a regional religious practice long associated with sorcery, and the label is an accusation. Two ritual specialists so labeled were killed in Potiguara territory, and accounts linked the killings to accusations that their work bred conflict and illness. Few admit to consulting such a specialist, and people also say that "every Indian has catimbó," meaning that the capacity to deal with invisible beings, and to do harm with it, is widely shared. [1, 2]

The closed table

Jurema is most central in the discreet ceremonies known as mesas, or tables, which are held mainly for healing and also for advice. Accounts from several peoples describe similar arrangements on the ground: crosses, vessels of jurema, pipes, candles, saints, and songs, with masters and encantados called to the work. The leaders hold what is known as the ciência do índio, the "science of the Indian," a body of sacred knowledge closed to non-Indigenous people and to other Indigenous groups. Even within one village, leaders may work with different spiritual currents, so their ceremonies differ. [1, 7]

Among the Pankararé, the science is a secret ritual open only to members of the people. An entity is received in the body of a participant, speaks through that person, and carries out healing. Because such ceremonies are closed, written accounts of them remain limited. [7]

The dance in the open

The toré is more visible and often takes place without jurema. The Potiguara call it a brincadeira, a form of play, in which enjoyment and reverence are mixed. Dancers wear seed necklaces and feathers, and their body paint is inspired by fish, birds, and armadillos. The dance is also spiritual work. Masters must "lock the currents" so that spirits do not attach themselves to dancers and disrupt the event. When someone was possessed at a toré, onlookers said the person lacked the strength to hold firm, while masters used smoke, the laying on of hands, and song to send the spirit away. Certain powerful songs are withheld from performances outside the villages and from places such as schools. To call a toré master a catimbozeiro is the gravest insult. [1, 2]

Songs still bring jurema into the dance:

> Jurema, oh Jurema, my Jurema, Jurema > We are the feathered caboclas, daughters of Tupinambá [2]

The Kariri-Xocó give the word toré two meanings: "sacred sound" in Xocó and "silent whisper" in the Kipeá dialect. The dance also marks a boundary. Non-Indigenous people may join the circle, while the Ouricuri, the people's closed ceremony held on sacred ground about every fifteen days, remains permanently forbidden to them. Invited members of other Indigenous peoples, including the Fulni-ô, attend. For the Kariri-Xocó, jurema there is linked to the origin of life and to renewing what it means to be Kariri and Xocó. [2, 6, 7]

Suppression and secrecy

Jurema's early history survives largely through those who tried to suppress it. There are no archaeological records of its use. The earliest known written mention dates from 1739, in records from Pernambuco and Paraíba, by which time it was already being prosecuted. One review of the plant says that use began long before colonization, while a historian reads the late and sparse evidence as a sign that the cult is relatively recent. [1, 4, 5]

Missionaries left a clearer mark in memory. A Kariri-Xocó tradition keeper recounts that around the seventeenth century, his ancestors were led to burn their feathered headdresses, rattles, and necklaces in front of a church. One researcher suggests that these objects belonged to the toré and that the materials of the Ouricuri stayed hidden. Xokó memory recalls a friar who banned the toré, and people danced in secret, sometimes hiding boats so that he could not cross to them. Later, according to the same Kariri-Xocó keeper's mother, police on their street forbade the dance and beat residents. Moving onto a city street after losing their land did not end the Ouricuri. "The white man gave us names to divide us and tried to eliminate our culture and religiosity," the keeper wrote in 2018. "But we survived." [6]

In this history, secrecy can serve as protection. The Potiguara's reluctance to discuss catimbó has been linked to violent persecution by the Paraíba state government, and the silence itself has been read as resistance. [2]

A dance that proved a people

In the twentieth century, practices that had drawn prosecution and police violence acquired a legal importance. From the 1930s onward, the toré and jurema spread among Indigenous communities of the Northeast, and they became a general mark of Indigenous identity for peoples long dismissed as mixed. The Atikum of Pernambuco's backlands, known until the 1940s as caboclos, sought recognition from Brazil's Indian Protection Service as a way to stop the seizure of their land. The agency treated the toré as evidence of Indianness, so the Atikum needed to perform a dance they did not know. They learned it from the Tuxá of Bahia, who also taught them to make the drink. A post was established in 1949, though the land was not demarcated until the 1990s. By 2004, the Atikum were dancing toré at least weekly, and they described the Encantos as central to their religion. Even when no one drinks jurema, it remains present in the songs. [1, 3]

Exchanges of this kind continue to raise questions about what belongs. At a toré in a Potiguara village in 2007, a master served jurema that he had brought back from a gathering among the Pankará in Pernambuco. Some drank it, and no trance followed. Smoke was blown over a war club planted in the center of the circle, and two mediums led a song to the "brothers of light," deceased leaders and healers recently counted among the protective spirits. Some masters and dancers said that these practices made the toré more powerful. Some spectators said that outside mixture weakened it, and they saw in the jurema songs a resemblance to pipe work and Umbanda circles. The masters answered that the drink strengthened the work and protected the dance against enemies. [2]

Beyond the villages

Outside the villages, the plant has entered other settings. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, Kariri-Xocó and Fulni-ô groups began offering toré workshops in large Brazilian cities, initially without jurema. At the request of participants, they later created rituals using white jurema. Other groups, also from the late 1990s on, have drunk jurema mixed with Syrian rue, a plant from Central Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, and some borrow Indigenous songs and ritual forms. In their own descriptions of the plant's history, Indigenous people appear unanimous in seeing themselves as jurema's traditional keepers. [1, 7]

What the drink does chemically remains unresolved. Black jurema contains DMT, the psychedelic compound also found in ayahuasca, but the body breaks the compound down when it is swallowed unless something blocks the enzyme responsible. Researchers have looked for a "secret of jurema," an added ingredient that might make the drink active, and have reached no conclusion. Reported effects vary from one preparation to another, and how far traditional experience depends on DMT is unknown. Most traditional users do not think of the plant in these terms. [1, 5, 8]

The Amaro festival

The Pankararé of the Raso da Catarina region in northeastern Bahia show how closely ceremony and land can be tied. In 1979, during the struggle over demarcation, a chief was killed in an ambush. The conflicts made ceremonies hard to hold, and rituals survived largely through songs passed on orally. A later chief was herding cattle when he stopped to rest under a jatobá tree, the only green shade in the parched scrub. The cattle returned on their own and licked his feet, and there he first saw Caboclo Aboiador, the enchanted figure at the center of the festival that grew up around that tree. "All the strength we had came from here," he said of the fight for the land. In 2023, 47,500 hectares were approved for about 2,400 Pankararé, while another 13,000 hectares were demarcated and still awaited the Ministry of Justice's approval. [8]

The Festival of Amaro has been open to the public since 1995 and takes place on the last Saturday in October. Its syncretism is visible on the chapel altar, where Caboclo Aboiador stands among Jesus, Saint George, Iemanjá, and Father Cícero. During the day, an elder arrives with a delegation from the village, and people receive enchanted beings in prayer, including one whose proper name the Pankararé do not reveal. Parts of the festival are restricted. Jurema is kept in an enclosure around the sacred tree. Only men over sixteen may enter it, and they gather there before the night's dancing. [7, 8]

After dinner, the praiás appear from the forest. These dancers represent the enchanted forces of the woods and are covered head to foot in fiber costumes and masks. A line of women leads the songs. At the 2023 festival, young apprentices danced in the twilight before them, wearing the same fibers. [8]

A journalist who drank the wine at a Pankararé festival in 2023 noticed no psychedelic effect, then wept when the ceremony's elder embraced him. A Pankararé woman told him that the entity, not the elder, had embraced him. He observed that communion with the enchanted seemed to arise from the ritual as a whole: songs, rattles, pipe smoke, prayer, and shared meals. [8]

Between festivals, residents return to care for the trees, put up buildings such as a women's house and a children's shed, and hold the closed ceremonies known as science tables. [8]

What is uncertain

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