Word: conselheiro
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1944-1944
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...turned up in the city of Itabaiana. Now he had disciples. They built a temple. Coming into a town, they would hang an image of Christ on a tree, kneel in prayer, lift the image aloft and triumphantly enter the town to the chorus of litanies. Antonio Conselheiro's sermons were barbarous and terrifying, clownish but dreadful, compounded of visions, prophecies, dogmatic counsels, delivered in a dull monotone, with downcast eyes, suddenly interrupted when he turned his eyes on his listeners and hypnotized them with his intensity. He preached...
Demoniac Saint. Antonio Conselheiro believed that the Roman Catholic Church was doing the will of Satan. His morality combined the absolute license of free love with chastity exaggerated "to the point where woman is looked upon with horror"- his followers accepted half of this, and practiced free love. Because his disciples renovated abandoned cemeteries, built new churches and restored old ones, the priests "good-naturedly tolerated the excesses of this demoniac saint who at least helped to increase their dwindled revenues." By 1877 Conselheiro was famous, feared, implacable, "a species of great man gone wrong," ascetic, thin, weary-looking, half...
Creeping Vines and Metaphors. Conselheiro was a genuine fanatic, a 2nd Century hermit born in the days of railroads. In his own way, Euclides da Cunha, his biographer, was as fanatical. Rebellion in the Backlands is Brazil's great classic, 476 pages of prose, thick as the jungles of Matto Grosso, through which (even in translation) a North American must hack his way blindly, barely able to make out the thread of history in the overhanging metaphors and the creeping vines of Da Cunha's philosophizing. Conselheiro's teachings soon led to open revolt, in which...
...hundred soldiers were sent to the town of Canudos in November, 1896, to pacify Conselheiro's restless followers. They were routed. So was a second force of 543 men two months later. In February 1897, an expedition under Colonel Moreira Cesar set out with 1,300 men, 15,000,000 cartridges, 70 rounds of cannon shot. Moreira Cesar was tough, relentless, an epileptic. The objective was Canudos, a mountain village of 5,200 huts and two churches whose population had been swollen by crowds of Conselheiro's followers. It was 60 miles away over mountain roads that...
Death at Dusk. It took more than a three-month siege to reduce Canudos, Antonio Conselheiro died; the rebellion became a national crisis. On Oct. 5, 1897, a year after the first expedition, the last defenders of the village were killed. There were four of them, a boy, an old man, two grown men. They faced an army of 5,000 soldiers. They died in a trench which had also been dug to serve as a grave. When the soldiers stormed the trench they were paralyzed. "There before them, a tangible reality, was a trench of the dead, plastered with...