Word: lemanj
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Year's Eve, the white-clad throngs gather on Brazil's beaches after dark, more than a million people in Rio alone. They bear worldly offerings-lipstick, combs, jewelry, perfume, mirrors, flowers-to give to a vain, beauteous sea goddess. Called lemanjá, she is one of the pantheon worshiped by the various devotees of the pagan cults known as Umbanda, Quimbanda, Candomble, or-to its detractors-as Macumba...
...start, and worshipers seized by spirits begin their slow, rotating dance. As the old year wanes, fireworks flare above the beach. Then at midnight, hundreds of thousands of little homemade rafts bearing the offerings are pushed or paddled far out into the waves. If the offering is "accepted" by lemanjá it does not wash back onto the shore and it spells a lucky New Year. Hours later the people wander away, and by dawn all that is left on the sand is a mountain of trash, including the forlorn offerings that returned...
Spiritist rites run the gamut from sanitized middle-class meetings with benches set out for tourists, to clandestine nightlong orgies in forest grottos. Whatever the style, all groups believe in a family of "spirits" or orixas, who usually resemble Christian saints. Thus lemanjá, the sea goddess, is identified with the Virgin Mary and Oxóssi with St. Sebastian...
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