Representation of the African saint Rosa Maria Egípcia, during the Rio Carnival, on February 21, 2023.Alex Ferro (Viradouro | Riotur)
A perfect stranger with a fascinating history.
This is Rosa María Egipciaca, a name that from now on will begin to be more familiar to many Brazilians.
The biography of this 18th century woman starred in the parade of the Viradouro samba school at the Sambadrome in Rio de Janeiro.
Floats, costumes, choreographies and 3,200 people dedicated to explaining to the general public the life of this woman who was a slave, a harlot, a sorceress, a popular saint and the first recorded black writer in Brazil.
It all started when Tarcisio Zanon, the carnivalesque from Viradouro (a kind of artistic director of the samba school), came across a copy of the book
Rosa Egipciaca: An African Saint in Brazil
, by the anthropologist Luiz Mott in a bookstore.
He devoured it quickly and tucked the idea away as an ace up his sleeve.
“Carnival has a black, Afro-Brazilian origin, very latent and when we can we bring those stories so they can see the light.
There was a silencing of important characters in the history of Brazil and the samba school has the mission of revealing them”, he explained a few days ago while finalizing the preparations for the parade in the City of Samba, the gigantic pavilions where the floats are built.
Rosa is the Catholic name given to this girl from the Courá ethnic group, kidnapped and taken as a slave by the Portuguese in 1725 from the coast of present-day Benin to Rio de Janeiro.
She arrived at the age of six and soon after moved to the neighboring state of Minas Gerais, which was experiencing a fever for gold and precious stones.
From a very young age she worked as a slave on a farm where she was forced to sexually serve 70 men.
Normally, sex slaves received clothes and valuable jewelry with which they could buy their freedom over time, but Rosa María, who already began to have mystical visions coinciding with an illness, donated everything to the poor and began to live like a pious person. .
It is there that she adopts the nickname of Egyptian, by association with Saint Mary Egyptian, an Egyptian ascetic who was also a prostitute.
Allegorical carriage to Rosa Maria Egípcia, during the Rio Carnival. Ismar Ingber (Viradouro | Riotur)
Already within religious life, she meets the priest Francisco Gonçalves Lopes, known as
Chuta Diablos
, who buys her and promises to expel the devil from her.
He becomes her confessor and she becomes one of her main
possessors
, at a time when exorcism shows were very fashionable.
At that time, she went through an inquisitorial court that burned her tongue for 15 minutes with a candle to prove that she really had paranormal powers.
The Bishop of Mariana considered her a liar and ordered her to be publicly flogged, something unusual among women.
In the end, Rosa María and her inseparable priest (who wore a pendant with one of his teeth on her chest as a relic) took refuge in Rio de Janeiro, where they were welcomed by the Franciscan monks of the convent of San Antonio.
“She was a black woman, seen as possessed, a sorceress, but she gradually demystified that.
When she moved to Rio, the Church began to take care of her in a different way and she began to be adored as a saint”, comments the carnivalesque Zanon.
Her gifts were an infallible hook to fill temples at a time when it was convenient for the Catholic Church to have black saints (such as Saint Ephigenia or Saint Benedict) to convert slaves.
Rosa María became the best letter of introduction.
Her fame grew rapidly;
she founded the
Recollection of Our Lady of Childbirth
, to take care of girls and prostitutes, and sold a kind of host made with their saliva, considered sacred by their devotees.
His crowded ceremonies mixed Catholic liturgy with African rites, from voodoo dances to pipe smoking.
At that moment of popular boom, he learned to read and immediately began to write compulsively.
He captured his visions in the
Sacred Theology of Divine Love of Pilgrim Souls
, a book of almost 250 pages that would later be considered a heresy by the Church and partially destroyed by his confessor to try to save her from the Inquisition.
In the end, 15 pages remained, which are still preserved in the National Archives in Lisbon.
A dance in honor of the African saint, during the Carnival of Rio.Tata Barreto (Viradouro | Riotur)
The last years of Rosa María's life were already full of megalomaniacal delirium: she insisted that a flood would devastate Rio de Janeiro just as the earthquake destroyed Lisbon and that her small convent would emerge from the water like Noah's Ark.
King Sebastião of Portugal, who disappeared two centuries before in Morocco, would appear in another boat, with whom she would marry and found a new empire.
She also claimed that her heart was Christ's own heart, and that she nursed the baby Jesus.
In her moments of trance she began to be violent with some key figures of high society, which led to her fall from grace.
In 1763 she was considered by the Church as a heretic and a false saint, and transferred to Lisbon, where she died in prison, which according to Zanon proves the importance she had at the time, since it was not common to take a prisoner to the other side of the Atlantic.
The tribute to Rosa María Egipciaca joins other famous carnival parades that revealed the names of black women forgotten by history, such as the slave Xica da Silva, the African queen Agotime or the quilombola leader Tereza de Benguela.
This year, in addition to the one in Viradouro, there were other “afro-centred” parades that have even been suggested by the Secretary of Education of the city of Rio as work material in public schools.
Mangueira dealt with the Africanness of the music of Bahia, Beija-Flor, with the heroes of the independence of Brazil who do not appear in the official history, and Tuiuti, with the relationship between black and indigenous culture on the island of Marajó.
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