In Venezuela, Adoration Meets Blend Of Traditions

October 27, 2009

Author: Simon Romero

Source: The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/americas/28venez.html

A medium lit the candles around him. The pounding of drums filled the air. A crowd of pilgrims repeatedly shouted “fuerza” — strength — with such fervor that beads of sweat dropped from their brows. Even his tipple was ready: a helper poured Johnnie Walker Swing whisky into a hollowed bull’s horn.

But Erik the Red was not in the mood to party.

Instead Erik, a Norse spirit who possesses some of the devotees of María Lionza — a figure at the center of the Venezuelan religion that draws thousands of pilgrims each October to this remote mountain in the northwest — looked a bit uncomfortable.

Blood trickled from points on his face, which he had punctured with a nail. He staggered under his red cape. Yet he went on with his duties, blessing a teenage girl in search of good fortune in romance and rubbing the belly of a middle-aged housewife suffering from a hernia. To one and all, he offered sips from his horn.

“One is born with this ability to channel positive energies,” explained the medium, Juan Antonio Castillo, 42, a shoe salesman who said he had been possessed by the Norseman and carried out the ritual accordingly. “Erik,” he said admiringly, “was first a pirate, then a farmer, then a great warrior who made it to Greenland.”

María Lionza, with its ever-growing pantheon of saints and spirits, has emerged as one of the New World’s most malleable religions, blending Catholicism with West African traditions and many other customs. Across Venezuela, it is symbolized in statues depicting a sensuous María Lionza, an Indian woman riding a tapir — the South American herbivore related to the rhinoceros — while holding a human pelvis in her upstretched arms. As many as 30 percent of Venezuela’s 27 million people, from varying social classes, take part in its rites, according to anthropologists.