Jurema in Northeastern Brazilian Religiosities: Polysemy, Historical Transformations, and Ritual Circulations

Abstract

Abstract This article examines jurema in Northeastern Brazil through the lenses of religiosity, historicity, and polysemy. Rather than treating it merely as a plant or psychoactive beverage, the article approaches jurema as a point of articulation among vegetal materiality, mystical experience, indigeneity, memory, and historical transformation. Because the term can refer simultaneously to a plant, a ritual drink, an entity, a spiritual line, an enchanted city, and a marker of collective identity, the article argues that such multiplicity should not be read as semantic imprecision, but as a constitutive feature of historically situated religious experiences. It further contends that jurema has circulated across distinct religious formations shaped since the colonial period in zones of contact among Indigenous peoples, Black populations, popular Catholicisms, and local healing circuits, while being continuously reworked up to the present. The argument is organized around three axes: the polysemy of jurema and its condition as a plant of power and ritual mediation; the historicity of its uses, with attention to colonial records, missionary repression, and forms of subalternization produced by colonialism; and its centrality among Indigenous peoples of Northeastern Brazil, as well as its later circulation in contexts of catimbó, umbanda, and the so-called jurema sagrada. In conclusion, the article proposes that jurema offers a privileged analytical entry point for thinking about Latin American religions through processes of intercultural mediation, historicity, and ritual circulation.