Maracatu Nação, uma corte sagrada afro-brasileira: um estudo sobre a transição religiosa na trajetória da figura do rei do Congo em Pernambuco

Abstract

This assignment concentrates on the importance of the figure of the king of Congo, that has, on this specific focus, its origin in the African socio-political institution in the kingdom of Congo, already existing in Africa, by the constitution of kingdoms and empires, before the arrival of the Portuguese, being the figure of this king introduced in the Portuguese metropolis around the XV century by a theatrical formulation from a Congolese embassy. In this context they had the African communities gathered in Lisbon as actors, around the confraternity of Our Lady of the Rosary that had the athorities approval. The documentation, although rare in the XVI and XVII centuries, often appeared in the XVIII century, and even then simultaneously in Portugal and in Brazil, being this theatrical reproduction inserted by the authority of the Catholic Church as the institution that legitimates the power of this king. This figure arrives in the Brazilian territory as a mediation and control element among the local authorities and the Africans, and it is inside the Catholic Church, with the brotherhoods, that the figure of the king of Congo occupies its first action scenery until the XIX century. In the XX century, with a new dual profile between the sacred and the profane, transits the representation of the king of Congo in a sustentation artifice of an identity culture for the maracatu-nação tradicional, being the Pernambucan xangô or candomblé location of fetichism its fixation instance in the sacred space. Nowadays, right in th XXI century, the figure of the king as its meaning, beyond the religious sphere, the Afro-Pernambucan cultural interaction and the return of theatricality as a symbolic function of the valorization of the African origins. This research ties and analyses, through Peter Berger s concept of social plausibility the idea that reality is a social construction from the representations and the unfoldings of the figure of the king of Congo, in its first instance as an idealized figure, afterwards as a control element, and after 1888, transiting from the sacred sphere of the Pernambucan sangô to the court of maracatu-nação tradicional. In this sense, we try to bring to light the concept of sacred anchore on Mircea Eliade, that makes it possible to translate the history of hierophany of the king of Congo, in the construction and in the trajectory through different spaces of the sacred.