Fronteiras semânticas: o dialogismo das linguagens rituais pentecostais e umbandistas – uma análise das expressões gestuais

Abstract

The ritual space is a sacred locus of celebration. In the religious stage, the feeling of being recognized full of the Holy Spirit or incorporated by the Entities rewrites, in the subject's own body, the authenticity of his mythological tradition. Simultaneously, religious experience reactualizes the power of this tradition. And there are several ways in which the mythical narrative emerges, coming to the surface and becoming tangible to perception and emotion. And, in this sense, culture plays a fundamental role: it is the link to promote the meeting between the truths of belief and religious experiences. Michel Meslin points out that religion only reaches man through the cultural mediations of his time. Among these also varied "cultural mediations" is music, with its genres, rhythms and a symbolic force capable of functioning as a key, opening the doors of sensitivities. In addition to the chants - but related to them - the ritual trance experience is an even more powerful device of cultural mediation: a dynamo of liturgically sacralized emotions. This religious feeling of joy has its basis in the structure of the belief system, and thus even the song that helps and complements the rites, consubstantiates its sacred status. Musicalizing the Sacred, this expressive art of faith and also of culture further enhances the social feeling of belonging to the individual's religious community, which also nourishes their hope for life. This work lies in the path of religious experience, in its sinuous mishaps. In this way, the intention is to understand a little the functioning of the symbolic gears that give meaning to the performance manifestations experienced by Pentecostals and Umbandists in two specific religious groups. And when analyzing the relationship between the ritual dynamics of these cults and the production of meanings operated in the gestural languages of the subjects of belief, we reflect on the ritual semantic dialogues that, by constructing experiences of spirituality, also reconfirm, reconstruct life experiences. This is when the divergence of worldviews succumbs to the convergence of religious meanings.