TEN BILLION SPACE COLONISTS

On 5/27/06, Omar E. Vega wrote:
(...)
> Rome superposed Christian believes to local religions. That's common
> in every country of Latin America. In Chile we have the "Virgin of
> La Tirana", in Bolivia exists the "Virgin of the Socavon" (Virgin of
> the mine) and every single country has some syncretic idea, blessed
> by the Church but that preserves old myths. Besides in Peru and
> Bolivia the Natives sacrifices llamas in honor of Mother Land theses
> days, not people.
(...)

In Brazil syncretism is a bit more complex because *two* alien,
non-native religions - Catholicism, brought from Europe by the
colonizers, and Candombl, brought from Africa by slaves - are
syncretized. So, the Orixs (the gods from candombl) are intertwined
with Catholic saints (which in fact are the equivalent of minor gods
in this vertent of Chistianity). We have for instance Iemanj, the
goddes of the sea and the mother of all mortals, identified with the
Virgin Mary, and Nan, the old goddess of the earth and mud,
identified with Saint Anna (Mary's mother). This attitude is kind of
easy for some spin-offs of Candombl like Umbanda, which believes in
reincarnation - and so it is easy to think of the Virgin Mary and
Iemanj as just two different avatars, or incarnations, of the same
goddess. The attitude of the local Catholic church is of veiled
tolerance, but not approval.

Oddly, from the religion of native Brazilians almost nothing is left
but for some legends like the Iara (a kind of fresh water siren), the
Curupira (a spooky guardian spirit of the forests, red haired, with
inverted feet and using a boar as mount) and transmorphs like
she-leopards.