THE POLTERGEIST AND CULTURAL VALUES: A COMPARATIVE INTERPRETATION OF A BRAZILIAN AND AN AMERICAN CASE

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David J. Hess
Interdisciplinary Writing Program
Colgate University
Hamilton, NY 13346
The Poltergeist and Cultural Values:
A Comparative Interpretation of a Brazilian and an American Case*
Abstract
The interpretations of both the members of the afflicted
families and of the parapsychology researchers are compared for two
poltergeist cases: Powatan case of the United States and the
Gaurulhos case of Brazil. The "recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis"
intepretation of the American case expresses Anglo-Saxon values such
as individualism, whereas the sorcery interpretation of the
Brazilian case expresses Latino values such as personalism. An
alternative approach which might superoede these value-laden
theories is suggested.
" I wish to thank Patric Giesler for his comments on an earlier
draft of this paper, especially regarding the possibility that the
poltergeist itself" might vary across cultures and that the two
theories considered here might represent "culture-bound theories."
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Most parapsychologists who belong to the Parapsychological
Association interpret poltergeists as the "recurrent spontaneous
psychokinesis" (PSPK) of an "agent," a person around whom the
phenomena focus. This paper examines some of the cultural values
and implicit assumptions behind this interpretation by comparing a
typical poltergeist case in the United States with one in Brazil.
This comparison will lead to a series: of questions regarding the
values that inform the current approaches to the study of
poltergeists. I begin by reviewing two poltergeist studies in two
cultures; the first is based on the work of Hernani Guimar&ies
Andrade on the poltergeist of Guarulhos, a city in the state of S&o
Paulo, Brazil, and the second is based on the research of John
Palmer on the poltergeist of Powhatan, a town in the southern United
States.
The Case Studies
The family involved in the Guarulhos case spent most of their
time in this city, which is located outside of S&o Paulo. In the
beginning, an extended family lived together in two connected
houses. This included the presumed poltergeist "agent," whose name
was Noemia. NoAmia was recently married and pregnant, and she lived
with her husband, a one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, her husband's
father and mother, and their family of three daughters and two sons.
The family all belonged to the Pentecostalist faith, a religion that
is growing rapidly in Brazil by attracting large numbers of converts
among the working class.
Andrade divides the case into three major phases (for an
English-language review, see Alvarado, 1985). During the first
phase, from April 27, 1973, to May 1, 1973, the family experienced
cuts on the furniture, some disappearances of money, and apparitions
of a monstrous, animal-like figure. The poltergeist ended after
prayers and Bible readings (Andrade, 1984: 8). During the second
phase, from the end of April, 1974, to October 25, 1974, the family
experienced rock showers, bodily cuts (first on the husband, then on
Nodmia's daughter, then on Nodmia), tears in their clothing, broken
objects, mysterious appearances of rosemary branches, disappearances
of money, and fires. During this period Noemia's family moved to
her parents' home, but the poltergeist followed them. In August of
1974, the family moved to a new home in Guarulhos and held an
evangelical session in their home, which -Vas successful (p. 23).
A third phase began on March 28, 1975; no date of termination
is given. During this phase the family experienced missing money,
moving and breaking objects, and falling stones, but no more cuts
(p. 29). In addition, one of the children and a girl who did chores
also showed signs of spirit possession, and Noemia reports having
lost a tooth while she was sleeping. The religious leaders of the
family's church held a ceremony in which they anointed the corners
of the house with a special oil, and this brought relief to the
family.
The family expressed two broad interpretations. Noemia's
father-in-law believed that her husband had caused the problems
because "he began to fall away from the principles [of the Gospel]
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and we knew that something would happen" (p. 53). The father-in-law
believed that there were three monsters involved, one of which he
defeated in a physical struggle. According the No6mia's husband,
the poltergeist diminished after No6mia saw the figure of a deformed
Satan and became more religious (p. 67). Together these comments
indicate that one interpretation was that the phenomena represented
divine retribution for lack of religious faith.
The second interpretation, which Andrade supported, was that
the phenomena were due to sorcery. A mysterious pair of women
attempted to enter the house on more than one occasion, and No6mia
notes that she saw,-that the women were carrying a clear plastic bag
with candles and rosemary in them, which in Brazil are often
materials for black magic rituals (p. 47). In addition, sensitives
of the family's religion made a psychometric reading of a piece of
clothing and said that someone had performed a work of black magic
against them. No6mia's husband believed that the person responsible
might have been an old lover (p. 72). Furthermore, Andrade notes
that the monster which some members of the family saw corresponds to
the Umulum spirit of the Umbanda/Ouimbanda religion (p. 63), and he
argues that sorcery was the best explanation for the poltergeist of
Guarulhos. He rejects the RSPK interpretation and argues that there
were no signs of sexual repression or family conflicts (p. 70).
A different type of poltergeist is found in Palmer's report
(1974) on the Powhatan poltergeist in the rural South of the United
States. The presumed agent of this case was a ten-and-a-half-year-
old boy, J. E., who lived with his elderly foster parents.
According to J.E., the poltergeist attack began on December 2, 1971,
and Palmer investigated the case on January 6, 7, and 10, when the
case was still active. The report does not give a precise date of
termination, although it appears to have ended prior to J.E.'s
foster mother's death in April, 1972. The witnesses--which included
J.E.'s great aunt, maternal grandmother, and local doctor--
experienced stomping noises and object movements.
Like the Guarulhos case, the interpretations of the people
involved were split. J.E.'s foster father believed that the
phenomena represented "a revelation of God," and later he
interpreted them as portents from God warning about the impending
deaths of his wife and J.E.'s great aunt (pp. 19, 32). Prior to her
death, J.E.'s foster mother said that J.E. "had the devil in him"
(p. 20). The only other interpretations that Palmer discusses are
those of J.E.'s great aunt and the family doctor, whose naturalistic
point-of-view contrasts sharply. with the religious meaning that the
events had for the foster parents. The great aunt told Palmer that
the events "fascinated" her more than they "scared" her, and the
doctor appeared to believe that the boy had psychokinetic abilities
(pp. 20-21). Palmer does not discuss the meaning of the poltergeist
to the other witnesses; his own interpretation focuses on
personality and psychodynamic factors that might have patterned what
he interprets as ostensible RSPK centered on J.E. Palmer notes that
J.E. was a severe behavior problem in school and that it was likely
that he denied feelings of aggression because at one level he felt
thankful that his foster parents had taken him in.
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Comparing Interpretations
The two cases bring out three major types of interpretations
of the poltergeist. In the Brazilian case, the percipients
oscillate between the religious and sorcery interpretations, and in
the American case, some percipients find a religious meaning more
suitable, whereas others find a more naturalistic, RSPK-type
interpretation more appropriate. In the Brazilian case, the
researcher sides with the sorcery interpretation, and in the
American case, he sides with the RSPK interpretation.
The religious interpretation of the poltergeist (either as a
portent of God's will or as a demoniacal infestation) cuts across
the two cases and is a product of their shared Western, Christian
cultural background. The significant division in the two oases is
the difference between the sorcery and the RSPK interpretations.
Few, if any, poltergeist studies in Anglo-Saxon cultural contexts by
Anglo-Saxon researchers deviate from the RSPK interpretation, and
the sorcery interpretation is rare if nonexistent (for a possible
exception, see McHarg, 1973). Even in those Anglo-Saxon poltergeist
cases that have similar phenomena to that of the Guarulhos case--
such as the Berini case (Roll and Tringale 1983), which involved
apparitions and attacks on the focus person--the interpretation of
the researchers followed the RSPK framework.
In contrast, during my dissertation research in Brazil, I met
with Andrade and talked with him several times, and-when we
discussed his research on poltergeists, he pointed out that of the
poltergeist oases for which he has collected some information, the
vast majority involve sorcery (also see Playfair, 1975: 274).
However, not all poltergeists in Brazil are linked to sorcery. In a
report on jumping "Qj" stones in theCandomble ceremony, Giesler
(1982) argues that the poltergeist effect is ritual-centered;
several of the cases reported by Playfair do not involve sorcery;
and Jesuit parapsychologists such as Edvino Frideriohs do not
endorse the sorcery interpretation (1977). Nevertheless, in at
least two of the eight cases reported by Playfair (1975), who worked
closely with Andrade, the victims attributed the poltergeist attack
to sorcery. The sorcery interpretation is therefore relatively
absent in the American and Western European context, whereas it is
relatively commonplace in Brazil.
The two contradictory interpretations of the poltergeist--RSPK
and sorcery--are therefore linked to two different cultural
contexts--the United States and Brazil. The analysis that follows
will articulate this division of interpretations with previous
sociologiola and anthropological studies on the cultural differences
between Brazil and the United States.
To begin understanding the Brazilian'sorcery interpretation,
it helps to know that Andrade is a Spiritist (a follower of Allan
Kardec's doctrine) and that many Spiritists in Brazil believe that
the majority of the people who come to their Spiritist centers for
disobsession treatment (a kind of exorcism) are victims of the
sorcery of the-Afro-Brazilian religions. As I have discussed in my
dissertation (1987), the largely white, middle-class Spiritist
movement tends to lump together under the rubric of black magic all
of the varied Afro-Brazilian religions. Thus Andrade's
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 interpretation of the poltergeists as sorcery is linked to the
broader Spiritist belief that many victims of spirit obsession are
victims of sorcery.
Belief in spirits is unbiquitous in Brazil, as it is in many
Latin American, African, and Asian cultural contexts. Thus even if
Andrade had guided the afflicted family's interpretation toward
sorcery, he would have encountered resistance if this belief were
not already widespread in Brazilian culture. Andrade had no trouble
eliciting a sorcery,_interpretation from the victims, and this
interpretation probably occurred to them prior to his investigation.
In abort, the sorcery interpretation is an expression of the
Brazilian cultural context.
There is also some evidence that the sorcery interpretation of
poltergeists exists in other cultures of the African diaspora. For
example, J. J-. Williams (:1934: 251-252) suggests that poltergeist
and duppie cases in Jamaica may be related to obeah sorcery, and
sorcery was one of the interpretations that appeared in the Jamaican
poltergeist case discussed by anthropologist William Wedenoja
(1978). Likewise, three of the cases, reported by I. D. Du Plessis
(1966) for South Africa involve a belief in sorcery, and many
anthropological studies have demonstrated the importance of
witchcraft and sorcery in African cultures. The sorcery
interpretation of poltergeists may even extend beyond the African
diaspora; for example, an Indian newspaper that reported on the
Pillay case suggested that "someone had through a magician induced
the devil to do havoc in the house of Mr. Thangapragasams Pillay"
(Thurston, 1953: 78). .
The problem with most reports of poltergeists in non-Western
cultures is that they generally involve European or Europeanized
witnesses-and investigators; this, combined with the researcher's
emphasis on the "evidentiality" question, means that there is very
little opportunity for the articulation of non-Western cultural
interpretations. As a result, there is a dearth of data on this
possible cultural pattern, and one can at this point only
hypothesize that although all interpretations probably exist to some
extent in all cultures, in some non-Western cultural contexts the
sorcery interpretation tends predominate.
Existing research in comparative sociology/social anthropology
on the contrast in values between modern and traditional cultures
helps clarify the question of why a sorcery interpretation might be
more prevalent in non-Western or traditional cultural contexts.
Anthropologist Roberto DaMatta argues that in the United States and
much of Western Europe, formal political and economic institutions
play the dominant role in society, whereas in Brazil and other
societies with a strong traditional component, kinship and informal
personal relationships rival and at times predominate over formal
institutions (DaMatta, 1978, 1985, 1986; for an English-language
source, of. DaMatta, 1982). Wagley's survey (1968: 175-195) of
Brazilian kinship studies reveals that Brazilians have extensive
godparent/godchildren relationships and large parentelas (webs of
kin relations), which in the middle and upper classes of the cities
sometimes involve several hundred relatives. These informal
institutions generally involve hierarchical relationships
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(older/younger, male/female, godparent/godchild; see Hutchinson
1966), and their personalistic, hierarchical ethic encompasses both
formal institutions and their accompanying egalitarian and
universalistic ethics.
DaMatta discusses this difference in ethics as a difference
between the p2aBoa (literally "person," but meaning something more
like "insider") and the individuo (literally "individual," but more
like "outsider"). In Brazil, social relations are constructed in a
framework of diffuse roles, particularistic values, and hierarchical
relationships, whereas in the United States and many countries of
Western Europe the framework involves role specificity,
universalistic values, and egalitarian relationships (Parsons and
Shill, 1951). DaMatta characterizes Brazil as a "relational
society," in contrast with the United States, where formal
institutions based on the value of the abstract "individual"
encompass informal, personalistic relationships (see Dumont, 1980,
on the individual).
This background of social anthropology/comparative sociology
helps clarify the cultural presuppositions at work in the two
opposing theories of the poltergeist. Andrade argues that the
necessary and sufficient factors for a poltergeist outbreak are the
following: "1) a sorcerer, 2) the discarnate agents that obey the
sorcerer and act as intermediaries, 3) the empirical magical
practices that act on the discarnate agents and lead them to molest
the victim, and 4) the presence, at the location -of the phenomena,
of a human epicenter that is capable of furnishing the energy or
substance necessary for the discarnate agents sent by the sorcerer;
in the absence of the epicenter, discarnate agents appear to be
capable of using the accumulated energy that the epicenter
furnishes" (1984: 73). In an academic language, Andrade clearly
formulates Brazilian cultural concepts regarding the elements of
sorcery. Note that, in DaMatta's terms, it is a relational theory
of the poltergeist: the poltergeist is encompassed by a set of
personal relationships between a sorcerer, a spirit, a human agent,
and, implicitly, a victimizer or someone who initiates the sorcery.
The sorcery interpretation therefore transforms the
poltergeist into a series of hierarchical, personal relations: the
victimizer goes to the sorcerer, who acts as patron and in turn
binds the evil spirits and sends them to perturb the victim. The
victim, in turn, calls on religious authorities--in this case the
Protestant pastor and No6mia's father-in-law--who serve as counter-
balancing patrons in this spiritual feud. In other oases, the
victim may go to a Spiritist disobsession ("exorcism") meeting,
where Spiritist mediums call on their own patrons, the spirits of
light, for help in turning back the evil spirits (on the medium as
patron, see Greenfield, 1986). The structure therefore involves
three pairs of relations: victim/victimizer, sorcerer/pastor (or
Catholic exorcist, Spiritist medium, etc.), and evil spirit/God (or
Catholic saint, Spiritist spirit of light, etc.). The sorcery
interpretation confirms the importance of this network of
conflicting, hierarchical, personal relationships in the face of
alternative explanations--demoniacal intervention, RSPK--that
represent universalistic values and formal institutions.
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Andrade believes that if the "astral double" of discarnate
spirits "has a sufficient dose of ectoplasm, it can manage to to
manifest itself tangibly" and to assume animal or monstrous forms
(1984: 63). When the theory of materialized beings and ectoplasm
.replaces that of a psyohokinetio force (the ASPK interpretation),
the the poltergeist is transformed from an independent "individual"
to a ssoa that can only exist in a personal relationship of
;hierarchy with the victim: the poltergeist is a spirit that depends
,on the living agent. The difference between ectoplasm and
psychokinesis therefore corresponds to that between the Brazilian
oa and the Anglo-Saxon individual.
In contrast, the phrase "recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis"
replaces the network of personal relations with one actor, the
agent, who is a prototype of the Western individual. The RSPK
interpretation focuses on how the social context (a family
situation) affects the psychology of the individual; it translates
the social into the psychologidal. The essential conflict then
becomes not one of two feuding hierarchies but of an individual (the
agent) versus the community (the family). The American poltergeist
case therefore dramatizes the classic dilemma of American culture--
'the relationship between individual and community--just as the
Brazilian case dramatizes the Brazilian dilemma of conflicts between
those linked to a hierancey (pesaoaa) and those outside of it
(individuos). In the American base, the community or family creates
a social context in which the individual is forced to repress or
deny feelings of sexuality or hostility. The poltergeist outbreak
confirms the value of the individual; the community or family can
only repress the individual so far until it rebels and (through
RSPK) reasserts its importance.
As I have discussed in another paper (Hess, 1988), the term
"spontaneous" may be linked to implicit ideas that situate the
psychic in a network of gender-laden images that mark it as female.
In this context, we see how an image of the female--the psychic as
something "spontaneous" and not reducible to the law-like patterns
of society--links up with the Anglo-Saxon ideology of the
"individual," an entity that is also to some extent "spontaneous"
and not reducible to the oppressive demands or laws of the society
in which it is placed. In the.RSPK interpretation, the raw emotions
of aggression or sexuality dramatize the moral principle of
individualism; they represent the individual in an act of rebellion
against the oppressive rules of an authoritarian family or community
situation.
The RSPK interpretation is also similar to the religious
interpretation of the poltergeist, in which the family is victimized
because it has violated some kind of universalistic moral principle
or because a demon has happened. to choose the family as its victim.
In this case, the poltergeist drama represents an explicit conflict
between universalistic values of good and evil, just as the RSPK
interpretation represents the conflict between the rights of the
individual and the oppressive demans of society. In contrast, the
sorcery interpretation encompasses the religious drama of good and
evil with the personal relationships of envy, hatred, and passion:
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revenge replaces universalistic principles of divine retribution or
social justice.
Concluding Comments
Cultural comparison has the advantage of relativizing what
appears to be a "universal" and "scientific" interpretation of the
poltergeist: the RSPK theory. By showing that in other cultures
the sorcery interpretation appears to make more sense to both the
afflicted and the researchers, the RSPK interpretation appears in
contrast to express modern cultural: values such as individualism and
the conflict between the individual and the community.
This comparative study may raise a series of questions for the
parapsychologist. Which theory is right? Is the RSPK
interpretation the universally, valid theory and the sorcery
interpretation the traditional, "popular" theory? Or does the
"poltergeist itself" vary across cultures, and therefore might each
interpretation be correct in its own cultural context? In other
words, do the sorcery and RSPK interpretations represent culture-
bound theories?
These are questions with which parapsychologists are likely to
grapple, but it is possible to avoid these questions by adopting a
different methodology for researching poltergeists. Both the
sorcery and the RSPK theory derive from the researcher's adherence
to a methodology which sets as its goal the explanation of the
poltergeist. Both theories attempt to answer the question, what
causes the poltergeist? In other words, they ask, how do re explain
the poltergeist?
A more relativistic and anthropological perspective would
substitute the question of "Can we explain the poltergeist?" with
"How do we interpret the poltergeist?" In other words, what does
the poltergeist mean to the people whom it afflicts? In what ways
is it serving as an "idiom of distress" (Crapanzano, 1977) for the
articulation of conflicts, needs, dilemmas, and both personal and
cultural meaning? From this point of view, both the RSPK and the
sorcery interpretation become not endpoints but starting points;
they become pathways to the discovery of the meaning of the
poltergeist to the afflicted. If parapsychologists who research
poltergeists wish to avoid the series of difficult methodological
questions which a comparative perspective raises, they might do well
to heed Clifford Geertz's famous dictum for anthropology, that the
analysis of the poltergeist should be "not an experimental science
in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning"
(19711: 5)
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