The Commendation of Souls is a widespread tradition in several parts of Brazil under different
names and practices. Generally held during Holy Week or throughout Lent, it assembles ritual
practices of prayer, chanting of mournful songs and prayers, which aim to intercede for souls.
In the Amazon, it appears as a probable result of the incorporation of indigenous, African and
European beliefs, in the form of expressions of worship to the souls and memory of the dead,
aiming at their encouragement or salvation. In Oriximiná, in northwestern Pará, nine groups
composed of specialists in ordering souls work in the urban and rural areas of the municipality.
Among them, the Santas Missões group was defined as an empirical object of this ethnography.
Accompanying it at different times and contexts - before, during and after the rites themselves
-, interacting and dialoguing with their members - including in the context of interviews - we
asked how they understood death and dealt with the dead through ritual and/or in everyday life.
We hypothesized that, basically, the ritual set performs functions with two distinct classes of
beings: the souls (of the dead) and the living. These, on the other hand, are divided into two
groups: those who request/receive the ritual and the commissioners themselves, who perform
it. In native discourses, the religious categories of heaven, hell and purgatory are recurrent,
justifying the commendation of souls and articulating symbols and notions of sacredness, in
order to affect the state of souls. In ritualistic acts that bring prayers and believers together, the
dead are thought of as endowed with intention, feelings, wills; they can act on the living world
through apparitions (visages), providing blessings and protections, and even applying
punishments to the deserving ones. In the biographical accounts of the commissioners, beliefs
and knowledge emerge in a way that leads us to see the dead as alive and in constant interaction
with this world, where natives conceive and operate their own cosmology that characterizes the
local ritual practice. In short, the research documents the practice of the Commendation of
Souls, which is based on traditional knowledge about the world of the dead, but produces effects
in the world of the living, revealing ways of being, existing and thinking about the phenomenon
of life.
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