French Anthropologist Finds Her Calling as Afro-Brazilian Priestess

Under rafters hung with goat testicles, Mother Omindarewa, high priestess of candomble, leads two guests to the temple’s inner sanctum. Unlocking the door, she beckons them into the presence of the deity.

In the half-light, a stern-faced wooden statue of Yemanja, the African goddess of the sea, stares down from an altar adorned with lace and seashells, ornate metal crowns, colored beads, clay pots and the horns of sacrificed goats. The visitors kneel reverently.

Mother Omindarewa shakes a tin rattle and intones a hymn in Yoruba, the ancient language of a religion brought to Brazil centuries ago by slaves uprooted from Africa. Behind her, women in turbans, their foreheads to the ground, sing the response.

In minutes, the ritual is over. Mother Omindarewa rises, her blue eyes sparkling.

“All done,” she says in French-accented Portuguese. “You have been blessed by Yemanja.”

Outside candomble circles, Mother Omindarewa--Yoruba for “beautiful waters”--is known as Gisele Cossard, French author and Sorbonne-educated anthropologist.

Far from academia and the diplomatic circles of her past, Cossard has found a calling in her terreiro, or spirit temple, in this gritty industrial suburb of Rio.

For initiates to candomble, it’s not surprising that a white European could be a priestess in the religion of black Africa. Such destiny is preordained by the orixas--the African gods of light. “It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from,” she says. “The orixas choose.”

Cossard’s destiny was Africa. She knew it even as a girl growing up in Nancy in the 1920s. Her parents had lived in Morocco, and her home was filled with brass trays and exotic art from North Africa, her imagination with tales of a lost paradise.

In 1949, with Cossard married to a geography professor, Africa again entered her life. The couple moved to Cameroon, then to Chad, the Ubangi, the former Belgian Congo, Kenya. In the twilight of European colonialism, nations simmered with revolt, and African culture was veiled in suspicion and hate.

“I tried to escape the European community,” she recalls. “I hungered for all that mysterious life I sensed, but I could not break the barriers of color, of social caste. Africa did not open to me. It was an impenetrable world.”

They returned to France, settling near Cognac for what Cossard calls “two years of purgatory.” But in 1959, her husband was named cultural attache to the French embassy in Rio de Janeiro. In Brazil, she found Africa again.

“It was in the people, the movement, the gestures, the dancing way of walking,” she says. “I saw it immediately.”

Straying from the elite circles of expatriates, Cossard fell in love with samba and climbed Rio’s hills to learn firsthand about life in the favela shantytowns.

And she found candomble.

One night, at a feast at a terreiro in the poor outlying district of Sao Joao de Meriti, Cossard felt dizzy, then slumped to the floor in a trance, “possessed” by Yemanja.

“That’s when my life began,” she says.

She and her husband separated in 1964. He returned to France; she remained in Rio with their teenage children.

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Candomble (pronounced cahn-dom-BLEH) dominated the religious lives of roughly 3.5 million African slaves brought to Brazil between 1550 and 1850 to work the mines and plantations.

Its followers believe in a vital force called axe, found in all things, living or inert. It is personalized in the orixas, those deities that embody forces of nature and can “possess” the chosen during a ritual trance.

In candomble doctrine, everyone has a chief orixa that defines personality and protects affairs. Guided by a priest, offerings to that orixa can strengthen one’s axe and bring harmony, prosperity and progress.

For the Roman Catholic Church, candomble smacked of devil worship. The religion was outlawed and its practitioners punished. To skirt the ban, slaves were assigned a Catholic saint to each orixa. Iansan, the goddess of tempests and lightning, became St. Barbara. Xango, lord of justice and thunder, became St. Jerome.

The mix grew into a uniquely Brazilian religion called umbanda, although pure candomble also survived. Their appeal has grown steadily among white Brazilians, and many see nothing wrong in attending mass in the morning and a terreiro at night.

Still, a stigma of backwardness lingered. When government census takers called in 1988, fewer than 1% of Brazilians said they belonged to Afro-Brazilian cults. The question was not pursued in the 1995 census, but black cultural groups claim that 70 million of Brazil’s 160 million people have some link to African religions.

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Exu, the sly messenger of the orixas, guards the gate at Cossard’s terreiro, a walled oasis on a dirt road near a strip of working-class bars and shops.

Inside, the tile roofs of the main house and the temple buildings peek above the lush gardens, dotted with trees she brought from Africa. Cossard sits in a tooled-leather chair on the veranda, a ceiling fan whirring. An open door offers a glimpse of a cozy living room, with a European-style fireplace and crowded bookshelves.

One by one, some of her “children”--those she has initiated into candomble through secret sacrificial rites--approach respectfully to ask her blessing or instructions for their chores.

Cossard also enjoys respect in academic circles, half a world away. In 1970, she earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne, defending a thesis on what she knew best: the Angolan branch of candomble. Praise came from renowned sociologist Roger Bastide, author of the classic study “The Candomble of Bahia.”

As an outsider, Cossard claims a unique take.

“For those who live within candomble, it’s a puzzle that is never complete. You learn a plant, a dance, a sacrificial chant; it’s never finished,” she says. “I could reflect and see candomble as a whole. It was my special gift.”

Today, Cossard has lost count of her initiated “children,” although she knows there are hundreds. When she takes a break from candomble duties, she works on a book at the computer in her study.

At 74, she moves easily between her different worlds, despite some resistance at home.

“My father never understood. It was just beyond him,” she says, fingering the strands of colored beads over her white lace dress. “My brother thought I had sullied the family name.”