Ex-Votos: Extreme Devotion and Faith in the Sertão do Brazil

In the Northeast of Brazil, the religion is as tragic, wounded by thorns, tortured by the sun as the dry land of the region. With this statement, the anthropologist Roger Bastide sought to describe the connection between religion and the hard life of those living in the sertão, the dry lands of Brazil, where death is present everywhere - from the dry vegetation to the scarcity of food and water. In the sertão, to be alive is a miracle. In this hostile environment of extremes, religion becomes the hope that one relies on in order to survive; and ex-votos become the strongest evidence of this, where extreme hardship is balanced with extreme faith.
Faith in the Divine who hears the plea of a desperate population and answers their cries with miracles. The woman who cured her leg, the child who had a good birth, a good marriage, a good harvest everything is believed to have a Divine intervention. In the sertão, the relation between divine and the people is lost in time. Like in the medieval era, priests become knights that protect the devotee from the evil, and the Church is the castle where the King of the Kings lives.
In the form of wood legs, wax bodies, photos, or clothes, the ex-votos, as David Freedberg defines, are the drive to ensure accuracy of representation for the grace received. The ex-votos are indeed the devotees own body that is given back to the Divine, repeating the sacrifice that the son of God did once for them

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Education

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• ex-votos
• sertão
• Brazil
• faith
• devotion