At the beginning of century XVIII, the slavery arrived at its apogee in the Portuguese Metropolis, especially in Lisbon. Until 1761, a thousand captive Africans, or more perhaps, per year, disembarks in the wharfs of the capital. They come directly of Africa or Brazil where some years had inhabited. A long process of adaptation, reconstruction of the identity and of the imaginary one starts for them. Behind frontage of seven black brotherhoods, between which two were of nations, which presents the official and framed version of baroque Catholicism and seek to produce and to present blacks with a white soul, appears another reality: the persistence of the traditional African beliefs, articulated or mixed to the Portuguese popular traditions, to which, answering to its search of magical cumulative and differentials powers, the white populations reveal sensible. Thus, the Inquisition trials disclose that, mandingueiros, soothsayers, wizards, and black magical folk healers insert themselves, each one with its manner, in the complex chain of legitimated and illegitimated agents of the sacred.
Lisbon; slavery; black magicals.