Exorcists, Inquisitors, and the “Tree of Life”: Ritual Translation from Angola to Portugal in the 1730s

Francisco Buytrago believed he had made a discovery of great significance: a new tool to combat demons. Upon his return from Angola to Lisbon, he drafted a manuscript on the uses of what he dubbed “the tree of life.” The curious story of Buytrago’s manuscript, his amateur exorcisms performed with priests in the Lusophone Atlantic, and an Inquisitorial crackdown on these unorthodox practices brings together environmental, religious, and medical history. While a cavalry officer stationed in Angola, Buytrago adapted West Central African rituals surrounding the bark of Erythrophleum suaveolens— a tree used widely in judicial ordeals and known as nkasa in the Kingdom of Kongo and the “red water” or “ordeal tree” in West Africa —into a new way of conducting exorcisms that emphasized the preparation of the red water oath draught and the importance of vomiting to expel demons. Buytrago may have been a failed bioprospector, as his unpublished manuscript did not lead to recognition in naturalist circles or the commodification of the bark. However, an emphasis on commodities and imperial extraction, while important, can obscure ways in which ritual practices from around the Atlantic world shaped practices in Europe as an integral part of the Atlantic world. Material objects like nkasa bark were embedded in cultural bundles with their own histories and contexts, in this case West Central African concepts of ritual efficacy, morality, and political power. This project explores how the cultural bundle surrounding nkasa bark influenced these exorcists, whose practices increasingly involved documented experimentation, bodily ways of knowing, and proving the efficacy of their work. The story of the ontologies of ritual surrounding this tree offers a window on the intersecting histories of the Portuguese Enlightenment, cross-cultural medical and religious exchanges in Atlantic Africa, and the circulation of medical knowledge in the Atlantic world.