Lovesick Brazilians Seek Out Sorcerers to Fix Relationships

BY SAMANTHA PEARSON

Some bemoan spells that work too well, as clingy partners make life ‘hell on earth’

SÃO PAULO—A broken heart takes time to heal. In Brazil, you’ll also need the feet of a dead chicken, some red ribbon, honey and a pot of glue.

Lovesick Brazilians are turning to magic to get their partners back as the country grapples with one of the world’s fastest-rising divorce rates.

Witches thought to have magic powers guide the heartbroken through rituals such as wrapping frogs in underwear or dipping a chicken’s feet in honey. They say it will keep a spouse from cheating or bring back one who left. Some customers say the spells have backfired, making their spouses unbearably clingy. “My life became hell on earth,” said Josefina, who declined to give her surname for fear of angering the spirits.

Concerned her husband was cheating on her, the 67--

year-old housewife from São Paulo asked a woman who identified as a sorceress to cast a spell on her man, only to have him follow her around the house all day.

“He wouldn’t leave me alone, it drove me crazy,” Josefina said. She paid another witch $50 to undo the spell.

Once home to one of the world’s largest slave populations, Brazil is steeped in religions with African roots that rely on magic to invoke spirits, such as Candomblé and Umbanda. Led by respected practitioners, they combine African beliefs with Catholic traditions inherited from the country’s Portuguese colonizers.

But a new generation of self-proclaimed witches has emerged in recent years, drawing on these religions to make a fast buck.

“Make a man fall in love with you in 24 hours,” promises one online advertisement, boasting a $25 ritual with a 98% success rate. You can pay via credit card.

Tech-savvy sorcerers, often dressed in the robes of traditional Afro-Brazilian spiritual leaders, teach their witchery online over YouTube and Tik-Tok to hundreds of thousands of followers.

Most spells fall under the category of “love-binding,” which promises to make any chosen target smitten and loyal for life. But videos also include step-by-step guides to casting deadly curses on enemies by stuffing raw beef liver into a miniature coffin and dousing it with rum.

Among the most popular rituals are those that promise to keep cheating husbands faithful by giving them erectile dysfunction.

“This one’s infallible,” says a man, dressed in white, who identifies himself in a video posted online as Father John of Ogun, in reference to an African warrior.

“He’ll never look at another woman again!” he says, binding up a piece of tissue covered in what he says is sperm and planting it in the stem of a banana tree.

Spellmaking has surged in the years since the pandemic, when fear of death prompted people to seek spiritual guidance, practitioners said.

The country’s lockdown accelerated Brazil’s rising divorce rate, leaving swaths of heartbroken customers desperate to try anything for love. Some 420,000 divorces were filed in 2022, a 76% increase from 2010, a trend also driven by greater financial independence among women and a 2007 law that made it easier to ditch a spouse.

Mending a broken heart is such big business that banners offering love-binding spells have appeared at stoplights. Stores sell DIY spell kits, from “cry-at-my-feet” shower gel blessed by African spirits to bottles of love-binding powder to sprinkle over a husband’s pants.

Practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions don’t take these spells seriously. But that hasn’t stopped people believing them, said Rodney William, an anthropologist and Candomblé leader.

“Everyone wants to be loved and rich,” he said.

More sinister forces are sometimes at work. A handful of swindlers masquerading as Umbanda leaders online have used love-binding rituals to blackmail clients into paying as much as a thousand dollars in hush money, victims say.

Rafael Alves, a 36-year-old English teacher and restaurant owner in Rio de Janeiro who moonlights as a sorcerer, said about 75% of requests for his love-binding spells come from women.

Men tend to ask for spells to get rich or overcome infertility problems. “But some men do also come to me in tears, begging me to help them after being abandoned by their wife,” said Alves, who often practices in Rio’s favelas, as the city’s poorest settlements are known.

Known as Father Rafael the Slick One from the Favela, Alves now has almost a quarter of a million subscribers on the YouTube channel he started in 2016. A Panama hat often atop his head, Alves demonstrates a popular ritual to keep loved ones close. Inserting a piece of paper with their name between two chicken’s feet, he binds them together with red thread or ribbon and covers the offering in honey.

He also addresses more mundane concerns: rituals to get lucky at gambling, magical bay leaf baths for sex workers to attract wealthy clients, and spells using earth from freshly dug graves to force a noisy neighbor to move away.

“It took a while, but that good-for-nothing is gone!” marveled one follower after carrying out the spell at home.

Such success isn’t always down to the spirits. “I couldn’t understand why my neighbor kept throwing soil on my house,” said Barbara Viana, a nanny in São Paulo. When a friend explained it was probably earth from a cemetery, Viana said she couldn’t leave her home soon enough.

But not all spells go to plan. After Valdir Oliveira’s wife became angry with him for coming home late one night, the laborer from São Paulo jokingly performed a love-binding spell that he found online while at a bar.

The magic hasn’t returned to his marriage yet. “She’s still mad at me.”