My offical review of Brida, by Paulo Coelho
Brida is the second book I have read by Paulo Coelho (The Zahir was the first). In the Introduction, he explains that while on a pilgrimmage road to Rome he met an Irish woman who told him her story of her spiritual pilgrimmage. This story is supposedly the story of her spiritual quest, with the names of the relevant people changed.
The story involves a young woman who is in search of Wisdom and Knowledge, and also of her Soul Mate. She seeks this wisdom in the old "pagan" religions that is today called Wicca. She studies under two teachers in Ireland, a woman and a man (a "Wizard" and a Witch) and she is tormented by her quest for love, which is complicated by her decision that she has 2 Soul Mates, and she needs to resolve whether to accept this, or to choose between her spiritual and her romantic passions.
The book follows the young woman's interactions between the Wizard, who is an older man who lives in the forest by himself, and an older woman she calles "Wicca", who lives in town. Both of these older people teach her different aspects of the same pagan traditions, which incorporates old nature-based, pre-Christian fertility rituals and Christian doctrine. The Wizard teaches the the so-called "Tradition of the Sun", and the woman teaches her the so-called "Tradition of the Moon". Both of these are basically the same set of ideas, explained from different perspectives.
I think the details of the story are less imporant than the atomosphere of the book. I can't help but compare the conversations in the book with the ideas of Carlos Castaneda, who Coelho says had a big influence on him. I think that Coelho is trying to preserve Castaneda's ideas, but at the same time preserve the spiritual teachings of Christianity. Instead of casting aside organized religion for a supposedly more-pure spirituality, as Castaneda did, I think Coelho is trying to combine multiple traditions into one holisitic view of spiritual questions. This task alone makes him somewhat unique amongst modern writers, whose inspirations are usually a bit more down-to-earth.
Carlos Castaneda claimed to have found a source of deep spiritual knowledge in a primitive culture. This culture was supposedly unaffected by the diluting effects of modern civlization, science, and organized religion. Castaneda argued that this primitive, more-pure culture, was able to perceive different, parallel realms of existence, occupied by spirits, that are real and not imagined. This more-pure, unorganized set of teachings also possess a deep spiritual knowledge that is harder to connect to from within the modern world. Connecting to this deeper spiritual part of life requires somehow avoiding the distractions of modern life, and our own personal assumptions built up over our lives, and to approach spiritual questions from a place of peace, concentration, inward-focus, and trying to forget our past. We must imagine that have just been born.
These primitive cultures are usually refered to as "pagan", which just means that they are older than Christianity, and are not organized, in the way that the Church is. Any group that is organized, religious or otherwise, is assumed to have lost touch with the more pure, early phase of its life. To return to that original inspiration requires that we cast aside the organization and seek that original "spark". This is why Castaneda cast aside any religious, and personal, heritage he was raised in.
Paulo Coelho seems to have taken to heart the ideas of Castaneda, but without making the either-or decision that Castaneda made. Assuming the conversations in the book "Brida" reflect some of Coelho's own thoughts, he seems to argue instead for a perspective where these older, primitive, intuitive approaches to spiritual things be incorporated with the organized aspects of his religious heritage, specifically the Catholic Church. Coelho's spiritual apprach seems to be a combination of primitive "pagan" inward-seeking spiritual disciplines, with the teachings of the Bible and the Church.
Several times in the book the woman named Wicca teaches the younger woman things by referring to "our sisters", the witches that have been hunted throughout history. But in the same breath she will also refer to the Virgin Mary, almost impling that Mary possessed some of these same nature-based ideas. Wicca and the young woman spend time out in the forest, uttering magical phrases, talking to the moon and stars, drawing circles on the ground, and performing Wiccan ceremonies, but they also visit churches, they attend Mass, and they refer to passages in the Bible, without ever criticizing any of these things. This is done by the older "Wizard" also. The Church is never referred to as somehow trying to suppress deeper wisdom, but is portrayed as pointing to the same wisdom, but from a more organized perspective.
I think this dual approach - of intuition and organized doctrine - is what is appealing in Coelho's writings. It is very easy to write a story claiming that the bigger, organized group is suppressing the smaller, more pure group. This is common especially in books about religion. The Church is often portrayed as a massive conspiracy, suppressing some secret knowledge, and a small group of spiritual rebels seek to uncover "the truth" and free the world from the Church's evil deeds. But this is a old idea by now, and it is simply naive to assume that an organized approach to anything is somehow less pure and less good than a disorganized, intuitive approach to a topic. Organization often is required to preserve an idea, whether that organization is a corporation, a nation, or the Church. Primitive doesn't always equal more-pure.
So I think Coelho represents a more healthy balance between these 2 opposite perspectives. I'm not sure I follow exactly what pagan teachings he is trying to reconcile with Church doctrine. Perhaps he doesn't refer to anything specific, and he is interested more in a balanced spiritual mindset. But, then again, his books refer to secret societies, with names like "RAM", which he supposedly belongs to, which supposedly teach spefically defined ideas and doctrine. So perhaps these details are secret. Perhaps he is a Gnostic in disguise...!
At the end of this book the young woman completes the first phase of her training, and she is initiated into the "sisterhood" of witches. This part of the book is portrayed as a ceremony as positive and as deep as any Catholic Mass, but which takes place in nature instead of in a building. I found this detail, and the entire book actually, to be a bit unfocused, with the main emphasis being on the atmosphere and mood of the event rather than the specifics. But perhaps that's the point of the book.
As with Castaneda's spiritually-aware Indians in northern Mexico, the pagans of Ireland supposedly are in touch with the spiritual world, and this affects the heart more than the mind. Coelho says more than once that the "energy" that flows between our reality and the parallel realities of the spirits is Love. So I probably shouldn't ask too many questions. I should focus instead on Love, regardless of if Love comes from primitive traditions, or from an organized Tradition.