ABSTRACT
This chapter evokes the dialogic wanderings in an imperfect mimetic rendering three times removed: bridging Tonio's embodied spatiotemporal journeys with my own temporal journeys represented in the mimetic inscriptions that follow. Tonio also speaks as a popular Spiritist medium in the tradition of Kardecian Scientific Spiritism. A fashionable secular-transcendental practice created in France during the second half of the nineteenth century, Spiritism was based on the belief in human communication with enlightened spirits and reincarnation. European Romantics believed that enlightened spirits could direct people in creating a progressive, morally sound world, and this is why Spiritism was embraced by nineteenth-century liberal, anticolonial and progressive elites as a counterforce to the hegemony of Spanish Catholic rule in Puerto Rico, and became through the decades a legitimate sphere for alternative transcendental practices. Tonio, as many other brujos, adopted the form and content of Spiritist practices such as holding night-time spiritual gatherings or veladas.
