Gilberto Gil: Mysticism and Science

In an interview he gave CartaCapital magazine in 2015, Gil admitted that he had come to the Candomblé religion late in life, despite his ongoing quest for spirituality always being closest to his heart. It was, perhaps, his way of dealing with the harshness of the world from a young age. 

 When, for example, he was unjustly imprisoned during the military dictatorship, he sought lightness outside of his body and thoughts.

While locked up from December 1968 to February 1969, he did everything he could to sublimate his flesh and seek answers in other dimensions, including taking up macrobiotics and spiritual cleansing.

After returning from exile in 1972, his songwriting started to reveal his restless desire to interweave art, science, and the mystical. For Gil, these are clearly interconnected:

it would be wrong to fall into the trap of talking about the sublime, and what lies beyond ourselves, without anchoring those ideas in a macroscopic, supraconscious, and comprehensible understanding.

Gil wrote the song Iansã with Caetano Veloso and it features on a 1973 LP he recorded live at the University of São Paulo's Polytechnic School (Gilberto Gil ao Vivo na Escola Politécnica da USP). In his spoken introduction to the song, Gil says: 

For Gilberto Gil, everything within him encompasses transcendence and immanence. The idea of two opposites, like science and mysticism, therefore makes perfect sense given that the concepts are two edges of the same sword, which should always be held aloft. 

From the 1980s onward, Gilberto Gil became even more intensely immersed in questions linking heaven and earth. His albums Luar (A Gente Precisa Ver o Luar) in 1981, Um Banda Um in 1982, Extra in 1983, and Raça Humana in 1984 are remarkable examples of Gil trying to feel his way toward the light...

...emanating from both scientific materialism and spiritual transcendence.

The album also features the beautiful song Se Eu Quiser Falar com Deus, which resembles a kind of prayer board or set of rules. It explains that to have a relationship with God, you must once again purge yourself of the sin of intellectualism.

and end the separation between the tangible and the “incontível”⁠—a word Gil invented to mean "unspeakable" in the song Metáfora, on his Um Banda Um album. 

On his album Extra, Gil resumes his journey into the extraterrestrial or extrasensory—areas he diligently studied and struggled with while in exile. As he himself explains:  

"The music was inspired by a series of literary references connecting apparitions in the Bible (the angel Gabriel, the chariots of fire) to extraterrestrial beings and flying saucers. This was somewhat late for me...

"... because that wasn't the time when I was deeply interested in those things. I was more into all that in the 1970s, around the time when I was in London and first came back to Brazil, at the time of my Refazenda album, [the ufologist] General Uchôa, and ufology gatherings....

"...I made the Extra album 10 years later. It is a kind of prayer, a cry for help, an invocation to the heavens, in the hope that when ET does arrive, in the guise of a saint, humankind and life on planet Earth will improve."

Animals—Earth's irrational beings—feature on the cover and insert for this 1983 album, and in the track O Veado (The Deer).

The same theme echoes through Gil's Raça Humana (Human Race) album, which was even the subject of a TV Globo Christmas special in 1984. The central thread running through the show, titled Gilberto Gil No. 2—Raça Humana, was the fictional story of an extraterrestrial who came to Earth. 

The ET was played by Caetano Veloso's song Moreno. But despite periods of poring over these issues more closely, Gilberto Gil's radar has always been squarely focused on trying to understand what exists between heaven, Earth, and humankind.

His album Quanta came out in 1997. "Quanta, the Latin plural of quantum, when there is almost no quantity to measure, no quality to convey," is how Gil poetically defines the concept behind the album title, in its opening track with the same name.

Ever since 1968, Gil had been caught up in his endeavors to predict the future shifts that would impact on his life and work. By 1997, he was so engrossed in trying to understand these questions that he got in touch with the physicist César Lattes.

Gil asked Lattes for his help in unraveling the concepts for the album he was keen to make. He received the following reply from the physicist in response to his concerns:

Gil continues translating these shifts, bringing them into his art and creating an empire of the senses, in which our understanding of the world is acquired by osmosis through our pores of emotion.

In the interview he gave Terra magazine in 2009, he reflected on his futuristic album Banda Larga Cordel (2008), saying: "Seen in these terms, the poet is no longer that solitary, visionary figure who points the way...

"... There isn't much to be pointed to out there, where we have not yet seen, and where the system has not yet seen. Because everything will be pointed out ahead, beyond the horizon."

For Gil, art engenders mysticism and science, beyond any self; beyond mere "cogito, ergum sum." And Banda Larga Cordel seems to have emerged to further stress the concept of spirituality he has been working on all his life: 

"The concept of spirituality is a limited thing. Limited to individual space, to self-interpretation, to self-referencing. ‘Oh, my soul!’ ‘Oh, my body!’ ‘Oh, my individuality!’ ‘Oh, my relationship with God!’… Or ‘Oh, poor me' and all the rest. 

"... I don't see things in that way any more, even if you can still find elements of that on this album, in the discourse, in the hermeneutics of the album and the songs...

"... What I want is to break with all that, to see that everyone is feeling something that can't be named out of a desire to name it. I don't know. I just don't think like that," Gil concluded, leaving room for doubt—that vital force.

All Gil's searching led him back to the beginning, with the recording of his 1999 album Gil Luminoso, which was released in 2006. 

For this album, Gil rerecorded his most spiritual songs using just two instruments at his disposal: his voice and his guitar. It was the first time he had ever made an album like it.

It was woven together as if to rethink and resing this journey from the tropical outburst of Cérebro Eletrônico (1969) to the admission that we are nothing, in Tempo Rei (1984), with the lyrics: