the act, seeking to heal, reconcile, forgive and ultimately save, is common in pentecostal churches and the charismatic catholicism movement. and apart from prayer in the christian tradition, there is another side to the spiritual component of folkloric healing in brazil.

simpatia (sympathy) is a kind of applied superstition which draws direct, if not always rational, lines between the forces of nature and the treatment of illness.

for instance, if a child born to a working class or rural family does not walk well, on top of her prayers and the knowledge she has of curative plants, the child's mother may make a stock of venison leg, in which to soak the child's feet and confer to her the deer's sure-footedness.