María Lionza’s spiritual courts and heavenly intermediaries

Record summary

Accounts of María Lionza practice describe organized spiritual courts in which mediums receive or embody named entities, including celestial, historical and folk figures. This provides a concrete comparative lead on intermediary beings: authority is established through trance performance, ritual diagnosis, testimony and community recognition rather than canonical scripture alone. Ethnographic sources can clarify how practitioners distinguish angels, saints, spirits and dead persons. Uncertainty concerns regional variation, changing terminology and the researcher’s dependence on translated or observer-mediated descriptions of trance and ritual speech.