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Blanes, Ruy Llera (2026). The Prophetic Skill: Learning to Discern and De-Scale in the Angolan Tokoist Church. In Marcello Múscari, Ehler Voss, Martin Zillinger (Ed.),  Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship.  Ethnographic Inquiries into New Communities of Practice and Enskilment. (pp. 117-134). Köln: J.B. Metzler.

R. J. Blanes,  "The Prophetic Skill: Learning to Discern and De-Scale in the Angolan Tokoist Church", in  Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship.  Ethnographic Inquiries into New Communities of Practice and Enskilment, Marcello Múscari, Ehler Voss, Martin Zillinger, Ed., Köln, J.B. Metzler, 2026, pp. 117-134

@incollection{blanes2026_1772853820834,
	author = "Blanes, Ruy Llera",
	title = "The Prophetic Skill: Learning to Discern and De-Scale in the Angolan Tokoist Church",
	chapter = "",
	booktitle = " Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship.  Ethnographic Inquiries into New Communities of Practice and Enskilment",
	year = "2026",
	volume = "",
	series = "",
	edition = "",
	pages = "117-117",
	publisher = "J.B. Metzler",
	address = "Köln",
	url = "https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-72097-4_7"
}

TY  - CHAP
TI  - The Prophetic Skill: Learning to Discern and De-Scale in the Angolan Tokoist Church
T2  -  Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship.  Ethnographic Inquiries into New Communities of Practice and Enskilment
AU  - Blanes, Ruy Llera
PY  - 2026
SP  - 117-134
CY  - Köln
UR  - https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-72097-4_7
AB  - In this paper, I propose to discuss issues of skill and/as discernment in Christian prophetic and mediumistic traditions. I will use the case study of the prophetic cultures of the Tokoist Church in Angola, a Christian prophetic movement that emerged in the late colonial period, founded by a former Baptist student named Simão Gonçalves Toko (1918–1984). The Church cultivates a form of prophetic spiritualism—locally referred to as corpos vates or “foreseeing bodies”—that throughout its history has produced an internal archive of prophetic knowledge, handed to the world through the channeling effected by the spirits of ancient prophets. In this work, we observe processes of enskilment and “learning to discern” that produce what I call “silent prophets”, a human-spirit relationship based on secrecy and semiotic reduction. These “silent prophets” constitute a form of mediumistic and prophetic practice that is anonymous, secluded, anti-materialistic, and anti-aesthetic. Thus, invoking ethnographic and historical research conducted among the Tokoist corpos vates between 2007 and 2015, I will discuss this tradition in terms of a hypothetical “absence of scale” in ritual and liturgical terms.
ER  -