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.

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• Anthropology - Social Sciences