The Stone Idol is a fictional attempt to recreate the episode known in Brazilian history as A Santidade de Jaguaripe (The Jaguaripe Sanctity), an indian cult that flourished in the sixteenth-century, in Bahia, and was labelled as a heresy by the Inquisition during its first visit to Brazil in 1591. A result of the hybridism between the Catholic doctrine - propagated by the Jesuit fathers and misunderstood by the Indians - and native beliefs, the Sanctity had the power of enthralling even the Portuguese settlers, fascinated by the degree of participation demanded in its cerimonies. It is this very aspect that The Stone Idol employs to put forward the hypothesis that the cults popularity lay exactly in the offer of a mystic experience that was absent from the Catholic church celebrations at the time.