Brazil: Candomblé, the Nations, and the Terreiros

Candomblé is the Afro-Brazilian religion of the orixá, organised around the terreiro, a temple compound headed by a priestess or priest, entered through initiation, and centred on the cultivation and transmission of axé, the vital force. It took recognisable institutional form in Salvador da Bahia in the first half of the nineteenth century and spread across Brazil in the twentieth 12. It is not one tradition but several, distinguished by nation, and the difference between them is the first thing to understand.

The nations, and why the distinction matters

A nação, nation, in Candomblé names a ritual tradition: its liturgical language, its drum rhythms, its pantheon, its initiation sequence and its lineage. It does not name the ancestry of the people practising it. Members of any nation may be of any descent.

Ketu, also called Nagô, is the Yoruba-derived nation, named for the Yoruba town of Kétu on what is now the Benin side of the border. Its liturgical language is Yoruba-derived, its spirits are orixá, and it is the nation that dominates the scholarly literature and the international image of Candomblé 1.

Jeje derives from the Fon and Ewe traditions of the Dahomean coast. Its spirits are voduns, its liturgical language is Fon-derived, and its ritual grammar is its own. The name comes from Adja, applied in Brazil from the early eighteenth century 3.

Angola and Congo derive from Central African, Bantu-speaking traditions. Their spirits are inquices or nkisi, their liturgical language draws predominantly on Kimbundu and Kikongo, and many Angola houses have adopted the Yoruba orixá pantheon and much of the Ketu initiatic sequence alongside their own 4.

Two further points make the nations more than a taxonomy.

The first is chronology. Luis Nicolau Parés argues that vodun practice carried by the Jeje from the early eighteenth century was central to Candomblé's formation, and that the common assumption that Candomblé originated in Yoruba orixá worship gets the sequence wrong 3. Jeje presence in Bahia predates the great Yoruba influx by roughly a century. What became the standard Candomblé initiation grammar may owe as much to vodun ritual as to òrìṣà ritual, with Yoruba content layered onto a structure already in place.

The second is politics. There is a hierarchy in Bahia that ranks Ketu above Jeje and both above Angola, in prestige, in scholarly attention and in claims to purity. Matory's argument is that this hierarchy was substantially constructed in the early twentieth century, through the Nagô purity discourse carried from Lagos and reinforced by scholars from Nina Rodrigues onward who treated Nagô practice as the most evolved 5. It is not a neutral measure of who preserved more. A Yoruba reader should be careful here: the tradition that most flatters Yoruba origins is also the one whose primacy is most historically suspect.

Origins and the Bahian foundation

African religious practice existed in Brazil from the sixteenth century, but Candomblé as an organised structured liturgy and community of practice formed later 2. Between roughly 1775 and 1850 people from the Bight of Benin dominated arrivals in Bahia, and their cosmologies became ascendant among Afro-Bahians 2. Enslaved people were classified into nations largely by port of embarkation rather than by their own ethnic identity, which is why Nagô in Brazil, like Lucumí in Cuba, is a trade category that later became a religious one.

The founding house is Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká, known as Casa Branca do Engenho Velho, in Salvador. Oral tradition holds that it was founded by three African women of the Nagô nation, associated with the Barroquinha church and the lay brotherhood attached to it, in the first half of the nineteenth century, probably around 1830, though the earliest surviving documents proving its existence date from the late nineteenth century 16. The founders are named in tradition as Iyá Nassô, Iyá Acalá and Iyá Adetá; the freed African woman Marcelina da Silva is documented in the house's early leadership 12. Most Nagô terreiros in Bahia trace descent from this community 2.

Two of the three most prominent Bahian houses are its offshoots.

Terreiro do Gantois, Ilê Iyá Omi Axé Iyamassé, was founded in 1849 by Maria Júlia da Conceição Nazaré following a leadership dispute at Engenho Velho, with the terreiro buildings raised in 1900 under Mãe Pulquéria 7. Its best-known leader, Mãe Menininha do Gantois, Maria Escolástica da Conceição Nazaré (1894 to 1986), led the house from 1922 and became a nationally recognised figure, celebrated in song by Dorival Caymmi and Caetano Veloso and visited by presidents 8.

Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá was founded in 1910 by Eugênia Anna Santos, Mãe Aninha (1869 to 1938), by a group that separated from Casa Branca 9. Mãe Aninha also established a branch in Rio de Janeiro. In 1937 she instituted the twelve Obás de Xangô, honorific male offices modelled on Ọ̀yọ́ court practice, on advice from Martiniano Eliseu do Bonfim, the Bahian who had studied in Lagos 59. This is the single clearest case in Bahia of a twentieth-century institution built from direct African consultation and now experienced as ancestral. Her successors included Mãe Senhora, Maria Bibiana do Espírito Santo, and later Mãe Stella de Oxóssi, Maria Stella de Azevedo Santos (1925 to 2018), who took a public position against syncretism and in 1983 signed with other ialorixás a declaration rejecting the identification of orixá with Catholic saints.

Casa Branca was listed by IPHAN, the national heritage institute, in 1984, the first Afro-Brazilian religious site to receive that protection 6.

Repression and legalisation

Candomblé was policed for most of its history.

Police raids on Afro-Brazilian religious gatherings increased in the 1820s and 1830s, in a climate shaped by the Haitian Revolution and, in Bahia, by the 1835 Malê revolt. From 1822 laws allowed police to shut down batuques, drumming ceremonies 2. The 1890 republican Penal Code prohibited spiritism, magic and the use of talismans, which gave police a direct instrument against terreiros even though the 1891 constitution enshrined religious freedom 2. In practice terreiros operated under police licensing regimes into the mid-twentieth century, and required registration with the police in Bahia until 1976.

Getúlio Vargas' Law Decree 1202 in the 1930s recognised the legitimacy of terreiros and permitted them to practise, and the 1940 Penal Code offered further protection 2. Legal tolerance and actual freedom from harassment were separated by decades.

What Candomblé is, structurally

Axé is the organising concept: vital force, power to make things happen, present in substances, words, blood, leaves, stones and people, and accumulated, transmitted and depleted. A terreiro's axé is its inheritance and its working capital. Its physical seat is buried in the house's ground. Initiation transfers axé; ritual maintains it.

The orixá are the deities: Exu, Ogum, Oxóssi, Ossain, Xangô, Oyá or Iansã, Oxum, Yemanjá, Nanã, Obaluaiê or Omolu, Oxumaré, Logunedé, Oxalá and others, with Olorum as the distant supreme being. Each initiate has a tutelary orixá, the owner of their head, and may have a second, the juntó. Names are recognisably Yoruba in Portuguese orthography, and the comparative file treats the correspondences and their limits.

The head of a house is the ialorixá or mãe de santo, mother of saint, or the babalorixá or pai de santo. Beneath them a structured hierarchy of offices: the iyakekerê or little mother as deputy, the iyá basé over ritual cooking, the ekedi, women who do not enter possession and who care for the orixá when they mount, the ogã, men who do not enter possession and who serve as drummers, patrons and sacrificers, and the alabê over the drums.

The initiate is the iaô, from the same Yoruba root as the Cuban iyawó. Initiation involves seclusion, the shaving and preparation of the head, the seating of the orixá, the emergence and naming ceremony at which the orixá speaks its name, and a graded sequence of obligations at one, three and seven years, after which the initiate may become an ebomi and eventually found a house.

The public ceremony, the xirê, sequences the orixá through songs and drum rhythms in a prescribed order, with the initiates dancing and the orixá arriving in possession. The drums are the atabaques, played with hands and sticks, and the specific rhythms are the ritual language as much as the songs are.

Possession is the ordinary mode of contact and is not treated as extraordinary. The orixá arrives, is dressed and equipped, dances, may give counsel, and departs.

Regional variants

Candomblé is Bahian and Carioca in name, but the family of Afro-Brazilian orixá religions is national and regionally named.

Bahia is the historical centre and the site of the great Ketu houses. Rio de Janeiro has Candomblé alongside a much larger Umbanda presence and the practices sometimes labelled Macumba, a loose and often pejorative term for various Afro-Brazilian practices, used more narrowly for Quimbanda and exu-centred work in Rio 10. Pernambuco and neighbouring northeastern states call the tradition Xangô rather than Candomblé, with the Nagô and Eba nations, and it exists alongside Jurema, an indigenous-derived tradition with which it is frequently combined 11. Maranhão has Tambor de Mina, with Mina-Nagô and Jeje houses. Rio Grande do Sul has Batuque, with the Oió-Ijexá nation 12. The Shambá nation in Alagoas and Pernambuco is nearly extinct 12.

São Paulo shows the twentieth-century spread most starkly: from virtually no terreiros in the 1960s to around 2,500 in the late 1980s and over 4,000 by the end of the 1990s 2. Candomblé's growth in the south was among a population with no Bahian ancestry and often no African ancestry, which is the ordinary condition of the religion now.

Umbanda is a distinct formation

Umbanda is not Candomblé and is not a Yoruba tradition, though it uses orixá names.

It emerged in the Rio de Janeiro area in the 1920s, blending Afro-Brazilian practice with Kardecist Spiritism and Catholicism 13. The pivotal figure is Zélio Fernandino de Moraes, who founded the Centro Espírita Nossa Senhora da Piedade in Niterói around the mid-1920s. In the founding narrative, prominent from the 1970s, a spirit called Caboclo das Sete Encruzilhadas manifested through Moraes and defended the legitimacy of African and indigenous spirits that mainstream Spiritists dismissed as spiritually undeveloped 13.

Umbanda's structure is Spiritist. It takes reincarnation and karmic evolution from Kardec and arranges spirits by degree of evolution: orixás at the top, never incarnating, often identified with Catholic saints; caboclos, spirits of indigenous Brazilians; pretos velhos, spirits of old enslaved Africans; and exus and pombagiras, less evolved entities capable of harm or of redemption 13. Mediums receive these spirits and the spirits give consultations. White Umbanda eliminated animal sacrifice and simplified initiation, while Africanised Umbanda retains practices closer to Candomblé 13. Umbanda defines itself against Quimbanda, which it casts as working with spirits for harmful ends 13.

The whitening question is real and contested. Umbanda's early institutional leadership was substantially white and middle-class, its theology drew heavily on a French Spiritist framework, and it made Afro-Brazilian religion respectable in part by reordering it within a European evolutionary scheme in which African spirits occupied a low rung. Whether that constitutes embranquecimento, whitening, or a genuine popular synthesis is argued both by scholars and by Umbandistas, and Africanised Umbanda is partly a response from within.

At its peak in the 1960s and 1970s Umbanda was reported to have ten to twenty million followers; census figures are far lower, with hundreds of thousands formally identifying, while actual participation runs into the millions 13. This gap between census identification and participation is characteristic of the whole field and is discussed in the world religion file.

The current situation

Candomblé achieved cultural respectability in the late twentieth century and simultaneously came under a level of physical attack it had not faced since the police era.

Attacks on terreiros in Brazil have risen sharply. In 2023 there were 1,478 reports of religious intolerance to the national human rights hotline, an 80 percent increase over 2022, and attacks on religious freedom rose a further 81 percent between 2023 and 2024 according to official data 14. Attacks specifically against Umbanda and Candomblé adherents tripled 14. Documented incidents include vandalism, stoning, arson of terreiros, threats against priests, loss of employment, and killings 14. In Rio de Janeiro, armed gang leaders professing evangelical conversion have destroyed terreiros and expelled practitioners from areas under their control 15.

The framing matters. Practitioners and Brazilian scholars increasingly use racismo religioso, religious racism, rather than religious intolerance, on the argument that the attacks track Blackness and African origin rather than doctrinal disagreement, and that terreiros are targeted in ways that other minority religions in Brazil are not 16.

Against this, the legal and cultural position has strengthened. Casa Branca has been federally protected since 1984 and other terreiros have followed. In 2023 President Lula signed a law establishing 21 March as the National Day of Traditions of African Roots and Candomblé Nations 2. Brazil's evangelical population continues to grow and its Afro-Brazilian religious population is small in census terms and under-reported, which makes the political arithmetic unfavourable regardless of the legal position.