Umbanda

Umbanda holds a single God, usually called Olorum or Zambi, and beneath him the orixas, taken from Yoruba tradition by way of Candomble but reduced in number and reinterpreted. In most Umbanda houses the orixas are not possessing deities but vibrations or lines of spiritual force, each governing a domain and paired with a Catholic saint: Oxala with Christ, Ogum with Saint George, Iemanja with Our Lady, Xango with Saint Jerome. Practice is commonly organised into seven lines, each headed by an orixa, though the schemes differ from house to house and no authority reconciles them.

What actually arrives in the body of a medium is not an orixa but a spirit of the dead advanced enough to help the living. These entities come in recognisable types, and the types carry the religion's whole social imagination.

The pretos velhos and pretas velhas are the spirits of old enslaved Africans, arriving bent and slow, smoking pipes, speaking in an archaic register, offering patience, herbal cures and forgiveness. The caboclos are Indigenous Brazilian spirits, upright hunters and warriors of the forest, brisk where the pretos velhos are gentle; scholars note that their portrayal owes more to nineteenth-century Romantic literature than to any Indigenous tradition. The eres or criancas are child spirits, playful, fond of sweets, and consulted precisely because they say what adults will not.

The exus and their female counterparts the pombagiras occupy the difficult ground. Associated with streets, night, sexuality, money and settling scores, they are approached for problems respectable religion will not touch. Umbanda distinguishes exus who have turned toward the light from those who have not, and distinguishes itself from Quimbanda, understood as the practice that works with the latter deliberately, though the line between the two is less firm than Umbandistas usually present it.

Umbanda's stated ethic is caridade, charity, inherited from Kardecist Spiritism along with reincarnation and the idea that spirits progress through successive lives toward greater enlightenment. Helping the living is how a spirit advances, and mediums are the instrument of that help. Consultations are given free, and a house that charges for them is regarded with suspicion.

The public ritual is the gira, held on set nights in a centro or terreiro. It opens with prayers, often including the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary, the lighting of candles, and the cleansing of the space with incense. Songs, the pontos cantados, call each line of spirits in turn, and mediums receive their guides and are dressed and equipped for them: a pipe and a low stool for a preto velho, a headdress and a bow for a caboclo. Members of the public then queue for a consulta, speaking privately with an entity about illness, work, debt, family or fear, and receiving advice, a herbal bath, a cleansing passe, or an instruction to make a small offering.

Mediumship is developed rather than innate. New members attend development sessions over a period of years, learning to recognise and control incorporation under supervision, and only afterwards take consultations. Most Umbanda mediums are women.

Ritual style varies widely. Houses at the Spiritist end use hand-clapping, white clothing and no drums, and reject animal sacrifice outright. Houses at the African end use atabaque drums, elaborate ritual dress, and in some cases sacrifice. Leadership belongs to a pai or mae de santo, and centres are independent of one another. Federations exist and have real membership, but no doctrinal authority; there is no Umbanda scripture, creed or hierarchy binding the whole.

The founding story is unusually precise, which is one reason to handle it carefully. On 15 November 1908, at a Kardecist Spiritist session in Niteroi, a seventeen-year-old named Zelio Fernandino de Moraes is said to have been taken by a spirit calling itself the Caboclo das Sete Encruzilhadas, who rebuked the assembled Spiritists for dismissing the spirits of Africans and Indigenous people as unevolved and announced a religion in which they would be heard. The Tenda Espirita Nossa Senhora da Piedade is dated to that night.

Historians treat this as a foundation narrative rather than an established sequence of events. Contemporary documentation is thin, much of the account was set down decades later, and comparable centres appear to have formed independently in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in the same period. Some practitioners hold to the story firmly; others regard it as a myth of origin adopted after the fact by a plural movement. Both positions are held inside the religion.

Early leadership was largely white, urban and middle class, and worked hard to present Umbanda as orderly, charitable, Christian in tone and distinctively Brazilian. Under Getulio Vargas and later under the military government that meant registering centres, forming federations, holding congresses, and marking distance from Candomble, which was being policed as witchcraft. The strategy worked. Umbanda gained a legitimacy Candomble was denied, and grew quickly in the industrialising southeast.

The cost of that strategy is the tradition's central internal argument. Umbanda Branca, white Umbanda, keeps the Spiritist and Catholic framing and treats the African material as symbolic. Africanised strands, including forms called Omoloco and Umbandomble, have moved back toward Candomble practice, restoring drums, initiation and sacrifice. Most houses sit somewhere between and rarely use the labels at all.