Candomblé

Candomble is organised around the orixas, powers of nature and of human character who are, in Bahian houses of the Ketu nation, largely the Yoruba orisha under Portuguese spelling: Oxala, Ogum, Xango, Oxum, Yemanja, Iansa, Omolu, Exu. Above them stands a distant creator, Olorun or Olodumare. Beneath everything is axe, the vital force, which must be accumulated, protected and transmitted. A house's authority rests on the axe it holds and on the lineage through which it received it.

Every person is held to belong to a particular orixa, sometimes to a pair, identified by divination. Devotees are less students of the orixa than its vessel. The relationship is completed in initiation, a long seclusion during which the head is prepared to receive the orixa, after which the initiate can be mounted in ritual and will be recognised, when possessed, by dress, gesture and a dance specific to that deity.

The unit of the religion is the terreiro, a house and compound rather than a congregation. It has a leader, the pai de santo or mae de santo, a hierarchy of initiates ranked by seniority of initiation rather than by age, its own festival calendar, its own drums and its own dead to honour. Women have led the most prestigious Bahian houses for most of their history, and that female authority is one of the tradition's distinguishing features in a strongly patriarchal setting.

Public ceremonies are festivals for particular orixas, with drumming on consecrated atabaque drums, songs in a liturgical language derived from Yoruba, Fon or Kikongo, dancing in a circle, and the arrival of the orixas in the bodies of initiates. Food runs through all of it: each orixa has dishes that belong to it, and the meals prepared for the spirits are then shared, which is how Candomble came to shape Bahian cooking.

Candomble is not one liturgy but several, grouped into nacoes, nations, which preserve the distinct African origins of the people who built them. The term no longer refers to the ethnic descent of members, who may come from any background, but to the ritual tradition a house follows.

Ketu, also called Nago, draws on Yoruba practice from the region of Ketu in present-day Benin and southwestern Nigeria. It venerates orixas, sings in a Yoruba-derived liturgical language, and is the most prestigious and best documented nation, which has led outside accounts to treat it as Candomble entire.

Jeje derives from the Fon and Ewe traditions of Dahomey and serves voduns rather than orixas, with its own pantheon, drum patterns and vocabulary. Angola and Congo houses come from Central African, largely Bantu-speaking sources, serve inquices, and use terms derived from Kikongo and Kimbundu. Caboclo entities, spirits understood as Indigenous Brazilian, appear in some houses, especially Angola ones, and are marginal or absent in others.

The nations exchanged material heavily, and many houses are mixed in practice while claiming a single identity, so the categories describe tendencies rather than sealed compartments. The prestige ranking is itself a historical artefact: Ketu houses were favoured by the twentieth-century scholars and writers who made Candomble respectable, and Angola practice was correspondingly treated as less pure, a judgement practitioners of Angola houses reject.

The Casa Branca terreiro in Salvador, conventionally dated to about 1830 and the oldest house whose descent can be traced, is a Ketu foundation. The two other great Bahian houses, Gantois and Ile Axe Opo Afonja, descend from it through splits over succession.

Candomble has been illegal, semi-legal or harassed for most of its existence. Colonial and imperial authorities treated African religion as witchcraft. After abolition in 1888 the republic prosecuted it under laws against curandeirismo, unlicensed healing, and against public nuisance. Police raided terreiros, seized and destroyed ritual objects, and catalogued them as criminal evidence; in Bahia, houses had to obtain authorisation from a police vice department to hold ceremonies, and paid for the permit, a requirement lifted only in 1976 after a direct appeal to the state governor by one of Salvador's leading priestesses.

Official acceptance came late and unevenly. The listing of the Casa Branca terreiro by the federal heritage institute in 1984, the first non-Catholic place of worship in Brazil to receive such protection, marked the turn. Candomble is now embedded in the national image of Bahia and in Brazilian music, food and literature.

Acceptance has not ended hostility. Reports of religious intolerance to Brazil's national complaints line have risen steeply over the past decade, and Afro-Brazilian religions account for a share of cases far out of proportion to their numbers. Terreiros have been vandalised and burned, and in some urban areas houses have been driven out under threat by armed groups. Preaching that identifies orixas with demons is a significant driver, and practitioners increasingly describe what they face as religious racism rather than intolerance, on the ground that the target is African origin as much as belief.

Within the religion, the twentieth century brought a movement to strip out Catholic elements adopted under duress, restore Yoruba liturgical language and re-establish contact with Nigeria and Benin. Some houses have gone far in that direction. Others keep the saints, hold that syncretism is now part of what they are, and regard the purifying project as an outside imposition. The disagreement is unresolved and is argued house by house.