Candomble took form in Bahia in the nineteenth century among enslaved West Africans and their descendants, chiefly from Yoruba, Fon and Bantu speaking backgrounds, and its houses preserve distinct nations of practice with their own languages of ritual, among them Ketu, Jeje and Angola. Because the religion was illegal or policed for most of its history, its liturgy was carried in the body rather than in books, and the dance is one of the principal things that was carried.
A public ceremony, a festa or toque, follows a fixed sequence. The initiated members enter and circle before the drums, and the drummers work through the orixas in an established order, playing the toque, the rhythm belonging to each, with the songs that go with it. The order is not decorative. It opens with Exu, who carries messages and opens the way, and no ceremony proceeds without him; it closes with Oxala, the oldest and calmest. What happens in between is the succession of the orixas, each greeted in their own rhythm and their own movements, and the whole ceremony is an unfolding of the pantheon in time. What visitors are admitted to see is the public portion; the initiations, the obligations and the knowledge held by the leaders of a house are not public, and the atlas does not attempt to describe them.