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.