Pomba Gira is a powerful class of feminine spirits in the Brazilian religions of Umbanda and Quimbanda, the female counterpart to Exu, with whom she shares the crossroads, the streets and the night. Like Exu, she is not a single deity but a whole family of intermediary spirits who work close to the human world and its everyday concerns. Her name carries her nature: it is generally traced to a Central African (Kongo/Kimbundu) phrase for the crossroads, forms such as Bombo Njila or pambu njila, by way of the Kongo name Bombonjira for the trickster and crossroads spirit, reworked in Brazil into "Pomba Gira." She is thus, at root, a spirit of the threshold and the meeting of ways, an opener of paths and a messenger between worlds, and she is turned to above all in matters of love, sexuality, marriage, money and the tangled business of human relationships. She is imagined as a woman of striking sensual power, often in red and black, laughing, dancing, smoking, fond of perfume, roses and drink, confident, worldly and entirely unashamed.