Quimbanda is an Afro-Brazilian religion that crystallised in the cities of south-eastern Brazil, especially Rio de Janeiro, in the early twentieth century. It emerged from the same milieu as Umbanda, with which it shares much vocabulary and ritual grammar, and it draws together Kongo/Bantu religious inheritance, Yoruba-derived elements, popular Catholicism and the European Spiritism of Allan Kardec. Its very name derives from a Kimbundu/Kikongo term for a ritual specialist, and much of its cosmological structure descends from Central African religion carried to Brazil under slavery.
For much of its history Quimbanda was defined largely by contrast with Umbanda: where Umbanda cultivated an image of luminous, morally elevated spirits, Quimbanda was cast, often by Umbandists themselves, as the domain of the "left-hand" spirits and of practical, this-worldly magic. Practitioners and recent scholars have challenged that framing, presenting Quimbanda instead as a coherent religion in its own right with its own theology and ethics rather than as a mere shadow of its neighbour. The tradition is transmitted orally and through initiation within terreiros (temple-houses) led by a tata or yaya, and it has no single founder, central authority or canonical scripture.