This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The religion Zelio Fernandino de Moraes founded at Neves in 1908 did not stay a single strand of practice. Umbanda grew into a synthesis of three distinct traditions at once, Kardecist spiritism, Afro-Brazilian religious practice drawn substantially from Candomble, and Catholic popular devotion, held together in one religious system rather than kept as separate influences.
That synthesis was already present in the founding moment itself. The spirit who spoke through Moraes at the Kardecist center identified as an indigenous Brazilian guide and specifically declared that the spirits of enslaved Africans and indigenous Brazilians, excluded from Kardecist practice as it was then organized, would now be welcomed. Umbanda's combination of traditions was, in that sense, built into its origin rather than added afterward.
From that founding synthesis, Moraes and the temple he built at Tenda Espirita Nossa Senhora da Piedade gave institutional shape to a religion that could draw on Kardecism's spiritist framework, Candomble's Afro-Brazilian ritual inheritance and Catholic popular devotion together, without treating any one of the three as the whole of the tradition.
The result, documented by Diana Brown among others, is a religion that grew into a major national tradition in Brazil precisely because it did not require choosing between those three inheritances. What Moraes founded in 1908 was, from its first reported moment, already a synthesis rather than a single lineage extended.