Exu

Exu, in the Brazilian religions of Umbanda and Quimbanda, is not simply the same being as the Yoruba orisha Eshu from whom the name descends, though the two are related and share the essential character of the messenger and the master of the crossroads. In Brazil, Exu became less a single deity than a whole class of spirits: the spirits of the streets, the crossroads, the cemeteries and the night, a numerous and varied family of intermediary beings who work close to the human world and its everyday troubles.

As spirits of the crossroads and the threshold, they are, like their Yoruba ancestor, the openers of the way and the messengers who carry communication between human beings and the other spirits, and no work with the spirits can proceed without first addressing them. They are tricksters and intermediaries, quick, sharp, worldly and unsentimental, dealing in the concrete problems of life, money, love, protection, conflict, justice, and they are known for their frank speech, their humour, and their refusal of pious solemnity. It is essential to correct a persistent and damaging misunderstanding: because Exu stands at the crossroads, wears black and red, is connected with the cemetery, and refuses respectability, outsiders, and especially hostile Christian observers, have frequently and wrongly identified Exu with the Christian devil. This is a mistaken and unjust framing that the traditions themselves reject; Exu is not a figure of evil but a morally complex intermediary spirit, a worker at the boundary between worlds who can help or hinder and who deals in the real business of human life. Umbanda and Quimbanda are living Brazilian religions with millions of adherents, and Exu, in his many forms, is among their most important and most active spirits, the messenger and master of the crossroads, too often maligned and too rarely understood.

Exu's treatment differs sharply depending on which Brazilian tradition is asked about him, and the difference is not merely one of emphasis but of theological structure. Candomble, which preserves Yoruba ritual language, initiation and cosmology with comparatively little alteration, keeps Exu, there generally called Exu or Eshu, close to his West African role as an inherent, morally neutral messenger without whom no offering to any orisha can reach its destination, propitiated first and always at the opening of a ceremony as a matter of protocol rather than choice.

Umbanda, which formed in early twentieth century Brazil out of a deliberate blending of African tradition with Kardecist spiritism, Catholicism and indigenous belief, reorganizes Exu instead within a spiritist framework of moral evolution: exus become a category of formerly disordered human spirits who can progress, through mediumship and guided work, toward the light, a scheme with no equivalent in Yoruba thought and one that Kardecist doctrine specifically supplies. Quimbanda, in turn, works with those same spirits without insisting on their moral reform, treating Exu's power as available for direct, practical use. The three traditions therefore do not represent one belief about Exu inconsistently practiced, but three distinct theological systems, Yoruba, spiritist and a synthesis of both, each giving the same name and the same crossroads a different explanatory frame.