Afro-Brazilian

The Afro-Brazilian religions carry a West African arrangement into Brazil and reorganise it around the terreiro, the house. A supreme being, Olorun in the Ketu tradition, stands at the origin and is not served directly; the orixas are served, each with characteristic domains, colours, foods, rhythms and days, and each house holds the ones that belong to it.

Ancestry runs through the house rather than through birth. A person belongs to a terreiro, and to the priest or priestess who heads it, in a line of religious descent that is traced and named, and the house's own history is part of its authority.

Under slavery and for a long time afterwards the practice was illegal or policed, and the identification of orixas with Catholic saints belongs to that history. It permitted observance to continue in the open, and it has since become part of the religious texture rather than a disguise that can simply be removed.

The traditions are plural and they are not interchangeable. Candomble has several nations with different African origins and liturgical languages; Umbanda, formed in the twentieth century, incorporates spiritist and indigenous elements and works with a different range of entities. The atlas keeps them distinct where it can.

These are living religions, and the atlas lists them as restricted traditions. Terreiro initiation is closed. What passes inside it is not reproduced here.

The written record about these religions was for a long time a record of policing. Brazilian law criminalised practices associated with the terreiros well into the twentieth century, and much of the early documentation is court, press and medical material produced by people arguing that the religion was a public danger or a pathology.

Early Brazilian scholarship was entangled with that argument, and some of it applied racial theory directly to the question of what the religion was. Later ethnography, from the mid twentieth century, is far better and carries its own bias: researchers worked with a small number of prestigious Bahian houses, and the picture of Candomble that entered the literature is disproportionately the picture those houses presented.

The tradition's own transmission is oral, musical and embodied, held in the songs and drum rhythms that call particular orixas, in the obligations of the house, and in what is taught to initiates in stages over years. It was not designed to be legible from outside and is not fully legible now.

Since the late twentieth century, practitioners have themselves become authors and scholars, and terreiros have pursued heritage recognition and legal protection, which has changed both the record and who controls it.

The atlas describes the structure of the pantheon and the character of the institutions. It does not reproduce liturgy, and it does not describe an initiation that the traditions hold closed.