Tata and Mae de Quimbanda

A Quimbanda terreiro is headed by an initiated person holding the title Tata if a man and Mae if a woman. The role combines two things that are often separated elsewhere: ritual authority within the house, and practical service to people who come to it with problems.

On the ritual side, the head opens and closes ceremonies, holds the standing to authorise the work of other mediums in the house, and carries the relationship with the particular Exu or Pomba Gira the house works with. On the service side, Quimbanda is consulted for concrete results in matters of money, law, love and protection, and the Tata or Mae is the person a client deals with to have a spirit's help engaged on their behalf.

The two sides are not in tension in the way an outside observer might expect. A tradition that understands its spirits as bound by obligation and reciprocity requires someone who can hold up the house's end of that relationship, and the authority to conduct rites and the capacity to get results are the same capacity described from two directions. Kelly Hayes's ethnographic work on Pomba Gira devotion in Brazil describes how this looks in the running of an actual house.

The titles themselves carry the tradition's Central African inheritance. Tata is a Kikongo and wider Bantu term of respect for a father or an elder, and it appears as a title of religious seniority across the Afro Brazilian traditions whose ritual vocabulary descends from that region, distinguishing them from the Yoruba derived titles used in Candomble houses of other nations.

Seniority in Quimbanda runs through initiatory descent. Who initiated whom establishes standing, and a person's position is understood through the line they belong to rather than through age, education or any external examination. That is the pattern across the Afro Brazilian traditions generally, and it means the authority of a Tata or a Mae is inseparable from the house they came from.

The titles developed alongside Umbanda's own emergence in early twentieth century Brazil, as practitioners who worked primarily with Exu and Pomba Gira, rather than with the orixas or with the evolved spirit guides of Umbanda, formed their own houses and their own lines. Personnel and family lineage frequently overlapped with Umbanda and Candomble houses even as the traditions defined themselves partly against one another, a formation described in Diana Brown's study of Umbanda in urban Brazil and in Lorand Matory's work on Afro Brazilian religion.

The initiation itself is closed. The obligations sworn, the ritual materials used and the words that bind a Tata or a Mae to a given spirit are held within houses and disclosed to initiates, and the atlas does not describe them beyond recording that they exist and that access to them is restricted. The initiation is marked as restricted in this atlas for that reason. Naming the boundary is part of describing the role; crossing it would not be.