Iara Lima

There is a moment in Brazilian religious history that tends to receive less attention than it deserves. A moment when different traditions, coming from distinct continents, found ways to dialogue without completely losing their identities.

This encounter happened amid the violence of colonization and slavery. It was from this context that some of Brazil’s most singular religious expressions were born.

To understand this process, it is necessary to go back to the 16th and 19th centuries, when millions of Africans were forcibly brought to the American continent. Peoples from different regions of Africa came, among them Yorubas, Ewes, and Bantus, bringing with them languages, cosmologies, healing practices, and their own ways of understanding the world.

Upon arriving in Brazil, they encountered a reality marked by religious repression. Many were forced to abandon their public cults, learn a new language, and adopt the Catholicism imposed by the colonizers.

One of the survival strategies was syncretism.

In various places, images of Catholic saints came to represent, publicly, African deities. Thus, religious practices could continue to exist even under persecution. But this was not the only transformation that happened.

Africans found here peoples who had already inhabited this territory for thousands of years. Peoples who possessed their own cosmologies, their knowledge about plants, rivers, animals, and the forest.

This knowledge also survived the violence of colonization.

Over time, especially in the formation of Umbanda and other Afro-Brazilian traditions, elements of these different matrices began to dialogue. It was in this context that the cult of the Caboclos gained strength.

In Umbanda, the Caboclos represent entities associated with Indigenous wisdom, knowledge of the forests, herbs, and healing. They act in spiritual lines related to the Orixás, establishing a symbolic bridge between different cultural heritages present in the formation of Brazil.

According to Umbanda tradition, the Orixás represent forces of nature and divine principles, while the Caboclos work more directly in communication with mediums during incorporations.

This religious organization is the result of a long historical process of cultural construction.

Academic research shows that the so-called candomblé de caboclo and, later, Umbanda, incorporated elements from different African and Indigenous traditions and from popular Catholicism, producing a genuinely Brazilian religious expression.

More than a simple mixture of beliefs, it is the creation of a new religious language.

This ability to integrate different traditions can also be observed in other countries of the African diaspora.

In the United States, for example, Hoodoo developed a popular tradition of African-American origin deeply marked by the context of slavery. There, resistance happened through different paths.

Hoodoo developed practices aimed at protection, healing, justice, and prosperity through the use of herbs, roots, symbolic objects, and biblical passages, where the Psalms, for example, came to be used in rituals of protection and blessing, acquiring new functions within this tradition.

Brazil and the United States responded to the same historical trauma in different ways. In Brazil, different religious matrices dialogued and gave rise to new forms of worship. In the United States, religious texts and traditional knowledge were reinterpreted to preserve ancestral practices in a context equally marked by violence.

In both cases, one observes an impressive capacity for adaptation.

It was not merely about preserving the past, but about continually recreating it so that it could survive.

The more I study memory, heritage, and ancestry, the more I realize that this movement also happens outside of religions.

Culture is always in transformation. One tradition converses with another. One piece of knowledge inspires the next. One generation inherits questions and returns new answers.

It is never a repetition of the past. It is always a way of making it continue to survive.