Candomblé

History

African religious practices have existed in Brazil since the 16th century and historically were divided into “nations”—ethnic and religious affiliations in which Yoruba, Angolan, Dahomean, or other ethnic affiliations and languages predominated. Through practices that were severely repressed by Portuguese and then Brazilian authorities, enslaved Africans maintained collective memories and social structures against all odds. Such practices were unified as an independent “religion” known as Candomblé by the first decades of the 1800s. The religion took shape especially around the frame provided by Yoruba philosophy and ritual practice. The Yoruba of southwest Nigeria were the primary targets of the slave trade to Brazil from 1780 to 1850, and with their powerful concentration in cities such as Salvador da Bahia and their fresh memories of Africa, the Yoruba religious system became a watershed for Brazilian religious practice in general. Whereas Candomblé began as the reconstructed African religion of African Brazilians, it has during the last century become a national Brazilian religion with a strong foothold even among urban groups without African ancestry.

Axé: Transforming Power

Candomblé involves a relation of exchange with a group of superhuman entities called orixás, that mediate between Olorun (lit. “King of orun, the otherworld”), a distant high god, and human beings. In the religious world of Candomblé, everything and everyone “eats,” not only people but also musical instruments, such as drums; natural phenomena, such as rivers, trees, and stones; and significant places, such as terreiros or temples. The world must be fed to replenish the force of movement and transformation, called axé. This is especially true of the orixás, the divine but humanlike agents who mediate and redistribute the power (axé) that animates nature but that also helps human supplicants with everyday needs of health, prosperity, and fecundity. Candomblé involves an elaborate set of religious practices that work to preserve life with its abstract problems of meaning, but above all, in all its pragmatic needs, it works against the forces of anomie, death, and consumption. Initiates seek to expand their axé through the ritual work of maintaining proper reciprocal relations with the orixás, the personified forces of nature, culture, and history.

Axé refers not only to transforming power but also to ancestry or lineage. Axé is not only a transforming force that can change one's personal [Page 179]life, it is also a lineage one may enter and engage in. To undergo an initiation in a specific terreiro is to enter that house's axé, its “nation” and lineage. Terreiros usually possess axé that is descended from one of the original houses of Candomblé, in Bahia, founded in the 19th century, and often even from a specific African source.

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