Umbanda
In the more Spiritist-oriented wing of the religion, White Umbanda, these are viewed as divine energies or forces of nature; in more Africanised forms they are seen as West African deities and are offered animal sacrifices.
The emissaries of the orixás are the pretos velhos and caboclos, spirits of enslaved Africans and of indigenous Brazilians respectively, and these are the main entities dealt with by Umbandistas.
Roman Catholicism was the dominant religion in early 20th-century Brazil, but sizeable minorities practiced Afro-Brazilian traditions or Spiritism, a French version of Spiritualism developed by Allan Kardec.
Umbanda gained increased social recognition and respectability amid the military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985, despite growing opposition from both the Roman Catholic Church and Pentecostal groups.
[14] Reflecting a general universalist stance that encourages tolerance towards other traditions, Umbandistas are commonly permitted to also pursue other religions,[15] with some also practising Roman Catholicism,[16] Judaism,[17] or Santo Daime.
[47] Beneath God is a pantheon of spirits that reflect syncretic origins,[47] assembled into what Brown called "a complex, impersonal bureaucracy",[48] and it is these entities thought to intervene in humanity's daily lives.
[56] Sometimes, the realm of the evolved spirits is also called Aruanda, a term that likely derives from Luanda, a port in modern Angola, but which in Umbanda has looser connotations of an area within the astral plane.
[92] Umbanda departs from Spiritism over the value placed on these entities, with Umbandistas believing that Spiritists often negatively misjudge the pretos velhos and the caboclos because of their appearance.
[105] Brown suggested that the portrayal of the pretos velhos reflected the stereotype of the "faithful slave" common in the writings of Brazilians like Castro Alves and Artur Azevedo.
[119] Other types of spirit found in Umbanda include the boiadeiros (cowboys), crianças (children), marinheiros (sailors), malandros (rogues), ciganos (gypsies) and sereias (mermaids).
Umbandistas often hold an annual birthday party for these spirits on the Roman Catholic feast day of the child martyr saints Cosmas and Damian.
[131] In Umbanda, the exús are often referred to with Christian-derived names like the Devil, Satan, or Lucifer, and are portrayed as being red with horns and tridents, reflecting Christian iconographical influence.
[136] They wear red and black clothing,[137] and only possess women and gay men,[138] who will then often smoke or drink alcohol,[139] using obscene language and behaving lasciviously.
[148] Most Umbandist mediums take on this role as a result of an initial personal crisis, often physical illness or emotional distress, that they come to believe is being caused by spirits as a means of alerting them.
[171] Brown suggested that Umbanda was "an essentially conservative religion", for it does not challenge the socio-economic status quo, and encourages "individual rather than collective responsibility and action".
[175] Brown noted that Quimbanda represented "a crucial negative mirror image against which to define Umbanda,"[174] suggesting that it could also serve as an "ideological vehicle for expressing prejudices" towards African-derived and lower class religions.
[158] A centro may close on the death of this leader; alternatively, their leadership role will often be passed to a family member or, more rarely, to a non-related senior initiate.
[208] The centro is financed largely by its members, who consist of both its ritual corps and its regular lay attendees; they are expected to pay an initial registration and a monthly membership fee.
[209] Centros will sometimes also operate in a manner akin to mutual aid societies, offering their members social welfare services such as access to doctors and dentists or burial funds.
[194] To start a ceremony, a ritual purification using incense, the defumacão, is used to banish harmful spirits,[194] with the exús often being placated and asked to remain absent.
[224] The ethnomusicologist Marc Meistrich Gidal suggested that Umbanda embraced change and innovation in liturgy and ritual much more readily than Afro-Brazilian religions like Candomblé and Batuque.
[144] In White Umbanda, consultations generally always take place as part of the public ceremony, thus emphasizing the idea that they are being offered to clients as a form of charity, rather than as a means of earning money.
[259] The use of spiritual healing does not mean that Umbandists dismiss mainstream medicine;[260] practitioners of White Umbanda generally place great faith in the latter, reflecting the ideological positivism inherited from Spiritism.
[270] In the early decades of the 20th century, Candomblé was subject to considerable disapproval from the bourgeoise classes and the dominant Roman Catholic Church, with its terreiros often experiencing police repression.
[283] There is a lack of clear evidence regarding Umbanda's foundations and it is possible that it emerged from multiple origins around the same time,[284] with various early 20th-century groups having combined Spiritist and Afro-Brazilian religious practices.
[285] A key figure was Zélio Fernandino de Moraes, founder of the first Umbandist group, the Centro Espírita Nossa Senhora da Piedade (Spiritism Center of Our Lady of Mercy).
[302] In response to the growth of Umbanda, Spiritism, and Pentecostalism, Brazil's dominant Roman Catholic Church mounted a campaign against these minority religions, one later formally terminated due to the changes of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
[303] In part to counter Catholic opposition, in the late 1950s Umbandistas began campaigns to get their co-religionists elected to office, typically rallying around Brazilian nationalism and calls for religious freedom.
[342] A 1961 book by the Franciscan friar Boaventura Kloppenburg, for instance, presented Umbanda as a heresy based on superstition which encouraged sexual permissiveness and harmed its practitioners' mental health.
[347] In the early 1960s, a group of sociologists at the University of São Paulo began to study Umbanda, the most prominent being Roger Bastide, who saw the religion as an expression of urban industrial change.
