YORÙBÁN RELIGIOUS SURVIVAL IN BRAZILIAN CANDOMBLÉ
Kasey Qynn Dolin
Virginia Commonwealth University
Candomblé is a possession religion widely practiced in Brazil today. This Afro-Brazilian religion is syncretic, a mingling of the pantheon, practices, and beliefs brought to the New World by Yorùbán slaves and freedmen with the Catholicism of the dominant European culture. Candomblé is one of many New World religions finding its roots in African beliefs. In Brazil alone, we find a multitude, including Xangô, Umbanda, and Macumba. Other African-based religions, such as Haitian Vodun, Bahamian Obea, and Cuban Santeria have made a home for themselves in various areas of the United States, most notably Florida, New York, and California (Voeks 1997).
What distinguishes Candomblé from these other Afro-Brazilian religions is the members’ interaction with orixás (òrìsàs)[1], or deities. To be classified as a house of Candomblé, a terreiro, or “religious center,” must have members who “receive,” are “ridden by,” or are possessed during trance by orixás. A terreiro must also have a member who has been “seated” by Exu (Esù), the trickster messenger and mediator between man and the other deities (Houk 1995:54; Wafer 1991:4).
This paper is primarily concerned with the origins of Candomblé. Why, when the Africans brought to the New World came from multiple diverse cultures, each with its own rich religious traditions, was it the Yorùbán pantheon and practice that took root and grew? To answer this question, this paper examines various contributing factors, including the demographics of the Portuguese slave trade, the role of the Yorùbá in Africa, the role of Yorùbán slaves in Brazil, and characteristics of the Yorùbán set of beliefs that predispositioned it to survival in the New World. After a discussion of the levels of syncretism that the Yorùbán religion underwent on its way to becoming Candomblé, there is a brief overview of Yorùbán cosmology and how it is similar to and differs from the Catholic cosmology.
The Yorùbá
The Yorùbá are an African people concentrated in South-Western Nigeria, specifically the States of Oyo, Ondo, Ogun, Lagos and Kwara, as well as a part of the Bendel State of Nigeria. Some Yorùbá also occupy the Republic of Benin (formerly known as Dahomey) and Togo, countries located west of Nigeria (Awolalu 1979:xiii).
The Yorùbá have been urban for centuries. Their kingdoms were made up of independent city-states, which were organized according to landholding lineages. State politics were centralized and ritualized, ruled over by a king. The king’s female relatives directed religious activity and managed the royal compound (Nevadomski 1993:20; Pinn 1998:56).
The official known as “mother of all women” coordinated the female half of the community, deciding the position women took on important public issues such as the declaration of war, the implementation of taxes, and the maintenance of markets in addition to holding court and settling disputes (Harris 1997:340-341). This role is reminiscent of that of mãe de santo[2], literally “mother of the saint,” head of the Candomblé terreiro. While some terreiros are headed by male leaders, pais de santo, or “fathers of the saint,” according to Robert A. Voeks, the majority of terreiros are led by women (1997:51).
The Yorùbá were advanced in the areas of agriculture and animal husbandry, especially cattle-raising, with notable equestrian skills. They also excelled at metallurgy, producing iron that “was perhaps of better quality than that being produced in Europe” (Voeks 1997:42). As we shall see, this skill in metalworking, in addition to their familiarity with urban environments, lent many Yorùbán slaves in Brazil a degree of mobility that contributed to the survival of much traditional knowledge[3].
why the Yorùbá
- demographics of the slave trade
Pure numbers account in part for the survival of the Yorùbán belief system. The timing of importation also played a critical role. The last period of importation of African slaves to Brazil lasted from the late eighteenth century until the final shipment in 1851. The majority of these unwilling immigrants were Yorùbáns and Dahomeans taken from the Bight of Benin. “Their religious dominance thus resulted in part simply from their numerical superiority” (Voeks 1997:52).
James T. Houk refers to the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries as “the critical period of development of Afro-American culture in the New World” (1995:48). It was during this period of time that approximately one half of all slaves imported to the New World arrived[4], and over seventy-five percent of those slaves were from west-central Africa, the Bight of Benin (which extends into western Nigeria), and the Bight of Biafra (which encompasses the central to eastern portions of Nigeria). In other words, a large portion of the most recent and influential influx of slaves were Yorùbá-speakers (Houk 1995:48).
Characteristics of that group of slaves also played a part. In 1835, the Yorùbán Empire of Òyó fell. Many members of the Empire were taken prisoner and sold into slavery, eventually ending up in Bahia (also known as Salvador), an area in Brazil known for its strong cultural connection to Africa and the highly visible presence of Candomblé. Many of these prisoners were from the higher social classes of the Empire, including several priests of the Yorùbán religion. The presence of these religious practitioners would have certainly provided a vehicle for the continuation of the Yorùbán religion in Bahia (Ligièro 1993:99).
- the Yorùbá in Africa
Language, as always, probably played an important role in the emergence of the Yorùbán religion as the base for the common religion of the Africans in Brazil. During the mid-nineteenth century missionaries in West Africa taught literacy in Nagô, the Yorùbán language. This role of Nagô as a limited lingua franca in West Africa may have contributed to Nagô’s rise as the lingua franca of Africans in Bahia (Matory 1999:74).
The cultural dominance of the Yorùbá in the areas of Africa in closest contact to Brazil during the slave trade also played a huge role. J. Lorand Matory explains the relationship between Brazil and a Costa, the Brazilian term for the coast of western Africa, as a major factor in the process by which the Yorùbá came to be the main cultural representatives of Africa in Brazil: “Elements of the regional society that emerged [in a Costa] in the nineteenth century had been precedented among inland political formations, cultural centers, and trade routs. For example, the Kingdom of Ife was much admired as a spiritual and cultural capital by various peoples beyond its small domain…The Kingdom of Òyó spread its influence through conquest, government, and trade. However, as a political and cultural identity uniting Ife, Òyó, and other groups, Yorùbá-ness was created in the Creole society of the Coast, in a place and time that put it in constant dialogue with the nations of the Afro-Latin diaspora” (1999:82).
In other words, at the major point of contact between Brazil and Africa, the cultures of various distinct Kingdoms of Nagô speakers mingled; on the Coast they were represented as one larger, blanket cultural group: the Yorùbá. This “Yorùbá-ness” influenced even the non-Yorùbán peoples of the region, so almost all of the Africans imported from the area as slaves were at least familiar with the culture.
-the Yorùbá in Brazil
One role occupied by some Brazilian slaves that helped maintain the Yorùbán religion in Bahia was that of negro de ganha. As I have mentioned earlier, the Yorùbá in Africa were city-dwellers; their familiarity with the urban environment contributed to the fact that in Bahia during the nineteenth century, the majority of urban slaves and negros de ganha were Nagô speakers (Matory 1999:78).
Negros de ganha were slaves who contracted work for themselves in a city (remember that the Yorùbá as a people excelled at metallurgy, a skill which would have been very marketable in colonial Brazil) and then gave a set portion of their earnings to their master. Since negros de ganha lived in cities away from their masters, “Their freedom of movement also allowed a certain freedom to organize themselves and to commemorate their ancestral practices beyond the supervision of their masters” (Matory 1999:78).
Working as negros de ganha enabled some slaves to buy their freedom from their masters. Many freed blacks became merchants, some sea-faring ones. According to Mikelle Smith Omari, free black merchants of Yorùbán descent made regular trips from Bahia to ports in Nigeria and Dahomey. In 1848 alone, ninety-one trips of this nature were documented, and Omari (1989:57) hypothesizes that “Ritual objects and the ritual knowledge needed to install new shrines and to invoke the [orixás] could easily have been imported along with related material items.” Certainly, free blacks moving back and forth between Bahia and the Yorùbán homeland would have been in a position to reinform Brazilian blacks as to their traditional religious practices.
Characteristics of Yorùbán spirituality
- relevance within a new environment
Robert A. Voeks, an ethnobotanist who studied the use of native Brazilian medicinal plants in Candomblé, offers an explanation of the success of the Yorùbá religion in Brazil that is logical, though perhaps overly influenced by his field of study: “[The Yorùbán] gods were nature gods, personifications of physical elements…Unlike the religions that developed in Africa’s nearby savannas and deserts – wide-open landscapes where worship was directed toward the celestial vastness of the heavens, towards the sun, the moon, and the stars – the religion of the Yoruba [sic] was a closed forest religion…Disengaged from one tropical forested region and deposited in another, Africans bypassed many arid physical habitats that would have provided less inviting to their pantheon. Coastal Bahia, although distant from the known world of the Yoruba [sic], presented an array of physical features complementary to the ones to which they had previously attached cosmological significance” (1997:160-161).
Yemoja, for example, is the Yorùbá goddess of waters. It is accepted that all bodies of water, rivers, lagoons, and seas, flow from her body. In Africa, she is closely associated with the Ògùn River in particular. As she controls the amount of fish caught, the capsize of fishing vessels, and other aquatic accidents, she of course was relevant to people living in coastal Bahia. When she came to Brazil as Iemanjá, her association was transferred from the Ògùn River in Africa to the beaches and seashores of Brazil. Yemoja’s daughter Òsun also found a home in Brazil as Oxum, where she is associated with streams and waterfalls instead of the River Òsun in Africa (Awolalu 1979:46-47; Ligièro 1993:111-113).
Òsanyìn, the Yorùbán divinity of medicine invoked before healing rituals, in Brazil became Ossain[5], “who owns all liturgical and medicinal leaves” (Ligièro 1993:112) and wanders the extensive forests and woodlands of Brazil. Oshoosi, the Yorùbán god of hunting and the forest, also transferred well to Bahia’s perpetually green rainforests under the name Oxóssi. Obalúwayé[6], who guarded the gates of African villages from smallpox, was certainly relevant in the face of the smallpox epidemics that also swept Brazil, where he was known as Omolu-Obaluaê, or just Omolu (Awolalu 1979:74 & 115; Ligièro 1993:108-114; Pinn 1998:63; Voeks 1997:161).
An example of a Yorùbán deity who lost his/her[7] following because of a lack of relevance to the situation of Africans in Brazil is Òrìsà-oko, known in Brazil as Okô. Òrìsà-oko is the divinity of agriculture. As the Yorùbá in Africa depend heavily on agriculture for their sustenance, they accord Òrìsà-oko a very prominent place in their worship. Of course, for plantation slaves in Brazil, “planting and harvesting were times of misery, not causes for celebration. The spiritual cultivation of Okô would have symbolized nothing less than endorsement of the source of their oppression” (Voeks 1997:56). Though some terreiros still acknowledge Okô, not many people actively worship her (Awolalu 1979:39).
Voeks also credits the “rich and complex cosmology, rigidly defined social structure, and a highly portable animism” for the Yorùbán religion’s survival, stating that “Bahia’s major ethnic groups reconstituted their own native beliefs and practices within the religious framework provided by the Yoruba [sic]” (1997:52-53). In other words, the Yorùbán’s spirituality transferred well from the forests of Africa to the forests of Brazil while others did not; the unsuccessful religions were those which were more focused on specific localities or specific landmarks as sacred. Removed from the environment of these localities and landmarks, these people’s religions lost much of their relevance (which is not to say importance). This led to the integration of the still-relevant aspects of their religions into the firmly-defined structure of the Yorùbá.
-syncretism
–the process
A discussion of any aspect of Candomblé almost inevitably leads to a discussion of syncretism. I include this topic here because it has been argued that the Yorùbán religion survived because it possessed certain characteristics that were easily syncretized with Catholicism, the dominant religion of colonial Brazil. Before exploring what aspects of the Yorùbán religion made it a likely candidate for this process, and how the process helped in its survival, I feel that I must include a brief discussion of the concept of syncretism. This discussion is necessary not only for the enlightenment of those who may not be familiar with the term, but also to explore the various levels of syncretism and how each applies to Candomblé.
Syncretism is a process of borrowing and blending. In surveying the various working definitions of this process, one finds that different scholars emphasize different aspects of the process. A blanket definition presented by Houk summarizes syncretism as “the integrating or blending of selected meanings (ideology) and/or forms (material culture) from diverse sociocultural traditions, resulting in the creation of entirely new meanings (ideology) and/or forms (material culture)” (1995:180).
The “and/or” distinction within this definition is key. It allows the concept of syncretism to be broken down into “simple” syncretism and “complex” syncretism. Simple syncretism “involves the combination of the visible forms of two previously distinct traditions” while complex syncretism “involves the blending of meanings, attitudes, and so on from two distinct cultural traditions” (Houk 1995:181).
If we use the elements that went into Candomblé to illustrate these definitions, simple syncretism would have occurred if African slaves, in the interest of preserving their religion in the face of severe persecution, associated certain orixás with Catholic saints without adopting the actual Catholic beliefs. Indeed, this is often cited as being the case (Ligièro 1993; Pinn 1998). Complex syncretism would have occurred if African slaves adopted both external trappings of Catholicism and certain elements of Catholic doctrine. As Houk acknowledges, this too could have been the case.
Simple syncretism, one could say, is intimately related to complex syncretism. The adoption of forms foreign to the original belief system would require a reinterpretation of these forms in order to place them in context; this reinterpretation, a mingling of meanings, would be complex syncretism at work. Houk says, “in many cases an initial period of synthesis seems to be followed by reinterpretation and elaboration…Simple syncretism (form synthesis) was the rule during the early period of contact, and complex syncretism (reinterpretation and elaboration), if it occurred at all, followed much later” (1995:181).
This makes sense. If the first generation of African slaves hid their worship of, say, the orixá Iansã, by telling any inquiring slave master or Catholic priest that they were instead venerating her corresponding Catholic saint, Saint Barbara, it would not have been difficult for them to maintain the distinction between the two firmly in their minds. But the next generation, or the next, even if indoctrinated fully into the tradition of orixá worship by the slave community, was still exposed, forcibly, to the Catholic ideology. Since a parallel between the orixá and the saint had already been drawn within the minds of these second- and third-generation slaves, and they were exposed to the ideologies of both the Yorùbá and the Catholics, it seems logical that the “reinterpretation and elaboration” of complex syncretism would almost inevitably follow. Houk supports this analysis, saying “In time…the initial synthesis of form gave way to elaboration on a broader scale involving the fusion of ideology an meaning, and many orisha [sic] worshippers now view the two figures as aspects of the same deity” (1995:182).
–how syncretism influenced survival
Obviously, the process of syncretism is facilitated by similarities between the two elements being combined. When discussing the survival of the Yorùbán religion in the New World, we can safely presume that other African religions with characteristics that precluded or impeded syncretism were at a much greater risk of being eradicated by the Catholic authorities. Other African religions, such as the Kongolese religion, did not include a “complex and widely recognized pantheon of gods” (Houk 1995:53).
This would have placed them at a distinct disadvantage when it came to syncretism with the Catholic saints, which would have endangered the survival of these religions. This is the case because though many modern practitioners of Candomblé believe that their ancestors’ deceptions involving the substitution of Catholic saints for orixás actually tricked their white captors, in actuality it was most likely “a calculated tolerance on the part of the authorities, a feigned ignorance meant to lull Africans into conversion. In fact, this process of gradually substituting Catholic saints for pagan deities had long been a cornerstone of conversion policy[8]” (Voeks 1997:60). Apparently, the Catholic conquerors had a firm grasp of the interrelated and subsequent natures of simple and complex syncretism. This being the case, they would have looked badly upon religions that didn’t oblige this aspect of their conversion policy by coordinating their cosmology with the Catholic one. Voeks even goes so far as to point out that because of Catholic missionary activities in West Africa long before the massive importation of Yorùbán slaves to Brazil, “there is every reason to believe that the concept of Catholic saint- Yorùbán orixá correspondence was familiar, if not already accepted, by incoming Africans” (1997:59). In the face of authorities insistent on the speedy conversion of their colony’s massive slave population, this head-start would have certainly been a factor in the preservation of the Yorùbán religion, especially considering the fact that syncretism was viewed as a vehicle for conversion.
Yorùbán cosmology
In the following section I will outline the Yorùbán cosmology. Included are the aspects easily syncretized with Catholicism in addition to those aspects which are distinctly Yorùbán. This is to emphasize that Candomblé is more than just a version of Catholicism dressed up in African costume. I hope to illustrate that far from being a haphazard collection of pagan gods, the Yorùbán religion possessed a rich ideology before its forced introduction to Catholicism: Candomblé, in turn, is not a bastardized mockery of a “real” religion, but a complex spiritual system drawing more from its African roots than from its relatively recent Catholic additions.
Yorùbán orixás had more in common with Catholic saints than just their mere presence, and the orixá-saint correspondence wasn’t the only similarity between the cosmologies of the two religions: “The cosmologies of both religions are essentially pantheistic; both recognize a high god, distant and largely inaccessible to mortals, as well as a pantheon of lesser divinities, to whom direct appeal can be made during periods of adversity. Like the Yoruba [sic] gods and goddesses, who are viewed as deified heroes of African antiquity, the Catholic saints were once mortal beings, whose exceptional deeds are immortalized in myth. And, like their West African counterparts, the saints took on certain ‘pagan’ qualities: dominion over nature, control of fertility, and influence over health” (Voeks 1997:59). Both cosmologies embrace the concept of an afterworld composed of infinite space that is the dwelling of their respective high, remote supreme gods. Both picture their intermediary deities as capable of migrating from this higher plane to the realm of mortals (Voeks 1997:63).
However, “If Catholics and Yoruba [sic] exhibit a degree of shared vision in terms of spiritual actors, they nevertheless place their respective deities in distinct cosmological kingdoms. The Yoruba [sic] and their New World descendants have retained much of their original view of the spiritual universe and the hereafter, and it has little in common with the Christian concepts of heaven or hell”: Orun is “the celestial dwelling place of the divinities” (Voeks 1997:63) associated with the Catholic heaven. It is the home of the orixás, the supreme god Olódùmare (Olórun), and the éguns (eguns), or soul of the dead.
Divided into nine levels, or spaces, orun is depicted as a series of energy levels, concentric rings of ever-increasing power surrounding the world of mortals, aiê [ilé]. Although all of the spirits reside in orun, those that exist at the highest levels, Olórun and Irumalé, are too distant, geographically and energetically, to return to the land of the living. They occupy the end of space: infinity. The eguns are dispersed in all the nine spaces, with their level of ascent (perhaps) dependent upon the level of spiritual growth achieved during their mortal existence…The orixás inhabit the primary levels of orun, where the energy intensity is believed to be similar to that of Earth. This balanced energy status translates to a highly permeable membrane separating the parallel worlds of the spiritual and the material. The deities who occupy this intermediate zone are provided free passage to aiê when summoned forth by their supplicants. Incarnated in the bodies of their devotees during possession trance, the orixás can once again savor the precious fruit of material existence. Humans are more limited, able to enter even the lowest layers of orun only through death (Voeks 1997:63).
We can see from this description the similarities that exist between orun and the Catholic heaven. In both, the high and supreme god is elevated to the point of no contact with the world of mortals (ilé). Also populating both heavens, however, are intermediary deities that can and do interact with mortals. Both heavens are the dwelling of certain dead souls; it is in the home of the other dead souls, however, that the two cosmologies begin to differ.
A special class of spirits occupying the Candomblé cosmos are the exus. The exus are souls that have come under the influence of Exu [Esú[9]]. Exu is the trickster god of the Yorùbán spiritual realm: he “is not the personal embodiment of evil standing in opposition to goodness…he is to be seen as that part of the divine which tests and tries out people. He tempts people, but that does not mean that he is against the human race or will do only harm. He is one who loves to try out what is in people’s hearts and what their real character is” (Awolalu 1979:28).
Exu acts as intermediary between orun and ilé, communicating the wishes of the unknowable deity Olódùmarè to mortals. No matter who any worshipper’s personal orixá is, no ceremony will begin without first sacrificing to Exu. If this offering is given, Exu will co-operate with the worshipper to make the ceremony a success. If his offering is forgotten or foregone, he will refuse to participate, and as it is he who carries the supplicant’s offering to the orixá, this is a grave situation (Awolalu 1979:30).
Because of his destructive and mischievous capabilities, Exu is frequently associated with the Christian devil. This association was enforced in the minds of Catholic priests by the fact that statues of Exu always feature a prodigious phallus and that sacrifices of goats and roosters anointed with alcoholic beverages were made to him. As we have seen, however, though Exu can be extremely dangerous and is always a force to be reckoned with, he is not a personification of unmitigated evil. He instead “represents latent, pure, amorphous energy, which begets uncontrolled, amoral, chaotic life” (Ligièro 1993:107). Of course, for Catholic priests trying to convert a mass of pagan slaves that far outnumbered their white masters, any hint of the uncontrolled and chaotic would certainly seem like the work of Satan.
The souls of the dead under the dominion of Exu, the exus, also bear this confusion of their status. In formal context, exus are “referred to, respectfully, as ‘slaves’ (of the orixás)” (Wafer 1991:14), because they are frequently called upon to assist mortals who do not wish to disturb the orixás. In casual context, though, they are often referred to as “devils” and given names such as Lucifer and Belzebu (Beelzebub). Like Exu, the exus are not, however, absolutely evil. Their help can be enlisted by humans through offerings with none of the perils associated in the Christian perspective with dealing with “devils.”
Their place in orun, however, is identified as hell. Here we find another difference between the Catholic and Yorùbán perspectives on the universe:
The difference between these two perspectives is most apparent if one examines the ‘orientational metaphors’ of their cosmologies. In Christianity heaven is metaphorically ‘up’ and hell is ‘down,’ which results in the popular conception of a three-tiered universe, with the human world in the middle. Candomblé’s universe is structured differently…In Candomblé the various entities that populate the universe, and the ‘places’ they inhabit, are conceptualized as lying on a continuum between matter and spirit. The lowest place in this schema is the world of mortals, which is identified with matter…All spirit entities occupy places that are metaphorically ‘above’ matter. These places are themselves hierarchically arranged, according to their degree of proximity to one pole or the other. The exus are closest to matter, for which reason it is considered more appropriate, and more efficacious, to call on them when one needs help in the material world, rather than to trouble the orixás, who are high on the spirit-matter continuum (Wafer 1991:14).
As we can see, the universe of practitioners of Candomblé, though superficially similar to that of the Catholics, is fundamentally different in several respects. Unlike the Catholic conception of good and evil, Candomblé embraces no absolutes. Exu and his exus, “like human beings…are capable of doing both good and bad” (Wafer 1991:14).
The entire conception of the Candomblé universe is based upon the concept of a matter-spirit continuum, while the Catholic universe is based upon the dichotomy between good and evil. In the Candomblé universe, all nine levels of orun, no matter who their occupants are, exist metaphorically above the world of mortals. All non-human entities are hierarchically ranked not by their relative goodness or badness, but by their association with matter. With the exception of Olódùmarè, all of the residents of orun are personified as equally capable of good or evil; if the proper offerings are made by worshippers, even Exu can and will be coerced into a helpful role. The Catholic saints maintain an objective role in dealings with mortals. The orixás, however, savor the opportunity to once again inhabit bodies made of matter during possession (Voeks 1997:63).
conclusion
There are several factors which led to the survival of the Yorùbán religion in Brazil. Among these are the demographics of the Portuguese slave trade; the Yorùbáns constituted the majority of the slaves imported to Brazil during the last and most influential wave of the trade. Included in this group of slaves, because of the fall of the Yorùbán Empire of Òyó in 1835, were priests and other high-ranking officials well-versed in their religion.
The role of the Yorùbá in Africa also contributed. The Yorùbán language was spread throughout West Africa by missionaries who taught literacy in it. Because of its prevalence, Nôg then became the lingua franca of Africans in Brazil.
Throughout the coast of western Africa, the area in closest contact with Brazil during the period of the slave trade, the culture of the Yorùbá was well-respected and well-known. Even non-Nôg-speakers of the area were familiar with the Yorùbán culture, including its religious beliefs.
Once in Brazil, Yorùbáns again occupied roles that predispositioned them toward religious survival. Chosen as urban slaves because of their familiarity with cities and marketable skills, many Yorùbá were employed as negros de ganha, which granted them a degree of freedom from the supervision of their masters. This freedom would have given the negros de ganha a greater opportunity to practice their religion than their plantation-bound counterparts.
A number of Yorùbán slaves were able to buy their freedom and become sea-faring merchants. A considerable number of trips were made by these merchants back and forth between Bahia and their ancestral homeland. According to one scholar[10], these trips helped to preserve traditional religious knowledge by allowing ex-slaves of Yorùbán descent to import both ideas and material goods related to orixá worship back into Bahia.
The Yorùbán religion also possessed a relevance to life in Brazil that other religions lacked. The orixás of the Yorùbán religion were associated with aspects of nature that existed both in Africa and Brazil, and they for the most part governed activities that held the same significance in Brazil as they did in Africa. Those that didn’t, as in the case of the orixá of agriculture, Òrìsà-oko, were effectively discarded. The Yorùbán religion also contained a firmly designated internal structure which allowed for the integration of aspects of other African religions.
Though it may appear paradoxical, the apparent ease with which Yorùbán slaves syncretized their religion with Catholicism also aided in its survival, as the dominant Catholics recognized syncretism as a step in the conversion process. The Yorùbáns even had a head start of sorts in this respect, as missionaries in West Africa had planted the idea of an association between the orixás and the saints before the slave trade. Candomblé in its early stages was tolerated because of the assumption that full-scale conversion would soon follow.
The Yorùbán religion was a likely candidate for syncretism with Catholicism for many reasons. Both religions featured a class of intermediary divinities whose exceptional deeds as mortals caused them to be deified. Both the orixás and the Catholic saints could be called upon by mortals for assistance in the areas in which they specialized, and both served as a connection between the earthly realm and the unknowable, untouchable higher god.
Candomblé, however, survived as a distinct religion rather than a form of Catholicism because much of the complex syncretism that occurred was a reinterpretation of Catholic forms within the conceptual framework of the Yorùbán religion rather than the other way around. Using Exu as an example, Wafer illustrates this by stating that “the ‘confusion’ of Exu and the devil entails not so much a corruption of Exu by seeing him from the perspective of the Christian conception of evil, as rather a reinterpretation of the devil by seeing him in terms of Candomblé’s own theodicy” (1991:14).
Candomblé also retains the Yorùbán, rather than Catholic, orientational metaphor. In Candomblé, the world of mortals is not sandwiched between a heaven above and a hell below. Rather it is positioned at the cente of the concentric rings of the spirit world. A spirit’s position in the hierarchy of Candomblé’s afterworld is not determined by the spirit’s relative goodness or evilness, but by the level of association it maintains with the world of matter. Olórun does not occupy the highest level of orun on the basis of his ultimate goodness in opposition to a being of ultimate evil; he instead occupies this position because he is the ultimate expression of the spirit end of the spirit-matter continuum.
The demographics of the slave trade and the characteristics of the slaves imported allowed for he introduction of the Yorùbán religion into Brazil and provided a firm base of potential followers; however, these factors alone cannot account for the religion’s survival. In essence, Candomblé owes its existence to both the distinctions that mark it as separate from Catholicism and the characteristics that facilitated its merging with Catholicicsm. Without the latter, the Yorùbán religion would have been eradicated in Brazil by zealous, conversion-minded Catholics. Without the former, its identity as an independent religion would have been jeopardized.
Notes:
[1] All terms in Brazilian Portuguese appear in italics, while Yorùbán terms are underlined. The first time a term is used, if there is an equivalent term in the other language it follows immediately in parentheses. All spellings are taken from the works cited; where I found discrepancies in spellings I have tried to include all alternate spellings and their sources.
[2] The Yorùbán terms, rarely used in Candomblé, are according to Robert A. Voeks (1997:63) babalorixá (pai de santo) and ialorixá (mãe de santo). Voeks seems, however, to have used Portuguese spellings to render the terms, and I was unable to find them using Nôg spellings.
[3] More on this under Why the Yorùbá – the Yorùbá in Brazil.
[4] James T. Houk (1995:47) makes this statement using the estimate of 11.7 million as the total number of African slaves shipped to the New World – other estimates range from 9.42 to 11.77 million.
[5] This is the spelling used in Ligièro (1993); in Voeks (1997), his name is rendered Ossâim.
[6] This is the spelling used in Awolalu (1979); in Pinn (1998), his name is rendered Oba-’lu’aiye.
[7] There is some dispute over whether this deity is male or female; the Yorùbá legend about Òrìsà-oko describes the man and his wife who first discovered that fruits left on the ground to rot produce new fruits of the same type. “There is some confusion among the Yorùbá as to which of the two is deified…is it the man or his wife?” (Awolalu 1979:38). In referring to Okô, Voeks (1997:56) uses the pronoun she, making no reference to the discrepancy.
[8] Houk (1995:181) mentions this process as part of the religious conquest of colonial Mexico.
[9] Also known as Eshu, Elegba, Elegbara, or Eleggua.
[10] Omari (1989:57).
Works Cited
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