What is Umbanda?
Umbanda is a Brazilian religion that emerged in the 1920s. It blends three sources: the Spiritism of the Frenchman Allan Kardec, Afro-Brazilian traditions such as Candomblé, and popular Roman Catholicism. Its central activity is mediumship. Trained mediums enter trance to channel ancestral and nature spirits, through whom worshippers receive healing, advice, and guidance.
Umbanda vs Candomblé, Spiritism, and Quimbanda
Umbanda is easily confused with the traditions it grew out of. Candomblé is the older Afro-Brazilian religion that preserves West African orixá worship more directly, with animal offerings and an initiatory priesthood. Umbanda borrows the orixá names but reinterprets them, and centres its rituals instead on humbler spirits. Spiritism, also called Kardecism, is the French import that gave Umbanda its belief in reincarnation and spiritual evolution, but Spiritists tend to look down on the pretos velhos and caboclos that Umbandistas most value. Quimbanda is Umbanda's sibling and shadow. It is a related tradition that works openly with the exú spirits Umbanda treats with caution, and which Umbandistas often define themselves against.
The tradition's account
The religion has no single founder, but its origin story centres on Zélio Fernandino de Moraes, a man in Niterói, near Rio de Janeiro, who in the early twentieth century began working as a medium. He objected to the way local Spiritists dismissed the spirits of old enslaved Africans and indigenous Brazilians as low or unevolved. Around the 1920s, groups combining Spiritist and Afro-Brazilian practice took shape, and de Moraes's circle became the most influential. In 1939 he helped form an Umbandist federation, and in 1941 the first Umbandist congress was held. The religion gained respectability through the mid-twentieth century, even under the military government of 1964 to 1985, despite opposition from both the Catholic Church and growing Pentecostal movements. There is no central authority; Umbanda is transmitted orally and varies widely by region and by house.
Spirits, mediums, and the terreiro
Umbanda teaches that one distant creator God, sometimes called Olorun, presides over a vast hierarchy of spirits. At the top are the orixás, treated as deities or as forces of nature. The orixás are thought too powerful and too remote to appear at ordinary rituals, so they send emissaries. The two most important are the pretos velhos, the wise and patient spirits of deceased African slaves, and the caboclos, the proud spirits of indigenous Brazilians. In a terreiro, mediums fall into trance and let these spirits speak and act through them, smoking pipes, offering counsel, and performing cleansings. From its Spiritist inheritance Umbanda holds that the soul survives death and passes through repeated reincarnations, rising or falling according to karma. Its ethics place charity, caridade, at the centre, treating service to others as the chief means of spiritual evolution.
Where it sits in the index
The index does not yet hold media specifically on Umbanda, so this entry stands on its cross-links rather than pointing outward. It belongs in the lexicon because it touches several threads the corpus already follows. Like shamanism, it rests on trained mediation between a community and a spirit world entered through altered states. Its cosmology of repeated lives and accumulated karma overlaps with Indian ideas of reincarnation, routed here through nineteenth-century French Spiritism rather than the Upanishads. Its concern with the surviving soul and with direct contact with unseen realms places it within the broad field of mysticism, even as its public, ceremonial, healing-oriented character sets it apart from the solitary contemplative traditions that make up most of this index.
What scholars dispute
Scholars do not agree on how to classify Umbanda. Some treat it as an Afro-Brazilian religion alongside Candomblé. Others, noting that its Spiritist framework is more consistent across the tradition than its African ritual elements, call it a form of Western esotericism. The religion-studies scholar Steven Engler has argued that the Spiritist influence is the more pervasive. Its origins are contested too. Many practitioners present Umbanda as an ancient wisdom carried from Egypt, India, or elsewhere, while historians place its formation firmly in early-twentieth-century Brazil. It is not the lexicon's task to settle these questions. They are noted here because the disagreement is part of what the term means.