Pomba Gira

Pomba Gira is a powerful class of feminine spirits in the Brazilian religions of Umbanda and Quimbanda, the female counterpart to Exu, with whom she shares the crossroads, the streets and the night. Like Exu, she is not a single deity but a whole family of intermediary spirits who work close to the human world and its everyday concerns. Her name carries her nature: it is generally traced to a Central African (Kongo/Kimbundu) phrase for the crossroads, forms such as Bombo Njila or pambu njila, by way of the Kongo name Bombonjira for the trickster and crossroads spirit, reworked in Brazil into "Pomba Gira." She is thus, at root, a spirit of the threshold and the meeting of ways, an opener of paths and a messenger between worlds, and she is turned to above all in matters of love, sexuality, marriage, money and the tangled business of human relationships. She is imagined as a woman of striking sensual power, often in red and black, laughing, dancing, smoking, fond of perfume, roses and drink, confident, worldly and entirely unashamed.

Two persistent distortions attach to Pomba Gira, and both should be named. The first, inherited from hostile Christian observers, identifies her, like Exu, with the devil, because she is dark and red, keeps company with the dead and the crossroads, and refuses respectability. This is the same mistaken framing that has long been imposed on the Afro-Atlantic crossroads spirits, and the traditions themselves reject it: Pomba Gira is not a figure of evil but a morally complex intermediary who can help or harm and who deals frankly in the real business of life. The second distortion is reductive rather than hostile: because many Pomba Giras are understood as the spirits of women who lived at the margins of a respectable Catholic society, among them women who worked as prostitutes, she is sometimes dismissed as merely a "spirit of prostitutes."

Scholars and practitioners read her more seriously than that. Precisely because she speaks for women whom society condemned and cast out, Pomba Gira has become, for many of her devotees, women especially, a figure of feminine power, autonomy and defiance, one who stands outside and against the constraints of patriarchal and respectable morality and who is invoked for confidence, protection and control over one's own life and desires.

Umbanda and Quimbanda are living Brazilian religions with many millions of adherents, and Pomba Gira is among their most sought-after and most misunderstood spirits, the woman at the crossroads, too often maligned as a devil or dismissed as a harlot, and better understood as a fierce intercessor for those the respectable world refused.