Prayer in Umbanda is described here rather than reproduced. The wording is often oral, carried within a lineage or a family, given only after initiation, or bound to a particular language, and the fact that a version has appeared in print does not make it free to repeat. Who may say the words, and to whom, is settled inside the community and not by what happens to be publicly available.
Facts
Cultural Restriction
Restricted TraditionPrayer wording in Umbanda is largely oral, carried within a lineage or a family, and often given only after initiation or bound to a particular language; the fact that a version has appeared in print does not make it free to repeat. The atlas describes this prayer tradition rather than reproducing its wording. This does not extend to Umbanda's other documented spirits and practices, which remain openly described elsewhere in the atlas. 1 Practice
Practice StatusClosed ceremonial knowledge, described but not reproduced 1Tradition: Umbanda Learn More
A Twentieth-Century Synthesis with Deep Roots
This entry records that Umbanda, a Brazilian religion formally organized in the early twentieth century, combines elements drawn from African-derived traditions including Candomble, from Kardecist Spiritism, and from Roman Catholicism and indigenous Brazilian spiritual traditions, structuring its prayer and ritual life around communication with a range of spirit guides, most distinctively the caboclos, spirits associated with indigenous Brazilian heritage, and pretos velhos, spirits of elderly enslaved Africans, without presenting Umbanda's specific prayers or ritual invocations here.
Umbanda ceremonies, held at a terreiro under the leadership of a medium who channels these spirit guides for consultation, healing and guidance, involve specific songs, called pontos, and ritual procedures that vary somewhat across the considerable diversity of Umbanda houses and lineages that have developed since the religion's formal founding, reflecting Umbanda's character as a genuinely syncretic and still actively developing tradition rather than one built around a single fixed liturgical canon. Given this internal diversity and the community-specific, mediumship-based transmission of its ritual songs and prayers, this entry limits itself to describing Umbanda's general character and historical formation.
A Religion Built to Bridge Brazil's Religious Landscape
Historians of Brazilian religion generally describe Umbanda's formation in the 1920s and 1930s as a deliberate synthesis intended in part to bridge and legitimize Afro-Brazilian spiritual practice within a Brazilian society then more receptive to a religion incorporating recognizably Spiritist and Catholic elements than to Candomble's more directly African-derived form, a historical context that shaped Umbanda's distinctive blended character from its formal founding onward rather than through gradual, unplanned syncretism alone. This origin has made Umbanda a frequent subject of scholarly discussion regarding the complex relationships between race, religion and social respectability in twentieth-century Brazil, since its formation occurred during a period when African-derived religions faced significant legal and social discrimination that Umbanda's specific synthesis was partly designed to help its practitioners navigate.
Umbanda remains a widely practiced religion in Brazil today, with considerable regional and house-to-house variation in specific practice, and its terreiros and mediums maintain their own authority over how their specific ritual songs and prayers are used and taught, consistent with the descriptive approach this entry and related entries for other Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Caribbean traditions in this atlas maintain.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
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