Case Study: Mãe de santo Bianca de Xango (São Gonçalo, Brazil)

It is Sunday morning in São Gonçalo, Brazil – a city known for its footballers, heavy industry, and violent crime. Though the streets are still sleepy, people are buzzing in and out of the evangelical storefront churches that dot every block. Not far from the early praise music stands a different house of worship, hidden behind a whitewashed wall. This is a terreiro: a domestic temple where mãe de santo Bianca de Xango, a Candomblé priestess, gathers her community. 

Candomblé is one of the many diasporic religions that evolved out of colonial oppression. Forbidden from practicing their own religion, Yoruba, Bantu and other West African peoples layered the Catholicism of their European enslavers onto their own indigenous practices and divinities to create a hybridized religious form that survives in a distributed network across Brazil and beyond. De Xango’s altar features an array of saints and orixás (deities), while sacred plants sit in the center of the room. But the spiritual mixing doesn’t stop there. She also leads Umbanda rituals, involving spiritual possession, with a small curtain being drawn across the room to conceal, or spotlight, the relevant statues and icons. 

Today, de Xango has gathered family and friends to celebrate the festival of Iemanja, the goddess of the sea and mother of all orixás, who in Brazil is frequently associated with the Virgin Mary. Along the Brazilian coastline, people gather dressed in white to bring flowers or food offerings to Iemanja. Having endured state suppression for centuries, the tides have changed as Iemanja celebrations in tourist hotspots like Ipenema beach are now encouraged by government cultural institutions, with large branded posters promoting the fact.

Even though only a small minority of Brazilians practice Candomblé, there is growing curiosity about pre-colonial spiritual practices and rituals worldwide, and nowhere is that reclamation of indigeneity more evident than in the explosion of interest in plant medicine. Foreign tourists flock to urban retreat centers and Amazonian villages across Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil for powerful spiritual experiences using mind-altering plant medicines like ayahuasca. 

Philippe Bandeira de Mello runs Arca da Montanha Azul, another home-based ritual space, where he’s hosted sacred plant ceremonies for decades. Like de Xango, his altar combines religious figures from across traditions, and he draws on Jungian psychotherapy as much as Amazonian indigenous practices. 

In a religious system without institutional hierarchies, innovation can spread quickly but quality control can suffer. Alonso del Rio, founder of Ayahuasca Ayllu in Taray, Peru, explains: “When ceremonies travel all over the world, there is a much faster expansion than the capacity to self-regulate…People don’t realize the important relationship between the power the plant gives [them] and the rigor and discipline needed so that the power does not create harm. The majority of people use it for their own benefit, with unfortunate consequences.” And as Western capital is injected into a plethora of psychedelic startups, these questions of integrity are likely to grow. 

Back in the terreiro in São Gonçalo, mãe de santo Bianca de Xango points to the cupboards stacked high with plates and bowls, which she’s used during community meals and celebrations for decades. Amidst the current cultural fascination with pre-colonial spiritualities, de Xango reminds us that so long as her people are faced with repression, poverty, and violence, the heart of her spiritual work remains to nurture a community of care.

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