Sacred Leaves of Candomblé: African Magic, Medicine, and Religion in Brazil

In his exploration of the ethnobotany of Brazilian Candomblé, Robert Voeks has uncovered fascinating dimensions to a familiar religious terrain. Sacred plants have scarcely been mentioned in works on Afro-Brazilian religions, in contrast to the extensive ethnobotanical literature that has developed around the hallucinogens used in autochthonous New World religions. However, Voeks convincingly establishes the importance of sacred plants in Candomblé liturgy and healing. In Sacred Leaves of Camdomblé, he develops the botanical evidence, explores the historical processes through which West African sacred flora were reconstituted in Bahia, and examines their contemporary role in Candomblé cosmology and practice. His data derive from plant collecting expeditions with Candomblé personnel, interviews and attendance at Candomblé rituals, and observation and discussions with proprietors and suppliers of commercial “leaf houses” (casas de folhas). All this is supplemented by Voeks’s own botanical explorations and his extensive reading on Candomblé and its Yoruba predecessors.

After determining that only a small portion of the species now commonly used in Brazil is of African origin, Voeks speculates on how African healers recreated the sacred flora of the Yoruba, the principal African influence in Bahian Candomblé, within the alien landscape of coastal Bahia and the confines of European civilization. In one particularly intriguing chapter, he notes that coastal lowland forests of Brazil and West Africa once formed a single land mass with common flora; although after 35 million years of separation and divergent evolution the two continents have few species in common, at the level of genus they still share numerous plant forms. Voeks’s discovery that many substitutions of New World for African species have been made at this higher level indicates that Candomblé specialists utilized generic similarities as the basis for species substitution of Yoruba sacred plants. He concludes that like many other aspects of its practice, the Candomblé “floristic” repertoire represents a creative adaptation to a new environment. In this the spread of botanical knowledge parallels the process whereby African religions became established in Brazil.

Those interested in Candomblé ethnobotany and medicinal plants will find chapters on Candomblé medicine, medicinal plant classification, and flora, including photographs and an extensive list of the species used by specialists that gives the plants’ scientific and vernacular names, origin, and spiritual and organic medical uses. Voeks discusses the symbolic significance, healing powers, and particular deities associated with specific botanical species, as well as their places in a hot/cold classificatory system derived from Yoruba mythic and European humoral traditions. He challenges those who have disparaged the African medicinal contribution to Brazil. On a more somber note, he finds the Candomblé tradition threatened by increasingly tenuous botanical knowledge among younger urban religious leaders as well as by the dwindling space available for gardens of the required flora.

Some might question Voeks’s choice to enter into an extended review of widely available material on the history of slavery and Afro-Brazilian culture, while merely listing the significant environmental and ethnopharmaceutical implications of his case study of Candomblé: the increasing globalization of the world’s tropical forest flora and the importance of “disturbed landscapes” with their “weeds” and common cultigens, rather than rapidly disappearing primary forests, as major sources of botanical diversity and medicinal plants. Also, his emphasis on the similarities, rather than the differences, of Candomblé ethnobotanical knowledge produces a synthetic and somewhat static portrayal of current practice. This contrasts with the dynamism he ascribes to the historic process of creative reconstruction of Candomblé sacred plants. It also neglects the very internal differences and contestations among contemporary sectors of Candomblé practitioners that account for its continuing dynamism. Voeks’s conclusion that Candomblé sacred plants represent a creative blend of European, African, and Amerindian flora recalls more the work of Gilberto Freyre than the current fierce debates over such issues as African identity and orthodoxy and the role of Catholicism in Afro-Brazilian religious practice. It would be interesting to know if and how a study of Candomblé plants and their symbolic usages might be relevant to these debates. As an American scientist, Voeks might also have more forcefully interrogated his own position and biases on these issues.

Nevertheless, Sacred Leaves of Candomblé stands as a creative contribution to Afro-Brazilian studies, ethnobotany, and environmental history, and it will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, cultural geographers, and those who study diasporas. Simply and engagingly written, it is both appropriate for introductory-level undergraduate courses and an important work for specialists on Afro-Brazilian religions.