Before Umbanda Had a Name: João do Rio and the Caboclos of Rio

When the Caboclo das Sete Encruzilhadas spoke through Zélio Fernandino de Moraes in 1908, announcing the birth of Umbanda, many thought they were witnessing something entirely new. A Spiritist medium gave voice to an indigenous spirit who declared a religion that would unite Spiritism, Catholic devotion, and the ancestral spirits of Africa and Brazil. Yet the world he described was not new at all. Only four years earlier, the journalist João do Rio had already led his readers into that hidden spiritual landscape and made it visible to the wider public.

João do Rio, the pen name of Paulo Barreto, was one of the most curious and daring writers of his generation. Rather than focus on the polite society of Rio de Janeiro, he turned his attention to the streets, the backyards, and the tenements where the city’s ordinary people lived, prayed, and created. In 1904 he published As Religiões no Rio, a collection of articles first printed in the Gazeta de Notícias. These chronicles astonished his middle-class audience. At a time when many Brazilians imagined their country as European and modern, João do Rio revealed that the capital’s soul was profoundly popular, diverse, and African in character.

He described candlelit Catholic processions winding through the night, Spiritist séances conducted in drawing rooms, and, most strikingly, the Afro-Brazilian practices alive in the portside districts of Saúde, Gamboa, and Pedra do Sal. These areas, later called Pequena África, were home to descendants of enslaved Africans from Congo and Angola who carried forward their ancestral knowledge in new forms. João do Rio wrote of drummers beating complex rhythms, women falling into trance, and priests who guarded the ritual order of their communities. He paid close attention to the objects of popular magic: bottles steeped in palm oil and herbs, powders and charms sold in markets to protect against envy or illness, and spells to heal, to attract love, or to call down justice. To outsiders these practices looked like superstition; to the people who relied on them they were necessities, a way of surviving and shaping life in a difficult city.

Among the many spirits and presences João do Rio encountered, he gave particular space to the caboclos. These indigenous spirits appeared in possession and mediumship, offering advice, protection, and healing. They stood alongside African ancestors and Catholic saints, embodying the distinctly Brazilian blend of influences that characterised Rio’s popular religiosity. For João do Rio, the caboclo showed that religion in Brazil was not only African or European but something new, woven from the land itself.

This detail is especially significant in hindsight. Only four years after João do Rio’s reports, Zélio’s new religion would be announced by a caboclo. The Caboclo das Sete Encruzilhadas became the herald of Umbanda, declaring that the spirits of Brazil’s people - pretos velhos, caboclos, exus and pomba giras - would now have a framework that united them with Spiritism and Catholic devotion. What João do Rio had witnessed in the streets and described to his readers was the very world that Umbanda would crystallise into a religion.

It is impossible to say with certainty whether Zélio or his family ever read João do Rio’s articles. Yet the Gazeta de Notícias was one of Rio’s most widely read newspapers, and his reports were provocative enough to be discussed in salons and Spiritist circles. If Zélio did see them – and it is highly likely that he did - he would have found vivid descriptions of caboclos, pretos velhos, Congo spirits, and the rituals of Rio’s backstreets. The same spirits that would soon be named and gathered under the banner of Umbanda.

Whether or not Zélio turned those pages, the timing is remarkable. João do Rio made the invisible visible in 1904. He revealed a city alive with drumming and trance, with palm oil and spells, with pretos velhos and caboclos guiding the people. Four years later, Umbanda appeared, with a caboclo at its centre, not inventing a new world but giving a name to one that had already been there all along.

To read João do Rio today allows us to glimpse Umbanda before Umbanda was formally establishe. His words remind us that the new religion did not emerge in a vacuum, but from the lived spiritual life of Brazil. African, indigenous, and Spiritist currents woven together in the streets of Rio. And at the heart of this world stood the caboclos, the spirits of the land, who announced themselves to João do Rio’s readers and soon after to the entire nation.