João do Rio: Chronicler of a City of Spirits

When Umbanda was formally revealed in 1908 through the young medium Zélio Fernandino de Moraes, many thought something entirely new had entered Brazil’s religious life. Yet in truth, the world that gave rise to Umbanda had already been mapped out a few years earlier by one of Rio de Janeiro’s most unusual writers. João do Rio, the pen name of Paulo Barreto, was a journalist, flâneur, and literary modernist whose curiosity led him into places most of his contemporaries would not dare to go.

In 1904 he published As Religiões no Rio, a collection of articles that shocked polite society. At a time when Brazil’s elites preferred to imagine themselves European and modern, João do Rio insisted that the true soul of the capital lay in its streets, markets, and tenements. He described Catholic processions winding through the night, Spiritist séances in drawing rooms, and, most daringly, the hidden African cults carried out in backyards and portside houses. These were the practices of what was called Pequena África, the “Little Africa” of Rio’s harbour district, where descendants of enslaved Africans from Congo, Angola, and Yoruba lands kept alive the knowledge of their ancestors.

João do Rio entered these spaces as an outsider. He wrote with a mixture of irony and fascination, at times mocking what he saw, at other times overwhelmed by its vitality. Yet for all his prejudices, he left us one of the earliest accounts of the religious life that would later crystallise into Umbanda. He described drummers who summoned the spirits with complex rhythms, women who fell into trance and spoke with otherworldly voices, and men who carried the titles of priest, initiate, or guardian, each with their place in an order invisible to those who passed by in the street.

He also captured the way Rio’s people spoke of their origins. Some called themselves children of this or that African “nation.” Others used words that mingled memory and invention, naming lineages and languages that were already being transformed on Brazilian soil. He noticed that, despite the variety of names and identities, there was often a common language of ritual, a shared speech through which people from different backgrounds could pray, sing, and invoke the spirits together.

The picture João do Rio painted was not of isolated sects but of a city humming with overlapping traditions. On one street corner there might be a Catholic procession, its candles flickering as worshippers sang litanies to the Virgin. In a nearby tenement, a Spiritist circle sat around a table, listening for the raps and whispers of invisible presences. And just beyond, in a backyard or warehouse, a group gathered to honour Congo spirits, the drums sounding into the night while mediums danced and fell into trance. This was Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the century: not one religion, but many, entwined and alive in the same urban space.

It was into this world that Umbanda was born. When Zélio de Moraes and his circle gave the new religion its first name, they were not inventing something from nothing. They were crystallising a reality João do Rio had already described. Umbanda’s blend of Spiritism, Catholicism, indigenous memory, and above all Congo-Angola practices was not an accident, but the lived religion of Brazil’s working classes, visible to anyone willing to step into the streets.

What makes João do Rio’s work so powerful is that he captured a moment just before Umbanda emerged. Reading him today, we see Umbanda in embryo, still unnamed but already present in the drum rhythms, the voices of the pretos velhos, the prayers to saints who were also orixás, and the mediumistic trances that blended Spiritist and African forms. His Religiões no Rio is not only a journalistic curiosity but one of the earliest documents of Afro-Brazilian popular religion in its full complexity.

Umbanda remembers itself as a religion born in 1908, but João do Rio shows us that its roots go deeper, into the ordinary lives of the people who prayed, drummed, and healed in Rio’s backstreets. He is, in a sense, Umbanda’s first chronicler, though he never used the word. To read him is to glimpse a city where spirits walked openly, where God was invoked by many names, and where the Congo heart of Umbanda was already beating beneath the surface.