The tropical port city São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos occupies a peninsula that separates the Atlantic from the waters of its namesake bay, first capital of Portuguese Brazil, historic harbor to the trade in slaves. Sometimes called Black Rome, Salvador is today one of Brazil's largest urban regions, and therefore one of its poorest. It is also home of the Yoruba candomblé, a religious practice of the African diaspora in Brazil, and the purest source of Yoruban culture in the Americas. The divinities of candomblé are the orixá, powerful gods who protect and guide and grant favors, and who enter the bodies of entranced initiates, imparting visions, speaking through them. Bahia is also a place of syncretic observances that parallel or conjoin the power and attributes of the orixá with those of the saints of Rome. Its practitioners are said to be visited by the departed spirits of ancient guides, sometimes speaking with the voice of the orixá Exú, the go-between, messenger of the gods.
Mario Cravo Neto dedicates this book to Exú Maragbó. The most human of orixá, Exú is the son of the Mother of Waters, Yemanjá, which is important to this story. These gods who walk among us seem incestuous and are sometimes strangely sexed, and the stories of their birth and death and joining and the recitation of their attributes are at source complex. According to a nineteenth century account of the Yoruba myths of creation, Yemanjá is daughter of Odudua, who is the earth, Black One, chief goddess of the Yoruba people, and her father is called Obatalá, the sky, chief god, Lord of the White Cloth. Odudua and Obatalá are in turn the children of Olorun, god of the firmament and all the heavens, and some say the two are one, a single androgynous divinity, the image of a human being, with an arm and a leg and a tail that ends in a sphere. According to the word of Obatalá, the priests were made by Olorun, who passed to him dominion over the firmament and world, and then stepped back to rest, and others say that Odudua was coeval with Olorun, not created by him, as was her husband Obatalá. It is Yemanjá who is revered as mother of the ocean and the rivers and of all things orixá, receiving the petitions of sailors and the fishermen and anyone whose life depends on the sea. She is represented by tradition as a female figure, her color, yellow, wearing blue beads and white cloth.
