Paper short abstract:

Plants are central in Candomblé’s healing rituals, where they participate in complex assemblages with other vegetal, mineral, animal, technological, spiritual and human beings, and act according a hybrid ontology (as lines of forces and fluxes, and as individualized conscious beings).

Paper long abstract:

In Candomblé, health and the continuation of life are dependent on a complex dynamic of interactions involving all more-than-human beings (humans, objects, artifacts, the environment, animals, plants, minerals, the ancestors, spiritual beings, forces). These beings exist and act according multiple situated practices and an ontology based on relationality, multiplicities, continuities, creativity, not-excluding possibilities, and transitions. In fact, all beings are relational, composite and incomplete, with porous boundaries and spread bodies, part of a meshwork of life flows and individualized subjects, with their own will, desires, consciousness, feelings, and experience.

Plants intervene and manifest in different forms in healing rituals in Candomblé, that are, usually, a combination of “medicine” and “offer”, since they have in view transmitting, making the human being “participate” of specific modulations of lifeforce, and to establish flows and movements of forces in the cosmos.

Plants are especially used in baths, that aim at balancing and strengthening a person’s energy, and at making him or her participate in specific modulations of lifeforce. Baths are ritually prepared with the intervention of assemblages composed by human, spiritual, technological and natural beings. Plants are chosen according their therapeutic properties, qualities, characteristics, their form of life and dwelling, their relationships with other more-than-human beings, the oracle’s advice and myths. In the process that starts with plants’ collection and continues after the healing rituals, plants manifest also their multiple and transient forms, their capacity to produce participations and transitions, their force, consciousness, efficacious action, and their relationships with other more-than-human beings.