Rethinking Spiritual Ontology in Candomblé and Avoiding the Legitimation Trap Across the Atlantic

Abstract

Abstract This paper reexamines the ontology of the divine in Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion whose cosmology and ritual life challenge the monotheistic assumptions that continue to shape philosophy of religion. Responding to what I call the legitimation trap —the strategy of securing intellectual respectability for African and Afro-diasporic traditions by assimilating them to Western monotheistic norms—I argue that Candomblé articulates a hierarchical polytheism grounded in graded immanence. Drawing on mythic narratives as well as ritual practices of possession, sacrifice, and initiation, I show that divine agency in Candomblé is distributed across multiple autonomous beings whose cooperation sustains the cosmos. This structure of multi-devotionalism reveals a metaphysics in which vitality ( axé ) circulates through relations among deities, humans, and material elements. Candomblé’s spiritual ontology thus calls for a philosophical shift from theology and ontology to what may be termed entitology : a study of relational co-constitution and participation. The paper concludes by proposing that decolonizing philosophy of religion requires engaging such Afro-diasporic grammars of divinity as sources of metaphysical insight rather than as objects of comparative classification.