Meaning and use
Within these traditions, saravá functions as both a greeting and a farewell, and carries an older sense tied to the forces that move through nature — practitioners sometimes gloss it, syllable by syllable, as force, reign, and nature or energy combined. It is used both on its own and directly before a name, as in "Saravá, Ogum."
A disputed origin
One account traces the word to enslaved Africans speaking Bantu languages, who are said to have rendered the Portuguese salvar or salvo ("to save," "saved") as something closer to salavá as they learned the language, which over generations settled into saravá as a greeting among the faithful. The word has at times been given a pejorative reading by people outside these traditions, which practitioners and scholars alike attribute to unfamiliarity with, and prejudice against, Afro-Brazilian religion rather than to anything in the word's own history.