Origins and core beliefs
Umbanda is generally traced to early-twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro and the work of the medium Zélio Fernandino de Moraes, though many of its individual elements existed in Brazilian popular religion earlier. Practitioners hold that a single supreme creator — called Olodumare, Olorum, or, in the Angola branch, Zambi — stands above a pantheon of Orixás, deities often paired with Catholic saints, who act as forces of nature and divine energy. Umbanda also teaches reincarnation and spiritual progress across many lifetimes, and treats the practice of charity as central to religious life.
Mediums, understood to have a natural capacity that can be developed, serve as the means by which spirit guides communicate with and counsel the living. Quimbanda is a related but distinct Afro-Brazilian tradition sometimes contrasted with Umbanda as its "left-hand" counterpart, though contemporary practitioners of Quimbanda generally treat it as its own religion rather than as a branch of Umbanda.
Spirit lines
Umbanda cosmology organizes spirits and Orixás into a hierarchy of lines, phalanges, and guides, commonly grouped under a scheme called the Seven Lines, with Oxalá's line typically placed at the top and the Line of Dead Souls at the base. The spirit guides who most often communicate through mediums include Caboclos (spirits associated with Brazil's indigenous peoples, credited with deep knowledge of medicinal plants), Pretos Velhos (spirits of enslaved Africans, known for wisdom and compassion, covered in their own entry), and Crianças or Erês (spirits who appear childlike and speak with joy and humor, though the tradition holds they are highly evolved rather than literally children).
Umbanda also recognizes branches with their own emphases and practices — among them Umbanda d'Angola, Umbanda Jejê, Umbanda Ketu, and Umbanda Esotérica — reflecting a century of regional variation since the religion's founding.
Further
Umbanda is its own religion, not a department of the Daime. It enters the doctrine as a line of work, and how far it enters is the sharpest difference between lineages: Umbanda works are central at ICEFLU and largely absent at Alto Santo. Russo Júnior's fieldwork treats the two as being in dialogue rather than in hierarchy, which is the honest frame — any sentence beginning "in Santo Daime, the orixás…" needs a lineage attached to it.