Brazil - Event

Every year, people congregate on the golden beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema and Leblon to worship the Goddess of the Sea, Iemanjá. Throngs of Umbanda followers enact their rites of worship alongside hundreds of thousands of new year revellers.

Iemanjá is also the Goddess of Carnal Pleasures and it is up to her followers to sate her appetite once a year with a menu of overt dancing, smoking and trances. As part of the beach rituals cigar-toting priests and priestesses usher people forward to enter trances (pegar um passo).

At dusk celebrants administer offerings to the goddess. Rafts are decorated and launched out to sea and Cariocas (people from Rio) come together to see in the New Year, all dressed in white, whether they are believers of Iemanjá or not.