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Keywords: Bolsa de mandinga, Bahia, Atlantic, slavery, Afro-Brazilian religions.
ABSTRACT: Among the cases documented by the Holy Office at the time of its exercise in the Portuguese Atlantic Empire, bolsas de mandinga appear as the most recurrent religiosity among those practiced by Africans and their descendants. Seen as empowered, they were used by various ethnic groups, blacks and non-blacks, who sought to solve the myriad problems that were victimized in the colonial period, the 18th century was the great exponent of their dissemination. Among the sources listed for this research at the inquisitorial level, we note that most of those involved with these materials were those who, to a large extent, were trafficked as slaves to Brazil. Based on this assumption, we aim to understand the worldviews brought by these subjects to the flagship of Bahia and how they embodied them in other practices to maintain their ethnicities in an unfavorable space for this because of Christian persecution. Through this analysis, we realized that Atlantic interactions enabled black men and women to access protagonism, from a worldview open to the new, but without ignoring the old.