Pomba Gira is the death mask of Venus, she is sensuality, transformation and challenge manifesting in beauty, truth and ordeal. She is every woman and knows the heart of every man. She is the bitterness of scorn and she is the ecstasy of obsession. She is legion. We come to her with broken and confused hearts; she is the spirit of solace and of solution. She is the fire of transformation that all Exu seek to preserve and take nourishment from. As such she is the serpentine heart of the cult of Quimbanda. Any attempt to define her as this or that is something she simultaneously affirms and escapes. She is the embodiment of the sensual and finds her mystery spoken off in woman, both mortal and stellar. Quimbada itself can be seen as a cousin of the cult of Ghede who also walks on the points of death with erotic and sexual steps. Death and sex, the alpha and omega of human life, our journey’s beginning and end, so often diabolized, is what lies at the centre of Quimbanda and because of ...