Candomble religion diffused from the Yoruba area of West Africa to Bahia, Brazil, via the slave trade. Use of plants for spiritual and medicinal purposes is fundamental to the practice of Candomble. Religious leaders retained elements of their ethnoflora by importing Old World species and by using accidentally introduced weeds. Brazilian species were substituted, when it was not feasible to use African ones. The biogeographical similarity of the two distant areas facilitated successful diffusion of this African religion to the New World.
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Robert A. Voeks (1990) studied this question.
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